What We Continue to Miss in Bosnia

A recent Bosnian Serb artillery attack left 73 dead in Tuzla, an industrial city in Bosnia that the United Nations had designated a safe haven.

Most of the dead were teenagers or persons in their 20s, and “many lie in a new cemetery above the town,” reporter Alex Thompson said in a story from Independent Television News that aired Monday on PBS’ “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”

“And where the shells struck the crowded streets,” Thompson added in his crisp British accent, “[there was] open anger from people who accuse the U.N. of failing to protect this so-called safe area.”

A woman from Tuzla was furious: “Sometimes I want to get a grenade and throw it at the U.N. transporters, no matter the consequences.” And reflecting perhaps a deeper sorrow, a man from Tuzla plaintively asked: “Where is the conscience of these people?”

Through television, Bosnia speaks.

There’s nothing new about news media being used to rally public support for an apparent underdog and opposition to a brutal oppressor.

In the TV age alone, for example, flash back to 1990, when a 15-year-old girl, identified only as Nayirah, horrified a congressional committee and much of the United States with her televised accounts of Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, just prior to a vote on this nation’s use of force in the Persian Gulf.

Echoing reports from other Kuwaitis lobbying for U.S. intervention, she recalled seeing invading Iraqi troops storm into a hospital and pluck 15 babies from their incubators, leaving them “on the cold floor to die.”

Although her testimony drew skepticism from Amnesty International and other human rights groups, Congress voted overwhelmingly for U.S. involvement, and the rest is history. Not until early 1992 was it revealed that Nayirah, far from being an ordinary citizen, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. In effect, a ringer.

How pivotal was this teen-ager’s testimony? Were some lawmakers duped by her and others into endorsing war against Iraq? Given the smashing military victory over Iraq, these questions and her congressional appearance endure only as blurry footnotes.

In any event, as the United States continues shaping its policy regarding the bloody, complex tangle in the former Yugoslavia, the Nayirahs testifying from Bosnia appear not to be embellishing or telling any tales. Their heart-wrenching accounts of ongoing misery--mostly of Bosnia’s Muslims being victimized by Serb aggressors--have been independently verified by reporters again and again.

“I just don’t want any more people I’ve grown to admire and love . . . to die,” National Public Radio’s Scott Simon said Sunday in a Bosnia commentary on NBC’s weekend “Today,” the program he once hosted.

Those he cares for in besieged Sarajevo include Irena, a 17-year-old he befriended during several trips there on assignments. Her face in photographs--she’s a striking beauty with dark hair and enormous black eyes--hauntingly recalls Anne Frank.

Simon captured Irena’s thoughts on tape on several occasions, once after they had all been pinned down by a sniper attack. “Behind my building . . . sometimes in the whole day . . . it’s shooting, and I have to just run,” she said in the “chatty English” that Simon said she’d picked up from listening to rock stars. “But I don’t care about my life. I don’t give a damn about it.”

Ongoing is the debate about whether to end the U.N.’s so-called peacekeeping role and send in NATO jets to take out the Serbs’ lethal artillery emplacements. Simon said that he told Irena not long ago that he feared that Bosnian Serbs would counterattack such air strikes in ways that would endanger her and her family (her father is Serbian, her mother Muslim).

Irena replied: “The people who I know, they say, ‘Please, God, let NATO bomb them. They can, if they want, destroy all Sarajevo. We don’t want to live like this anymore.’ I’m saying to all America, please do it. Destroy the Serbian positions. It’s OK. We can save ourselves. We go to the basement of somewhere to hide ourselves. It’s OK for us. You don’t have to worry. We got used to it.”

Simon said that because central Bosnians have been living peaceably for some time, he abhors hearing Americans say, “Those people over there have been fighting for centuries. Why should we care?”

There are, of course, many reasons to care. Throughout his commentary, Simon’s and Irena’s words were supported by the sounds of guns and footage of Bosnians living under the ongoing terror of combat, running for cover, running for their lives.

On Globalvision’s “Rights & Wrongs,” the feisty renegade that bills itself as “human rights television,” pictures from the Bosnia death zone are more gruesome: Body bags along with slaughtered children, their eyes empty and mouths open, lying on the ground in an eerie stillness that belies the shrill carnage that engulfed them.

On Saturday, “Rights & Wrongs”--which airs on PBS stations--ends a two-part powerhouse report that utilizes chunks of “The Yellow Wasps,” a documentary from Ilan Ziv and Rory O’Connor, whose title is taken from a Serb-sponsored paramilitary unit said to have run amok on a campaign of anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing. We hear of terrorism and atrocities during one stretch in 1992. Someone speaks of a boy who was shot point-blank in the mouth. On the screen, the village of Zvornik is dying, its 1,862 residents removed from their homes by Serbs and deported by train.

Unfortunately, it’s a “cleansing” that won’t be witnessed in Los Angeles during June, when KCET-TV Channel 28 is bumping “Rights & Wrongs” from its 1:30 p.m. Saturday time slot in favor of more promotable fund-raising programming.

Looking back a half century, the thoughtful Simon on Sunday joined others in comparing Bosnia’s catastrophe to the horrors wrought by Nazism: “Fifty years ago, the world pledged, out of the pride and shame in which we’d liberated the concentrations camps, to never again permit a holocaust. But in not defending Bosnia from attack and standing aside from war crimes, we have allowed a smaller holocaust under a new name, ethnic cleansing. As someone wise once said, ‘We have got used to it.’ ”

Have we, the U.S. public, watching all of this securely from across the sea, gotten so used to these now-nightly pictures of violence and sorrowful victims that they’ve become abstractions? Has relentless news from Brentwood desensitized us to news from the Baltics?

Even if TV captured atrocities as they were being committed, instead of just their aftermath, would it make a difference? Would anything have been different had TV--not just print reporters and occasional newsreel cameras--been present to chronicle the violent assent of Nazism in the 1930s?

“I’ve thought about this a lot,” Simon said on the phone from Washington. “In spite of a lot of excellent coverage, the terrible scenes we’ve been seeing of civilians haven’t been enough. I do not necessarily believe if we had all this technology 55 years ago we would have awakened earlier [to Nazism] than we did. We often find increasingly intelligent reasons to rationalize our actions. We say, ‘Of course the suffering is terrible, but people are also dying in Rwanda.’ We say, ‘Of course the Serbs are brutes, but they’re not as mean as the Nazis.’ ”

As if being less mean than the Nazis conferred sainthood.

Saturday’s “Rights & Wrongs” ends with Charlayne Hunter-Gault interviewing former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. An architect of U.S. policy in the Balkans under President George Bush, Eagleburger agrees that when it comes to alleged war crimes in Bosnia, justice isn’t likely.

Through television, Bosnia speaks. But who is listening?