Turning a Blind Eye to Genocide in Bosnia : THIS TIME WE KNEW: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia Edited by Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Mestrovic; New York University Press $50, cloth; $18.95, paper 404 pages

Jack Miles, then a Los Angeles Times editorial writer and now the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of “God,” once canceled a lunch date because of a breaking news story that required his urgent attention. The telephone message that I found at my desk on that day was terse but eloquent: “Can’t make lunch--Bosnia.”

Miles took every opportunity to call the attention of his readers and his fellow journalists to the carnage in the Balkans. But few Western observers can be credited with the same concern for what was happening before our very eyes in Bosnia during the recent Balkan wars. Thanks to CNN and satellite technology and the Internet, we were all witnesses to the crimes against humanity, but very few of us did anything about it.

The point is made with great passion (and in great detail) by the contributors to “This Time We Knew,” a collection of essays on how the “Western elites”--defined as “academics, public intellectuals, journalists and policy makers” --responded (or, more accurately, failed to respond) to the well-publicized acts of genocide in Bosnia.

“For the last four years, the West has played an important role in the Balkan war, the role of voyeur,” write the editors of “This Time We Knew,” Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic. “One could even make the case that the nature of the Western response actually abetted genocide and other crimes against humanity in the region by allowing the perpetrators to proceed with a guarantee that they would not be punished.”

The title of the book is an allusion to the self-proclaimed ignorance of the same Western elites during the Holocaust. The editors carefully distinguish between the Nazi genocide and the recent terror in Bosnia, but the various contributors clearly regard the Holocaust as a benchmark against which both the war criminals and the witnesses to their crimes ought to be measured, even if the Bosnians “replaced gas chambers and crematoria with chain saws, knives, and everyday garden tools.”

(I feel obliged to point out, however, that the Holocaust was not much of a secret even when it was happening. As Deborah Lipstadt has documented in “Beyond Belief: The American Press & the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945,” the machinery of mass murder was well known to the Allied governments and the world press at a time when the gas chambers at Auschwitz were still in full operation.)

A further distinction is made in “This Time We Knew” between atrocities in general, which were committed by all sides in the Balkan war, and genocide, a crime that the authors charge against the Serbs alone. “According to a leaked CIA report,” the editors write, “the Belgrade regime is responsible for 90% of the atrocities . . . and 100% of the systematic killing (i.e., genocide).”

Few in the West come in for much praise but, ironically enough, some of the harshest criticism is directed against Israel. Contributor Daniel Kofman points out that the here-and-now war crimes of the Serbs were masked and distorted by memories of Croatian atrocities during World War II--and fear of terrorism by fundamentalist Muslims in Israel today. “In the high noon of the ghosts,” Kofman quotes Israeli author Amos Elon, “the human dimension is lost.”

“This Time We Knew” is a deeply troubling book precisely because we are shown how little the world has learned from its own recent history.

“This Time We Knew” is a work of scholarship that aspires to be an act of conscience--and succeeds in its aspirations. Preserved in its pages is the evidence of two crimes, genocide itself and the willful refusal to recognize genocide when we see it. That’s why making peace among the warring “ethnic nations” of the Balkans is not the only goal of the book’s contributors. “Even if peace is achieved there,” the editors conclude, “a vivid memory of a barbarism unknown in Europe since World War II will remain.”