Quoting a Serbian soldier whose civil and political conscience had been revolted, Trotsky reported:

"The horrors actually began as soon as we crossed the old frontier ... The darker the sky became, the more brightly the fearful illumination of the fires stood out against it. Burning was going on all around us. Entire Albanian villages had been turned into pillars of fire -- dwellings, possessions, accumulated by fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers were going up in flames."

But most Europeans found that they could contemplate the immolation of obscure Muslims with relative equanimity. As indeed can we. In order to understand the shame of what has lately occurred (or better say recurred) in Kosovo, one must revisit the shame of what occurred at Srebrenica. It is unlikely that even the Serbian "irregulars" in Kosovo have yet exceeded what they accomplished in that Bosnian "safe haven" in July 1995: the organized killing and interment of perhaps 10,000 male captives.

That slaughter was carried out as American satellites whirled calmly overhead, recording the information, and as NATO troops stood by and exchanged pleasantries with the overworked executioners. Even Richard Holbrooke, a man trained to realpolitik in a hard school, had the grace to look embarrassed and awkward when asked what the United States knew, and when it knew it. As Mark Danner put it in his brilliant reconstruction of the slaughter for the New York Review of Books:

Even on that Sunday afternoon, as he sat answering the reporter's questions, Holbrooke tells in his memoirs, 'Precise details of what was happening in Srebrenica were not known ... but there was no question that something truly horrible was going on.'

An odd construction, that sentence, defining what is known only by what is not: Five days after the Serbs swept into Srebrenica, Holbrooke and other officials, men and women perched on the heights of the United States' national security bureaucracy and benefiting from all its vast powers of perception (satellites gazing down from space; spy planes snapping photographs from the upper atmosphere; unmanned drone planes relaying real-time video images; diplomats and attachés in-country working their informants for secrets and rumors and gossip), could know no "precise details" of Serbian actions in this one tiny place in eastern Bosnia, but were able nonetheless to harbor the certainty that "something truly horrible was going on."

Next page | Srebrenica: "A blessing in disguise"