A 120-mm mortar can lob a shell more than 3 miles, and a round from one can throw shrapnel more than 30 yards. In a world of cruise missiles and laser guided bombs, a 120-mm mortar is not a very formidable weapon. But a single round from a humble mortar has now prompted the United States and its European allies to take one more step into the tangled civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, where the mortar round exploded, knows the power of a single shot: The bullet that killed Austria-Hungary's Archduke Franz Ferdinand there in 1914 helped bring on the First World War. But the mortar shell that slammed into Sarajevo's marketplace was no shot heard 'round the world. It killed 68 civilians buying food, but its mark on the slaughter in the Balkans was marginal: The civil war had already claimed more than 200,000 lives. Nor did it reveal anything the world did not already know about the inhumanity of the conflict among Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims: Just three weeks ago, another mortar round killed six Bosnian children who were out sledding.
What gave this mortar its power was not its high-explosive round or the fact that it hit a table by chance, burst above the ground and therefore killed more people than it otherwise would have. President Clinton and other Western leaders paid attention to this one mortar round because television cameras captured its carnage. The Holocaust was already on Bill Clinton's mind: He was moved by the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum last year, and in December he attended the premiere of the movie Schindler's List now assuming an exalted place in popular culture with a dozen Oscar nominations. No wonder Clinton found it hard to continue doing nothing while the Serbs pursued their ethnic cleansing. But the influence of television and movies, even great ones, can be dangerous when foreign policy decisions are at hand.
Television and movies (and still photography) are wonderful devices for bringing faraway events closer. But like a telephoto lens, they do so by narrowing the field of view, reducing the depth of field and magnifying whatever image they see. Television brought the latest massacre in Sarajevo into living rooms around the world, but it has not witnessed the strangulation of the Bosnian cities of Tuzla and Srebrenica, the 1,000 people dying daily in Angola (many of them at the hands of a group that was armed partly by the United States), the ethnic cleansing in East Timor or the growing tragedy in Sudan. Television does not always show what is most important. But in politics, all too often, what is most important is what television shows.
TV and movies are better at making you weep than at making you think. That is why, in a society that values emotion more than reason, style more than substance and image more than reality, one mortar round is influencing a policy that will not end the suffering in the Balkans but may create the comforting illusion that America at last has acted decisively.
