We have come to know them as chapters in a long book of lamentations: Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Gorazde, Bihac. There has been no end to the slaughter -- and to the shame -- of Bosnia. The lands of former Yugoslavia have robbed us of all innocence and pretense. No sooner had we proclaimed the ascendancy of a universal liberalism than a dark, sinister Serbian nationalism sprang up from the catacombs of history. Grant the knights and brigands of Greater Serbia their due. They knew what they wanted. It is the rest of us -- powers on both sides of the Atlantic, the United Nations and its "peacekeepers" and diplomats -- who wavered and thus became accomplices to the slaughter.
The people of Bosnia never understood the hoax played on them. They told us again and again, in Europe and America alike, about the multireligious, pluralist republic they wished to defend. They held out to us the example of Sarajevo, where Rome and Byzantium and Islam had fashioned an oasis of cosmopolitanism. People of the crossroads, they knew that the West feared the bogeyman of "militant Islam." They were keen to display their worldliness, the ease of their faith. Outsiders, they believed, would come to the rescue.
The Bosnians were waiting for America's cavalry. They knew the ways of Europe, understood that their cause generated no sympathy in Britain or France. Nor did they have much faith in the United Nations or its secretary general, Boutros Boutros- Ghali. From the time he dismissed their calamity as a "rich people's war," they knew they had no friend in the Egyptian diplomat at the helm of the U.N. Their slender hope was invested in American power. In the aftermath of Bihac's siege and a stunning week that saw the custodians of American foreign policy scurry for cover and bemoan the absence of options they themselves had precluded or undermined, the Bosnians now know better. We had recognized their nationhood but denied them the means of defending it. All that was needed from the Bosnian people now was the favor of a quiet surrender.
From the tribal "republic" of the Bosnian Serbs there comes to us this remarkable photo of a Bosnian Muslim prisoner being forced to wear a fez, paraded and ridiculed. The fez is extinct in the domains of Islam. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of Turkish secularism and modernity, banned it six decades ago in favor of the European hat. But the Serbs know no better. In a different age, before the dark nationalisms of the Balkans had spun their ennobling legends, when the Serbs were a Slavic peasant population beyond the courts and the life and the enlightenment of Latin Christendom, a leader of theirs, Milos Obrenovic, rose against the Turks in 1815 and then turned around and built a house in Belgrade in the Turkish style, with a divan on which he would sit cross-legged, smoking his waterpipe. But that was a simpler time of lesser crimes. The Serbs should perhaps at last be granted their Europeanness. After the horrors of 20th-century European history, that is no great badge of honor.
