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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 4, 1993                   TAG: 9302040402
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

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LIMITED-TEARS DOCTRINE IS IMMORAL

SLOBODAN Milosevic has been implementing his policy of "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia since September 1991. An estimated 125,000 are dead, 30,000 women and girls raped in detention centers, and more than a million are homeless refugees. United States and European leaders have not identified a strong enough national interest to justify decisive intervention. Harvard's Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor tells us: "It's a tough thing to turn your back when you see infants being killed. But there is an argument that the world is a place of misery and you have to adopt a doctrine of limited tears - you can't cry over everything."

This morally bankrupt stance implicates the West as an accessory to war crimes. Now we are asked to become active supporters of this reign of terror by rewarding Milosevic with the Owens-Vance "peace" accord that ousts the legitimate multicultural Bosnian government and makes official the gains made by Serbian war criminals. This accord frees Milosevic to engage in further aggression into Kosovo and Macedonia in his creation of a Greater Serbia.

Milosevic will not stop until United States and European governments stand up to him. The doctrine of limited tears is an indictment of "good" Americans in the same way that denial of Nazi genocide was an indictment of "good" Germans in World War II. APRIL TANINECZ BLACKSBURG

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