Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993 TAG: 9305210176
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The situation in Bosnia is a case in point.
Up until this week, our government had at least occasionally referred to the Serbs' and Croats' campaigns against their Muslim neighbors as a near-Holocaust.
The whole notion of "ethnic cleansing" bore unmistakable kinship to the Nazi plan for the "final solution" of the "Jewish problem."
Entire Muslim villages are reported wiped out. Muslim women who are not killed are raped, apparently in hopes that they will conceive.
Now, with a U.S.-initiated peace plan rejected and no support among our allies for military intervention, we are told that, well, actually, the Muslims are guilty of war crimes just as the Serbs and Croats are.
There are no innocents. There is no holocaust. We'll just have to concentrate on "containing" the conflict.
James Wall, editor of the liberal Christian Century magazine, concluded in a recent issue that the situation in Bosnia meets all the classic criteria for a "just war" except for waiting to make sure war is truly the last resort.
Wall - who opposed the Persian Gulf war - contends that we should wait to see if non-military sanctions, such as embargoes, will work. If they don't, and the atrocities we've heard about continue, his editorial implies we would then be justified in taking military action.
Since we're outsiders - not facing any physical threat from the conflict - it's easy for us to sit back and examine the philosophical implications of action or inaction and the way moral imperatives are affected by political realities.
During the Second World War, the evidence now seems clear, the Allies knew Jews were being transported en masse to slaughterhouses in Eastern Europe. Allied leaders considered and rejected a plea to bomb the rail lines leading to the concentration camps.
Such strikes would have been risky. There was no guarantee they would have any lasting effect.
Politically, even a half-century later, that inaction is not generally regarded as complicity in the atrocities that continued almost unimpeded by the war. Germans, in a way no other nationality is affected, still bear the guilt of the Holocaust.
We usually excuse the witness to a murder who, because of fear or confusion or shock or self-protection, fails to attempt to prevent the crime. We won't do that for Germans who had no hand in the Holocaust, but we will extend that forgiveness to the rest of the world.
We excuse ourselves historically for not having attempted any direct intervention in the Holocaust - even for refusing to accept all the refugees who were attempting to flee the fire.
But we cannot avoid the "what if" questions those decisions left in our national consciousness. And we are faced with them again, no matter what the political situation has become.
From Bosnia, we have seen pictures of the concentration camps. We have heard about the piles of bodies. No one doubts the stories of soldiers' officially sanctioned rape of Muslim women.
Though the scale of this disaster is dwarfed by the Holocaust, its moral atrociousness seems on a par.
I do not believe, as some critics do, that our moral response to the Bosnian situation is being governed by our affinity for or opposition to the religious beliefs of its victims.
In fact, the religious victims are reversed in the Sudan, where the Muslim majority has systematically killed Christians who refuse to convert to Islam. We ignore that situation where Christians face not only death by gunfire, but agonizing starvation in their isolated enclaves.
So, what do we do?
Damned if I know.
I know we'll do anything to avoid another Vietnam. I know most of us don't even realize that millions died in a Cambodian civil war and the remainder may be threatened by a new political power struggle there. I know we have only a passing interest in headlines about Hindus and Muslims killing each other in India.
Spin a globe. Point a finger just about anywhere. See death and despair nearby.
We cannot fix every problem in the world. We cannot even fix our own inner cities.
But we can't just throw up our hands and try not to think about it. We have to be aware.
And sometimes we have to decide to do something.
For some, action will be through prayer.
The Education for Ministry group from St. John's and Christ Episcopal parishes is sponsoring an ecumenical prayer vigil from noon until midnight on May 30.
St. John's church, Jefferson Street and Elm Avenue Southwest, will be open as people are encouraged to spend at least 15 minutes praying for peace and an end to suffering in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In asking others to join the vigil, the group cited its own frustration over the continuing cruelties in Bosnia and its belief that "the energy of these prayers will help bring peace."
Lowe Cody Lowe reports on issues of religion and ethics for this newspaper.
by CNB