A place called Srebrenica

Because the United Nations disastrously failed a decade ago in Srebrenica, there was a memorial service on Monday.

Ten years ago this week, the killing began in the mining town in east Bosnia. It would become Europe's worst act of genocide since World War II. Bosnian Serb soldiers massacred 8,000 mostly men and boys in Srebrenica, supposedly a U.N.-protected "safe zone" for Muslim refugees, just before the Bosnian civil war ended in 1995. The rampage was typical of the ethnic cleansing that then-Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic had directed for four years after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

NATO intervention and the U.S.-led Dayton accords forced the Serbs to end the killing. But that was only after Dutch so-called peacekeepers in Srebrenica stood by and let the genocide happen. The timid Dutch enablers reported people being killed outside the Dutch base where terrified civilians had sought refuge, yet forcibly expelled thousands to their executioners. President Clinton also had refused to send American soldiers.

Over the weekend, thousands of people lined the streets of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for a funeral procession of tractor-trailer trucks transporting more than 600 bodies to a memorial site. But along with the ongoing pacification effort, which now includes U.S. peacekeepers, bitterness still rules in Bosnia. It will continue to do so long after Srebrenica massacre masterminds Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic are brought to justice, as they must be. Like Milosevic, they have been indicted for genocide at the U.N. war crimes tribunal court in The Hague.

That won't change the fact that neither the Serb nor the Croat members of Bosnian's multiethnic presidency joined the Muslim member to pay respects. Or that survivors and Dutch attorneys are gathering evidence to prosecute the U.N. officers in charge for failing to stop the killings. Or that Bosnian Serbs lamented being blamed for war crimes and pointed at Muslims for last week's bombings in London.

In 1994, hundreds of thousands were murdered in Rwanda. What President Bush and other leaders call genocide continues in Darfur, Sudan. Civilized societies cannot legislate hearts and minds. Individual nations cannot prevent every atrocity. Civilized nations, however, must find ways to save innocent human beings from slaughter.