The rewriting of history under way in the current Geneva negotiations threatens to undermine the United Nations Security Council's objective to create a war crimes tribunal to bring to justice those guilty of atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

How is it that Serbian leaders accused by the State Department, Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch of direct responsibility for atrocities and genocide have been recast as peace-makers during the Geneva negotiations? I have in mind, among others, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia; Radovan Karadzic, head of the Bosnian Serb rebels and Gen.Ratko Mladic, commander of the Bosnian Serb forces.

The transformation is fictional, for "ethnic cleansing" genocide, massacre, torture and systematic rape continue even now under their direction. This recasting of characters conceals a cynical response to the crimes inflicted on Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The mediators between the warring parties in Bosnia who have been charged with creating an environment hospitable to a just and durable peace have acted with the ill-considered expediency one would expect from the producers of an overbudget B movie. Unwilling to face up to the ever-increasing costs of the aggressor's actions. Lord Owen and Thorwald Stoltenberg, the co-chairmen under whose auspices these negotiations are being held, have hastily scripted an incoherent and non sensical ending to the story. A war of genocidial aggression has been rewritten as a civil war. Like the scenes littering an editing studio, evidence of brutal war crimes has been swept from view. The spoils of aggression have been legitimized and accepted.

The real situation is best illustrated by an order of the International Court of Justice at the Hague, in response to a complaint by Bosnia-Herzegovina.

On April 8, it told Serbia's leaders to ensure that their forces in Bosnia not commit genocide.

But the international community's continued appeasement of these politicians will only increase their sense of invincibility and exoneration. Their victims, meanwhile, will feel an even greater sense of abandonment and lose confidence in any solution originating in the West.

One reason the Security Council voted on May 25 to establish a war crimes tribunal was to deter atrocities. We should question the judgment of anyone in the peace process who might seek to undermine this prosecution of violators of the Geneva Conventions and Protocols and the Genocide Convention. Violations of these laws cannot in theory be amnestied, so any betrayal of justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina will be achieved by weakening the tribunal especially in its prosecution function.

The prosecutor will be responsible for bringing charges against the defendants, not merely for developing the case, and therefore must be independent of political elements that may prefer expediency to justice. If the tribunal is to function properly, it also must have sufficient financing and staff and its authority to apprehend and punish those found guilty must not be interpreted so narrowly as to render its verdict meaningless.

For Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the former Jugoslavia as a whole, war crimes trials are essential for any reconciliation. They will deter old Communists and new Fascists - frequently one and the same - from using ethnicity as a weapon against a pluralistic society.

More immediately, if we are to encourage the more than three million displaced people to return to their homes and not become a bitter class of permanent refugees, those who brutalized them must not go umpunished. Who would return to a territory controlled by those who murdered and raped his family? If the war crimes tribunal is a travesty, the victims will take justice into their own hands, setting off a cycle of revenge and counterevenge.

By prosecuting the guilty, we will exonerate the innocent. The entire Serb nation does not deserve to bear stigma of genocide and other heinous crimes committed in its name.

The connection between impartial justice and a sound peace is "overwhelming clear - so much so that we can assume that those who would frustrate the one fear the other.