By Fred Hiatt The Washington Post

International Herald Tribune, May 15-16, 1999

WASHINGTON - If the Holocaust were taking place today, would the story bore us after a few weeks? Would news executives be saying: ''We led with Auschwitz last night. Let's go with something else tonight?''

Would we hasten to reassure Hitler that he could maintain sovereignty over the peoples he sought to destroy?

There is a holocaust taking place today. An entire population, nearly 2 million strong, is being systematically forced from its country. Along the way, people are being murdered, raped, robbed, set on fire and brutalized.

You would think, given that reality, that the political debate in Washington would center on two questions: What more might be done to help the hundreds of thousands still trapped inside Kosovo, still in danger of starving or being killed? And what would be the best strategy to end this huge crime and bring its perpetrators, especially Slobodan Milosevic, to justice?

Instead, the debate in Washington now is moving toward negotiating with the Yugoslav president, and the people inside Kosovo have essentially been written off. Politicians who should know better put the victims and the villains on the same moral plane. Our attention drifts from the Kosovars' misfortune.

This is partly a tribute to Serbian news management. Mr. Milosevic's government allows Western reporters to cover every wayward NATO bomb. The twisted metal of the blown-up bus, the pathos of the Serbian funerals - these are vividly brought home to us.

The Serbs encourage detailed reporting of the Serbian doctor bravely tending victims of NATO shrapnel in a hospital in Pristina, the Kosovo capital. But when the ethnic Albanian doctors were forced from that same hospital a few weeks back, when ethnic Albanian patients, no matter how sick, were chased from their beds, the Serbs made sure no reporters would be present.

Today, at this very moment, new atrocities are taking place. Of some, we will never learn. Others will be reported, but at a remove - a few days late, by distraught deportees, with all the inevitable inconsistencies induced by trauma, accompanied by all the necessary and proper journalistic caveats about what remains unproved.

And none will appear on our television screens. ''Western opinion is ready to react only to visible atrocities, not to written accounts,'' noted Blerim Shala, a Kosovar journalist who escaped through Macedonia after hiding from Serbian police for more than a week. ''It is very strange.''

President Bill Clinton plays a part in minimizing the war crimes, too, even as he and his spokesmen assail Mr. Milosevic. It is not just a matter of Mr. Clinton belittling Serbia's atrocities by comparing them, in his well-meaning but obtuse way, to American racial prejudice. It is not just when he urges Kosovo survivors to ''support each other'' and ''get your feelings out'' and ''find a way to be glad that the sun comes up in the morning.''

Mr. Clinton's clichés reflect a deeper refusal to docu-ment, label and prevent the devastation now taking place. Early on, when Mr. Milose-vic accelerated his assaulton civilians as NATO bomb-ing began, the U.S. administration could reasonably argue that the alliance could do nothing to prevent the atrocities.

But that was more than six weeks ago. The atrocities go on, the Serbs continue to taunt their victims with, ''Where is your NATO now?''

Airpower is wreaking more damage. But if there were a will, NATO Apache helicopters or special forces by now could be playing some role inside Kosovo, at least harassing the war criminals, forcing them to look over their shoulders as they massacred their victims. If planning had begun with the onset of bombing, food could be reaching the hungry thousands in the hills.

NATO decided early on that it could not help the people inside, and it refused to deviate from that defeatist ideology. The U.S. administration hesitates to fully document the crimes, because it dare not close its escape hatch - the option of negotiating with Mr. Milosevic.

Clarity about Serbia's crimes would lead inexorably to clarity about goals, to a conclusion that Mr. Milosevic must go, for reasons both moral and practical (he will keep the Balkans in flames as long as he is able).

''We are not dealing with some minor thug whose local brutalities may offend our sensibilities from time to time,'' the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said recently. ''Milosevic's regime and the genocidal ideology that sustains it represent something altogether different - a truly monstrous evil; one which cannot with safety be merely checked or contained; one which must be totally defeated and be seen by the Serbs themselves to be defeated.''

Mr. Clinton has explicitly ruled out Mr. Milosevic's total defeat as a goal. There are understandable reasons for that, big risks in seeking total victory - of friction within the alliance and rupture with Russia, of a costly war and a long occupation.

But there are risks, too, in setting limited goals in the face of ''monstrous evil.'' If you are compromising with Mr. Milosevic, if you are promising him continued control over Kosovo, then you may start to believe that the evil cannot be so monstrous.

''To accept the horrors we are witnessing would be to lose our soul,'' President Jacques Chirac of France said last week. In this war that we will not call a war, that danger remains.