The New York Times

June 22, 1999

ABROAD AT HOME

By ANTHONY LEWIS

The Question of Evil

There can be no doubt, now, about the scale of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo. Western reporters and war-crimes investigators have begun to confirm what Kosovar Albanian refugees described.

NATO officers estimate that at least 10,000 ethnic Albanians were murdered; the figure could be much higher. Families were burned alive in their homes, children killed in front of their mothers.

The details are so terrible that, in our safe lives, we are inclined to turn away -- to stop reading, to change the channel. But we must know what happened. For what the Serbs did in Kosovo confronts us again with the question of the human capacity for evil.

"It is still hard to credit," said Geoffrey Hoon, a minister in the British Foreign Office, "that our fellow human beings could be guilty of machine-gunning children, systematic rape of young women and girls, digging mass graves. . . . But this has happened in Kosovo."

How could a Serbian soldier or policeman do those things? I asked a onetime war correspondent if he could explain it. In war, he said, a blood lust may come over one who has a gun, so that he sees even women and children as enemies. That may indeed happen -- may lead to an occasional violation of the laws of war. But the crimes the Serbs committed in Kosovo were not incidental; they were planned and systematic. Time magazine, in its current issue, has a detailed report on what it called Serbia's "killing machine" in Kosovo. The story shows how the Serbs set out to destroy particular areas, obviously on orders from above, sweeping through towns three times to kill and burn.

Another explanation suggested to me was that the worst was done in Kosovo by a few thousand Serbian paramilitaries, some of them the same thugs who raped and killed in Bosnia. But many of the atrocities described by Kosovar Albanians were carried out by policemen and even Serbian civilians. One policeman threw a grenade into a basement where 30 people were waiting, killing among others a six-month-old child.

At a minimum everyone in the Serbian security forces had to know what was being done. A veteran soldier named Marinko, interviewed by Time, said he had killed 500 Kosovo Liberation Army fighters. As for killing civilians, he said, "there are wacky members in every unit. And you just don't have the time to control them." Sure.

Slobodan Milosevic is not the only author of the war crimes in Kosovo. Thousands of Serbs were involved. And hundreds of thousands more back in Serbia proper were fixed in the belief that the Serbs had done no wrong. They were subjected to Milosevic propaganda, yes. But even when told of the atrocities in Kosovo, they argued that the Serbs were only replying -- they were the real victims.

A sense of victimization is said by specialists to be a central feature of the Serbian national character. It is the belief that Serbs have been treated unjustly again and again in history.

Mr. Milosevic's genius has been the ability to manipulate those feelings, to arouse fear and hatred of The Other. Thus he used films of Nazi attacks on Yugoslavia to suggest, during the Bosnian war, that Bosnians menaced the Serbs.

The capacity for evil exists in any people, in any human being. But national histories are different. And most crucially, I think, leaders are different. Think of the difference Nelson Mandela made in a country where there could have been a powerful desire for revenge.

The question of evil and leadership is not going to go away in Yugoslavia. Mr. Milosevic is still there. The country is not likely, soon, to go through the process of reformation that made Germany a trusted nation again.

But the question is not limited to Yugoslavia. How could Rwandans slaughter half a million of their neighbors with machetes?

If we have learned anything at the end of this terrible century, it is that we cannot ignore such evil. That should be the lesson of Kosovo. Some of those who opposed the NATO action there said Kosovo was not our business. But John Donne's words are writ large now: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde."