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be disastrous. I think that wave has sort of passed a bit, but that feeling of
moral outrage did lead President Clinton and many others to say we must
bomb.
Slavenka Drakulic:
I have seen that the feelings of the people some–
times are very different from their government's behavior; there is a huge
gap between the two. Recently, I read in the
International Herald Tribune
that there has been a poll in several European countries about how to
proceed in this conflict, and whether they should intervene with
European forces or not, and in most countries there was a huge number,
ranging from forty to sixty per cent of the populations, saying, "Yes, we
are for intervention," while the governments were behaving very conser–
vatively. So there is some kind of gap between what the people and what
the governments really see as necessary. Maybe there is something wrong
with Western democracy; perhaps people have no power to influence the
governments . But I have seen that they are getting desensitized,
anesthetized by these kinds of images. There are two sides of the media,
of course; one is to bring the story out and to let the world know. But
the question is, "What then?" What do you do with information? To in–
form may not be enough. I am just saying that we - intellectuals, writers,
people in general - are not dealing enough with the moral issues, with
the moral questions, with the questions of responsibility. I myself am
puzzled why European intellectuals are not posing any of these questions.
This war hasn' t been an issue among European intellectuals at all.
Intellectuals next door don't discuss it. They pretend not to understand,
but I wonder if they want to understand what's going on. This puzzles
me. I see it as closing your eyes, I see it as turning your head away. I am a
bit bitter because I come from there. Maybe an insider's look into these
problems is different from an outsider's position.
Edith Kurzweil:
I want to follow up on that. Of course w e all want the
slaughter to stop. But can it be stopped with bombing? And, if it were to
stop with bombing, where do we bomb? Do we know, can we even
separate one population from another? Mter all, there are all these en–
claves.
Slavenka Drakulic:
Well, I think nothing could be won without
ground troops engagement. I read an article by an expert who said that
without two hundred and
fifty
thousand soldiers nothing could be solved
at all, and who is going to put two hundred and
fifty
thousand soldiers in
Bosnia? It's yet another issue.
