GENOCIDE ALLOWED, AGAIN; ONCE MORE, WE DEBATE WHILE A PEOPLE IS DESTROYED IN KOSOVO.

Byline: Jonathan S. Shapiro Local View

IT is one thing to remember holocausts. It is quite another to learn from them.

The national Holocaust Museum has become the most visited site in Washington, D.C. Those who have been to the museum say they can never forget it. Many leave it guilt-ridden, wondering why the world did not do more to stop the slaughter, to let more refugees enter safe havens.

Some leave critical of the world leaders who knew what was happening but did little to alleviate the suffering.

Yet the year that the museum opened, new concentration camps began cropping up in Europe, almost exactly 50 years after the last living skeletons stumbled out of Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

Every year since the museum has been in existence, new victims of ancient European hatreds have died, victims of ethnic cleansing.

Hollywood has done what it can.

It has produced major motion pictures depicting the horrors of holocaust. ``The Killing Fields'' showed the world how Pol Pot and his minions killed more than a million Cambodians. ``Schindler's List'' broke even more hearts depicting the slaughter of Jews and others by the Nazis.

The audience wept. The audience swore never again.

And as they filed out of the theater, a world away, a million Rwandans were being murdered in Africa, tens of thousands of Muslims were being butchered in the Balkans. So much for the media's power to influence behavior.

The United States Senate tried to do its part.

The Senate Banking Committee, led by New York's Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, held hearings that led to a Swiss admission that they collaborated with Nazis to steal from the victims of the 1940s.

Yet D'Amato and his colleagues have done less to help the victims of 1998. As you read this newspaper, a crime as horrid as any that has besmirched the 20th century is being committed against a defenseless people.

Ethnic Albanians in the former Yugoslavia are being murdered: men, but mostly women and children, the very old and the very young. The population of whole villages is disappearing from the Earth, wiped out because of their religion, because of their culture.

The world's reoccurring nightmare has come again. Jack-booted thugs in paramilitary uniforms are making the streets of Kosovo run with blood. We knew it would not happen again.

Yet it is happening again.

And again the world does nothing.

We talk about action for almost a year, NATO has warned Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that he will be attacked if he does not call off his killing squads.

President Clinton, eager to talk about anything other than his own problems, has expressed concern. Secretary-General Kofi Annan angrily denounced Serbian atrocities, denounced Serbia for having lied about its responsibility for the killings, and swore action would take place.

And the United Nations, the world's great debating society, talks about taking action. But words have never stopped a bullet from killing a child. Rather than acting to stop murder, the world busies itself with less dangerous, less helpful measures.

War crimes tribunals are springing up like mushrooms after a storm. Slowly, far too slowly, a small number of those responsible for the most horrific crimes are brought to trial - long after the killing stops.

Justice delayed is justice denied victims of genocide. Indeed, it is not justice at all. Murder trials are important, but nobody was ever brought back to life through the verdict of a war crime trial.

When it comes to stopping murder, litigation is a lousy way to deal with the problem. Indeed, it is worse than doing nothing. It fools us into thinking we are taking action; it tricks us into thinking that we are making the world more safe, more sane.

The time for action against the Serbians has long since passed. Every day we fail to act, it passes us more. We need no longer go to museums to learn about world apathy in the face of horror. We need only look in the mirror. Yes, those that forget history are destined to repeat it.

But simply knowing history is not enough.

Indeed, to change destiny for the current victims in Kosovo, just knowing history is not nearly enough.