Six years before the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed more than three thousand people, in the quiet Bosnian town of Srebrenica, more than 7,000 men and boys were marched by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries to the outskirts and shot, one by one.

These two events should be contrasted but they have not been. On one level it is easy to see why. The Sept. 11 attacks were so spectacularly incredible, so widely witnessed on television screens around the world. Every decent person shared the agony and the tragedy of that savage event in the heart of New York, itself the heart of the world’s capitalist system.

Srebrenica, by contrast, is in the heart of nowhere, just a quiet Bosnian town. The world was not looking when Bosnian Serb commander Vladko Mladic overran the place in the face of non-existent resistance by Dutch members of the UN peacekeeping force who had been sent to protect the townspeople. There was a television camera, which filmed Mladic arguing with the Dutch commanding officer and later telling the citizens that they had nothing to fear and should return to their homes. The UN troops were persuaded to withdraw and as their trucks drove out of sight, the butchery began. Men with guns and hearts heavy with hate set about exterminating thousands of men and boys with the same brutality that Nazi troops used against their luckless Jewish victims in Poland and Russia.

There was only one good thing about the Srebrenica massacres. It finally shamed the international community and the US Clinton presidency into firm action against the Bosnian Serbs and, by extension, their sponsors in Serbia itself. Yet once the Bosnian Serbs had been humbled and, after Kosovo, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic driven from office, it seemed that the international community had no appetite to remember the disgusting and shameful Srebrenica massacre, which had originally galvanized it into action.

However, Clinton went this week to Srebrenica to open long-overdue memorial to the 7,000 innocent dead and to express his sorrow and horror at what his administration and the rest of the world, allowed to happen. The widows and mothers and daughters and sisters of the victims who heard him speak appeared to be grateful that he had agreed to open the memorial to their dead, a memorial costing some $5 million. But the former president owed them something more. What he might have said was that even though Srebrenica proved to be the trigger of a final and decisive blow against the genocidal Bosnian Serbs, the massacre itself has not since shown up on the radar of the West for a simple reason. The lives of 7,000 Bosnians simply do not seem as important as those of the 3,000 predominantly American victims of Sept. 11.