CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / U.S. SENATE : Herschensohn Urges U.S. Role in Bosnia

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Herschensohn said Thursday the United States should be prepared to send American warplanes or ground troops if necessary into the former nation of Yugoslavia to make certain that innocent victims of the civil war are not being persecuted or killed in refugee or prison camps.

“We have to have an inspection, no matter the risk,” Herschensohn said in a meeting with reporters and editors of The Times. “We have to inspect. We have to provide not just food, but we have to provide arms to the victims.”

Likening the events in Bosnia-Herzegovina to the atrocities in Nazi death camps, Herschensohn suggested that the standard for U.S. military intervention should be based on questions of “humanity and liberty,” not on a narrow reading of direct American interests.

Herschensohn said Bush Administration policy is inadequate. The Administration has condemned the violence in the former Yugoslavia and allowed the United Nations to take the lead in unsuccessful efforts to stop the fighting.

Herschensohn said he has no direct evidence, but according to generally available accounts he has read, “there are concentration camps in existence and innocent men and women and kids are being tortured and killed.”

To ignore those reports would be comparable to shrugging off reports of atrocities at Dachau, the Nazi death camp, he said. Asked whether the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina is the moral equivalent of Dachau, Herschensohn, said, “I don’t know. I read the same reports that you do. . . . It sounds like it might be.

“What if this was 1940 and someone was saying, ‘Well, you can’t really do that? I don’t know where Dachau is and by God what would it call for if we went in there? I don’t know.’ ”

Dachau was built 10 miles from Munich in 1933 as a Nazi concentration and extermination camp for Jews and political prisoners. During World War II, Dachau inmates were forced to work in nearby weapons plants and were subjected to brutal medical experiments.

When it was suggested that there was a vast difference between Hitler attempting to conquer continents with his massive war machine and the civil war in mountainous provinces of what was once Yugoslavia, Herschensohn said the compelling American interest was not geography but “humanity and liberty.”

Herschensohn raised the issue in the context of his insistence that the United States should make no cuts in defense spending. He said the United States must retain its role as a “beacon of liberty.”

Then Herschensohn, a conservative commentator for KABC for 13 years with a long interest in foreign affairs, said he rarely is asked about the Bosnian crisis in meetings with newspaper and television editorial boards.

“This meeting reminds me of an old Warner Bros. picture in 1940 of an editorial board and no one mentions what is going on in Germany and Austria and other countries,” he said.

Herschensohn, who is Jewish, said that as a child he was frequently required to watch the newsreels of German concentration camps. Asked why, he was told, ‘ “So that we never allow that to happen again.’ ”

He added, “We’ve allowed that to happen again. We’ve allowed it to happen again in Cambodia, in the Central African Republic, in Afghanistan and most likely, unless the reports are wrong, we are allowing it to happen this very second in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

Ideally, he said, the United States should intervene to inspect the camps in concert with NATO allies or the United Nations. But he said that since it is apparent that is not going to happen, Americans should act alone.

“I believe you would do everything in your power to keep it to aircraft rather than troops,” he added. “But I don’t think that you can ever exclude anything, nor should you exclude anything, that every option is always open to you.”

After suggesting the use of American force is necessary, Herschensohn was asked if he was prepared to commit U.S. military power based on the information available now.

“No,” he responded. “I’m not the President of the United States and I don’t have the information. . . . But I believe the United States should seriously be on record regarding Bosnia-Herzegovina, or I have to look back in history and say, ‘Do the same thing all over again, no one really cares, as long as they don’t live there, they don’t care.’ ”

During his debate last Saturday with Democratic opponent Barbara Boxer, she called for major cuts in military programs and said the United States no longer can serve as “the 911 of the world.”

However, Boxer, a U.S. congresswoman from Marin County, was a co-sponsor last month of a successful House resolution calling for U.N. and Red Cross access to refugee and internment camps.