HARROWING footage and chilling eye-witness evidence of mass atrocity by the Bosnian Serbs were shown on TV last night.

If not proof of their guilt of war crimes equal to the genocidal evil of the Nazis, then the Panorama programme hammered out a compelling case to be answered.

Yet, as an uneasy peace settles on war-ravaged Bosnia, the perpetrators and instigators of these horrendous deeds go unquestioned, unmolested and unpunished.

And, seemingly, the international community is content not to rake too deeply for the truth or for justice - perhaps, one wonders, because this was an unspoken clause in the US-brokered Dayton peace deal that brought a grudging conclusion to the war in Bosnia.

Yet, consider just one instance of what Panorama revealed last night.

In the former UN safe haven of Srebrenica, 8,000 Muslims are still missing - and overwhelming evidence was given that they were systematically slaughtered in an act of revenge by the Bosnian Serbs.

While alive, these people were dreadfully let down by the United Nations when Srebrenica was overrun in violation of its status as a UN-declared sanctuary.

Are they - and the crying-out case for justice - to be disappointed in death, too?

For is it not an outrage that with the mandate of the international community now prevailing in force and on the ground in Bosnia that those accused of being the principal war criminals and architects of these evils, Bosnian Serb army commander General Ratko Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic, are apparently free to come and go as they please?

Civilised people cannot condone such a situation.

The UN must act.

And failure to do so leaves festering and waiting to explode once more the hatreds that tore Bosnia apart in the first place.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.