THE STORMING of the Bastille 210 years on

THE STORMING of the Bastille, 210 years on. That is the name given by disrespectful Belgraders to the headquarters building of Serbian television, which Nato bombed early yesterday morning. There are those who will tell you that it is not as simple as that But it really is. It is as simple as not walking away.The writer is a BBC News special correspondent.

But I come back to the question that faces all of us: when confronted with evil on a vast scale, do you sit back and do nothing when you have the power and scope to do something?Of course, we cannot intervene everywhere, all the time. But we can intervene where it is possible, and where the scale of the crime insists that we act. That is why, for example, we have a UN convention on genocide: the legal injunction that forces us to recognise the singularity of some international crimes above all others.Evil survives - whether in East Timor or Rwanda or the Balkans - because those with the power to act fail in their moral duty. When confronted with evil, do you take a view that you should not act to prevent it continuing? You may take this view for any number of reasons:n You believe there is no national interest to be served by intervention (honest but blinkered)n You wonder why we act in one place when we did not act in, say, Rwanda or East Timor (a fair question, but it evades the point)n You believe that everybody involved is savage and one side is bad as the other (frequently expressed, but racist, and it ignores history)n You believe that the long-term consequences may be catastrophic (intelligent and sober, but this again misses the point)There are all these reasons, and I do not mock anybody who espouses them. This is a notion that our liberal society finds difficult to countenance; it seems to challenge the very idea we have of ourselves at the end of this century.War makes us shiver; we lie awake wondering where it will all end, where it will lead us And we are right to question and right to worry. But my own actions were motivated not by those rational considerations, but quite simply by fear I was physically powerless and afraid for my own life. They and the militia had their plans for those people and we would have been unable to alter that And all of that is true in so far as it goes.

I have since told myself that nothing I or my colleagues could have done would have made a difference. Fear made me turn round and negotiate my way home through the roadblocks. Fear made me decide that the safest - not the best - thing to do was nothing.You must understand that this encounter had come after seeing many dead bodies, after seeing the capsizing of a world. But the army came up and told me and my colleagues to go away It was on the colonel's orders, they said Nobody was to be allowed near the refugees. For the record, this prefet is now facing charges of genocide at the International War Crimes Trial in Arusha, Tanzania I went back at night to try to speak with the people.