For years as a reporter I watched police officers – good, hard-working cops – refuse to take domestic violence seriously, despite the bruises, broken bones, and hollow-eyed terror they found when responding to the complaints of concerned neighbors.

''Why doesn't she just leave?'' they would say, shrugging their shoulders in dismissal.

Only after domestic violence task forces held seminar and training sessions did many police officers come to understand that it isn't quite that simple.

What they found were families facing a strange ingrained culture, low self-esteem, often with a victim's heightened awareness but incredibly narrow focus of watching one's abuser's every mood, because a late or too-warmed-over meal, a wrinkled shirt or a misspoken word could mean another beating. Lack of money or a place to go, shame, and the statistically verifiable possibility of even greater terror, of being hunted down and killed like an animal if they tried to leave, keep many women in their home-based torture chambers – often until death do them part.

I think of the complexities of domestic violence every time I hear a news broadcast about Bosnia. And the words of a Maine Militia representative, voiced recently on WERU-community radio in my home town of Blue Hill, ring in my ear.

''First, they need to stop fighting.''

Great idea. Why didn't WE think of that.

The conundrum which is Bosnia shares many things with the history of domestic violence in this country. One of the first is the refusal of the policing agencies to get involved.

After all, Bosnia is a domestic, a civil war, not a real war. Right?

OK, maybe we've reached the stage that we're beginning to think that it's not right to have people killing each other, even if it's not our problem, not our family.

So we call in the cops, separate the sides, figuring they will cool off. Jimmy Carter even gets them to agree to cut it out for four months, in the hopes that cooler heads will by then prevail.
But no, time's up, and it's like a bell was rung for Round 79.

So now some of the cops say:

''Let's level the playing field and make sure everybody has guns so they can defend themselves. That way we won't have to get in the middle.''

Wouldn't it make more sense to take the guns away from the people who are doing the shooting, some of us ask?

How you gonna do that? they reply. You gonna go up and ask them to hand over their anti-aircraft batteries, pretty please?

Good point. But more guns will only make matters worse, you argue.

The cops shrug and secretly hope that one side either runs out of bullets or kills everyone they are aiming at so there's nothing left to fight about.

It's not our problem. Hey, I got kids of my own at home to think about.

The advantage we in this country have with domestic violence complaints is that, once the will is there, once the policy decision has been made to deal with the situation through the judicial system, our cops have the tools – the laws, the courts and the jails – to put a stop to the terror, by imprisoning the perpetrators if necessary. And it may be necessary, because quite often, perpetrators can't get it through their thick heads that what they are doing is not acceptable behavior in a civilized society.

Why not? Papa did it, and his papa before him. Get real, man. This is the way life is.

Bosnians, unfortunately, don't have the option or even the prospect of a trained police force ready to step in, policy decision in hand. The U.N. commanders can't agree on what to do about the situation, and the onus of war crimes (a very strange concept when you think about it) is falling on deaf ears.

A war crime tribunal? Oh yeah? You and what other army?

What I can't get away from, what keeps flashing through my brain as I watch in horror as one group of people tries to force its idea of government on another group it detests – is our Declaration of Independence.

''When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation....

''...Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.''

Governments based on the consent of the governed. Founded on principles likely to lead to safety and happiness. Bosnia was a civilized country, only a few short months and years ago. It finds itself terrorized by its own people, people who used to be neighbors, pillars of the community, who suddenly do not recognize the most basic of human rights, the rights of self-government, the rights upon which this country, our great country, across the sea and apparently so very far away, were founded so very long ago – rights which we thought had become by now recognized and accepted worldwide as the standard.

Everyone has basic human rights. That's what ''rights'' are. Right? Right?

There are so many suffering people in Bosnia, although fewer each day. In a world turned upside down, bankers and accountants hiding in basements now take buckets to wells, and wait in line for life-sustaining water, hoping a bomb or a bullet will not interrupt their intensely focused but narrow quest in the few minutes they stand in the open, exposed.
In this formerly bustling industrialized country now trying to survive with only sporadic relief trucks, vegetable gardens offer both a chance for life in providing basic food, and risk of death in the open-air to tend, water, weed, harvest. In a place where the rules change daily on the whim of the people with the weapons, months of hungered labor could go for naught with one raid, one artillery round.

How can we arrest all of them, the ones who are running amok in the name of power and control? Where would we put them if we did? How can we heal the wounds, both mental and physical, of so many of them? Where can we find enough sacred ground to bury what's left of so many bodies?

Why don't they all just leave?
 

– The Aroostook Democrat