The actress Ms Vanessa Redgrave was shown documentary evidence of genocide in Kosovo, including photographs of children whose throats had been cut, before the NATO military intervention there earlier this year.
Ms Redgrave, a human rights campaigner, said all artists, and others, had an obligation to do what they could to oppose genocidal regimes.
She was in Dublin yesterday to deliver the Annual Distinguished Lecture in Health at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
Comparing the regime of President Milosevic to those of Hitler and Stalin, she said she was convinced the West knew of the genocide in Kosovo from an early stage and did little to stop it.
She said this was in contrast to the stance of the former Soviet president, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, who had "refused to allow Soviet tanks to be used by the regime in East Germany or any other horrific regimes", thereby making way for their downfall.
Ms Redgrave said she was convinced that had the West supported Mr Gorbachev in 1989 and 1990 with financial aid he would have been still in power in 1991, and "with power in cautious and thoughtful hands it would have been possible to stop Milosevic and what has happened under his regime". Speaking with difficulty because of a throat infection, Ms Redgrave, a UNICEF Special Representative for the Performing Arts, said the difference between the attitude of the West to human rights abuses in China and elsewhere "was in effect saying that some humans' rights matter and others don't".
She said the West could have intervened sooner in Kosovo, but in the mid-1990s "you couldn't get a story about Kosovo on the back page of a newspaper because the media were preoccupied with the Starr inquiry, what was an attempted coup in the US."
She was in favour of the military intervention when it came, although arguments remained about the way it was delivered.
The European Community, which had now declared that it would help repair the roofs of Kosovo, "should have no difficulty in knowing how many roofs would be required. They knew that between the end of February 1998 and October 1998 when the first NATO deadline ran out there were half a million Albanian refugees in Kosovo and a third of all Albanian-held property had been destroyed."
She said she knew of a small group of artists, intellectuals and students who had risked everything to maintain cultural links between the Albanian and Serb communities over 12 years. These people were now leading the moves to protect Serbs remaining in Kosovo.
The Open Door, a collection of papers from the speakers on health and foreign policy at the college, edited by Prof Kevin M. Cahill MD, has recently been published.
