THE EVIL AT THE DRAGON'S FEET

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Beneath Carpaccio's dragon lies a kind of Bosnian litter: half-devoured bodies . skulls . busy, slithering snakes. The painting St. George and the Dragon is a vision of evil perfectly at home in the late 20th century, even though the artist imagined it almost 500 years ago. It gleams like a premonition in the garage-dim Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice. What is missing from the picture in 1995, of course, is the St. George part -- the rescue: Evil impaled, Good's shining blond revenge.

It made some sense that Elie Wiesel chose Venice as the place to bring together 30 interesting adolescents ("Tomorrow's Leaders") from various battlefields around the world (Bosnia, several African countries, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, some of the more violent neighborhoods of American cities) to talk about their lives. Venice, with its gorgeous, impastoed melancholy, exhausted the possibilities of human glory and depravity centuries ago. Wiesel's young, all vulnerability and fire, assembled at the other end of history altogether. Furious at what the blackhearted past has done to them, they made friends across their inherited fault lines (Israeli with Palestinian, Irish Protestant with Irish Catholic, for example) and inspected the future with a kind of fervent wariness, a provisional hope.

In the meantime, of course, the dragon proceeded with his projects. Beside the Venice lagoon, you could practically hear the noise from Bosnia, an hour's hop across the Adriatic. (Some sporting Italians, it is said, fly over for the weekend, hoping to see some shooting and maybe even to do some violence themselves.) Nineteen-year-old Tarja Krehic from Bosnia told the others about the mysterious onset of evil in her neighborhood: "Hate came, I don't know from where." A 19-year-old from Kenya, Kim Muhota, reported that in the streets of Nairobi, children are known to wield discarded hypodermic needles (carrying God knows what viruses of doom) and threaten to jab passersby unless given money-the needles becoming grotesquely miniaturized moral inversions of the St. George lance.

Wiesel meant, in part, to audition the future while it is still in its teens. He told the young, "Some of us have access to the leaders of the world. But all the meetings we have had have been disappointments. So we wanted to start before you become leaders."

Some of the kids' short, traumatized biographies supported an underlying premise-a motif that the older speakers elaborated upon a bit too automatically. Bernard Kouchner, the French doctor who co-founded Madecins Sans Frontieres and Madecins du Monde, stated the theme when he spoke about Bosnia: Today there are 37 wars going on in the world. The adults have failed, he said. Youth must succeed.