In the Shadows of War

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To the alliance's credit, it has acknowledged the most dramatic "collateral damage" incidents, if sometimes belatedly:
  • The bombing of a railway bridge at Grdelica in Serbia, in which as many as 10 civilians aboard a train were reportedly killed;
  • The accidental bombing of a convoy of ethnic Albanian refugees near Djakovica two days later, in which up to 60 civilians were reported killed; and
  • The stray bomb that struck a residential neighborhood in the southern city of Surdulica, killing as many as 20 Serb civilians.
  • The missile strike on a bus crossing a bridge at Luzane, near the Kosovo capital of Pristina, that killed 47 people.

    But the "collateral" casualties that come in ones and twos don't generally rate a mention. Part of the problem is the absence of objective information from inside Kosovo. Western journalists were ordered out when bombing began, and Serb TV, NATO and the Kosovo Liberation Army each has its own agenda to consider when making information available. The stream of e-mail messages most news outlets are receiving from people purporting to be on the front line are, by definition, not considered reliable source material. But in one of the more heroic acts of the Kosovo war, the Los Angeles Times' Paul Watson simply rented a car and drove back into Kosovo after being expelled with the rest of the Western media corps. His dispatches from Kosovo have provided perhaps the only objective reportage from the war zone appearing daily in the Western press.

    And his accounts of the harrowing flight of refugees as well as of the hapless ethnic Albanian victims of NATO's "friendly" munitions offer little comfort to spin doctors on either side. He has, for example, mustered considerable circumstantial evidence, backed by experts in London and Washington, that the alliance has used cluster bombs in Kosovo, which NATO has denied -- although it has admitted using Combined Effects Munitions, which function in a similar way, spreading up to 200 deadly "bomblets" across a wide area. Watson also has provided graphic reportage of ethnic Albanian children killed by munitions that he claims came from cluster bombs, and of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians killed in their homes by stray bombs in incidents not reported or acknowledged by NATO.

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