Perception
US/NATO bombs are targeting military infrastructure.
 
The Truth:
"The U.S. and NATO war planes are using cluster bombs that have killed and wounded thousands of innocent civilians in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Nis, and other cities and villages throughout Yugoslavia including Kosovo."

From CNN online News, 25 May 1999

Belgrade's water supplies were down by 90 percent, according to some reports. Fifteen NATO bombs reportedly hit water pumps early Monday near the northwestern town of Sremska Mitrovica.  Other pumping stations were shut down because of power outages caused by NATO hits in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Nis. Millions of people were without electricity.

"Every effort is being made in this difficult situation to restore power supply to priority users -- hospitals, the water company, bakeries -- in order to alleviate the humanitarian disaster being caused by NATO," Serbia's power company told Tanjug.

• REPORT FROM THE WAR ZONE — Yugoslavs resolute as bombs fall everywhere - By Gloria La Riva and Sara Flounders Belgrade, Yugoslavia 24 May
• Eyewitness Yugoslavia: Ramsey Clark reportback - Emergency Mobilization to Stop the War. 22 May 1999

REPORT FROM THE WAR ZONE - Yugoslavs resolute as bombs fall everywhere - By Gloria La Riva and Sara Flounders Belgrade, Yugoslavia 24 May 1999

La Riva and Flounders went to Yugoslavia May 14 with an International Action Center delegation headed by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. They were accompanied by Pacifica radio news reporter Jeremy Scahill. La Riva, who also visited Belgrade with Clark in the first week of the bombing, is making a video, "NATO Targets." Flounders is an editor and co-author of the book "NATO in the Balkans." Scahill will be filing twice-daily reports from Yugoslavia to over 200 U.S. radio stations.

May 18, 1999--Tonight at 11:30 p.m. two huge detonations destroyed Yugopetrol's last remaining fuel-storage facility in Belgrade, a little over a mile from our hotel.

We raced to the scene through darkened streets to witness with our own eyes the latest crime of U.S. and NATO forces. The truth is inescapable: this war of aggression on Yugoslavia is a war against the people.

Today at the Clinical Center of Serbia, we witnessed patients with truly horrifying injuries. Dr. Vladimir Yucic was about to leave for the heavily bombed city of Nis to perform emergency surgery on injured patients there. He told us, "I am a specialist in liver surgery. This hospital was about to introduce liver transplants. Instead I'm doing amputations on people wounded by bombs."

Dr. Sonja Pavlovic works in intensive care. She took us to meet Nada, a 15-year-old girl whose legs had been mangled by a cluster bomb. The child's family is Serbian and lives in Kosovo. Because of the relentless bombing there, they sent her by bus to relatives in Montenegro. The bus was hit by a NATO cluster bomb. She is now paralyzed from the waist down, with shrapnel throughout her body.

NATO bombers have a diabolical practice: they drop a second missile minutes after the first, just as rescue teams arrive.

We spoke with two men from civil defense who had gone to rescue workers in the army headquarters in downtown Belgrade. As their vehicle approached the damaged building, a second bomb hit. One of the men whispered in great pain that a co-worker had died when they were blown into the air. He said he knew "in a millisecond" that his own legs had been blown off.

The other patient, Nebojsa Starcevic, has had reconstructive surgery that doctors hope will save his leg.

These two people were courageous not only in their struggle to survive, but in telling us their story and reliving the horror. Belgrade's top official for civil defense was also a patient in the ICU unit.

Dr. Pavlovic said, "These men are truly our heroes because they know of the second bombs and still rush to the scene to recover the wounded and dead."

During the day, people fill the streets of Belgrade and other cities, shopping, going to work. Life seems normal. But when the air-raid sirens go off, their lives can be turned upside down in an instant.

This afternoon at 3 p.m. we stood on a balcony in downtown Belgrade, about to head out to a refugee camp at Rakovica, a suburb 15 minutes away that had recently been bombed. Suddenly the sirens sounded. Within minutes came an announcement that bombs were dropping once again on Rakovica.

Yugoslavia has no high-tech weapons that could possibly take on the Pentagon. So what are NATO's targets?

In 50 days of bombing, NATO's goal has been to break the Yugoslav people's resistance to an army of foreign occupation--the main demand presented by the U.S. at Rambouillet before the bombing began.

The list of NATO military targets includes schools, hospitals, heating plants, communication grids, fertilizer plants to undermine this rich agricultural country, television and radio stations, cultural and religious sites, bus and train stations, and housing units on busy downtown streets.

All government and municipal services, fuel supplies and bridges have been targeted.

To drive from Budapest, Hungary, to Belgrade we had to take back roads. All the main highways, including bridges and overpasses, had been bombed and were impassable.

The countryside is intensely green. Fields have just been planted and new plants peek up in neat rows.

Between Novi Sad and Belgrade, we came on a small gas station still smoldering, flames licking pools of oil. Four laser-guided bombs had hit it just hours before. Gas fumes hung heavily in the air. Two gas pumps plus a small kiosk that sold coffee, crackers and plastic quarts of oil were now melted rubble. Several fuel storage tanks had been twisted into grotesque shapes.

A small house across the way had only two walls left and no roof. A haggard man--the gas station attendant--described how he heard the first bomb hit and fled into the fields. He said, "In one minute, I lost my home, everything I had, and my livelihood."

Local people stood around, looking at the smoking ruins.

Novi Sad was our first stop inside Yugoslavia. Three fine bridges once spanned the Danube River there. The oldest was used by local people in the downtown area. There was a railroad bridge and, further upstream, a new six-lane span for a major highway.

All three bridges have been bombed and now block the Danube, the major waterway of Europe. Some 150 vessels from Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Romania are stranded at the Yugoslav border. Altogether, 35 major bridges in Yugoslavia have been destroyed or damaged.

The largest and most advanced cardiovascular institute in the Balkans must now be reached by a gerry-rigged ferry boat. A large floating platform or raft with three engines at the stern, it is able to carry several hundred people at a time. Several other smaller ferries and boats shuttle back and forth, trying to make up for the loss of the bridges.

Our hotel in Novi Sad had only cold water. The thermal plant that had provided heat and hot water for the whole city had been bombed. This is an inconvenience in May. It will be life-threatening next January.

The people are calm.

Before nightfall, we visited a bombed school. A huge crater devoured what was once the schoolyard. All the windows were gone and the walls were charred.

Yet, after two months of bombing, we found people surprisingly calm even when night falls and the air-raid sirens wail. Conversation continues. People move quietly to the shelters.

The first day in Belgrade we spent touring bombed rubble, from small houses on side streets to the huge thermal plant that provided heat and hot water to all New Belgrade, a modern development of 80,000 new apartments. Now its 350,000 people are without heat or hot water.

The neonatal hospital in downtown Belgrade was a step into a seemingly secure world. Premature and critically ill newborns from all over Yugoslavia are sent here. Some 180 tiny, fragile infants cling to life in incubators and on mechanical ventilators. If the electricity is cut even for a few minutes, many lives will be lost. But backup generators stand by.

Bombings just two blocks away, however, have already rattled and disrupted these sensitively calibrated mechanisms several times.

We met with six doctors. All, including the director of the hospital, were woman. All health care in Yugoslavia is free, as is medical school. Since the bombing started, hospital emergency rooms have quadrupled their beds and material.

Defense is well organized

The initial bombings targeted government buildings, but all government ministries had already been moved and evacuated weeks before. Many valuable or life-sustaining supplies have been dispersed widely around the country. Air-raid shelters are well-stocked and marked. Even little children can recite air-raid warning procedures.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been on the move for several years, as Yugoslavia was being dismembered under the pressures of Western imperialism. With many refugees from the Krajina in Croatia, from Bosnia, and now from Kosovo, housing is packed.

Before the bombing, big apartment blocks were going up everywhere. The cranes can still be seen on the skyline. But all work has now been halted.

Even before the latest bombings--the heaviest of the war--half a million jobs had been lost as plants and infrastructure were destroyed. However, the government continues to issue paychecks so no one starves.

We visited Nis, one of the most heavily bombed cities in southern Serbia, just north of the province of Kosovo. The bridge we took coming into the city was blown up just a half hour after we passed over it. We had to take a different route on our return to Belgrade.

Nis is a city of 250,000. We saw destruction to a flour mill,
a bus station, and to many
little houses
all along the road. Huge gasoline holding tanks that provided heating and cooking fuel
for 800,000 people in the entire region were destroyed.

In one of the worst crimes, the central market of Nis was hit at noon on May 7.

Eleven people were killed and scores injured.

A hospital with a red cross clearly marked on the roof was hit with cluster bombs.

In one area of a few blocks, 1,300 bomblets were dropped.

Cluster and fragmentation bombs are anti-personnel weapons
banned by all international conventions.

One bomb full of razor-sharp ribbons of steel can shred an area the size of a football field.

On grassy lawns and pathways, unexploded cluster bombs are marked with bright ribbons and signs so people will avoid stepping on them.

Also bombed was the Greek consulate. As with China, there is tremendous popular sentiment for Yugoslavia in Greece.

At the Nis tobacco factory, a worker named Miloye told us, "Planes are constantly flying overhead but we come to work every day." Asked if he was afraid, he said, "Of course, but we must work because without work there is no life." The factory employs 3,000 workers and has been bombed on three separate occasions.

Miloye spoke about his eight-month-old daughter. "I wonder what her future will be. I hope this will be over so when she grows up to be a woman she can't even remember it."

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Eyewitness Yugoslavia: Ramsey Clark reportback - Emergency Mobilization to Stop the War 39 West 14th St., #206 New York, NY 10011 (212) 633-6646 fax: (212) 633-6646 http://www.iacenter.org email: iacenter@iacenter.org May20, 1999

Ramsey Clark will report on his trip from the Yugoslav war zone on Tuesday, May 25 at 6:30 pm at FIT in NYC (27 St. and 8 Ave.)

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and other members of a fact-finding delegation to the war zone in Yugoslavia between May 14-18 will provide testimony that the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is deliberately targeting civilians, civilian infrastructure, and the facilities necessary to sustain civilian life in Yugoslavia.

"It is a war crime as defined by the Geneva Convention to deliberately target civilians. But the U.S. and NATO war planes are using cluster bombs that have killed and wounded thousands of innocent civilians in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Nis, and other cities and villages throughout Yugoslavia_including in Kosovo," said Sara Flounders, Co-director of the International Action Center and a member of the fact-finding delegation.

The May 25 reportback meeting will include eyewitness testimony and dramatic, uncensored video footage that prove that civilians have been targeted in the U.S./NATO war effort. Clark traveled throughout Yugoslavia in late March 1999 and this second trip during the war provides comprehensive coverage of how economic, as well as military infrastructure, has been damaged or destroyed.

Members of the delegation will be available for interviews with the press on Tuesday, May 25 at 6:30 pm at the Fashion Institute of Technology (6th floor) located at 27 St. and 8 Ave. in Manhattan.

"If most people in the United States could have seen what we saw in Yugoslavia they would immediately join the ranks of the already growing anti-war movement," Flounders stated. "We are organizing a demonstration of tens of thousands of people for June 5, 1999, in Washington DC. It will be the largest demonstration to date to protest the U.S./NATO war. One thing that was evident from our trip is that the people of Yugoslavia have suffered greatly, but that their spirit of resistance against foreign aggression has not been broken. The U.S. must end this criminal war or it will be a repeat of the debacle in Vietnam."

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