Their Atrocities--and Ours.

There was a headline recently in my hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe: PENTAGON DEFENDS AIRSTRIKE ON VILLAGE. U.S. SAYS KOSOVARS WERE "HUMAN SHIELDS." That brought back the ugliest of memories. It recalled My Lai and other Vietnam massacres, justified by such comments as "the Vietnamese babies are concealing hand grenades."

Here's the logic: Milosevic has committed atrocities; therefore, it is OK for us to commit atrocities. He is terrorizing the Albanians in Kosovo; therefore, we can terrorize the Serbs in Yugoslavia.

I get e-mail messages from Yugoslav opponents of Milosevic, who demonstrated against him in the streets of Belgrade before the air strikes began. They now tell me their children cannot sleep at night, terrified by the incessant bombing. They tell of the loss of light, of water, of the destruction of the basic sources of life for ordinary people.

To Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times, all Serbs must be punished, without mercy, because they have "tacitly sanctioned" the deeds of their leaders. That is a novel definition of war guilt. Can we now expect an Iraqi journalist to call for bombs placed in every American supermarket on the grounds that all of us have "tacitly sanctioned" the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq caused by our eight-year embargo?

Official terrorism, whether used abroad or at home, by jet bombers or by the police, always receives an opportunity to explain itself in the press, as ordinary terrorism does not. The thirty-one prisoners and nine guards massacred on orders of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the Attica uprising; the eleven MOVE members, five of whom were children, killed in a fire after their homes were bombed by Philadelphia police; the eighty-six Branch Davidians, including twenty-four children, who died at the Waco compound in an attack ordered by the Clinton Administration; the African immigrant murdered by a gang of policemen in New York--all of these events had explanations that, however absurd, are dutifully given time and space in the media.

One of these explanations seeks comfort in relative numbers. We have heard NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea, as well as Clinton, pass off the bombing of Yugoslav civilians by telling us the Serb forces have killed more Albanians than we have killed Serbs--although as the air strikes multiply, the numbers are getting closer. No matter: This math work justifies NATO's killing not just Serbs but Albanian refugees, not just adults but children.

There were those who defended the 1945 firestorm bombing of Dresden (100,000 dead?--we can't be sure) by pointing to the Holocaust. As if one atrocity deserves another! I have heard the deaths of more than 150,000 Japanese citizens in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified by the terrible acts of the Japanese military in that war.

I suppose if we consider the millions of casualties of all the wars started by national leaders these past sixty years as "tacitly supported" by their populations, some righteous God who made the mistake of reading Thomas Friedman might well annihilate the human race.

The television networks, filling our screen with heartrending photos of the Albanian refugees--and those stories must not be ignored--have not given us a full picture of the human suffering in Yugoslavia. An e-mail came to me, a message from Djordje Vidanovic, a professor of linguistics and semantics at the University of Nis: "The little town of Aleksinac, twenty miles away from my hometown, was hit last night with full force. The local hospital was hit, and a whole street was simply wiped off. What I know for certain is six dead civilians and more than fifty badly hurt. There was no military target around whatsoever."

That was an "accident." As was the bombing of the Chinese Embassy. As was the bombing of a civilian train on a bridge over the Juzna Morava River. As was the bombing of Albanian refugees on a road in southern Kosovo. As was the destruction of a civilian bus with twenty-four dead, including four children.

Some stories come through despite the inordinate attention to NATO propaganda, omnipresent on CNN and other networks (and the shameless Shea announced we bombed a television station in Belgrade because it gives out propaganda).

There was a rare description of the gruesome scene at the bus bombing by Paul Watson of The Los Angeles Times.

The New York Times reported the demolition of four houses in the town of Merdare by anti-personnel bombs, "killing five people, including Bozina Tosovic, thirty, and his eleven-month-old daughter, Bojana. His wife, six months pregnant, is in the hospital."

Steven Erlanger reported, also in The New York Times, that NATO missiles killed at least eleven people in a residential area of Surdulica, a town in southern Serbia. He described "the mounded rubble across narrow Zmaj Jovina Street, where Aleksandar Milic, thirty-seven, died on Tuesday. Mr. Milic's wife, Vesna, thirty-five, also died. So did his mother and his two children, Miljana, fifteen, and Vladimir, eleven--all of them killed about noon when an errant NATO bomb obliterated their new house and the cellar in which they were sheltering."

Are these "accidents," as NATO and U.S. officials solemnly assure us?

One day in 1945 I dropped canisters of napalm on a village in France. I have no idea how many villagers died, but I did not mean to kill them. Can I absolve what I did by calling it "an accident"?

Aerial bombings have as inevitable consequences the killing of civilians, and this is foreseeable, even if the details about who will be the victims cannot be predicted.

The deaths and mutilations caused by the bombing campaign in Yugoslavia are not accidents but the inevitable result of a deliberate and cruel campaign against the people of that country.

There was an extraordinary report by Tim Weiner in The New York Times contrasting the scene in Belgrade with that in Washington where the NATO summit was taking place. "In Belgrade ... Gordana Ristic, thirty-three, was preparing to spend another night in the basement-cum-bombshelter of her apartment building. `It was a really horrible night last night. There were explosions every few minutes after 2 A.M. ... I'm sorry that your leaders are not willing to redd history.'

"A reporter read to her from Clinton's speeches at the summit meeting. She sounded torn between anger and tears. `This is the bottom to which civilization, in which I believed, has gone. Clinton is playing a role, singing a song in an opera. It kills me.' As she slept, NATO's leaders dined on soft-shell crabs and spring lamb in the East Room of the White House. Dessert was a little chocolate globe. Jessye Norman sang arias. And as the last limousine left, near midnight, Saturday morning's all-clear sounded in Belgrade."

When I read a few weeks ago that cluster bombs are being used gainst Yugoslavia and have caused unprecedented amputations in Kosovo hospitals, I felt a special horror. These bombs have hundreds of shrapnel-like metal fragments that enter the body and cannot easily be removed, causing unbearable pain. Serb children have picked up unexploded bombs and been mutilated. I remember being in Hanoi in 1968 and visiting hospitals where children lay in agony, victims of a similar weapon--their bodies full of tiny pellets.

Two sets of atrocities, two campaigns of terrorism--ours and theirs. Both must be condemned. But for that, both must be acknowledged, and if one is given enormous attention, and the other passed over with official, respectful explanations, it becomes impossible to make a balanced moral judgment.

Yes, Milosevic should stand in the dock to answer for war crimes. Clinton, Albright, Cohen, and Clark should stand with him.

There is another factor that we as Americans must consider when we confront the atrocities on both sides. We bear a moral responsibility in any situation to the extent that we have the capacity to affect that situation. In the case of the Milosevic cruelties against the Kosovars, our capacity to intervene--which may have been greater before we rushed to bomb--is very limited, unless we go into a fullscale ground war. If that happens, the resulting tragedy will far exceed the one that has already taken place. But we have a direct responsibility for the cruelties our government inflicts by bombing innocent people in Yugoslavia.

We are seeing liberals and even some radicals, forgetting their own harsh criticism of the controlled press, succumb to the barrage of information about the horrors inflicted on the people of Kosovo. That information is isolated from its context--the human consequences of our bombing campaign, the record of the United States government in ignoring or abetting "ethnic cleansing" in various parts of the world, the refusal of the U.S. and NATO to respond to reasonable and negotiable proposals from the other side. And so those who should know better are led to support violent solutions.

George Seldes, that fierce exposer of the press, and Upton Sinclair, who wrote of the prostitution of the newspapers in The Brass Check, both lost their sense of proportion as they were inundated with Allied propaganda in World War I and found themselves supporting a military debacle that ended with ten million dead. Seldes later wrote: "Of the first war years, I will say just this: I made a total fool of myself when I accepted as true the news reports from New York and Europe, which by their volume and repetition overwhelmed what little objective intelligence I had...."

If the Serbian military are killing and expelling the Albanians in Kosovo, it is a reasonable reaction to say: "We must do something." But if that is the only information we are getting, it is a quick and reckless jump to: "We must bomb," or "We must invade." If we don't want to perpetuate the violence on both sides, we will have to demand of our leaders that they discard their macho arrogance ("We will win!" "Milosevic will lose!" "We are the superpower! "Our credibility is at stake!"). We must demand that they stop bombing and start talking.

There will, at some point, be a negotiated end to the violence in Yugoslavia. But how many people on both sides will have died needlessly and horribly in the interim? That depends on how quickly the American people can raise a powerful cry of protest against the actions of our government.

Howard Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present" (HarperPerennial, 1995), is a columnist for The Progressive.