War in The Balkans: Nato stained with blood of civilians

BLOOD IS beginning to spatter Nato's campaign in Yugoslavia. Just under two weeks ago, it was the blood of 26 Serb civilians in the town of Aleksinac. Then on Monday, it was the blood of 27 Serb passengers - the latest reported figure for fatalities - on a train bombed by a Nato jet. Yesterday, more than 60 Kosovo Albanian refugees were reported torn to pieces by Nato bombs in Kosovo. That phrase "collateral damage" is beginning to sound ever more obscene.

By midnight last night, the usual fog was closing in on the dead. One of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe monitors (many of whom are former diplomats or intelligence officers) suggested that a MiG jet and a helicopter - presumably Serbian - might have been responsible for killing the Albanian refugees. The Pentagon suggested Serb forces may have been mixed up in the column of refugees - as if bombing civilians is excusable if military forces are using them as a human shield.

Needless to say, the Serb government is happy to publicise these atrocities - just as Nato is ready and willing to report every atrocity committed by Serb forces in Kosovo. But Nato's new ground rules are playing into Serbian hands. For it is becoming ever clearer that somewhere - in Washington, perhaps, or Brussels or the Aviano airbase in Italy - someone has decided that civilians must suffer for their country's sins. Or that their lives can now be regarded as forfeit if they live near a barracks or an airfield or happen to be travelling on a passenger train.

The Serb authorities - who denied the stories told by thousands of Albanian refugees of "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of Serb forces - were quite specific in their description of the slaughter of as many as 75 Albanian refugees by Nato aircraft yesterday, first near the village of Medjan, at 1.30 in the afternoon, then at Bistrazin at 3pm. The Kosovo Albanians were travelling in cars and tractors, "escorted" by at least three Serb policemen. The three policemen were also killed.

Wesley Clark - the general who thought he could fight a war without ground troops - gave a deeply unsettling performance when he tried to explain the train massacre this week. The pilot only saw the train enter his bomb frame at the last second, he said. He couldn't stop the bomb. But then - incredibly, knowing the train was there - he returned to fire two more missiles at the railway bridge. Even to attack a railway bridge when Nato knew it carried scheduled passenger services begs a thousand moral questions.

Are we now accepting civilian casualties as the price for bombing Serb forces? Is the target "worth the risk" of their deaths? The Serb authorities would be doing nothing out of character if they killed Kosovo Albanians and tried to blame Nato. But is it possible - with hundreds of Nato aircraft on daylight sorties, with every Serb MiG targeted - that a Serb air force jet could enter Kosovo airspace (with a helicopter) and attack a column of refugees (even if mixed in with Serb forces)?

Dark questions now lie across the whole Balkan war. No, there's no doubt that the greatest victims of this catastrophe are the dispossessed Kosovo Albanians. And there are war criminals among the Serbs. But unless it examines its own morality, Nato is now in danger of looking like just another killer in the Balkans war.