How about some reports like this one below like the ones Christiane just never got around to do. I know Raven will cry after reading this one...but will only post the kosovar refugee donation links...ahh the power of media!
Casualties from NATO Bombings (via Bob Djurjevich)
The Apr. 2 report by The (London) Independent, filed from Belgrade by
its
veteran reporter, Robert Fisk:
On the second floor of the Serbian Clinical Centre in Belgrade are
victims
of the Balkan war who will never be mentioned in any NATO briefing.
There's
a 14-year-old boy with his head crushed, lying in a coma, eyes
half-closed,
a fat oxygen tube down his throat. There's a middle-aged farmer hit in
the
head by shrapnel and expected to die within a few hours. A little
further
down the emergency ward is another boy - 13 this time - with his head
swathed in bandages, moving in agony, his brain damaged and his right
leg
fractured by a falling building. They are NATO's victims.
Our victims, I suppose. Standing at their bedsides, the phrase
"collateral
damage" seems somehow obscene. Ivan Tanasijevic, the 14-year-old from
the
Drina river valley, was wounded in a NATO air raid on Loznica, and his
father came to see him on Wednesday. "He asked if he could see his
son,"
Dr Dragana Vujadinovic says. "I said, yes, but that Ivan was in a coma.
The
father sat by his bed here and cried. He is a farmer. Yes, I told him
his
son is very bad but that we wouldn't know what will happen for another
few
days. Yes, the boy is likely to die."
[...]
Dobrica Vukojicic is likely to join them soon. He was a farmer and
appears
to have been in his fields near Kraljevo when a NATO missile exploded a
few
meters from him. Pieces of metal smashed into his head and the blast
caused
what the doctors call "contralateral" damage to his brain, which started
internal bleeding. He was brought to the medical centre on Wednesday
night.
Will he live, I ask Dr Mihaelo Mitrovic? He looks at me as if I am
foolish
to ask and raises his eyebrows. The man breathes noisily through his
tubes,
huffing and puffing as if aware of his fate. He will probably never
awake.
Dr. Mitrovic, who refuses to talk politics, insists on pointing out
those
patients who are not war-wounded and those who - though they may not be
direct victims of NATO's bombs - are victims of the war. Milan Lemajic,
for
example, lies unconscious in a bed at the end of the ward, his head as
bloated as a football, his face a mass of bruises. "We think he tried to
commit suicide after the first bombs," the doctor said. "He jumped from
the
fourth floor of his apartment block. Look at his X-rays." He holds out a
sheet of negatives that shows just a big, dark mass. "His head is like a
water-melon." |
