Massive destruction
"As the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia enters its second month" wrote correspondent Michael Dobbs in the April 25 Washington Post, "allied bombing has achieved one significant result: the destruction of large chunks of the country's economic infrastructure.
"The economy, already reeling from the effects of eight years of international sanctions and decades of mismanagement, is being dismantled piece by piece. Yugoslav officials say that the damage from NATO bombs has reached the $100 billion mark. By some estimates, the bombing has set Yugoslavia back one or even two decades."
In first few weeks of the bombing, 500,000 workers were left jobless, according to the Yugoslavian government. The New York Times has reported that the bombing is having "greater effects on the gross domestic product than the Nazi and, then, the Allied bombing of Yugoslavia" during World War II.
This deliberate destruction of economic and social infrastructure is a crime that will leave the region impoverished for decades.
Infrastructure destroyed or damaged during the first month of the bombing, according to the Yugoslavian government, included:
* 32 bridges;
* 16 railway stations;
* extensive railway track;
* water supply for 1 million people;
* roads, highways, buses and bus stations;
* seven airports;
* civilian industrial facilities including petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, machines, tobacco, agricultural aircraft, white goods, cars, metal, printing, furniture, textiles, wood processing, chemicals, plastics, cotton yarn, shock-absorbers, batteries, shoes and open-cut coal, and warehouses and depots storing construction materials, general merchandise, food and petrochemicals;
* a thermoelectric power station and boiler plant;
*electrical distribution grids;
* five agricultural complexes;
* 16 hospitals and medical facilities;
* more than 200 schools and facilities for students and children;
* tens of thousands of residences;
* 23 television transmitters;
* 18 medieval monasteries and religious shrines;
* nine cultural-historical monuments and museums.