The train had not completely left the bridge over the Juzna Morava River when an electricity cable supplying its power was cut by a missile fired from a Nato plane at a road bridge over the track. "The plane then returned and hit the train," said an official from the Yugoslav Army's press center.

Two passenger cars plunged from the bridge into the river at the bottom of a deep ravine. CNN reporter Brent Sadler described the carnage, in a 30-second live dispatch, as a scene of "blood amid the debris". Clinton's answer came a few hours later, when he addressed US Air Force personnel at the Barksdale base in Louisiana, whose B-52 bombers have been active in the bombing campaign in Yugoslavia. Clinton told his audience that theirinvolvement in the Nato air strikes represented "America at its best".

With the connivance of a docile media, which refuses to give an objective account of civilian casualties, the United States is targeting factories, residential areas, schools and similar facilities in Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. Nothing approaching the Nato air war has been seen in Europe since the Second World War.

As the bombing campaign has proceeded, the frequency of attacks on civilian targets has increased and the level of civilian casualties has risen. In the first days of the war, Washington and its European allies held back from attacking civilian targets out of concern for public opinion in the West. But as it became clear that the media campaign to demonize the Serbs had achieved considerable success, they felt their hands had been freed to intensify the drive to terrorize the population.

The passenger train was only one in a long list of industrial and civilian targets hit by Nato bombs and missiles over the pastseveral days. These include: The second strike in the past four days on the Zastavka industrial complex in Kragujevac, 45 miles southwest of Belgrade, which produces the Yugo automobile.

Last week Nato jets hit the plant despite the fact that the workers had surrounded the factory in an attempt to ward off a bomb assault. That attack injured 124 people. An additional 36 workers were injured in Monday's strike. Some 38,000 workers have been left without a job or livelihood as a result of the damage to the industrial complex.

The economic, social and environmental catastrophe that is being created by the Nato war was outlined by Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, issued a summary of facts on the impact of the bombing campaign.

Highlighting the impact of the air war on Yugoslav workers, Chossudovsky reported: "Several thousand industrial facilities have been destroyed or damaged with the consequence of paralysing the production of consumer goods. According toYugoslav sources, `By totally destroying business facilities across the country, 500,000 workers were left jobless, and 2,000,000 citizens without any source of income or possibility to ensure minimum living conditions.' Western estimates as to the destruction of property in Yugoslavia stand at more than US$10 billion."

An NBC TV report confirmed that Nato bombed the Galenika pharmaceutical complex, the largest medicine factory in Yugoslavia, located on the outskirts of Belgrade.

In considering the savagery of the US-Nato air assault, and its systematic targeting of Yugoslav industry, it should be recalled that US imperialism has pursued a policy of deindustrialization in the countries that emerged from the collapse of Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union. It has been a deliberate aim of American policy to dismantle large sections of industry in these countries, so as to eliminate "excess capacity" and further the interests of American-based transnational corporations.Similar considerations play no small role in the military strategy of the US in Yugoslavia.

As the toll of death and destruction mounts, it becomes increasingly clear that the aim of the US-led Nato bombing campaign is the decimation of the industrial and social infrastructure of Yugoslavia. As the tragic precedent of Iraq demonstrates, the extent of the devastation will only become clear after the war has ended.

In the years following the Persian Gulf War, some 1,000,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of military action and economic sanctions. How many hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs will perish in the aftermath of a war that has largely destroyed the country's economic foundations?

The eruptions of killing and death in the Balkan peninsula over the past decade have occurred within the context of civil wars whose cause is to a great extent rooted in the economic policies imposed on Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s by the Western powers and imperialist financial institutions such as theInternational Monetary Fund.

By the 1980s these policies had severely eroded the economic infrastructure which had for three decades after the Second World War enabled the Yugoslav people to live in peace. The resulting social crisis--rising unemployment, declining living standards--provided fertile ground for various capitalist powers, above all the United States, to encourage the growth of ethnic animosities, which were manipulated to further American and European designs in the region.

As terrible as the civil strife that has plagued the Balkans, far more horrific is the deliberate destruction of Yugoslavia, carried out in the pursuit of geo-political and economic interests that are kept concealed from the American and European people. All of the governments that are involved in this criminal enterprise will stand condemned before the bar of history.

(By The Editorial Board, WSWS. Reprinted with the permission of WSWS)