from Sam Smith's Progressive Review:

BALKAN STATS I

FROM A COLUMN BY TONY SNOW: Key members of the United States Senate sat
slack-jawed through a confidential briefing last Thursday from the Clinton
administration foreign-policy team. After the foreign-policy wise men
asserted that the United States has a moral imperative to stop the
murderous Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, one senator asked: How
many Albanians have Milosevic's troops massacred this year? The president's
emissaries turned ashen. They glanced at each other. They rifled through
their papers. One hazarded a guess: "Two thousand?" No, the senator
replied, that was the number for all of last year. He wanted figures for
the last month - or even the year to date, since the president had painted
such a grisly picture of genocide in his March 24 address to the nation.
The senator pressed on. How often have such slaughters occurred? Nobody
knew. As it turns out, Kosovo has been about as bloody this year as, say,
Atlanta. You can measure the deaths not in the hundreds, but dozens. (I'm
not trying to deny Milosevic's brutality here; only to provide some
comparisons.) More people died last week in Borneo than have expired this
year in Kosovar bloodshed - more died in a single Russian bomb blast; in a
single outburst of violence in East Timor; in a single day in Rwanda. China
has been bloodier this year.



BALKAN STATS II

--Estimated number of persons killed in Iraq due to American-led sanctions:
over 1,000,000
--Estimated number of persons killed in the Sudan over the past 15 years:
1,500,000
--Estimated number of persons killed in Rwanda over the last five years:
500,000
--Estimated number of persons killed in Chechnya: 80,000
--Estimated number of people dying each day around the world because of
lack of water, clothing, shelter, food or medicine: 100,000
--Estimated number of people in the world who go to bed hungry: 800,000,000
--Estimated number of persons killed in Kosovo last year: 2,000



BALKAN STATS III

--Estimate of new households watching CNN thanks to its war coverage: 2,000



BALKAN STATS IV

--Cost of America's 21 B-2 bombers: $42 billion
--Value of Yugoslavian GDP: $43 billion
--UN budget as a percentage of the Pentagon budget: 5%