Julian Cole

Here is a quote from Prime Minister Tony Blair: "It is not rhetorical to say we are witnessing scenes in Kosovo which we have not seen in Europe since the Second World War, and which we never expected to see repeated here."

The scenes to which Mr Blair refers are the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and no assessment of how the war is going, or indeed what it is for, can escape that barbarity.

Yet it is possible to put another meaning altogether on Mr Blair's words - not that he will thank me for doing so. For what we are also witnessing and never expected to see again in Europe is the bombing of one European country by another, or by assorted others and their big American friend.

There comes a point when one barbarity begins to look pretty much like another.

So while I wouldn't want to directly equate the ethnic cleansing with the bombing of Serbia, it is surely worth asking if the bombs we are dropping are doing what we intended.

Tony Blair always insists that Nato's bombs are hitting Milosevic's "war machine".

The quote marks are mine and I put them there for a reason. Milosevic obviously does have such a military apparatus, and yet the words "war machine" can sometimes appear to be a euphemism for something else altogether, such as "whoops, we've bombed an innocent village/hospital/TV station again" (delete according to scale and location of military slip-up).

And whenever such mistakes are made, you will hear the term "collateral damage". This is what military people say when they have accidentally killed innocent bystanders. It is a chilling term because it just sounds matter of fact when it refers to the ending of life.

As the war goes on, and as Nato planes continue to drop more and more bombs, soon to run to 700 bombing raids a day, it is difficult not to feel increasingly uncomfortable with what is being done in our name.

It is nave to say so, but I didn't vote for Tony Blair so that he could unleash bombs on Serbia - nave but worth saying all the same, for sometimes it is important to tap deep down into what you believe, and to still go on believing it, whatever else is being said or done.

For is it not possible that what is really happening in Serbia is the deliberate battering of the civilian population. Some commentators believe... but no, let me be honest... what the arch, anti-war journalist John Pilger believes is that "18 hospitals and clinics and at least 200 nurseries and students' dormitories have been destroyed or damaged, together with housing estates, hotels, libraries, youth centres, theatres, museums and 14th century monasteries on the World Heritage list".

Mr Pilger also maintains that "every day, three times more civilians are killed by Nato than the daily estimate of deaths of Kosovans in the months prior to the bombing".

More statistics and more opinions - and, no, I've no idea if Pilger's words are any truer than those spun out by the Nato press machine. But at least Pilger does remind us that there is another side to this story, and a side that is not often told.

And, whoever is right, the relentless bombing does nothing other than leave me feeling sick at heart, whichever way you look at it.

Whenever French lorry drivers have staged one of their traditional blockades, their British counterparts have complained bitterly about the inconvenience of it all, what with them not being able to get home.

Now some of the same lorry drivers are blocking British roads in protest at the rising price of diesel fuel. You could park a lorry-load of irony in the gap between these two contradictory positions, should you wish.

20/05/99

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.