>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: 472,000
>
>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%