In Yugoslavia, as in every other land, children wake up on a weekend morning ready to play.  They check the sky and, if it’s free of clouds and F-15s, head out into the neighborhood.  They play ball, kick sticks and hunt through the grass for bits of treasure.  Lately they’ve been stumbling upon some especially alluring objects – bright orange-yellow things the size of soda cans, and shiny spheres the size of tennis balls.  The kids snatch them up.  They explode.  The kids lose an arm, an eye, or a life.

This scenario is made possible by NATO, which has been scattering the colorful trinkets across Yugoslavia for weeks.  The soda-can things are CBU-87 and RBL755 bomblets, while the bright little balls are ATACMS bomblets.  …NATO likes to drop them on enemy airfields, because cluster bombs release a shower of explosives that then explode again – doing great damage to planes and other equipment.

But every now and then NATO misses its mark.  It drops cluster bombs not on a military installment, but on a civilian center.  This happened earlier this month in the southern Yugoslavia city of Nis, when an airstrike meant for an airfield instead hit a hospital complex and a market.  The damage of such a mishap doesn’t end with the airstrike.  That’s because the bomblets inside cluster bombs don’t always explode when they’re dropped.  A good 5 percent of them are duds – lying in quiet wait for an unwitting walker to happen by.  They become a kind of land mine, detonating when they’re disturbed on the ground.  Like land mines, they remain lethal years after a conflict has ended – killing innocent civilians. 

(VOICES asks: WHY IS THE U.S. DOING THIS TO THE CHILDREN???)