The daily VIP newsletter yesterday cited local experts as saying the sanctions had reduced Serbia's economy to the 1968 level. Even before the airstrikes began, the most optimistic forecasts did not see Serbia return to its 1990 level of economic performance until 2015. While NATO air attacks have not loosened the Yugoslav military's stranglehold on the Serbian province of Kosovo and its ethnic Albanian inhabitants, they have devastated targets ranging from the country's two biggest oil refineries, in Pancevo and Novi Sad, to the Zastava factory at Kragujevac, which produced the Yugo car and employed 15,000 workers. The bombing has cut all but one of the bridges across the Danube River, severely limiting communication between the agricultural region of Vojvodina in the north and the rest of Yugoslavia. Other targets have included chemical, drug, cigarette, shoe and light-aircraft factories, as well as TV transmitters, railway stations and airports.
Nobody is likely to starve.
Serbia, which makes up 80 percent of Yugoslavia, has always been self-sufficient in food, and stores even now are full of meat and dairy products. Vegetables are plentiful at Belgrade's farmers market. But fewer and fewer people can afford to buy more than bare necessities. Unemployment has soared to nearly 50 percent, and there are signals of worse ahead. Gas rations were halved Tuesday, leaving most drivers in a car-crazed nation with only about 5 gallons a month.