Such Web sites have taken on increasing symbolic importance, as each side protests what they call distorted media accounts of their position. The Serbs saw the Internet as threatening enough that the government closed down the Web site of B92, Belgrade's only major politically independent radio station, which was getting 40,000 hits per day until it was shut down last week. Though some of the rebel voices on the Internet, such as B92, have been stifled, e-mail chat rooms, exchanges and electronic bulletin boards based outside the country have remained a key channel of communication for those inside Yugoslavia and elsewhere. The site Serbian Cafe is one of a handful of sites where Serbs, Americans and Europeans are debating the war in real time in message postings that range from the juvenile to the profound. In one moment bombs start falling.
People start dying.
Fleeing their homes. Because of the anonymity of posting on the Web, it is impossible to know for certain if such messages are an elaborately clever form of cyber-propaganda or the earnest expressions of Yugoslav citizens. Neither Kosovski nor several other people who identified themselves as Yugoslavians posting on the Internet responded to e-mail messages this week. But Kosovski's posting did draw replies from several others. I'm really sorry that you have been bombed.