Scores of factories are destroyed. So is much of the country's oil industry. Already crippled by eight years of international sanctions and decades of mismanagement, the economy is being dismantled piece by piece, missile by missile. 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.
It is also uncertain whether the economic dislocation will lead to any serious challenge to President Slobodan Milosevic's rule. Yugoslavs have a long history of authoritarian rule. And Serbs have long considered themselves a people forced by outsiders to suffer unjustly. But fewer and fewer people can afford to buy more than bare necessities. I don't know how my family would make ends meet without help from my wife's parents.