In The Balkans, Ceaseless Savagery

Incredibly, Yugoslavia's year-old civil war got even worse last week. The shelling, rocketing and machine-gun fire raking Sarajevo intensified as desperate Bosnian forces tried to break out of the siege that the Serb militia had locked around the city. Artillery and mortar rounds hit the airport so constantly that humanitarian relief flights were suspended for three days and U.N. officials warned that they might back the aid effort with military muscle.

The unrelenting savagery produced television images that shocked the whole world: terrified babies tied to bus seats, the funeral of two toddlers killed by snipers, a sudden -- apparently intentional -- mortar attack on the mourners. Then came persistent reports of torture and starvation in detention camps and more terrible television images, this time of skeletal, bruised men behind barbed wire.

More than 2 million former Yugoslavs have been forced to flee for their lives in this war. They were uprooted by the atavistic policy of "ethnic cleansing" on conquered territory, enforced most fiercely by the Serbs but also by Croats and Muslims. Refugees are only a by-product in most wars. In this one they are the calculated objective. (See related stories beginning on page 20.)