The news from the Balkans is almost too terrible to think about. How can it have come to this?

How can ordinary, decent people with hopes and dreams, families and jobs, homes they have worked hard to buy and communities in which they believed they were secure - as most of us do in our own communities - have so suddenly had everything taken from them?

So many of them are now left without their security, their homes, their possessions, their loved ones, often their dignity and even their lives.

They are being shifted around the Balkans from camp to camp, sharing a mud-locked tent with strangers if they are lucky enough to find a place in one. Husbands and wives are searching for each other and their children, lost youngsters are searching for parents.

The stories grow more appalling by the day: stories of the callous murder of defenceless women and children; stories of menfolk being rounded up and marched away, never to be seen again; stories of the systematic rape of Muslim women for whom the shame is such that many now wish they were among the dead.

This is happening not in some distant part of the planet among people whose culture, lifestyle and moral code we find hard to understand. It's happening to people like us in Europe, which was last in turmoil more than 50 years ago thanks to another power-crazed, hate-filled lunatic.

Hitler died in his bunker but his spirit lives on in Slobodan Milosevic whose expansionist Serbian ambitions have led to the abhorrent policy of "ethnic cleansing". Like all tyrants, he has created a culture of evil in which psychopaths, bullies and rapists thrive.

Kosovo is now under the control of brutal people who see the ethnic Albanians who live there not as fellow human beings but as rightful victims to be punished and purged.

There are still plenty of people calling for NATO to cease its bombardment of Yugoslavia and seek a negotiated settlement. I share their revulsion at the deaths and injuries being inflicted by the bombing on civilians, people who have just the same sort of hopes and dreams and desire for peace and security in which to get on with their lives as do the beleaguered people of Kosovo and all of the rest of us, wherever we live.

But what's the alternative? Surely no-one can negotiate a settlement with Milosevic which will be honoured? And surely the world cannot turn its back on the Kosovans (and now, perhaps, the Albanians in their own country) and leave the tyrant to do his worst?

Yet because of NATO's intervention, a widening war is engulfing a deeply-troubled part of Europe and ever more people are falling victim to Serbian brutality because of it.

What a nightmare! Where will it end? Meanwhile, almost everything else in the news seems so trivial. Mortgage rates falling by a fraction of a percent. Baby Spice getting measured up for a Madam Tussaud's waxwork. A national newspaper columnist saying nasty things about Bradford. Even 2,000 Glasgow shipyard workers facing unemployment.

Really, what does it all matter beside what's happening in Kosovo?

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.