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BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - During a two-hour interview in his austere office, Slobodan Jovanovic, secretary general of the Confederation of Trade Unions of Serbia (CTUS), handed me a list of 164 factories destroyed by U.S.-NATO bombing, all of them state-owned. Not one of the foreign-owned enterprises in the country was targeted.
Many of these factories had been occupied by their workers, who hoped to prevent U.S. warplanes from attacking by placing their bodies on the line.
NATO bombed them anyway, proving that from the beginning the U.S. has targeted Yugoslavia's working class. Rebuilding this devastation after the bombing stops will cost billions of dollars.
Among the factories destroyed are the giant Zastava plant that employed 30,000, the Energoinvest plant in the Kosovo city of Pristina that employed 800, the Amortizeri plant that employed 4,500 workers and the 14th of October plant that employed 5,000.
Now in his mid-40s, Jovanovic is still as lean as he was in 1976 when he won fifth place in a rowing event at the Montreal Olympics.
Today he is pulling his weight in a different race as he and his 1.9-million-member organization struggle in defense of a new type of refugee - the Yugoslavs who have lost their livelihood.
The interview sometimes became so animated that it tested the capabilities of Ivan Pavlovic, the 22-year-old leader of the Communist Party youth organization, who served as my interpreter.
"We have lost the equivalent of more than two factories a day," Jovanovic said.
"More than a half-million workers no longer have jobs and, when you take into account members of their families, you've got three million people who are directly affected."
But the most revealing statistic: "Not one of these destroyed facilities was privately owned," Jovanovic said.
More than a decade after the fall of Yugoslavia's model of socialism, more than three quarters of basic industry is still state-owned. This is anathema to U.S. officials who have led the drive to either privatize or destroy publicly-owned property everywhere.
Pavlovic, well versed in World War II history, cited other instances when Yugoslav's industrial base had either been "exempted" from aerial attack or deliberately destroyed.
"When the Germans invaded my country, they left most of our industrial base intact," he said. "But there was a reason: They wanted the factories to produce for their army. But when it became obvious that the Red Army and the Partisans were going to succeed in driving the Nazis out, the British bombed our factories so they wouldn't fall into the hands of Yugoslav workers."
Displaced workers are provided with a money income equal to the minimum wage and a "humanitarian package" of necessaries.
When asked about the specific role of the CTUS, Jovanovic handed me a letter dated March 30.
It was addressed to the leaders of trade unions, especially those in the 19 member-states of NATO, who were conducting the "aggression" against Yugoslavia.
"We had always hoped the day would come when the calamity facing our country would pass and that the CTUS would be able to contribute to the common activity of trade unions in a United Europe," the letter began.
"We ask you, therefore, to do your best in order to stop the terrible aggression which will destroy numerous work places and ... provoke a humanitarian catastrophe."
"Our letter pointed to the fact that workers were attempting to protect their jobs and factories by gathering in groups at their workplace, hoping, in this way, to deter the bombing," Jovanovic said.
"We have no idea of how successful that was but it was a show of defiance that illustrates the mood of our workers."
A subsequent letter from the workers of the Zastava factory, Yugoslavia's largest automobile factory told that it had been attacked twice with 14 Tomahawk missiles, that many workers "who intended to protect their workplace with their bodies" had been wounded, that 22,000 workers were left without jobs and that a total of 80,000 people had been left "at the edge of existence."
The April 15 letter closed with an appeal to organized labor throughout the world to speak out for an end to the bombing.