As NATO cruise missiles illuminated the night sky this week, some Yugoslavs rushed not to bomb shelters -- but to their computers.

"Missiles started to fall like rains on Pristina," wrote Sevdie Ahmeti, a human rights worker in Kosovo, in a broken-English dispatch posted on the Internet the first day NATO war planes struck. "They looked like flames and falling like stars."

In its efforts to silence critics, the Serbian government expelled many foreign journalists this week and cracked down on the few independent media outlets in Yugoslavia. As this media brownout continues, the Internet is quickly becoming an important -- and in some cases the only -- means for outsiders to learn what's going inside the region.

Worried Yugoslavs living abroad are flooding Web sites and chat rooms to see if anybody has news about their hometowns and the whereabouts of friends and family. Meanwhile, activists in the United States and elsewhere, concerned about the potential for human rights abuses, are quickly establishing online forums for grass-roots journalists to post their electronic dispatches.

Many of these reports offer an unfiltered window into the thoughts of average citizens. "We didn't get some sleep for three nights," writes Belgrade resident Dragana Besara in a typical e-mail, "schools are closed, children are out of their minds. Every night we are waiting for bombs. Which bomb can stop human catastrophe, I would really like to meet it."

"The Internet is the most powerful weapon people can have to fight against the war," said Jack Boskovic, a native of Montenegro now living in Canada. "We cannot always trust the media but we can trust our friends and family."

Boskovic is collecting electronic dispatches from friends and family in Montenegro, Kosovo and northern Yugoslavia and publishing them on his Web site, Kosovo.com. The worldwide appetite for this news is strong. The site logged 750,000 visits yesterday, about 50 times the normal daily traffic, he said.

The correspondents in Boskovic's rag-tag network work hard to get news out. Phone service in some regions is spotty. Electricity often fails. Yugoslavs who want to send e-mail to Boskovic sometimes must use cellular phones to reach intermediaries in Italy, who then dispatch an e-mail to his computer in Canada.

Often the only words contained in the message are "I'm alive," he said.

But for many Yugoslavs living abroad, even terse reports such as these offer comfort. Mladen Raickovic spent yesterday trolling online chat rooms from his dormitory at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, to find out whatever he could about NATO attacks.

Raickovic, 21, immigrated to Canada with his mother and father when he was a child but has relatives in Montenegro and Serbia. He says the Internet offers a perspective he can't get in the newspaper or on television. "I want to hear what the Serbian people themselves are saying more than what people are saying about the Serbian people," he said.

Often the discussion in these rooms turns to politics. Many Serbs and their far-flung relatives are against NATO involvement in the Kosovo conflict, and chat room banter is frequently critical of "Klinton" for his decision to launch airstrikes.

At the same time, Serbs also appear to have mixed emotions about Slobodan Milosevic. "Some people love him; some people hate him," said Raickovic. "I just want everything to get solved peacefully. Nothing good ever comes out of war."

Activists in America, meanwhile, are creating their own online forums for journalism.

"Even if journalists are still there it adds value to have unmediated reports like you find online," said Steven L. Clift, an activist in Minneapolis, Minn. "I'm really interested in hearing stories from people who are spending a night in a bomb shelter, people who have fled to Macedonia. The Net is the only way at this point," he said.

But as more Yugoslavs reach out to the outside world, some human rights activists have begun to worry they might be tracked down and punished for their correspondence.

"I've seen a lot of messages being posted in the clear, with names, e-mail addresses, even phone numbers," said Alex Fowler of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights group in San Francisco. "It's just as easy for someone in the Yugoslavian government as it is for me to find these people."

The concern is real, notes Fowler. In January, China sentenced a 30-year-old software engineer to two years in jail for sending e-mail to a dissident publication in the United States.

With that in mind, yesterday Fowler and online firm Anonymizer.com cobbled together a system to help would-be correspondents in the Balkan war zone shield their identities from authorities by stripping their e-mails of any identifying information.

"We have to assume Milosevic and the Yugoslav government are monitoring the Internet," he said.

Pub Date: 3/27/99