From the editor's desk

It's been called 3M month-May Day, Mothers' Day, Memorial Day. May Day, that heady mix of labor struggles and druid rites. Mothers' Day, acknowledged here by remembering Julia Ward Howe's sturdy 1870 Proclamation. And Memorial Day. Peacework had long planned to mark it by offering an historian's catalogue of places in this country where peace is celebrated. His scholarly exercise takes on absolute urgency today. You can help create a new memorial by joining our friend Lewis Randa in his quixotic Stonewalk-pulling a caisson with an enormous, and enormously heavy, memorial stone commemorating civilians killed in war, from Massachusetts to Arlington National Cemetery and planting it in a place of honor there. Thus the three Ms.

This year we have to add a fourth M-Mayhem. Mayhem in the Balkans. Mayhem in so many other places that our minds and hearts cannot encompass them, horrors that compete for the last sound bite on the evening news and push each other off even the back pages of our morning paper. Mayhem in Colorado-a bizarre mirror of global catastrophe. The world is awash in grief.

We have devoted most of this issue to Kosovo because our government is so deeply involved, and because we have the responsibility to do something about it. Here in this office the flood of information and commentary has been overwhelming. Very good stuff; we long to show it all to you. (Indeed, we would be glad to share some things that we just couldn't fit in: for instance, suspected KLA/CIA/Mafia connections; what Gorbachov has to say; the perspective of an Indian army officer serving as UN Head of Mission in the former Yugoslavia in 1992-93; an essay on international and treaty law; the seductive mineral wealth of the Balkans; op-eds from Edward Said, a Palestinian, writing for an Indian newspaper; letters postmarked Belgrade, one from an Auschwitz survivor; the devastation of the Serbian socio-economic fabric and ecology; Noam Chomsky's early, incisive analysis-all nine pages of it. The list goes on. No excuse, but that's why this issue is so late; we just couldn't seem to stop reading our email. If you want to see some of this, write and ask us.)

For this May Peacework we've chosen points of view we haven't found in the papers or heard on NPR: some background information from AFSC and our colleague Joe Gerson's historian's take on hegemony and the misuse of power; a plea for the badly neglected OSCE; a clear-eyed look at media manipulation and whom it serves; a view that war is always about money and control, and that rape, among other things, is one of its by-products; a reminder that this war has already "gone nuclear"; and, to provide perspective, some comparative data on the death tolls of this decade's various other wars.

On this May day we savor the rich irony of Russia as peace-broker. We're grateful that Jesse Jackson may in fact have succeeded in bringing the three bewildered soldiers home and that he used his platform to speak out-to our President's visible annoyance-for peace. It's time for us to follow his example.

Also in these pages, on the eve of elections in South Africa, three writers talk about the consequences of apartheid-itself, of course, a war of sorts-thus reminding us that the consequences and anguish of the present Balkan conflict will be misery long after the bombers have gone.