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Within hours of the stories release through the Internet, a majority of the 100 diplomatic observers and 300 accredited journalists in Kosovo were on their way to Orahovac.

Many of them found the Gypsy quoted by Rathfelder and declared him unreliable as he changed details of his account with every telling. Serb officials rushed their own explanation onto the Internet. The gravesites, they said, contained bodies of about 40 KLA "terrorists" killed in the battle for Orahovac. The town cemetery was already full so the bodies were buried just outside of it. Rathfelders scoop was quickly spiked within days. In pre-Internet days it would have inflamed already raw emotions on both sides for weeks before being exposed as bad reporting.

The Serbian Government recently established a comfortable Media Center in the Prestina Grand Hotel. There's a well stocked bar, CNN from satellite, phones and Fax lines, translations of the local press, and for ten Deutchmarks you can get on the internet for an hour. For the Serb side of the war go to http://www.mediacentar.org.

In wars gone by, competing news agencies would go to great lengths to keep track of their rivals. Today, there is no more peeking over shoulders in the line at the Cable office to crib from your rivals copy. Now just punch up "Yahoo" or another search engine and Reuters can read the AP file, and the Washington Post reporter reads what the New York Times is printing within hours of the story being sent.

At the Serb Prestina Media Center each morning, all major news agency stories on Kosovo are found on the web and copied. To their credit, even the stories unfavorable to the Serb government are distributed. With war on the Internet, scoops from the front lines don't remain exclusive for long.

A few blocks away is the rival Kosovo Press Center run by Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova and his party the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). There too you can read a daily flow of press releases and tap into their web site. But questioning Rugova is more difficult. Wearing his signature dark silk scarf, he often appears at the press conference on Friday mornings, but usually rushes off declining interviews. Rugova is one of the most puzzling and mysterious leaders in Europe today. He's a longstanding pacifist and does not condone the guerilla war in which  many of his former followers are now engaged.

Perhaps more influential and better at Cyberwar than Rugovas organization is the Prestina daily Koha Ditore. (http://www.koha.net) It's a paper that editorially supports Kosovo independence, but covers all sides of the conflict. Koha Ditore's web site and offices have become a first stop in Prestina for both journalists and diplomats trying to sort through the confusion.

Editor Dukagjin Gurani says the press in Yugoslavia never had a tradition of presenting facts, only viewpoints. "Now people in Kosovo say our paper is not patriotic because we are objective. At Koha Ditore we feel that the highest form of patriotism is objectivity."

Koha Ditore has a vast network of stringers throughout Kosovo who report Serb military movements and detailed accounts of actions by either side. Within hours these details are reported on the Koha Ditore Web site. It is hard to imagine the 2,000 foreign observers who are to roam Kosovo under the NATO agreement being able to track the conflict any better or faster than Koha Ditore's web site.

However, the most important source of journalism throughout the former Yugoslavia may well be the independent Belgrade based radio news organization B-92. When Milosevic pulled the plug on B-92's broadcasts during the 1996 student demonstrations in Belgrade, B-92 took to the Internet. Although their broadcasts were returned to the air, a digital seed had been planted and now the Internet is the core of their news gathering activities. B-92's twice daily news reports on the web is the most complete and objective reporting I have seen on the Kosovo conflict and often days ahead of the AP, Reuters or the BBC. Go to etodrazb92e@brazil.tcimet.net to subscribe.

During the recent showdown with NATO, Slobodan Milosevic and his henchmen cracked down even harder on the Serbian independents like B-92. Two of the largest Belgrade dailies Dnevni Telegraf and Danas were raided by police and shut down. Their crime, "unpatriotic behavior." Earlier the police shut down several radio stations and banned re-broadcast of Voice of America and BBC. Not satisfied with his complete control over Serbian State Television, Milosevic is using the Kosovo conflict to stifle even the limited freedom that the independent media has in Serbia.

Serbian Information Minister Aleksandar Vucic (e-mail is mirs@srbija-info.yu) has also added the Internet to the draconian new Serbian Law on Information passed by the Legislature in October. Minister Vucic specified that a web presentation of publications which commit "verbal or opinion deceit" would be fined between10,000 and 80,000 US dollars.

Attacking freedom of the Internet in Yugoslavia may prove a slippery slope for Milosevic and his henchmen. On October 19th the Belgrade magazine Evropljannin (European) was banned for printing a scathing, article headlined "What's next, Milosevic?" Within hours the offending column was picked up by computers behind the walls of Visoki Decani Monastery and blasted out to a worldwide audience on the Internet.

The most dedicated and respected Cyber warrior in Kosovo today is a 33 year-old Serbian Orthodox Monk, Father Sava Janjic. As the monks in medieval monasteries once pioneered the use of the printing press, the Monastery in Decani, built 663 years ago, sends out a steady stream of E-mail to promote peace and conciliation in Kosovo. The old church contains the bones of Knights who fought in the famous battle of Kosovo in 1389, but today it is the home of a new breed of warrior, the Serbian Cyber-monk.  Within a few hundred yards of this ancient monastery is a wasteland of burned homes and looted shops. Decani has seen a lot of fighting since the 14th century, but none more devastating than in the summer of 1998 as Serb and Albanian military groups fought it out and the mostly Albanian civilians ran for their lives.

At the high point of combat around Decani last May, as his brothers raised the volume of chanting to overcome the sound of automatic weapons fire outside, Father Sava started bombarding the internet with e-mails to journalists, politicians and diplomats calling for peace between Serbs and Albanians.

"Slobodan Milosovic is playing a wicked game with the emotions of Serbs in Kosovo," says Father Sava. "In 21st Century Europe there is no place for ethnically cleansed territories, terror or crimes. The Holy Scripture teaches us that one cannot love God without first loving one's neighbor." He predicts that unless a peaceful compromise can be reached soon, the small minority of Serbs in Kosovo will pay the price for Belgrade's behavior.

Father Sava is a thoroughly modern monk. Rising at around 1:00 A.M. to take advantage of the best internet connections, he prays and then surfs the Internet. He will mark stories from a wide variety of sources and then fire them off to be shared with his list of more than 300 reporters, diplomats and friends; this scribe included.

The monastery at Decani, on the Bistrica river, near the Albanian border, is the largest in Kosovo, home to 23 monks and an island of spirituality in the sea of war and hate. The Decani Monastery has been nominated for UNESCO's world heritage list. Six hundred years ago dozens of renowned painters were commissioned to create thousands of images on the walls of the monastery's church. Many of the most beautiful illustrate the life of Christ before his crucifixion.

One of the paintings even depicts Christ in a spacecraft, an image that drew the attention of Erich Von Deniken, the researcher of lost civilizations. "It's nice to live in a medieval setting as we monks do, but that does not mean we are prepared to accept a medieval mentality. The Internet enables me to speak from the pulpit of my keyboard," says Father Sava. "I'm on a war footing, this is not a normal routine. I usually get 50 e-mails a day, but during the threat of NATO air strikes, there were about 200 a day. People were concerned about us." Father Sava's website is http://www.decani.yunet.com.

Slobodan Milosevic may have kept many war correspondents and the tv cameras away from seeing the Kosovo conflict at first hand, but he hasn't stopped the flow of news, images of war crimes or the exchange of ideas between the warring factions from multiplying themselves on the World Wide Web.  Kosovo may be the first major conflict being fought out on the Internet. It has quickened the pace of war coverage and put an avalanche of facts, opinions, propaganda and lies in the laptop of the war correspondent. There may be a greater flow of information direct to the public, but the Internet has not replaced  intrepid correspondents like The Washington Post's R. Jeffrey Smith, The New York Times' Mike O'Conner, AP's George Jahn or Reuters Kurt Schork to name only a few regularly covering Kosovo.

Although greatly aided by the Internet, these correspondents must still decide what's relevant and what is not. For the best war correspondents, the Internet has not replaced the often deadly necessity of commuting to the Kosovo killing fields through the checkpoints and mined roads to check out a story they first saw on the Internet.