Videotape shown by NATO to explain the killing of at least 14 civilians aboard a train on a bridge in Serbia last April was shown at triple its real speed, the German daily Frankfurter Rundschau has reported.

The alliance had sought to excuse the killing of the civilians by saying the train had been traveling too fast for the trajectory of the missiles to have been changed in time. NATO's supreme commander in Europe, U.S. General Wesley Clark, showed two videotapes of the train appearing to be traveling fast on the bridge, and said it had then been impossible to alter the missiles' trajectories.

The Frankfurt newspaper said the two videotapes were both shown at three times normal speed.

A spokesman for NATO's military command in Mons, Belgium, acknowledged in a telephone interview with AFP that those images had been altered by "a technical problem." He said NATO was aware of the problem since last October but did not consider it "useful" to disclose it.

Like the U.S., China says it sees the potential emergence of a "rogue" state that could throw the world out of balance early in the next century. Washington warns that unpredictable regimes in North Korea or Iraq could one day develop long-range missiles and a handful of atomic bombs to engage in nuclear blackmail or worse.

But China's top arms control negotiator, Sha Zukang, says a bigger threat to global stability is already armed to the teeth with hydrogen bombs and sophisticated rockets that can send a nuclear payload to any point on the planet.

That country, Sha says, is the United States. "Because the U.S. believes it's the only superpower in the world, it can act at will, without regard for international law and international norms," he says.

The end of the cold war and the break-up of the Soviet Union has not ushered in an era of global peace, he says. Rather, it is creating a U.S. that is drunk with its own power and technological prowess, adds Sha.

Sha is not one of the Communist Party hard-liners who regularly lashes out at the U.S. Rather, he is affable, cosmopolitan, and open, and seems more disillusioned than angry with the U.S.

Sha cites as one example of aggressiveness the U.S. bombing of a medical plant in Sudan that American intelligence initially accused of producing chemical weapons. The 1998 missile attack was not approved by any global organization, and the U.S. has never offered the world community solid proof that the plant made anything but medicine. "The U.S. bombing of Sudan was an act of state terrorism," Sha says.

There is a growing list, he adds, of similar acts of aggression against sovereign states in violation of the UN Charter or other global laws. Not only did the U.S. and NATO launch a massive attack on Yugoslavia without obtaining the UN's approval, but the coalition delivered, with pinpoint precision, five missiles into Beijing's embassy in Belgrade.

While Beijing appreciates Washington's apologies and compensation for victims of the attack, the U.S. government "still has to identify the culprits [behind the bombing] and bring them to justice."

A U.S. official formerly based in Beijing agrees. "So far the [U.S.] government has said institutional mistakes led to the bombing of the Chinese Embassy," says the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But specific individuals were responsible for mistakenly targeting the embassy, and heads should roll as a result of those fatal mistakes."

On May 7, 1999, the B2--at $44 billion the world's most expensive plane--took off from Whiteman air force base in Missouri, its sleek black belly loaded with missiles, destined for Belgrade. It flew high across the Atlantic and Western Europe before opening its bomb doors over the Adriatic and releasing the most accurate air-drop munitions in the world--the JDAM flying bomb. It is so precise a weapon it is accurate to a range of less than two meters.

The bombs carried on that B2 rocketed towards their target--the southern end of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade--demolishing the office of the military attaché and killing three "journalists." The midnight strike was so precise the embassy's north end was untouched, leaving the marble and glass of the front entrance and the ambassador's Mercedes and four flower pots unscathed.

The CIA, U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office claimed the strike had hit the wrong building. It was, they regretted, a terrible mistake.

But as mobs stormed the U.S. and British Embassies in Beijing, and Chinese President Jiang Zemin refused to take President Bill Clinton's phone calls, an entirely different story was being revealed on the other side of the world.

At the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Vincenza in northern Italy, British, Canadian and French air targeters rounded on an American colonel on the morning of 8 May. Angrily they denounced the "cock-up." The U.S. colonel was relaxed as he replied to the complaints: "That was great targeting … we put two JDAMs down into the attaché's office and took out the exact room we wanted … they (the Chinese) won't be using that place for (re-broadcasting radio transmissions) any more, and it will have given Arkan a headache."

Last month The Observer raised the first serious challenge to the official version of events and claimed the embassy was targeted directly. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described it as "balderdash." Since then, as this paper's journalists have continued to pursue the story, more witnesses have come forward.

The true story--though it is being denied by everyone--is that the Americans knew exactly what they were doing. The Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was deliberately targeted by the most precise weapons in the U.S. arsenal because it was being used by Zeljko Raznatovic, the indicted war criminal better known as Arkan, to transmit messages to his Serb death squads in Kosovo.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack there were some among non-U.S. staff who were also suspicious. On 8 May they tapped into the NATO target computer and checked out the satellite coordinates for the Chinese Embassy. The coordinates were in the computer and they were correct. While the world was being told the CIA had used out-of-date maps, NATO's officers were looking at evidence that the CIA was bang on target.

The Observer has gathered evidence from sources within NATO and also spoken to other serving officers, from intelligence officers to a military officer with the rank of a general. All are in agreement. The Chinese Embassy was deliberately bombed.

According to one of these sources, it was the fact that the embassy was being used to rebroadcast signals for Arkan and his White Tiger death squads that swung the argument to hit the embassy. "Had it just been a transmitter for the Yugoslav Army, they might have held off."

It is not only The Observer's NATO witnesses who have blown a hole in the CIA's original story that the embassy was bombed by mistake because the agency used old maps of Belgrade to work out its target list. This is a cover story which nearly all experts, including one's of America's most eminent China hands, Ezra Vogel, have judged not credible. The US's own National Imagery and Mapping Agency describes the wrong map story as "a damned lie."

The claims made by the CIA's director George Tenet to the Congressional Select Committee on Intelligence on 22 July have come under renewed scrutiny--and been found wanting. Tenet told the congressmen there were no visible signs that the building was an embassy, no flags and no insignia. But photographs taken in the immediate aftermath of the attack show a different story. These pictures show the Red Flag at the main gate and two signs covered in Chinese script on the side of the building. The embassy was clearly marked by a sign in Serb saying "Ambasada Narodne Republike Kine" (Embassy of the People's Republic of China)--stark evidence that the CIA chief was not telling the whole truth.

Equally compelling is the fact that the location of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was hardly a state secret to Belgrade's diplomatic corps, who regularly met U.S. diplomats at receptions in the building.

Not only were the embassy coordinates in the NATO computer, as the air targeters discovered, but the Chinese Embassy had long been a prime target for Western intelligence, and would therefore have been extremely well identified.

The reason for the scrutiny was that for years the Chinese Communist regime has been cooperating with the Serbs in building up its military capability. The eyes and ears of the Western world--the US's National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ--were watching and listening.

Asked what could have been the motives for a deliberate attack, a French official replied: "The possibility that the Chinese were helping the Yugoslavs in a number of ways, including militarily, and concern among American intelligence that China was indulged in a wholesale espionage against America." "The aim was to send a clear message to Milosevic that he should not use outside help in the shape of the Chinese," said a NATO intelligence officer.

One source, a senior air force officer, said: "I would lay money that the Chinese civilians killed by the bombing were intelligence officers. The Americans knew exactly what to hit and how to do it … far from not knowing the target was an embassy, they must have been given architect's drawings."

An intelligence expert told The Observer: "If it was the wrong building, why did they use the most precise weapons on Earth to hit the right end of that 'wrong building'?"

This has been, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, "without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record by the scale, frequency and length of the warfare which filled it," but even he, great historian though he is, did not expect when he wrote his verdict five years ago that we would be stumbling to the century's close through such a welter of blood.

Artillery shells rain down on 40,000 people trapped in the Chechen capital, Grozny, a city of ruined flats which has still not recovered from the Russian assault of 1994. On a semi-arid plateau in the Horn of Africa, half a million Ethiopian and Eritrean conscripts face each other in squalid trenches which replay the senseless tragedy of the First World War. Up to 50,000 have already gone "over the top" and been mown down in the 18 months since their leaders started the conflict.

To the south and west, Jonas Savimbi, who has defied the Angolan army and the United Nations for more than 25 years, is still adding corpses to the estimated 800,000 who are already dead.

In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers have just killed several hundred government troops in a new upsurge in their 16-year fight for independence. In East Timor, shattered communities are slowly recovering after a fury of ethnic murder launched by Indonesian troops and their hastily armed militias in August.

But the mother of this year's astonishing catalogue of wars occurred in Europe. The conflict over Kosovo saw wave after atrocious wave of ethnic cleansing on a scale that dwarfed even the crimes in Bosnia in the mid-Nineties. It also produced the first air war to be launched by NATO on a sovereign state in its 50-year history.

So 1999 turned out to be the most murderous year in the second half of the most murderous century. Rarely has a century ended in such terrible fashion.

The brief imperial wars of the late 1890s were the exception in a general climate of peace and rising prosperity which seemed to face no threat. It was not until several years later that the shock of war hit the world.

Then came the catastrophe of two world wars, the barbarism of the Holocaust, and the knife-edge nuclear balancing act of the 40-year Cold War. When that ended in 1989, it was natural that optimism would re-emerge. In vain, it seems.

Have we stepped back into barbarism again? It is not just the number of current wars which is alarming, but the kind of wars they are. Wars are increasingly fought within states, not between them. It is civilians, rather than soldiers, who die. In an illuminating recent book, New and Old Wars (Polity Press), Mary Kaldor points out that when this century began, the ratio of military to civilian casualties was 8:1. In the wars of the Nineties it has been 1:8.

Some writers call the wars of the Nineties "postmodern." Others describe them as "degenerate." Kaldor calls them "new wars" because, however primitive they seem, with the use of mutilation and massacre, they can only be understood in the context of globalization. It is not just that the warlords drive Mercedes and use satellite phones. The collapse of the state is due partly to the erosion of national economies and the loss of sovereignty to global capital.

Globalization produces stunning contradictions. It integrates and simultaneously fragments. There is a new global interconnectedness, even as individual and regional inequalities increase.

The 20th century saw wars of a magnitude unimaginable in the 19th century. Many millions of people died in conflicts large and small. Just about every nation on Earth was involved in some way or other; indeed, many nations owe their origins to warfare.

Here is an overview of the more significant conflicts. They are listed, roughly, in chronological order. For the most part, the list excludes civil wars, and is by no means comprehensive:

Boer War: From 1899 to 1902, British troops fought the Boers (those of Dutch ancestry) in what is now South Africa. The Boer forces were roundly defeated; in 1910, the British established the Union of South Africa.

Russo-Japanese War: Russia and Japan fought over Manchuria and Japan in 1904–1905. Japan was victorious; the defeat destabilized Russia's czarist regime.

Balkan Wars: Amid the decline of the Ottoman Empire, a great scramble ensued for Turkish territories from 1911 to 1913. Albania was born, Serbia grew and Bulgaria shrank. The wars rearranged the map of the Balkans for World War I.

World War I: The most futile of all wars, this conflict saw millions slaughtered in trench warfare from 1914 to 1918. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist set events in motion in the summer of 1914. Germany and the Ottoman Empire sided with Austria-Hungary; France, Russia and Britain sided with Serbia. Other nations joined the fray on both sides. In 1917, the United States would join the Allies in their fight against Germany. The war saw some of the most bloody campaigns ever fought. New technology such as poison gas, tanks, flame throwers and machine guns brought to warfare the industrial efficiency perfected in decades of economic growth before 1914. When it was over, up to 10 million were dead--a hitherto unimaginable toll for a continent that had lost only about 150,000 in its last major conflict, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Though the Allies never conquered Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm's forces were battered and his nation surrendered in 1918. The resulting peace treaty led to a redrawing of the map of Europe and the creation of an array of new grudges, all of which would play a part in World War II. Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were divided up, while Yugoslavia and other nations were born.

Russia: After Lenin's Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, a civil war broke out. Foreign forces fought with Russian anti-communists of all stripes against the forces of Lenin and Trotsky but failed to oust them, and the Soviet Union was born.

Spain: Communists fought fascists with the backing of various major powers from 1936 to 1939. With the support of Germany's Adolf Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco's fascist forces prevailed, and Spain went on to become one of the few European nations to sit out World War II.

World War II: The most horrific of all wars, this conflict began in the early 1930s but was at its zenith from September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, to 1945, when Japan and Germany surrendered. Germany, Japan and Italy (the Axis) were allied against Britain, France, China, the Soviet Union (starting in 1941) and the United States (starting in 1941), with dozens of other nations also involved in some way. This conflict saw the death not only of many millions of combatants, but also millions of civilians. Hitler's strategy of total war involved reducing enemy cities to rubble, and the Allies responded in kind. At the end of the war, Europe was divided, with Josef Stalin's Soviet forces occupying much of the Eastern half and Allied forces in control of much of the West. The stage was thus set for a Cold War that would divide Europe for almost 50 years and expand around the globe.

The Vietnam War: This war erupted at the conclusion of World War II as the forces of Ho Chi Minh resisted the efforts of the French to reassert control over Vietnam. It continued after the surrender of France in 1954, with the United States siding with the non-communist forces of South Vietnam vs. North Vietnam in a war that cost more than 1 million lives. The United States withdrew in 1973, and communist forces succeeded in conquering South Vietnam, neighboring Cambodia and Laos. Relentless massacres and warfare followed in Cambodia.

India vs. Pakistan: Starting shortly after they became independent in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three full-fledged wars, two over the region of Kashmir and one over East Pakistan (which is now the nation of Bangladesh). Conflict over Kashmir continued in 1999.

Israel vs. its neighbors: From the moment it became independent in 1948, Israel fought its Arab neighbors, including Syria, Egypt and Jordan. Other wars followed in 1956, 1967 and 1973. The 1956 war also involved British and French forces seeking to keep the Suez Canal open. Israel also invaded Lebanon in 1982 in an effort to eliminate Palestinian guerrillas there.

The Korean War: North Korea tried to reunify the divided Korean peninsula by invading South Korea in 1950. Ultimately, the war ended in 1953 just about where it began. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. No peace treaty has ever been signed; the North Korean-South Korean border remains one of the world's most volatile.

The Bay of Pigs: U.S.-backed forces invaded Cuba in 1961 in a failed attempt to oust Fidel Castro. U.S. forces have been involved in small wars in many Latin American nations during this century, including Nicaragua, Panama and Grenada.

Biafra: After the Biafra region of Nigeria declared independence in 1967, a vicious four-year war ensued. Casualties were estimated at more than 1 million. Biafra ultimately surrendered.

Angola: After Portugal granted Angola its independence in 1975, a war between three rival groups broke out. The combatants were supported by various world powers, and Cuban troops ultimately were involved in helping the victorious MPLA forces. Still, the nation has yet to see peace--conflict periodically breaks out and the nation is crisscrossed with land mines.

Afghanistan: The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 in an attempt to prop up a communist regime beset by civil war. Afghan rebels fought the Soviets to a standstill, wearing them out much in the same way that Vietnamese forces wore out U.S. forces in Vietnam. More than 2 million Afghans were left dead in a war that ultimately saw the ouster from power of the communists, though war continues in Afghanistan to this day.

Iran vs. Iraq: Iran and Iraq fought for most of the 1980s in a vicious border war that accomplished very little.

The Falkland Islands: Argentina seized the Falkland Islands in 1982, setting off a war with Britain, which had ruled the territory for more than a century. The conflict lasted about 10 weeks and saw the Argentine forces defeated.

The Gulf War: Iraq's conquest of neighboring Kuwait in the summer of 1990 spurred an international coalition to act against Iraq in January 1991. In a war that lasted about six weeks, the United States and dozens of other nations ousted Iraqi forces from Kuwait and inflicted heavy casualties. Iraq remained an international hot spot throughout the 1990s.

The Former Yugoslavia: Secessionist hopes that emerged after the death of Marshal Josip Broz Tito in 1980 led to a series of wars in the 1990s, with the worst conflicts involving Bosnia (now a nation) and Kosovo (which remains part of Yugoslavia). The conflict was sparked by nationalism and massacres have occurred frequently.

Burundi and Rwanda: Ethnic conflicts between the Hutus and Tutsis in these African nations in the mid-1990s left hundreds of thousands of people dead. The 1990s were a rough decade for Africa, with civil wars breaking out in such places as Uganda, Sierra Leone and the Congo.

WASHINGTON –– The century came to a close with a third of the world's 193 nations embroiled in conflict, nearly twice the Cold War level, a group that keeps track of battle zones reported Wednesday.

In its annual report, the National Defense Council Foundation blamed rising military coups and a backlash against democracy, a trend it suggested could continue for several years.

The foundation listed 65 conflicts in 1999, up from 60 the year before. It nominated Afghanistan as the world's most unstable state for 2000 – followed closely by Somalia, Iraq, Angola and the breakaway Chechnya region of Russia.

"It's going to be a very tough next 20 years," retired Army Maj. Andy Messing Jr., executive director of the Alexandria, Va.-based foundation, said in an interview. He said the growing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and an increasing world population add to the danger.

"The bipolar 'Cold War' system has disintegrated into a system of 'Warm Wars,' with randomized conflicts popping up in all corners of an interdependent world," the report said.

It cited a recent erosion of democratic advances, including military coups in Guinea-Bissau, Pakistan, Niger and Comoros and a slide back toward authoritarianism in Venezuela, Russia and Haiti. The list included cross-border wars, such as between Ethiopia and Eritrea; and civil wars such as those in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It also included major insurgencies.

Russia made the list because of separatist wars in Chechnya and its neighbor to the east, Dagestan, terrorism and organized crime activity. China was included based on "political turmoil," the Beijing government's crackdown on religious dissidents and tensions over Taiwan and the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Kosovo and East Timor, where international military intervention was used to end internal violence and human-rights violations, were among places added to the list.