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Does it matter, in the end, how many Kosovar Albanians were murdered by the security forces of Slobodan Milosevic before and during the NATO war against Serbia? Since every human life is of absolute value and since the Milosevic-sponsored propensity to slaughter the innocent as a means of sparking the flight of much larger numbers of ethnically despised people was well-established, it may mean little whether the actual total of victims in Kosovo numbered in the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands.
But last March and April, the remarkably broad moral and political consensus that underwrote the NATO air war was dramatically tied to numbers. As Steven Erlanger and Christopher S. Wren recalled in The New York Times last week, the US State Department said on April 19 ''that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing and feared dead.'' Not quite a month later, the number was reduced but still grotesquely high: ''We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing,'' declared Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. ''They may have been murdered.''
Such numbers seemed to justify the use of the word ''genocide'' to describe what was happening. Those who had grave doubts about what had led up to the decision to bomb Serbia, from Dayton to Rambouillet, and those who questioned whether the way to rescue the defenseless civilians of Kosovo was a strategic air war waged at 15,000 feet saw their objections marginalized in the crucial early weeks of the debate by the vast numbers of victims being cited in Brussels and Washington.
Those numbers were essential to the intervention's being defined as an urgent, humanitarian defense of human rights. Once it was assumed that many thousands of Kosovars were probably already dead, the reasonable fear was that unchecked Serb atrocities would indeed lead to a full-scale genocide. The entire Albanian population of Kosovo was seen to be at risk. And who among the critics could say it wasn't?
Last week, in the article by the veteran reporters Erlanger and Wren, The New York Times published the first clear numbers that indicate the scale of the atrocities committed by Serb security forces. The story, datelined Pristina, begins, ''In five months of investigation and exhumation of the dead in Kosovo, war crimes investigators have found 2,108 bodies in grave sites throughout the province, the chief prosecutor announced today.''
The investigation of reported grave sites is described as less than half complete, although the ''most serious sites'' have already been examined. Rumors of atrocities that took hold as ''facts'' during the war have often proven unfounded or severely exaggerated. One site in Ljubenic ''said to hold 350 bodies only held five.''
Investigators have reason to think that Serb forces may have tampered with some grave sites, hiding evidence of additional killings. But even so, the Times reports, ''senior Western officials'' now predict that the total will be a figure between 5,000 and 7,000. Included in that count are KLA fighters and some who died of natural causes.
Wanton killing even on this scale is a horrendous war crime and must be punished. The prosecution of Milosevic and his henchmen must be pursued. But it matters whether 10,000 is the far outer limit of their victims or whether 10,000 is a fraction of the minimum of victims.
The debate about whether the NATO air war against Serbia was justified is unfinished. We do not know yet how many innocent Serbs died in the bombing. The cost of the bombardment of Belgrade and other cities of Yugoslavia has yet to be reckoned. The negative impact on the region, from Montenegro to Ukraine, of the destruction of bridges on the Danube will be felt for years.
Moral calculations necessarily follow economic and physical ones. But the news from Kosovo last week marks a watershed moment in the process of assessment. Now that the scale of atrocities actually committed by Milosevic's forces before and during the war becomes apparent, what are we to make of last spring's rush to compare the killings to the worst crimes in history?
When the Holocaust was evoked by NATO leaders, were they merely at the mercy of flawed intelligence or were they too eagerly using that evil as a trump card to silence critics? Those who opposed NATO's air war were labeled appeasers, implicitly lumped in with the friends of Adolf Hitler. Yet, in the light of what investigators are finding in Kosovo, wasn't it a victory for Hitler when his crime - 10,000 Jews died at his order every day - was equated with that of Milosevic?
If not to the Holocaust, then to what should the massacres that Serb forces carried out in Kosovo be compared? If the numbers of Albanian Kosovars murdered last year and early this year is far lower than thought, the number of killings taking place in NATO-controlled Kosovo since the end of the war turns out to be higher than thought.
Erlanger and Wren conclude their article taking note of a new report by the International Crisis Group, which says that ''the number of killings now in Kosovo is comparable to the levels reported before the NATO intervention.'' This is happening despite NATO's presence. And it is happening disproportionately to Serbs.