Up to 300 out of 5,000 Serb refugees whose suburb of Sarajevo was heavily bombed by Nato jets in the late summer of 1995 have died of cancer.

"This is my grandfather Djoko," Nikola says. "He worked in the military repair factory, and died last year. We all thought it must be cancer from the bombs." Behind Djoko's grave is that of Slavica Korkotovic. She, too, died of cancer last year, and a photograph of a very pretty woman is encased under glass on her gravestone. "She was only 35, and had two children," Nikola says. And as we go on past the graves, past old Dejan Elcic, who died of cancer aged 65, and the young men who also worked with Djoko in the Hadjici factory, the rain now thundering across the piles of plastic flowers behind each tombstone, one thought springs to mind: it will be difficult for Nato to get away with this one.

All the surviving refugees of Hadjici – most of them fled to Bratunac on the Drina river in the months after the bombings – believe that the cancers and leukaemias that have affected this population were caused because the American A-10 bombers which struck their factories were firing depleted uranium rounds.

Djoko Zelenovic's story tells it all in horrifying detail. His son Nedeljko remembers the day when his father went to work in the factory, scarcely an hour before the Nato jets arrived. "When the first bombs hit, part of the wall fell on my father," he says. "And you've got to remember at the time he had no illness at all – he started becoming ill at the beginning of January last year. In March of 2000 we sent him to a clinic in Belgrade, and they found he had lung cancer, with the cancer covering a 15cm circle on his left lung. He was on chemotherapy but it did no good, and the cancer moved to the right lung, and he died on 30 May last year.

"You have to understand that my father was aware of depleted uranium, and we had talked to doctors about it.

"Just before he died, I spoke to him. And he said to me, 'I think that everything is because of what happened to the factory in 1995'."

And here is the point. Twelve men were in that room with Djoko, and nine had already died of cancer before him. Nedeljko remembers them all.

"There was Jovovic – he died of bone cancer last summer. Then there was Drago Vujovic. He died four months ago with cancer. Then there was Vule Banduka who also died last summer. That's why my father said to me that he was the only one left and he was bound to die, because all the others had."

A few streets away from the Zelenovic family lives Darko Radic. He was next to the factory when the first American jets bombed that summer. "My father and mother were both in the house with me. My wife, Diana, had just had our first daughter. I went outside and picked up a piece of shrapnel and it had an awful smell, like a dead animal. It was so bad, I was vomiting in the street, imagine, I just threw up because of the smell of a bit of a bomb. All that night, after it was hit, the factory glowed as if someone was putting phosphorous on it."

Then the tragedy began. First it was his mother, Liljana, who at 46 had never had a health problem. Three years ago, they found she had a brain tumour.

"My father, Radko, was only 57, and my mother was just 46," Darko says. "My father ran a small coffee shop near the factory, and he was always in the best of health. Just three months ago he was told he had cancer. I buried him three weeks ago in the cemetery up the road.

"Every week, we have a funeral here. My dad was one of the last to die, but the next will be Bozo Tomic, who has two small children. He is dying in a neighbouring house."

You don't have to go far for the tragedy of the people of Hadjici to continue. Sladjena Sarenac was six at the time of the bombings, and her father, Jobo, found her playing with pieces of the broken munitions in a bomb crater behind the house. "She took some of the bits of shrapnel into the house later," one of her friends told me. "After a while, under her nails, there was a kind of yellow sand and then Sladjena's nails started to fall out. She was complaining about pains in the back, shoulders and head. She was taken to hospital, first in Hadjici, and for two nights received blood transfusions. At the end of 1995 she was diagnosed as having in some way been irradiated. Two years ago she fell into a coma for 30 hours."

Local journalists believe that up to 400 men, women and children from Hadjici have died, about 300 of them from cancer or leukaemia. The town's little cemetery seems to bear powerful proof of this. As a local doctor told me last night: "As the Hadjici people in Bratunac grow fewer in number, as families move around Bosnia, the number of deaths among the decreasing population is going up."

© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

###