Unfortunately, it wasn’t until soldiers from Western countries began dying of cancer and getting sick that depleted uranium in the Balkans became an international issue for the corporate media. A fact not lost on people here.

“The West wouldn’t give a damn if their troops weren’t getting sick and dying,” says 53 year-old taxi driver Nenad Bulatovic. “If we get sick, that’ s collateral damage. We call that America’s Milosevic Syndrome.”

While leading scientists and environmentalists in Serbia are indeed concerned about the effects of DU munitions, they say it is just the tip of the toxic iceberg. “Depleted uranium is just one page in a very thick book of the ecological and health catastrophe caused by the NATO bombing,” says Vukasin Pavlovic, Director of the Belgrade-based ECOCenter.

Pavlovic’s group has just issued a ground-breaking report titled “Environmental Impacts of the NATO War in Yugoslavia.” Though the report does deal with the question of depleted uranium, it seeks to sound alarm bells about the lesser-publicized effects of NATO’s targeting of petrochemical factories, oil refineries and chemical plants during the 1999 bombing.

"War-induced negative effects cannot be viewed as collateral damage, because they are not induced by unintentional targeting, but by the deliberate and planned destruction of industrial and other environmentally hazardous systems,” the report states.

During the bombing it became domestic wisdom not to eat fish from the Danube River because of concerns the NATO bombardment had contaminated the international waterway.

Their fears are certainly not unfounded.

One of the stunning revelations in the report is the sheer quantity of toxins released into the Danube, the source of drinking water for 10 million Europeans. The report highlights NATO’s April 14-15th strikes on the Petrochemical Industrial Complex in Pancevo, which lies on the banks of the Danube, 10 miles outside of Belgrade. Within moments of the bombings, a devastating toxic cocktail poured into the river. This included some 3,000 tons of alkalis, 1,400 tons of vinyl-chloride monomers (VCMs), 1,000 tons of ethylene dichloride and 800 tons of 33% hydrochloric acid, according to the report. Attacks on the plant also resulted in an estimated 20 tons of highly carcinogenic VCMs entering the atmosphere. In 78 days of attacks, the petrochemical plant was bombed 9 times.

“NATO didn’t use chemical weapons during the bombing,” says Dr. Zorka Vukmirovic, a leading environmental physicist and one of the authors of the report. “But indirectly it caused the effects of chemical weapons use. If you release so many hazardous substances, major air pollutants and carcinogens in the vicinity of big cities like Belgrade and Nis, it is obviously a deliberate action against the civilian population.”

But NATO’s attacks on the Pancevo petrochemical plant are not limited to Serbia. Environmental groups and environment ministries from throughout the Balkans have discovered contamination of the Danube in several other countries. There are also studies from Greek environmentalists that the bombing caused increased pollution levels in the air over the northern Greek city of Xanthi.

The ECOCenter’s report also raises particular concern over the repeated attacks on an oil refinery situated in a populated area in Serbia’s second largest city Novi Sad. The report estimates that over the course of 12 NATO attacks on the refinery, some 80,000 tons of crude oil were incinerated, exposing the city’s residents to a high concentration of hazardous, carcinogenic and toxic substances multiple times during the bombing.

“These compounds have a high cancer risk, particularly when inhaled,” writes Professor Pavlovic. “Their deposition in the environment also jeopardizes other environmental media, particularly food storages and grain silos.”

“The people of Novi Sad are and will continue to be victims of the NATO bombing,” says Dr. Vukmirovic.

The report estimates that up to 50% of the sites targeted by NATO warplanes were “industrial and other hazardous objects with high environmental risks.” Professor Pavlovic is now calling for modification of international war law conventions and standards. “Crimes against nature and its ecosystems must be added to the list of war crimes,” he says. “International war law should confirm that ecocide, equal to genocide, is the most harmful and most dangerous form of destruction of nature.”

The environmental destruction wrought by NATO’s attacks continues to pierce through everyday life in Serbia. Dr. Vukmirovic says she doesn’t drink the milk from a leading dairy farm near Pancevo for fear of contamination, “I only buy milk from Subotica (in the north of Serbia),” she says. Professor Pavlovic admits, “I love fish soup, but all of the scientists I know who are monitoring the Danube tell me not to eat it, so I just go without.”

These sentiments are echoed at Green Markets around Belgrade where people make it a practice of asking merchants where their food is from. “We know they lie sometimes if they have goods from an area heavily hit by NATO,” says Mirjana, a mother of 2. “It just makes me feel better to ask.”

There are also fears in the agricultural sector here that goods exported from Serbia will eventually require labels with warnings about their safety.

Though the discussion of depleted uranium is certainly not new in Serbia, the current publicity makes it difficult to go anywhere without encountering a discussion or mention of DU. “Carla Del Ponte should take her depleted uranium out of this country before she takes Milosevic,” a 70-something pensioner said outside the press conference of the Chief War Crimes Prosecutor when she was in Belgrade last week (He was not allowed in to the press conference).

In Kosovo, NATO has identified some 112 sites where it acknowledges using depleted uranium munitions. But NATO has not given the government in Belgrade a comprehensive list for the rest of Serbia. Estimates from the Yugoslav Army say that as much as 1.5 tons of DU was dropped on other areas of Serbia. Authorities in Belgrade have to date confirmed 5 sites in Serbia other than Kosovo where depleted uranium munitions were used. Four of these have been fenced off and declared public health risks.

Since NATO’s bombing ended in June 1999, a number of reports from international agencies have examined the environmental impact of the NATO bombing. In several instances, these studies have supported NATO’s contention that the consequences are negligible. In the first visit of the United Nations Environmental Program to Serbia weeks after the attacks ended, the agency declared they found no negative impact of the use of depleted uranium. When asked what methodology was used to search for DU contamination, the head of the delegation, Pekka Havisto, said they had taken random soil samples in Serbia. Scientists here say that’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Rather than publicizing the fact that NATO refused to provide the UNEP with a map of areas targeted by DU munitions, the agency elected to declare it had found no significant health risks.

“The United Nations tried to diminish or reduce the scope and negative environmental impacts of the NATO campaign,” says Professor Pavlovic.

Eventually NATO released the map of 112 sites in Kosovo, most likely a fraction of the actual total. Now, almost two years after the bombing campaign started, the UN has begun analyzing the areas. But that’s just Kosovo. The rest of Serbia remains in the dark because of NATO’s refusal to make public the full extent of its DU use.

Without a highly detailed map of areas hit by depleted uranium, future health consequences may be the only way to discover where measures might have been taken to prevent further tragedies.

Jeremy Scahill is an independent journalist based in Belgrade. He reported live daily for Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! during the 1999 NATO war and was one of the few foreign journalists in Belgrade to witness the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in October. He can be reached at jeremys@EUnet.yu

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