|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Miscellaneous |
|
DU Balkans coverup |
Current rating: 5 |
by envirodoc
(No verified email address) |
31 Dec 2001
|
|
discussion on balkans contamination and health effects coverup |
Source:
http://www.thenation.com
=========================================================
The Balkans DU Cover-Up
by ROBERT JAMES PARSONS
Last November, when stories first appeared in the European press of deaths
from leukemia among Italian soldiers who had served in the Balkans, alarm
bells started ringing across the Continent. The leukemia was--and still
is--believed by many independent experts to be caused by radiation from
depleted uranium (DU) arms used in the Balkans during the war. Since most
European countries are members of NATO, most of them have troops stationed in
or near areas believed to be contaminated.
In France, the February 2000 broadcast of a documentary about DU triggered a
steadily increasing demand for more and better information. At the same time,
reports were surfacing in Belgium of illness among that country's troops
stationed in the Balkans. Early this year, Spain and Greece announced they
will screen their soldiers for contamination, and Portugal has decided to
remove its troops entirely from Kosovo.
Country after country summoned US ambassadors or dispatched delegations to
NATO headquarters in Brussels in search of more information about DU. But
NATO--which in effect means the United States--has stuck to the Pentagon's
oft-repeated refrain: If there is a problem, soldiers' health should
certainly be studied, but it is impossible that DU is involved because its
radiation is so low as to be utterly harmless.
A major reason for Pentagon evasiveness is the almost 200,000 Gulf War vets
apparently suffering from the variety of illnesses lumped together as Gulf
War Syndrome who have filed claims against the VA for service-related
illnesses. Three-quarters of that group are now classified by the VA as
disabled, and almost 7,000 of the original total have died.
In the case of contamination by Agent Orange in Vietnam, the Pentagon ended
up admitting claims from anybody who had served in the theater after use of
the defoliant had begun. If this were repeated in the case of Gulf War
Syndrome, most of the almost 700,000 vets who served on the ground in the
Persian Gulf would be eligible to press claims.
Further, in addition to helping solve the serious problem of what to do with
nuclear waste, DU weapons play a key role in the US military's concept of a
"no loss" war. If such arms performed brilliantly against tanks in the Iraq
war, they performed equally brilliantly against the Serbian regime's huge
underground installations ("hardened targets" in military jargon) in Kosovo,
where NATO has admitted to using some nine and a half tons of DU. Hence, far
from planning to remove DU from its arsenal anytime soon, the Pentagon wants
to increase its use.
Thus, duly attentive to its own interests, the US government has consistently
pressured its NATO allies and the UN--which has assumed responsibility for
Kosovo--to keep the lid on DU contamination investigations (to the extent
that such inquiries cannot be thwarted outright). Such pressure, however, has
not stopped information from slowly leaking out, as evidenced by the French
documentary and the reports from Belgium. But until the Italian government
decided in December to launch an official inquiry into DU use in Kosovo,
there was no general awareness of the danger among the European public.
Significantly, Britain, whose government has long been at odds with its own
veterans over Gulf War Syndrome and is the only country other than the United
States to admit to using DU, has been a low-key but insistent supporter of
the Pentagon line.
Much, in fact, is already known about DU. Contrary to what the Pentagon keeps
insisting, the "depleted" in the name depleted uranium does not indicate
uranium bereft of all but weak, hence harmless, radiation. Rather, it is
depleted of its contents of the uranium isotope U-235, which, because it is
fissionable, is used for bombs and for fuel in nuclear reactors. What's left,
U-238, is 40 percent less radioactive but still extremely dangerous. Anybody
handling DU metal must wear clothing resistant to high-level radiation,
hermetically sealed and equipped with a respirator.
The Pentagon itself knows the dangers. On July 22, 1990, the US Army made
public an exhaustive study of armor-piercing DU munitions (quoted in the
Military Toxics Project's 2000 report "Don't Look, Don't Find"), which warned
of respirable DU oxides, created during combat, that could cause cancer and
kidney problems. It further warned that "following combat, the condition of
the battlefield and the long-term health risks to natives and combat veterans
may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic
energy penetrators for military applications." Nevertheless, since the Gulf
War, the Pentagon has spent millions to convince the public--and especially
Gulf War veterans--that radiation from DU is essentially harmless.
In May 1999, during the Kosovo war, the UN arranged for representatives of
all humanitarian aid agencies involved in the conflict to make an initial
assessment of the overall situation in the field. However, the UN Environment
Program's report, sounding the alarm on DU contamination, was not made public
until it was leaked to this journalist by people within the organization who
described themselves as exasperated with UNEP director Klaus Töpfer's
willingness, as they saw it, to defer to US foreign policy. According to the
sources, the pressure had come directly from Washington, presumably from the
Pentagon, through UN headquarters in New York. The leaked report appeared on
June 18, 1999, in two Swiss French-language dailies, Le Courrier and La
Liberté. Later, at a UN press conference in Geneva, Töpfer denied suppressing
the report. Reminded that it had been written up in the press, he said that
was proof that it was public information.
Another report, funded by the European Commission and published shortly after
the war, made virtually no mention of depleted uranium. However, without
identifying them, the report incorporated, verbatim, several paragraphs of
the suppressed UNEP report.
Under pressure to do something after the end of the war, UNEP set up a
working party, the Balkans Task Force, to make a full report. Töpfer
appointed Finland's former Environment Minister Pekka Haavisto to lead it.
Haavisto was adamant that depleted uranium was part of the overall pollution
picture and could not be left out of the inquiry. When the resulting report
was released in October 1999, it was shorn of all but two of its seventy-two
pages on DU.
Throughout this period a procession of officials conspicuously uncritical of
the US position on DU came to Geneva. These included Dennis McNamara, the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees' special envoy to the Balkans, who stressed at
a press conference on July 12, 1999, NATO's assurances that depleted uranium
posed no problems. Dr. Keith Baverstock of the World Health Organization's
regional office for Europe also insisted that there was absolutely no danger,
though he added that depleted uranium could cause problems in a battle
situation. And former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, now the UN Secretary
General's special envoy to the Balkans, curtly stated that depleted uranium
was a "nonissue."
After news leaked that the Balkans Task Force had received a targets map from
NATO, Töpfer called a meeting in Geneva on March 20, 2000, to consider how to
deal with the leak, but on the same day, Le Courrier published the map. The
next day Haavisto was allowed to present it to the Geneva media. Töpfer
received a second, much more detailed, targets map in early July. Haavisto is
said to have become aware of it only in September, at which time he pressed
to send a mission as soon as possible into the field to investigate at least
some of the target spots before winter set in. Töpfer's response was to
postpone any mission until after the October 24 municipal elections in
Kosovo, allegedly out of fear that if disquieting information got out it
might trigger mass exoduses such as had occurred during the war, thus marring
the "democratic" system the "humanitarian war" had created. The mission
finally began its investigation in November.
UNEP was far from alone in its timidity. As the world's highest instance of
policy-setting in the area of public health and as a member of the UN system,
the World Health Organization should have taken the lead in investigating DU.
But the WHO is bound by an agreement with the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA)--whose mandate boils down to promoting nuclear power--to obtain
the agency's consent whenever it proposes to undertake anything pertaining to
radiation and public health. (When questioned by telephone, David Kyd,
spokesman for the IAEA, claimed that his agency's mandate did not allow it to
investigate DU, adding that DU was, in any case, perfectly harmless.)
Thus it is no surprise that the fact sheet on DU that the WHO announced as
being in the works right after the end of the war was quietly canceled. A
subsequent general study of DU due out in December 1999 has still not
materialized, and a fact sheet hurriedly brought out this past January in
response to the European public's outcry is vague, contradictory and at odds
with current scientific knowledge about radiation and its effect on humans.
When the Balkans Task Force undertook its initial 1999 Kosovo study, the IAEA
did the measuring, and no radiation worthy of notice was found.
The November 2000 field assessment mission by the Balkans Task Force, which
has just reported its findings, further perpetuates the cover-up. Using WHO
radiation safety standards designed for measuring a brief "one event" source
of radiation conceived of as hitting the whole body, it concludes that there
is no real problem. However, the greatest danger from DU comes from the
uranium oxide dust created when the metal hits its target and can then be
inhaled. The Swiss government, whose military now cooperates with NATO, paid
for the project, and people from a lab run by the Swiss military were part of
the team, significant because the lab has echoed the Pentagon in declaring
that the whole DU issue is not worthy of discussion. (Switzerland, with a
huge Kosovar population that acted like a magnet for refugees during the war,
has its own reasons for downplaying the danger.)
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the chief coordinator of
humanitarian relief during and immediately after the war, took the
contamination threat seriously enough to launch its own inquiries and to
issue a directive made available to Le Courrier in early 2000 by Deputy High
Commissioner Frederick Barton. Among other things, it lays down rules for
personnel in the field: No pregnant women are to be sent to Kosovo, those
assigned there must be given the option of another post elsewhere and those
ultimately sent must have a note in their file to facilitate any later
compensation claims. Barton also made clear on several occasions that efforts
had been made to warn the refugees as they were returning to Kosovo--efforts
that he said had later been thwarted by the UN administration, by NATO and by
the local Albanian political leaders.
Others share this skepticism. Dr. Chris Busby, a low-radiation specialist,
recently conducted his own field assessment, whose results were presented to
Britain's Royal Society. In addition to finding radiation more than a hundred
times higher than natural background levels near target sites, he has
concluded that most of the uranium oxide particles are constantly being
resuspended in the air, allowing them to be blown by the wind throughout the
country and easily inhaled.
For those long critical of US influence in European affairs, whether they are
concerned with the Continent's military structure or simply a European
identity with reduced US influence, the DU dispute is heaven-sent. The latest
UN report, as well as a whitewash from the European Commission a week
earlier, far from calming the storm, seem to have intensified mistrust. The
extent to which such feelings affect EU public policy will depend on how long
the European public keeps up its demand for a reliable explanation of what is
behind the "nonissue" now known as Balkans War Syndrome
|
Comments
|
Re: DU Balkans coverup |
by Robert Wood-Smith
rgwsandptners (nospam) aol.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
01 May 2004
|
I comment in my capacity as Senior Partner within a UK radiation medical research team.
The natural process whereby low-level radioactivity can lead to radiation-induced genomic instability in human tissue, is now understood and documented.
Professor Malcolm Hooper (Chief Scientific Adviser to the Gulf War Veterans' Association in the UK) advocated last year, we test a new treatment for Motor Neurone Disease (more GWVs suffer MND than among a similar number of the general public). The outcome for MND patients treated during the subsequent Research Study, proved signficant. The more serious illnesses suffered by GWVs are capable of treatment.
YESTERDAY - Professor Hooper and Dr. Rosalie Bertell (United States radiation physicist) were advised - they will receive a detailed report from this Partnership, during the month of May 2004.
This morning - Dr. Bertell provided information which led me to your website.
Further information (gratis), at your request
E-mail: rgwsandptners (at) aol.com |
|
