The Committee for National Solidarity
Tolstojeva 34, Belgrade, YU
Comrades, friends--I send this to you mainly
because it
reports on how organizations in different European
countries
are reacting to the DU crisis and what the IAC is doing.
--------------------------------------------------------
GREEK
TROOPS WANT OUT OF KOSOVO
Protests against DU grow in Europe
Ramsey
Clark visits radioactive sites in southern Iraq
By John
Catalinotto
Despite denials by NATO and their governments that
depleted
uranium is a danger, people in Europe have reacted with
growing
anger and disquiet about this threat to soldiers and
civilians in occupied
Kosovo.
In some European countries-Greece, Portugal and
Italy
especially-parties and other groups have already begun to
organize
strong protest movements against DU weapons.
Anger and confusion has
grown as NATO and government
spokespeople contradict earlier statements
about the dangers
of DU. For example, NATO now admits U.S. planes fired
10,800
DU shells into Bosnia in 1995-1996. But in 1997 Lt.
Cmdr.
Garneau, a spokesperson for the SFOR occupation forces, said
"at
no time did NATO use depleted uranium munitions during
air strikes in
Bosnia."
This was one of many lies that has destroyed
NATO's
credibility, and for good reason.
In addition, the European
mainstream media is reflecting
differences among the NATO powers that
include DU use but go
beyond this to other areas of contention within
the
imperialist alliance. For example, in the single Jan. 12
issue of Le
Monde, there was more than a page of the dangers
of DU. But there were also
two pages of the debate within
NATO over the presence of U.S. troops and
other strategic
goals.
Seven Italian troops, five Belgians, two
Dutch nationals,
two Spaniards, a Portuguese and a Czech national have
died
after taking part in the occupation of Balkan countries.
Four
French soldiers also have contracted leukemia. The
Yugoslav news agency
Tanjug reports that a Hungarian soldier
has also died of leukemia and that
his wife is demanding
financial compensation from the Hungarian Ministry
of
Defense.
Subhead: Greek troops want out
The Daily
Telegraph in England reported Jan. 15 that over a
quarter of the 1400-plus
Greek troops stationed in Kosovo
have asked to leave because of the
increased risk of cancer.
The Greek defense minister had to say that the
government
would consider the requests, but "we must first wait for
the
official results of the radiation tests. If there is a
general
problem then NATO forces will take a joint decision
and leave
together."
Half of the 400 volunteers set to join the Greek
contingent
have now withdrawn their requests to take part in
the
occupation of Kosovo. On Jan. 11, the Greek Communist Party
called
out thousands of protesters in Athens, Thessalonika,
Patra, Serres, Chio
and Verioia to protest NATO's aggression
against Yugoslavia and to demand
that Greek soldiers be
pulled out of Kosovo.
The Portuguese
Communist Party called for a national day of
protest for Jan. 25 with a
meeting in front of the prime
minister's residence to demand an end to the
Portuguese
military presence in the Balkans. The PCP also is
"against
the dispatch of any more troops to Kosovo; for solidarity
with
the populations affected by NATO bombings; and for NATO
being
abolished.
The PCP is a mass party with 130,000 members that took
a
strong stand against NATO aggression against Yugoslavia
during the
1999 war.
In Rome on Jan. 13 the Italian section of the Ramsey
Clark
Tribunal, which includes supporters from the Pasti
Foundation and
the Communist Rifundazione Party, held a
protest meeting over the use of
DU. This group is protesting
the dangers to Italian soldiers but also to
the civilian
population of Yugoslavia. It organized hearings of
popular
war crimes tribunals against NATO following the
aggression
against Yugoslavia.
Stories about DU are now daily items
in the Italian press
and electronic media. This coverage has also
come-perhaps to
a lesser degree-throughout all of Western Europe.
In France, the veterans group Avigolfe has forced the
Defense
Minister Alain Richard to reverse some of his
statements about DU. In
effect he had to admit he had been
lying.
In Spain, the Committee in
Solidarity with the Arab Cause
has held a conference in November and more
recent meetings
exposing the dangers of DU.
Subhead: How Yugoslavs,
Iraqis see DU
While the deaths of NATO soldiers have attracted
media
attention, the greater number of DU victims come from the
local
civilian population of Bosnia and Kosovo.
In a Jan. 13 article in the
British daily The Independent,
Robert Fisk wrote of the town Hadjici, where
he asserts that
"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. ..."
"All the surviving refugees of Hadjici ...
believe that the
concers and leukemias that have affected this
population
were caused because the U.S. A-10 bombers that struck
their
factories were firing depleted-uranium weapons."
Snezana
Pavlovic is head of the Environmental Monitoring
Group from the Institute
of Nuclear Sciences "Vinca,"
radiation protection department in Serbia. In
an Jan. 16
interview for the Berlin daily Junge Welt, she said, "NATO
is
denying the danger, using as a foundation for this denial
the fact that it
is indeed hard to prove direct connection
between consequences for human
health and depleted uranium
on a small population."
But she says
"if one concrete person in his or her life is
shown to have been exposed to
radiation, and gets a illness
due to malignancy, radiation must be
considered its cause,
because of all cancer-inducing factors radiation is
the most
dominant one."
A standard rule by the International Agency
for Atomic
Energy, said Pavlovic, "is that radiation mustn't be used
if
the damage is bigger than the gain. And no one can prove any
gain
from DU bombing, for any Kosovo inhabitant, be they
Serb or
Albanian."
Pavlovic said that contamination in Serbia itself is low
and
concentrated, because few metal targets were hit and because
the
Yugoslav army and Vinca cooperated to monitor and remove
the contamination.
In Kosovo, however, KFOR occupation
forces carried out no similar
decontamination effort, and
the people and environment there are both at
risk.
Iraqi scientists, isolated by the murderous sanctions for
the
last 10 years, have begun to break into the media with
their studies on
increased leukemia and other cancers in the
areas of Iraq hit hardest by
U.S.-fired DU during the 1991
war. A paper included in a conference last
Nov. 25-26 in
Gijon, Spain, presents a detailed report of the increases
in
these diseases.
The International Action Center's "Sanctions
Challenge IV,"
now in Iraq, plans to bring back further information
about
the diseases believed to be caused by depleted uranium. The
Iraqis
are undoubtedly the hardest hit population. The IAC
will demand that
Western countries allow Iraqi scientists to
visit and present their
findings on DU, which is not now
allowed.
Former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark, who is leading
the "Sanctions Challenge" to Iraq and
researcher Damacio
Lopez from New Mexico have gone to the area south of
Basra
in Iraq where Iraqi tanks were hit during the 1991 war. They
plan
to get samples of the soil in that area. Lopez will
bring the samples to
Europe to test for radioactivity.
Mrs Jela Jovanovic, art historian
|
