FIRST REPORTS OF CIVILIAN CASUALTIES DUE TO DEPLETED URANIUM IN KOSOVO

Hajici, a suburb of Sarajevo, occupied mainly by Serbs, heavily bombed by NATO, in late summer 1995, produced 5,000 Serb refugees, 400 of whom are now in the local cemetery, 300 dead due to leukaemia or other cancers. Robert Fisk, from the UK’s Independent newspaper, visited the site and stated that the whole area was like a visitation of the plague. Walking through the cemetery, this journalist stated that one sees names, ages and death by cancer. “It will be difficult for NATO to get away with this one”, he claims. The population in this area has stated that the incidence of cancers, mainly leukaemia, are rife and started to appear after NATO A-10 bombers started to attack their factories with DU (depleted uranium) rounds. As the international press campaign gets under way, with Pravda.Ru’s correspondents being in the front line, we can confirm that Robert Fisk indeed found a common link between DU attacks and cancer among civilians in Bosnia. In 1995, during an attack on a factory, the civilian Djoko Zelenovic was working. Five years later, cancer appeared in his left lung. Two months after this he was dead. He said that his problems started after the NATO bombing of his factory. Twelve other men had been in the room that was bombed with DU weapons by NATO. Nine of them have since died, of cancer. Darko Radic claims he picked up a piece of shrapnel from a bomb. “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…All that night, the factory glowed as if someone was putting phosphorous on it”. His father died of cancer recently and his mother now has a brain tumour. “Every week, we have a funeral here”, he claimed. A six-year-old girl who started to play with the shrapnel from the bombs dropped by NATO bears witness to this depressing story. She started playing with the fragments of bombs and took them home to play with. After some time, a yellow substance appeared under her finger nails and then her nails dropped out. She then suffered back pains, was taken to hospital and was diagnosed as having radiation sickness. 300 out of 400 deaths from the same village have been from cancer or leukaemia in the last five years. Let NATO now say this was a coincidence. Let them say this in their favourite theatre, the International Penal Court of the Hague.

JOHN ASHTEAD Pravda.Ru London