🚀 go-pugleaf

Consigning their future to death 

George Monbiot warns that bombing Belgrade's chemical plants will
poison the unborn 

Thursday April 22, 1999 


The Nato commanders trying to explain what happened to the refugee
convoy they bombed sounded rather like the police at the Stephen
Lawrence enquiry. They did their utmost to appear contrite, without
actually apologising. Sorry, for the guardians of law and order,
always seems to be the hardest word. 

But even as the alliance tied itself in circumlocutory knots, it
continued to engage in the slaughter of non-combatants. Slowly,
largely silently, it is killing thousands of civilians. They are being
neither bombed nor shot: the people of the former Yugoslavia are being
poisoned.

Nato's immediate war aim is to destroy the Serb economy, in order to
restrict Milosevic's capacity either to attack the Kosovan Albanians
or to retaliate against Nato troops. This may or may not be working.
But whatever its impact on the Yugoslav Republic's economy might be,
Nato is succeeding in wiping out its ecology.

The Nato press office claims that it has 'no idea' how many chemical
plants and oil installations its bombers have hit. But it concedes
that there have been multiple raids on a vast oil refinery and
chemicals complex in the suburbs of Belgrade, on another chemicals
facility close to the capital and on an oil refinery at Novi Sad, in
the north of the country.

Britain's Ministry of Defence told me yesterday that the bombers are
'keeping the risks of pollution to a minimum', but it was unable to
explain how, while blowing chemicals plants to pieces, they have
achieved this commendable feat. Nato informed me that 'the smoke from
these fires is barely comparable to the smoke caused by the Yugoslav
attacks on several hundred villages'. It's clear that neither agency
has the faintest idea what it's talking about.

The chemical tanks ruptured by Nato bombers on the outskirts of
Belgrade last week contained a number of lethal pollutants. Some held
a complex mixture of hydrocarbons called 'naphtha', others housed
phosgene and chlorine (both of which were used as chemical weapons in
the first world war), and hydrochloric acid. As the factories burnt, a
poisoned rain, containing hundreds of toxic combustion products,
splattered Belgrade, its suburbs and the surrounding countryside.
Broken tanks and burst pipes poured naphtha, chlorine, ethylene
dichloride and transformer oil, all deadly poisons, into the Danube.
Oil slicks up to 12 miles long wound their way towards Romania.

It could, it seems, have been worse. Scientists at the plant claimed
that one of the bombs 'grazed' a vast vat of liquid ammonia. If that
had gone up, it would have poisoned most of the people of Belgrade.

These toxins are unlikely to kill people immediately. But they will
have soaked the soil across hundreds of square miles and percolated
into the aquifers. The people of the former Yugoslavia, as a result,
will be repeatedly exposed to them. Many of the compounds released
cause cancers, miscarriages and birth defects. Others are associated
with fatal nerve and liver diseases. The effects of the bombing of
Serbia's economy equate, in other words, to low-intensity chemical
warfare.

Nato might also be waging an undeclared, invisible nuclear war. During
the Gulf war, the Allies deployed a new kind of munition: bullets and
bombs tipped with depleted uranium, or DU. DU, being heavier than lead
or steel, penetrates armour more effectively. In lump form it is only
moderately harmful, but when the munitions explode they scatter
thousands of particles, small enough to be inhaled. The Atomic Energy
Authority predicted that if 50 tonnes of DU dust were released in
Iraq, 500,000 people would die of cancer. In the event, according to
the Campaign Against Depleted Uranium in Manchester, some 700-900
tonnes of DU were deployed. The result, the investigator Felicity
Arbuthnot found, is a seven-fold increase in leukaemia and a massive
rise in the incidence of certain rare cancers in Iraq. Thousands of
Iraqi children have been born without eyes, limbs, brains and
genitalia. DU has also been associated by some scientists with Gulf
War Syndrome.

I asked the MoD whether DU is being deployed in the former Yugoslavia.
'Certainly not', the press office replied. I asked Nato. 'It's used in
some American munitions,' I was told.

This, in environmental terms at least, is perhaps the dirtiest war the
West has ever fought. Nato's scorched earth policy, which seeks to
destroy Milosevic's armed capacity by destroying everything else,
places the Alliance firmly on the wrong side of the Geneva Convention.
For a war which targets chemical factories and oil installations,
which deploys radioactive weapons in towns and cities, is a war
against everyone: civilians as well as combatants, the unborn as well
as the living. As such, it can never be a just one.