When one reads analysis like this, it is easy to conclude that the US
and allies have a deliberate policy of waging chemical warfare on
civilian populations in Iraq and Yugoslavia.............Tony

Who's Going to Clean Up Serbia?
By Joan McQueeney Mitric
Sunday, July 9, 2000

Look at a map of Europe, and the long blue line of the Danube stands
out. Starting as a thin stream in Germany's Black Forest, and already
mighty as it passes Strauss's Vienna, this colossal river cuts a
1,770-mile southeasterly course through 10 countries before emptying
into the Black Sea. The Danube, for centuries a major trade route, links
central Europe's grandest capitals--as well as some of its most diverse
ecosystems--and supplies drinking water to millions.

Halfway along this vital watercourse, where the river is at its widest,
sits a political, geographical and metaphorical obstruction known as
Serbia, a state many Western policymakers are pretending no longer
exists. Most plans to rebuild and stabilize the Balkans circumvent
Serbia entirely. Perhaps because Serbia's villainous president, Slobodan
Milosevic, is an international pariah and indicted war criminal, the
West is turning its back on the environmental disaster that NATO's
78-day bombing war left behind.

A year later, the Serbian portion of the Danube, between Bulgaria and
Hungary, remains impassable. Debris from a half-dozen shattered bridges
continues to clog the waterway, crippling commerce in countries both up
and downstream. More troubling--and potentially longer-lasting--are the
toxic residues from NATO's high-altitude assault on Serbia's industrial
infrastructure. Hidden in the Danube riverbed and lingering in its
wetlands, these pollutants have the potential to affect the health and
well-being of 85 million Europeans and their descendants in the Danube
Basin for decades to come. By its nature war is destructive, but when
the war is over the destruction should end.

Many Americans remember the war with Serbia--the dominant state in what
is left of Yugoslavia--as a casualty-free conflict (from the U.S. point
of view), an immaculate intervention that has long since left their
radar screens. To me, though, it was much more personal.

Yugoslavia became my adopted country three decades ago, when I met and
married a Serb who had come to the United States to get his doctorate.
On almost annual visits there, I have enjoyed the loving hospitality of
Yugoslav friends and family; together we mourned as the country fell
apart.

During last year's war and in its aftermath, our sorrow has turned to
anger. Under the U.S.-led NATO onslaught, my Serbian friends saw
hospitals and schools damaged, workplaces obliterated, electricity cut
off, their economy in tatters. Little wonder they had difficulty
believing the leaflets NATO dropped that told them the war was aimed
only at Milosevic, to force a halt to the atrocities his thugs were
committing against Albanians in Kosovo.

When NATO's bombs slammed into food-processing plants and automobile
factories, oil refineries and electrical transformers, they released
large quantities of long-lasting chemicals that Americans would not
tolerate in the smallest amounts in their own backyards. These toxins,
including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), liquid mercury and vinyl
chloride monomer (VCM), made their way not only into the Danube but into
the soil and air of this largely agricultural country of 10 million in
the heart of Europe.

PCBs, and their toxic chemical relatives, dioxins, have been linked to
cancer and other ills and have been banned since 1977 in the United
States. Ingested by animals, PCBs bind to fatty tissue and can be passed
from fish and game to humans; infants can absorb them with their
mothers' milk. When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found
dioxin-laden soil on the streets of tiny Times Beach, Mo., in 1983, it
spent $200 million to clean up the site--and even so, no residents have
been allowed to move back.

Closer to home, Washingtonians may recall a basement fire last autumn
involving a few ounces of PCB-contaminated oil. It closed the Commerce
Department at 14th Street NW for four days and terrified parents of the
children enrolled in the building's first-floor day care center. One of
those parents, an EPA scientist, told me: "Even one nanogram [a
billionth of a gram] per cubic meter is not an appropriate exposure
level for children."

In that context, consider what happened in April 1999 when NATO bombs
struck the sprawling Zastava car and munitions depot in the Serbian city
of Kragujevac--in a region that is home to 320,000 people. More than two
tons of oils containing potentially carcinogenic PCBs in the auto
plant's paint shop combusted or spilled out to the Lepenica and Velika
Morava rivers, tributaries of the Danube that feed reservoirs used for
drinking water and irrigation. According to independent scientists from
FOCUS, a multinational environmental agency based in Switzerland, and
from the Regional Environmental Center in Szentandre, Hungary, the
amount of PCBs and dioxins unleashed at Kragujevac was 1,000 times
higher than the level that would trigger an environmental emergency--and
quick intervention--in Germany.

Unfortunately for the people of Kragujevac--and for anybody
downstream--defeated Serbia has neither the technology nor the money to
do a proper cleanup.

Also in April 1999, NATO warplanes pounded riverside oil refineries at
Novi Sad and the plastics and fertilizer plants in Pancevo, on a
tributary of the Danube northeast of Belgrade. The ensuing fires
released petroleum byproducts and cancer-causing VCM. Pancevo residents
soon suffered what the New York Times described as "a surge of
unexplained symptoms," including headaches, rashes and miscarriages.
Several Western journalists visiting the area six weeks later became ill
and were treated for nausea and respiratory problems.

Downstream from the attacks, residents of Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria
watched with alarm as oil slicks and fish kills, some reported to be 50
yards long floated by. They complained to European authorities that they
feared toxic particulates from the massive fires would leach into the
soil, poison their shared aquifers or end up in Danube River-fed
reservoirs.

One of the bombed Pancevo plants used liquid mercury, a highly poisonous
metal associated with neurological disorders, to produce chlorine. When
scientists from the U.N. Balkan Task Force and FOCUS took riverbed core
samples near Pancevo late last summer, they estimated that 50 to 100
kilograms (110 to 200 pounds) of liquid mercury and other byproducts
were scattered over a 24,000-square-yard area.
They said these agents were "very toxic and highly trans-boundary," and
capable of remaining for years in river water and sediment. Both
international teams independently found levels of mercury in mussels and
aquatic life four times higher than those allowed by food safety
standards of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization.

In fairness, every international team doing environmental assessments in
Yugoslavia has had difficulty distinguishing preexisting damage to soil
and water systems from new toxins linked to the war. Long before the
bombing, the Danube's viability was under siege from both industrial
polluters to the north and from 50 years of lax environmental oversight
in Yugoslavia and the former Eastern Bloc nations. Scientists taking
core sediment samples after the war have found toxins dating from the
'60s, '70s and '80s--including contaminants related to the 1986
Chernobyl nuclear accident. But the NATO bombing unquestionably made the
situation worse. Preexisting pollution is no reason to dismiss the
environmental fallout from the war; it only makes the case for a cleanup
more urgent.

To minimize allied casualties, NATO decided on a bombing campaign whose
targets included civilian infrastructure far from the Kosovo front. The
economic and ecological consequences of that choice are long-term and
potentially devastating.

Pollutants recognize no political boundaries--they will not stay put or
poison only Serbia. Rather, they are bleeding out, contaminating soil
and water, fish and fowl, far from Milosevic's Belgrade.

So who should pay for the necessary cleanup? Serbia, whose per capita
income has fallen below that of Albania, long the poorest country in
Europe, cannot. It is doubtful that Milosevic would do it if he could,
since he is happy to exploit the postwar destruction for his own
ends--refusing, for example, an offer from Austria to rebuild one of the
bombed bridges over the Danube because he wanted more in reparations
from "aggressor nations." Milosevic is a dark force whose murderous
policies have left Serbia isolated, defeated and bankrupt, and he is
happy to paint anyone in Serbia who opposes his misrule--and this
includes most of my Serbian friends--as NATO's pawn.

But the United States is also in something of a state of denial. Two
weeks ago at the United Nations, as U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke
tried to expel Yugoslavia's representative from a discussion about the
future of the Balkans, he referred to Yugoslavia as a "nonexistent
state." The United States has repeatedly let it be known that no help
will be forthcoming until Milosevic is gone: At a March congressional
hearing, Larry Napper, the State Department's coordinator for Eastern
European assistance, repeated the Clinton administration's long-standing
position:

"As long as Milosevic is in power we will not be doing any
reconstruction assistance in Serbia."

The people of Serbia are indeed unlucky in their leader--as are the
people of Iraq, which was also the target of a high-altitude bombing
campaign in the Gulf War's first days. I believe this kind of war from
above is wrongheaded and full of hubris, taking a disproportionate toll
on civilians. But if we are going to continue to use it as a foreign
policy tool, if we target factories, power plants and the rest of the
infrastructure of modern industrial society, we should be prepared to
take responsibility for the environmental consequences.

When I think about all of this, I keep coming back to my first encounter
with Yugoslavia. It was December 1968, and the farmers in my husband's
village regaled me with stories from their childhood, when Josip Broz
Tito was trying to keep the country from being swallowed by the Soviet
bloc. Many remembered American tractors with a picture of two hands
clasped in friendship stamped on their sides, and said those big green
machines and Ohio "C-192" corn seeds had helped them survive Stalin's
punishing blockade of the '50s.

Crowded around one of the village's only televisions, my new Serbian
friends cheered as American astronauts spacewalked across the night sky.
To these peasants, the acrobatic astronauts, the "helping hands"
tractors and the Ohio corn represented the best of American exports.

Does America today believe that the mantle of sole remaining superpower
means it can wage war for "humanitarian" reasons--and ignore the human
costs? Should the country that led the NATO alliance and dropped 80
percent of the bombs--along with the leaflets that said the enemy was
Milosevic, not the Serbian people--just walk away from the mess it
helped create? Can America's allies in Europe afford an environmental
and economic wasteland festering on their southern border?

I do not think so. It was in America's interests in the '50s to respond
to the needs of Yugoslavia--which, after all, was communist--with a
creative and generous show of goodwill. So today it is in our long-term
interests to project power in the Balkans with an equally creative and
generous concern for the people there and the shared environment in
which they live.

Joan McQueeney Mitric is a Washington-based writer specializing in
health issues.

© 2000 The Washington Post