http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Europe/2001-01/bosnia190101.shtml

THE INDEPENDENT (UK), Friday, January 19, 2001

Robert Fisk: In another Bosnian town two small boys lie in their
hospital beds. Is this collateral damage?

By Robert Fisk in Duboj, Bosnia

Within minutes of the first Nato depleted uranium air raids around the
Bosnian Serb town of Doboj in 1995, Milan Simic, the municipality's
civil defence commissioner, went to look at the wreckage. Some of the
bombs were targeted on mountain-top Serbian military installations,
others on a television transmitter and an ammunition depot in the town.

"About 10 months later, our people started reporting strange things," he
said. "Animals were being born with deformities, particularly in cattle.
We found calves born with large amounts of their skin missing but with
enormous ears and huge paws. They did not live very long.

"Then we found the vegetables and grass, after a few months, looked
brown and burnt in the area of the bombings. The trouble is that no one
at the time was able to document this - there was a war on."

But Mr Simic can recollect his personal health problems with documentary
clarity. "I didn't know anything about uranium or radiation. But in July
last year, I suddenly found my throat had tightened. I couldn't speak. I
lost 22 kilos in 18 days. If I hadn't been sent to the radiation
specialists in Belgrade and been admitted to the military clinic, I
would have died."

Mr Simic is right about the lack of documents. Scientific inquiry has
little scope in time of war. And there are unpleasant rumours
circulating in northern Bosnia that evidence connecting depleted uranium
(DU) munitions with ill-health has been suppressed on the orders of
Biljana Plavsic, now before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague and
anxious - perhaps - to offer Nato governments something in return for
modest treatment at her trial.

But detailed studies of the steady increase in cancers among Bosnian
Serbs after Nato's 1995 raids, the so-called "epidemiological research"
British and other governments demand before they will acknowledge that
DU weapons cause cancers among civilians, may soon be available.

The semi-autonomous Serb Republic is already reporting a fivefold
increase in cancers over the past five years, with Banja Luka, heavily
bombed in 1995, among the worst affected. The medical authorities there
say cancer cases climbed from 816 in 1999 to 1,800 in 2000.

In Doboj, which releases pre-war and post-war medical statistics on
Monday, a tour of the regional hospital produces repeated assertions
from doctors that the rate of tumours and respiratory infections now is
two and a half times greater than before the war. Dr Branko Dabovic, the
silver-haired head of the infection department, has never seen such a
rise.

"There was a significant increase in malignancies and skin infections
after the bombings," he said. "In the one year after, we had more herpes
zosta virus cases than in the 30 years I've worked here. We treated 200
cases here and 7,800 at their homes."

Dr Dabovic chooses his words carefully. He is a medical man, not a
politician. "We are aware there is a serious rise in patients suffering
from immunity decrease. We have been wondering why people should
suddenly suffer a decrease in immunity among all ages and both sexes. I
tried to prove scientifically that it was bad food or stress. But it
wasn't. We had one man come here who was under 20. He had felt fine the
day before. We diagnosed acute leukaemia. Within four days, he was
dead."

Dr Zora Drobac, a senior dermatologist, said: "There are a larger number
of tumours among children and a greater number of malignant tumours. The
skin problems are almost always face, hands and neck - which are
exposed."

The urology department reports an increase in lung tumours, around 40
cases a year in 1999 and last year, just 20 a year before the war.

For those who believe these claims are merely a variation of Serbian
Bosnia's wartime propaganda, all seven doctors interviewed by The
Independent at Doboj hospital insisted further studies would be
necessary before scientific proof could connect the frightening rise in
ill-health to DU munitions.

But it is impossible not to be moved by Filip Andreato, pale and
fearful, as he lies in the arms of a nurse in the paediatrics
department, at eight years old, unable to comprehend why he cannot
breathe fully. Or 11-month-old Ognjen Radonic, whose mother, Mirjana,
was close to the Nato bomb explosions at Doboj's ammunition dump. "There
were massive explosions and smoke like a small mushroom,"she said.

Ognjen was born four years after the raids, but so were many of the
other children now suffering from respiratory failure and unexplained
leukaemias in the former war zones of southern Iraq. At the end of one
bed, a small boy in blue sits, fiddling with a set of playing cards.
Dusko Duric has a serious lung infection, the first any of his family
have suffered.

Are they victims of Nato? The doctors are putting their research data
together for publication. In 1999, when research was published on
regional cancer increases by six medical practitioners at the Doboj
hospital, led by the head doctor, Obrad Filipovic, it was ignored in the
West. Its evidence was too disturbing to be examined. It was compiled,
said Dr Filipovic, because of "the enormous increase in the frequency of
skin tumours of the face and neck at the end of the war."

Their research showed that in the pre-war 1990-1991 period, Doboj, with
a population of 450,000, treated 154 tumours, of which 130 were malign
(86 baso-cellular and 44 plano-cellular). In 1996 and 1997, with a
post-war population of only 140,000, the hospital operated on 144
tumours, of which 101 were malignant (75 baso-cellular and 25
plano-cellular). In other words, the doctors operated on almost the same
number of tumour patients in the two years after the war as they did
when the population was more than three times the size. Of the patients,
98 per cent were Serbs, whose areas were, of course, the target of Nato
raids with DU shells. No one knows exactly how many DU rounds were used
on Doboj - Nato admits DU was used. But a Serb news crew filmed the
aftermath of one raid, and their videotape contains frames of a fragment
of munitions at Usara carrying the Nato coding: "Wing Assembly 96214,
ASSY 872128, Serial No: 80-230893. Date: M (letter damaged)- G12."

No doubt Nato in Brussels will know if that carried a DU warhead.

* Nato said yesterday that its investigation had found no "significant"
health hazard to S-for troops or to the present civilian population at
the Sarajevo suburb of Hadzici from the DU ammunition rounds which have
been discovered at the former military plant more than five years after
it was bombed.