http://www.swans.com/library/art7/alekp010.html

SWANS, Monday, January 22, 2001

Apocalypse Now

by Aleksandra Priestfield

The cat is well and truly out of the bag now - the Great&Powerful made a
valiant grab for its tail, but missed. It is out, and the pigeons are in
full flight.

The full extent of "humanitarian" war is being revealed before our eyes.
The word "humanitarian" is being redefined - who are the humans who make
up the root of that word? Only the people currently in favour with the
people using that word to damn their enemies as subhuman and therefore
unworthy of consideration?

How far we have come - from hell to hell, via a road paved with
something that was only disguised as good intentions. Just under a
hundred years ago the world writhed under clouds of poison gas on the
battlefields of World War I. Today, the same world that is so insistent
on searching high and low for the chemical and biological weapons which
persist in their absence in Iraq is watching with equanimity as its own
chemical and biological weapons are unleashed. Civilian populations on
the ground are so irrelevant as to be left out of the equation
altogether. It's only when "peacekeepers" and foreign troops stationed
on invaded and occupied soil start dropping from cancer and leukemia
that the issue becomes hot. As if only soldiers breathed the air and
drank the water. As though people whose homes are on the poisoned
ground, who have no choice but to drink the water from the poisoned
water table and eat bread milled from poisoned wheat grown on poisoned
ground, have no importance at all. And even now, even with evidence
mounting, the keepers of the laboratories insist that there is nothing
dangerous about radioactive weapons at all. Not even when recycled
reactor uranium and traces of plutonium are found in DU bullets (as some
reports have it). Even now, the powers that be are insisting that they
are fighting against "a regime", and have no quarrel "with the people"
(does that phrase sound familiar? It should. It was repeated ad nauseam
during the NATO war in Yugoslavia. "We have no quarrel with the people."
And yet, now that the big boogieman of Milosevic is out of the picture,
"experts" are warning that the situation in the Balkans is worse than
ever. They fought him (and not the people), he is gone, the people
remain, and the situation is "worse than ever"? hmmm. Bring on the
uranium.)

For an organisation that went to war on "humanitarian grounds", to
prevent a "genocide", NATO is finding itself on the ropes - no evidence
of such genocide, overwhelming evidence that the Albanian "white hats"
are in fact out to orchestrate another land grab as soon as they might
(witness the piling-up literature on "Eastern Kosovo"), and, now,
growing evidence that not only did NATO not go in to prevent a genocide,
it went in to organise one of its own. There is plenty of evidence for
that by now - where are you, Jamie Shea, the organisation needs you
badly to explain away this war crime! But I will content myself with two
appalling instances of cold-blooded and planned apocalypse brought upon
a nation of people who, all bough-and-paid for kangaroo courts to the
contrary, have yet to be proved to have done anything worse than taken
part in a (mostly defensive) civil war within the boundaries of their
own nation.

On April 4, 1999, NATO began targeting the petrochemical plant in the
Yugoslav town of Pancevo, on the outskirts of Belgrade. The complex was
pounded relentlessly from the beginning of April to the beginning of
June - i.e. right up until the end of the bombing campaign. Any
purported intent to disable the Yugoslav petrochemical industry becomes
moot. If this was what the attackers wanted, with all their vaunted
technological capability, it could have been achieved in days. But what
happened in Pancevo was far too deliberate and precise to have been
accidental, and such concentrated pounding can hardly be called
"collateral damage". The area, dangerously close to a river providing
drinking water to thousands and to actual residential areas where
civilians lived, included an oil refinery and a fertilizer factory.

NATO started out by assuring the world that precise targeting with
"smart bombs" was used to minimise "collateral damage", including
environmental hazards. Not taking that at face value, workers at the
plant frantically tried to minimise the potential for disaster by
emptying chemical containers at the plant. Among noxious chemicals
present at the plant were ethylene-dichloride (EDC), ethylene, chlorine,
chlorine-hydrogen, propylene and vinyl chloride monomers (VCM). VCM,
used to produce plastics (e.g. PVC resin) has been shown to be a
dangerous carcinogenic contaminant in a number of well-documented
studies. It can also cause neurological and liver damage, as well as
serious birth defects. For many of these chemicals there is no accepted
"minimum" toxicity - in other words, there is no threshold below which
exposure to them is still safe for unprotected human beings. They are
quite simply, and irredeemably, poisonous. They are accepted raw
materials for chemical industries but they were not meant to be used as
chemical weapons of war. And this is precisely what NATO proceeded to
use them as.

Quite aside from the fact that the strikes by NATO were intended to
"drive the Yugoslav army out of Kosovo" and thus any strike against the
nation's actual infrastructure and industry was indefensible from that
point of view, it could have been possible to quite effectively disable
the plant by targeting essential processing equipment and irreplaceable
machinery. But NATO bombers also targeted, with incredible accuracy,
containers filled with the noxious chemicals which were the stock in
trade for the refinery and the fertilizer plant. With incredible
accuracy - NATO appeared to disdain aiming for the containers which the
workers had worked so frantically to empty. The "smart bombs" went
directly for the full containers, contaminating the river Danube and
arable land nearby. The soil at and near the petrochemical plant is
still soaked with more than one thousand tons of ethylene dichloride, a
thousand tonnes of sodium hydroxide, and nearly one thousand tonnes of
hydrogen chloride1.We won't even mention the eight tonnes of mercury now
brooding in the soil; but the horrendous photographs of the malformed
children of Minamata in Japan come to mind.

An environmental report1 published in 2000 contained the graphic and
devastating advice that women who had been anywhere near Pancevo in
April, May and June of the previous year should not contemplate becoming
pregnant for at least two years, and those who were pregnant, if their
pregnancy was in an early enough stage for this to be practical, were
advised to abort foetuses which were almost certain to be born with
birth defects. The effects of the poisons in the ground and the
groundwater, on the crops grown on this ground and the food produced
from these crops, is still being evaluated. An entire unborn generation
has been condemned and wiped out. What is this if not genocide?

As if this was not enough, the country was seeded by still-undisclosed
amounts of depleted uranium from NATO anti-tank weapons. Now, DU is not
a new thing. Before the Kosovo conflict, it had been used in Bosnia.
Before Bosnia, it had been used with devastating effect in Iraq. The
so-called Gulf War Syndrome in vets from that war was being swept under
the carpet for a decade. But all of a sudden the straw that broke that
camel's back came in the form of European troops stationed in Kosovo
coming home to die of cancer and related diseases. Portugal promptly
pulled its troops. Greeks are clamouring to go home. Italy, who has now
lost more than eight "peacekeepers" to what is now called the Balkan
Syndrome, has suddenly started squawking about an investigation
(although planes flying DU ordnance left from an Italian airbase, and
the Italian Government therefore shares in the responsibility). The
European Parliament, goaded by public frenzy, has finally taken a vote
on putting a moratorium on the use of DU weapons.

But the information on the deadly potential of such weapons is hardly
news. Take a look at this:

"Aerosol DU (Depleted Uranium) exposures to soldiers on the battlefield
could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological
effects. [...] Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are
probably ground troops that re-enter a battlefield following the
exchange of armour-piercing munitions. [...] We are simply highlighting
the potential for levels of DU exposure to military personnel during
combat that would be unacceptable during peacetime operations. [...DU
is..]... a low level alpha radiation emitter which is linked to cancer
when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney
damage. [...] Short term effects of high doses can result in death,
while long term effects of low doses have been linked to cancer. [...]
Our conclusion regarding the health and environmental acceptability of
DU penetrators assume both controlled use and the presence of excellent
health physics management practices. Combat conditions will lead to the
uncontrolled release of DU. [...] The conditions of the battlefield, and
the long term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become
issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic
penetrators for military applications."

- Excerpts from the July 1990 Science and Applications International
Corporation report: 'Kinetic Energy Penetrator Environment and Health
Considerations', as included in Appendix D - US Army Armaments,
Munitions and Chemical Command report: 'Kinetic Energy Penetrator Long
Term Strategy Study, July 1990'

So, back in 1990 - a full decade ago - warnings had been sounded over
the use of depleted uranium. According to the quoted report, however,
the military's concern was far more with the possibility that they might
be denied the use of this weapon in conflict than with any possible
after-effects it might have. Once again, civilian populations on the
ground are nowhere.

"Peacekeepers" in Kosovo are dying; there has also been evidence that
the incidence of leukemia and similar diseases in the local population
is increasing, although this is less readily reported in the mainstream
news. Back in Bosnia, one in ten people in a population of 4000 Serbs
who had been exposed to DU bombardment by NATO planes is either dead or
dying from some form of cancer. Robert Fisk of The Independent is only
one of many respected journalists who cites the case of a 12-year-old
girl named Sladjana who is showing unmistakable signs of radiation
sickness after picking up pieces of DU ordnance, and whose symptoms are
roundly ignored by the scientists scrambling to investigate the Balkan
Syndrome of the "peacekeepers" who have been exposed to hazard only
intermittently and short-term.

And back beyond that, far enough removed in time for the true
ramifications of the genocidal warfare to become apparent, there is
Iraq. http://www.web-light.nl/VISIE/extremedeformities.html is a site
that is not for the squeamish. Graphic photographs of birth defects in
Iraqi children are appalling. And this is only coming to Yugoslavia,
maybe ten years down the line.

Apocalypse, now. And the West will deny its complicity for as long as it
can, because facing it would be unspeakable. Madeleine Albright has been
quoted as saying that the death of half a million Iraqi children was "an
acceptable price" to pay for the world that she wishes to live in. Those
who have to cope with the aftermath of paying that price might disagree.


1 For a full report on this, see
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/willful.htm and related
material.


Aleksandra Priestfield is a writer and an editor. She contributes her
regular columns to Swans