From The Independent January 8th, 2001

Robert Fisk

JUST FOURTEEN months ago, on a bleak, frosty afternoon, I
stopped my car beside an old Ottoman bridge in southern
Kosovo. It was here, scarcely half a year earlier, that Nato jets
had bombed a convoy of Albanian refugees, ripping scores of
them to pieces in the surrounding fields. Their jets, I knew, had
been firing depleted uranium rounds. And now, on the very spot
east of Djakovica where a bomb had torn apart an entire refugee
family in a tractor, five Italian Kfor soldiers had built a little
checkpoint. Indeed, their armoured vehicle was actually standing
on part of the crater in the road.

I tried to warn them that I thought the crater might be
contaminated.

I told them about depleted uranium and the cancers that had
blossomed among the children of Iraq who had - or whose
parents had - been close to DU explosions. One of the young
soldiers laughed at me. He'd heard the stories, he said. But
Nato had assured its troops that there was no danger from
depleted uranium. I begged to differ. "Don't worry about us," the
soldier replied.

They should have known better. Only a few weeks earlier, a team
of UN scientists - sent to Kosovo under the set of UN resolutions
that brought Kfor into the province - had demanded to know from
Nato the location of DU bombings in Kosovo. Nato refused to tell
them. Nor was I surprised. From the very start of the alliance
bombing campaign against Serbia, Nato had lied about
depleted uranium. Just as the American and British
governments still lie about its effects in southern Iraq during the
1991 Gulf War. US and British tanks had fired hundreds of
rounds - thousands in the case of the Americans - at Iraqi
vehicles, using shells whose depleted uranium punches
through heavy armour and then releases an irradiated aerosol
spray.

In the aftermath of that war, I revisited the old battlefields around
the Iraqi city of Basra. Each time, I came across terrifying new
cancers among those who lived there. Babies were being born
with no arms or no noses or no eyes. Children were bleeding
internally or suddenly developing grotesque tumours. UN
sanctions, needless to say, were delaying medicines from
reaching these poor wretches. Then I found Iraqi soldiers who
seemed to be dying of the same "Gulf War syndrome" that was
already being identified among thousands of US and British
troops.

At the time, The Independent was alone in publicising this
sinister new weapon and its apparent effects. Government
ministers laughed the reports off. One replied to Independent
readers who drew the Ministry of Defence's attention to my
articles that, despite my investigations, he had seen no
"epidemiological data" proving them true. And of course there
was none.

Because the World Health Organisation, invited by Iraq to start
research into the cancers, was dissuaded from doing so even
though it had sent an initial team to Baghdad to start work. And
because a group of Royal Society scientists told by the British
authorities to investigate the effects of DU declined to visit Iraq.

Documents that proved the contrary were dismissed as
"anecdotal". A US military report detailing the health risks of DU
and urging suppression of this information was dutifully ignored.
When two years ago I wrote about a British government report
detailing the extraordinary lengths to which the authorities went
at DU shell test-firing ranges in the UK - the shells are fired into
a tunnel in Cumbria and the resulting dust sealed into concrete
containers which are buried - I know for a fact that the first
reaction from one civil servant was to ask whether I might be
prosecuted for revealing this.

One ex-serviceman, sick since the Gulf War, actually had his
house raided by the British police in an attempt to track down
"secret" documents.

More honourable policemen might have searched for papers
that proved DU's dangers - and which might form the basis of
manslaughter charges against senior officers. But of course the
police were trying to find the source of the leak, not the source of
dying men's cancers.

During the Kosovo war, I travelled from Belgrade to Brussels to
ask about Nato's use of depleted uranium. Luftwaffe General
Jerz informed me that it was "harmless" and was found in trees,
earth and mountains. It was a lie.

Only uranium - not the depleted variety that comes from nuclear
waste - is found in the earth. James Shea, Nato's spokesman,
quoted a Rand Corporation report that supposedly proved DU
was not harmful, knowing full well - since Mr Shea is a careful
reader and not a stupid man - that the Rand report deals with
dust in uranium mines, not the irradiated spray from DU
weapons.

And so it went on. Back in Kosovo, I was told privately by British
officers that the Americans had used so much DU in the war
against Serbia that they had no idea how many locations were
contaminated. When I tracked down the survivors of the Albanian
refugee convoy, one of them was suffering kidney pains. Despite
a promise by Shea that the attack would be fully investigated, not
a single Nato officer had bothered to talk to a survivor. Nor have
they since. A year ago, I noted in The Independent that foreign
secretary Robin Cook had admitted in the House of Commons
that Nato was refusing to give DU locations to the UN. "Why?" I
asked in the paper. "Why cannot we be told where these rounds
were fired?"

During the war, defence correspondents - the BBC's Mark Laity
prominent among them - bought the Nato line that DU was
harmless. Laity was still peddling the same nonsense at an
Edinburgh Festival journalists' conference some months later.
Laity - who is now, of course, an official spokesman for Nato -
was last week reduced to saying that "the overwhelming
consensus of medical information" is that health risks from DU
are "very low".

But the growing consensus of medical information is quite the
opposite. Which is why a British report to the UK embassy in
Kuwait referred to the "sensitivity" of DU because of its health
risks.

And still the Americans and the British try to fool us. The
Americans are now brazenly announcing that their troops in
Kosovo have suffered no resultant leukemias - failing to mention
that most of their soldiers are cooped up in a massive base (Fort
Bondsteel) near the Macedonian border where no DU rounds
were fired by Nato. Needless to say, there was also no mention
of the tens of thousands of US troops - women as well as men -
who believe they were contaminated by DU in the Gulf.

So it goes on. British veterans are dying of unexplained cancers
from the Gulf. So are US veterans. Nato troops from Bosnia and
now Kosovo - especially Italians - are dying from unexplained
cancers. So are the children in the Basra hospitals, along with
their parents and uncles and aunts. Cancers have now been
found among Iraqi refugees in Iran who were caught in Allied fire
on the roads north of Kuwait. Bosnian authorities investigating
an increase in cancers can get no information from Nato. This is
not a scandal.

It is an outrage.

Had we but known. On those very same Iraqi roads, I too
prowled through the contaminated wreckage of Iraqi armour in
1991. And - I recall with growing unease - back in Kosovo in
1999, only a day after the original attack, I collected pieces of the
air-fired rounds that hit the Albanian refugee convoy. Their
computer codes proved Nato had bombed the convoy - not the
Serbs, as Nato tried to claim. I also remember that I carried
those bits of munition back to Belgrade - in my pocket. There are
times, I must admit, when I would like to believe Nato's lies.