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September 29, 1999news |  a+e | sf life | extra | sfbg.com
On the road to Kosovo
Yugoslavs are paying the price for NATO's war.
By Patricia Axelrod


'CRISPY CRITTERS,' corpses cooked to near cremation. Ex-U.S. soldier
Selina Perez, who buried the Iraqi dead of Desert Storm, called them
"crispy critters." These were people whose blood boiled and evaporated.
Their uniforms burned away with the skin down to naked, blackened bones,
leaving vacantly staring charcoaled skeletons brittle enough to break up
into skull, torso, legs, arms, and ashes. Calling these people "crispy
critters" was Selina's way of dealing with the horror of disposing of
the irradiated remains of death by depleted uranium in the Persian Gulf.
Selina went home, only to suffer a variety of symptoms that battered her
into bed. Other members of the Graves Registration Unit became ill.
Selina began to wonder if the "crispy critters" they helped bury were
the cause of her illness.
Eight years later, American depleted uranium (DU) was back on the
battlefield. This time it was being used in NATO's war against
Yugoslavia.
On June 10, 78 days after the bombing began, NATO declared a cease-fire.
DU use was downplayed by a NATO spokesperson, who said it had "not been
used extensively." The Pentagon claimed that there were minimal civilian
casualties and that only one U.S. plane had been shot down.
But I had reason to doubt that accounting. I have studied war for 16
years, and I have learned that when battle ends, the truth is left
silent.
Think about the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia: the Pentagon story of the
"old map" that led to the "accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy,
the bragging about straight-shooting missiles that seldom miss their
targets.
And how did the Yugoslavs shoot that invisible stealth bomber out of
their air? If they could pick off that plane, might not some of the more
visible NATO planes have been shot down, too?
On Aug. 1, I traveled to Yugoslavia to investigate DU deployment and
Allied losses. Most importantly, I wanted to see with my own eyes the
untold suffering caused by Operation Allied Force.
Eager to learn the facts, I followed my curiosity hundreds of kilometers
throughout the Yugoslav countryside. By foot, bus, car, or train, I went
alone, hitting the ground running. Gasoline is rationed to 20 liters per
month per family, so, like the Yugoslavs, I occasionally hitchhiked when
buses ran out of gas. Regardless, I always found people wanting to talk
to their first American since the bombing.
For food and lodging, I depended on the kindness of a people to whom I
was an enemy stranger, from a nation that had just bombed them. Geiger
counter-equipped, I was ready to measure for DU. Two weeks passed,
during which I successfully concluded a sample bomb damage assessment.
Helped by my experience in post-Desert Storm Iraq some seven years
earlier - with the evidence still warm on the ground - I saw a
different war than the one seen on American television.
It was like returning to the scene of a crime.
Strangely, by journey's end, I had no clear notion of just how many
civilians and soldiers had actually died. Many say that it's too soon to
know how many were killed in the whole of Yugoslavia, including Kosovo
- too many dead, injured, and missing haven't yet been accounted for.
Estimates by official Yugoslav government and unofficial sources range
from 500 combined Yugoslav soldiers and civilians killed to as high as
2,000 to 5,000 civilians alone and fewer soldiers than civilians killed.
Coming home to Sacramento, I called the U.S. Department of Defense to
ask about my findings. Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Colonel Vince Warzinski
was assigned to answer my questions about what Yugoslavs have dubbed
"the Aggression" and NATO calls "Operation Allied Force." I queried
Warzinski in detail about campaign strategy, tactics, misses, and
aircraft crashes and losses. I asked him about extensive
civilian-cluster and carpet bombing of Yugoslavia.
And what about the depleted uranium A-10 rounds and radioactive cruise
missiles the population is sure were used against them?
"You saw only what Belgrade wanted you to see, didn't you?" Warzinski
asked.
Twice as glad that I had gone alone, I answered, "Not so. I went
searching by myself, with no help from any government."
Unbowed
My first night in Yugoslavia, I met Nikola and his accomplished family,
who clearly knew all there was to know about hospitality. It was Nikola
who took me to my first bomb site, the search-lit otherworldly wreckage
of the state-run pro-Milosevic TV station where a bomb dug down through
the high-rise building into the basement, killing 16 or more employees
as their shelter exploded into hell. "Body parts hung from the trees,"
an eyewitness taxicab driver said.
Later Nikola would bring me to a bombed-out house just a brisk 600-meter
walk from his home. A place of bustling reconstruction, the handmade
sign in the front expresses the sentiments of the unbowed. "Sorry. You
missed us," it reads.
In Batjenika, there was Vera, who took me to meet the parents of Milica
Rakic, a three-year-old who died on her training pottie. According to
eyewitness accounts, a Yugoslav surface-to-air missile shot down an
incoming U.S. cruise missile. Bomb shrapnel exploded in the sky above
the second-floor apartment where the baby girl was just being readied
for sleep.
"I left her on her night pot to go to fix her bed," keened Milica's
mother. Gesturing from the bathroom to the bedroom and back, she pointed
to the naked bomb-damaged window through which the shrapnel flew to the
place where her child was slain. "She lived for five minutes. The heart
was beating. It was very short. Now she was here, then she was not
here."
When asked what she would say to Americans, her anguished reply was,
"Don't kill our children no more. You didn't have to kill us."
Chemical warfare
My plan to travel to battlefield Yugoslavia began on day one of
Operation Allied Force and coalesced when I called the Yugoslavian
Mission to the United Nations. Initially, my request for a visa to enter
Yugoslavia through Skopje, Macedonia, and then to travel north through
Kosovo and up to Belgrade and beyond was met with tepid enthusiasm from
the diplomatic powers that be. I finally entered Yugoslavia through
Belgrade with an invitation to join a Ramsey Clark Humanitarian Mission
as scientific adviser.
My first day in the theater of war began with the customary teaspoon of
honey my host Jovenka insisted upon and ceremonial briefings by the
Yugoslav Red Crescent Society. But I learned more from an impromptu tour
of the streets of Belgrade with Dr. Radjoe Lausevic, assistant professor
of biology at the University of Belgrade, and an unscheduled rendezvous
with Rajika B. Bagajevic of the Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
Lausevic concisely told me of the environmental disaster brought on by
the bombing. He listed the chemicals released when NATO bombs hit
chemical production plants, oil refineries, electrical power plants,
substations, and transformers. The effect of all those toxins, plus the
depleted uranium used in certain instances, he said, was "equal to
chemical warfare on a civilian population."
The air pollution has abated somewhat, he told me, but the soil and
water "remain heavily contaminated, as is the food, which, while still
plentiful, may well be poisoned."
Fruit farmers would later confirm Lausevic's educated opinion. Pointing
to burned leaves on the trees, they mentioned unnaturally heavy rains
and floods. They would expect such weather to yellow - but not wither
- their crops.
'Accidental' bombing
Foreign affairs officer Bagajevic shed new light on the mysterious
"accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy in New Belgrade. On May 7,
the building was hit by a missile, killing two. Later, the Department of
Defense called the strike a mistake, pointing to an old Defense Mapping
Agency graphic the department claimed was wrongly used to identify
targets. The map allegedly showed the Chinese embassy marked as a
Yugoslav target of strategic importance.
Bagajevic is highly amused by this tale of the bad map and tells me that
everyone in Belgrade is laughing at the rationalization.
"Impossible," he said. "The parcel of land on which the Chinese embassy
sits was undeveloped land before China built their embassy there about
two years ago. It is not possible that any old map could show that
address as anything other than empty land."
It didn't take long to discover that Bagajevic was right. A chat with
Dejan, a freelance driver tasked to deliver construction material to the
Chinese embassy while it was under construction, confirms Bagajevic's
assertion. Bagajevic and Dejan, like most of the Belgraders I spoke
with, say there is no doubt that the embassy was intentionally bombed.
Some say this was done to warn China not to interfere in Operation
Allied Force. Another popular theory is that Mirjana Milosevic, wife and
indispensable helpmate of President Milosevic, sought safe harbor there
(expecting the sovereign Chinese embassy to be off limits to NATO
bombs), attracting the NATO missile like a bee to honey.
Collateral damage
Day two: I left the Yugoslav government-sanctioned Ramsey Clark group
and set out on my own. Moving from bomb site to bomb site, the first
thing I noted was what appeared to be the improved accuracy of the
"precision-guided" missiles. I had expected to see the same kind of
damage and death I had seen in Iraq, where it took as many as 34
laser-guided bombs delivered from an altitude of 50,000 feet to bring
down a bridge. So I was initially puzzled when I learned that in this
war some bridges were toppled with as few as three to four bombs.
Other high-value targets, like the Novi Pasar airstrip and the Novi Sad
refinery plant, sprawled across acres of land, required continuous
bombing. In order to prevent the workers from making repairs to their
airstrips and pump houses, these targets were bombed night and day at
any hour. The constant spray of cluster and dumb bombing achieved the
goal.
Precision-guided munitions targeting was a different matter. Although
the Pentagon will not disclose how high NATO aircraft flew, Yugoslavs
who watched the bombing from the ground say NATO improved target
sighting by reducing strike altitudes from the 50,000 feet used in Iraq
to as low as a pre-launch 3,000 to 6,000 feet, thereby putting the
planes in range of Yugoslav antiair defenses. Listening to them speak
made reports from civilians who claim to have seen NATO aircraft shot
out of the sky seem plausible - an assertion Pentagon spokesperson
Warzinski dismissed as propaganda.
And it is said in Yugoslavia that NATO used U.S. Army Special Forces,
along with a network of spies, to plant radio transmitters and laser
designators at the target spot. This X-marks-the-spot strategy, they
say, dramatically improved the accuracy and expenditure of the
electronically smart missiles, which worked as well as if they were on a
Pentagon-rigged proving ground. (Warzinski responded with a terse "no
comment.")
And what of the so-called surgical strikes and the misses the press
euphemistically referred to as "collateral damage"? My visit to
Belgrade's Zavod Za Ortopedsku (Hospital for Amputees and Prosthesis and
Rehabilitation Clinic) and a chat with two young survivors of collateral
damage answered that question. They were in the same room; one a
curly-haired seven-year-old girl, the other a teen with dreams of
playing synthesizer in a grown-up band.
Slava, the seven-year-old, was on a bus when it was hit by a NATO
missile. The girl lost her leg; her mother has large pins holding her
leg together. Slava has been in the hospital since the first days of the
war, and she'll be there for another three operations. She's a perky
little creature who likes to watch TV cartoons.
But when I asked her to tell me about her leg, she began to cry, which
made her mother cry, and I never quite learned what the mother and
daughter said, because my interpreter was too sad and hurt to tell me.
The Yugoslav government would have its people believe that NATO missiles
made no mistakes - that the West intentionally targeted civilians to
punish Yugoslavs for Milosevic's conduct. This belief has united
Yugoslavia in a common sentiment: "No matter how much I hate Slobodan, I
hate NATO more."
Helping to paint this picture of NATO as baby killer comes a charge from
a Spanish NATO pilot, Captain Aldolfo Luis Martin de la Hoz, who has
publicly condemned NATO for intentionally targeting civilians. The
Department of Defense excused civilian casualties and property damage
either as the products of rare misguided missiles or as caused by the
propensity of the Yugoslav military to use human shields to protect
their troops, tanks, and weapons.
On the ground in the heavily bombed dirt street villages like Shangji,
which is within eyesight of the Novi Sad refinery, or in destroyed
Aleksinac, which is near an army barracks and tank depot, one begins to
understand the Yugoslav interpretation of this war.
Eye the pockmarked, shrapnel-sprayed houses, interview the survivors of
the dead, speak with the wounded but recovering father whose face was
blown away, talk to the old grandmother cut by flying debris or the two
mischievous little boys hit by shrapnel, and to the other children too
terrified to eat or sleep properly - as well as to the young mother,
Biljana, who, imagining she hears the aircraft engines overhead,
threatens to kill herself. Unable to comfort her child, she tells me, "I
just want to die."
Going underground
After decades trapped between Russia, the former Warsaw Pact countries,
and NATO forces, Yugoslavs have grown accustomed to being under siege.
They have prepared to survive war by burying their military assets and
soldiers deep beneath layers of dirt, concrete, and reinforced steel. So
NATO devised bunker-busting techniques to burrow deep and incinerate the
shelters.
Those Yugoslav troops not at the front are trained either to go
underground on base or to disperse to civilian homes. Sometimes they
seek safe harbor with friends or family; other times they are taken in
by supportive locals. The army forces gather in schools and churches
that can be converted into military hospitals or tank depots.
What's more, the reality of scarce Yugoslav real estate. Military
munitions, barracks, and bases are in close proximity to civilian
farmlands, homes, hospitals, and businesses.
With a network of spies on the ground reporting the arrival of army
troops and resources in civilian communities, civilian homes and
buildings became military targets. "This is war, and anything can
happen," one young café companion said.
Back home, on the phone with Pentagon spokesperson Warzinski, I asked
about the blurred line between military and civilian targets.
"There were allegations that they were keeping some of their equipment
in places like churches, schools, that sort of thing," he told me. "I
think our campaign planners took account of all that and made the proper
decisions."
What about the numbers of Yugoslavian soldiers and civilians killed, I
asked. He discounted earlier "hot wash" tallies but declined to give the
exact numbers, which he said would be found in an "after-action"
Department of Defense report of the war due out this month. As for high
numbers of civilian deaths, these Warzinski rejected as patently false:
"Allied planners are very careful with what they choose to strike [and
they have] a strong desire to minimize collateral damage," he said.
"Ninety percent [of the firepower] was precision guided. That meant they
could fly through the window of the building we chose."
Neglecting to mention the three-year-old who died when a piece of
shrapnel flew through her bathroom window, I asked him to elaborate.
"Out of 23,000 weapons dropped throughout the campaign, approximately 20
weapons went astray," he said. "We used very accurate bomb drops....
[There was] no carpet bombing.... We dropped 1,100 cluster bombs with
about 200 bomblets each ... but again these were at military targets....
[Although] a certain number of cluster bombs did not go off when we
dropped them, [they were] used as they should be to take out an airfield
or fielded forces and basic stuff dispersed over an area."
Bleak winter
After the cease-fire, civilians began to believe they had been targeted
by depleted uranium cruise missiles.
When I visited bomb sites, onlookers told me a closed-mouthed Yugoslav
military detachment had moved in shortly after a missile hit. Soldiers
brought Geiger counters, hauled away soil from the crater, and filled in
the hole with new dirt - perhaps hoping stray DU particles would
disappear into the background radiation of the earth. This explains why
my Geiger counter erratically beeped and spiked as high as 10 times
above the normal background of the earth, then abruptly returned to
normal.
Eventually I located one of these bomb-site inspectors. The 30-year-old
chemical engineer and reserve police officer had been recruited for
service against NATO as a member of the Yugoslav Nuclear Biological and
Chemical detection corps. His team rode in an air-controlled vehicle
equipped with Russian detection tools. After cruise-missile bombing
raids, he and his staff found "fifteen radioactive detections." Finding
a hot spot, he'd radio to a contamination crew, which pried radioactive
shrapnel out of walls and then cleaned up the area.
He asked me about American veterans of the Persian Gulf War who claim
that the depleted uranium the United States used against the Iraqis may
have made them ill. "My government covers up and denies the danger of
depleted uranium and has refused to accept responsibility for the
veterans' illnesses," I told him.
In response, the fellow reminded me that soldiers under any flag can
fall prey to unscrupulous politics. "My government covers up your
government's cover-up by cleaning up," he said. Milosevic, he said, is
frightened of the debate surrounding DU radiation, which could destroy
his government. And so "a decision has been made to hide confirmed DU
detections, not only those found by my team but by others."
Knowing of DU's long-term effects - as well as birth defects in
children born to Persian Gulf War veterans - this man has sought
postwar medical examination from the Vojno Medicincki Centar (Army
Medical Center) in Nis. Doctors there did some blood and urine testing
and determined that he was fine. He says he wasn't quite convinced. "I
will not tell my wife of my concern," he told me, "but I will tell her
we cannot have children for five years or more, until things get better
in our country."
Throughout my travels I had been looking for indications of radiation
burns and illness, so I was not surprised when the young chemist told me
they have been stowed out of public sight in the largest military
hospital in Yugoslavia, the Vojno Medicinsim Academija in Belgrade. This
confirmed an earlier discussion with a doctor who also said that DU
casualties could be found in military hospital wards.
Here's what Warzinski had to say about the use of DU: "The only DU used
in the Kosovo campaign was part of the A-10 Gatling gun, [which] fires a
30 millimeter [DU] bullet.... We did use some cruise missiles [to]
strike at high-value targets [but] there was no DU involved."
I never made it to Kosovo. By my last day, after stopping in 19 villages
and cities and traveling hundreds of kilometers, three kilometers and
one more very unreliable bus ride was all it would have taken. But try
as I might, I still had not gained cooperation from the U.N.
peacekeeping force - which, it was said, kept tabs on journalists in
return for limited protection against renegade Serbian and Albanian
forces. Time, as it is prone to do, had run out.
Humanitarian experts expect a bleak winter for Yugoslavia. Geneva-based
Merete Johansson, the United Nations chief of the European Division for
Humanitarian Emergencies, says "large segments of the population will
suffer a substantial lack of electricity, heating, and water this
winter."
To repair the devastated infrastructure, Milosevic's government has
imposed a bomb damage and reconstruction tax equal to one day's pay per
worker per pay period. Even the pensioners are taxed. Johansson told me
$119 million has been designated to repair the water and electrical
power plants, but she doesn't know how much of that money has actually
been released toward that end.
As for the land, FOCUS, a relief operation funded jointly by Greece,
Russia, Switzerland, and Austria, has taken samples of the rich soil for
testing of environmental contaminants including depleted uranium.
The results have not yet been released.
_________________________________
Patricia Axelrod is the recipient of the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Award, which helped seed the
Desert Storm Think Tank, where she is director. She is a veteran's
advocate and a founding member of the California Reserve Officers'
Association Committee on Persian Gulf War Illness. Story copyright 1999,
Patricia Axelrod.