The Aggression
September 29, 1999
San Francisco Bay Guardian
On the road to Kosovo
Yugoslavs are paying the price for NATO's war
By Patricia Axelrod
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 caf‚
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 w
ere] 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. |
