The Washington Post
NATO 'Duds' Keep Killing In Kosovo
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 19, 1999; Page A01
DJAKOVICA, Yugoslavia -- Bekim Malaj and his friends knew they were
fooling around with bombs, but they figured they were safe. After all,
they reasoned, the bright yellow containers -- shaped like soda cans
and topped with little parachutes -- had not exploded when they were
dropped over Kosovo by NATO warplanes. They must be duds.
So the 10 young men and boys huddled near a wooden front gate in the
village of Jahoc earlier this month to get a better look. One of them,
a former Kosovo guerrilla who fancied himself an expert, pried open a
canister.
"It started blowing fire," said Bekim, 11, lying half blind and
heavily bandaged in a gloomy hospital bed here in this southwestern
Kosovo city alongside victims of similar accidents. "It hit me in the
face, and I started running, and then it blew up."
The young man who opened the bomb was "torn apart," in the words of
one witness, and two others died along with him. Seven survivors were
hospitalized, including two in critical condition.
Up to 170 people have been killed or injured over the past month in
accidents involving land mines and unexploded bombs in Kosovo,
according to a World Health Organization report released last week --
making Kosovo's casualty rate from those sources comparable to
Afghanistan's and higher than that of Mozambique, where land mines
from a civil war that ended six years ago still litter the
countryside.
Just over half the Kosovo casualties were due to mines left by
Serb-led Yugoslav troops, the WHO report said. But nearly as many have
been caused by unexploded bombs dropped by U.S. and other NATO
warplanes in their 78-day air offensive against Yugoslavia, the report
said -- mostly from cluster bombs of the sort discovered by Bekim and
his friends.
Tantalizing to children and potentially deadly if touched, cluster
bomb explosives -- many of them painted bright yellow -- are smaller
and more powerful than most land mines. The lightweight bomblets -- as
many as 200 of which are bundled together in a single bomb casing,
then carried to earth individually on tiny parachutes -- are often not
easily recovered by disposal teams because of their tendency to drift
off course or to become caught in trees, brush and roof fixtures.
The number of deaths and injuries from unexploded cluster munitions in
Kosovo has reignited debate over their use and has prompted some U.S.
officials to advocate that they be engineered to self-destruct if they
land without detonating. The unexploded weapons also pose a serious
threat to NATO peacekeeping troops now on patrol in Kosovo: Two
British soldiers were killed last month as they tried to disarm one of
the devices in a schoolyard.
"In my opinion, they pose the major threat right now," said Chris
North, a 20-year British army veteran who is leading a Djakovica-based
de-mining team for Handicap International, a French humanitarian
group. "Most of the population here are aware of mines and know what
they look like. But many don't know what cluster munitions look like,
and that makes them a terrific risk. . . . If a person is nearby when
one of them goes off, there's usually not much left."
Cluster canisters are fuzed to detonate within 50 feet of the ground;
they can spray incendiary material to start fires, chunks of molten
metal that can pierce tanks and other armor, or shrapnel that can
slice with ease through 1/4-inch steel plate -- or human flesh and
bone.
NATO officials say that about 1,100 cluster bombs, containing a total
of more than 200,000 bomblets, were dropped on Yugoslavia and Kosovo,
a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic. Their failure
rate is about 5 percent. Human Rights Watch, a group that was sharply
critical of their use during the air war, estimates that 11,000
unexploded cluster munitions of U.S. and British manufacture are
scattered in the fields, trees and villages of Kosovo and the rest of
Serbia, a number not disputed by NATO. The human rights group
maintains that the weapons are unnecessarily dangerous to civilians,
whether they explode as intended or drop to the ground.
"What worries us most is that people are going to start going back to
work in the fields in the coming weeks, and so the numbers will almost
certainly get higher," said Etienne Krug, who conducted the casualty
survey for the World Health Organization.
U.S. and NATO officials acknowledge that unexploded cluster munitions
pose a serious threat to civilians and troops but say they are working
aggressively with U.N. agencies and other humanitarian organizations
to identify and clear dangerous areas. On Friday, part of the road
from Pristina, Kosovo's capital, to the western city of Pec was closed
so explosives experts could detonate a NATO bomblet found next to the
roadway.
"They are a particular concern to us because people may not be
familiar with what they look like and what they can do," said Kevin
Kennedy, spokesman for the U.N. mission in Kosovo. "People may not
understand that they cannot be handled, just as mines cannot be
handled."
U.S. officials say that while the danger from unexploded mines and
air-dropped munitions in Yugoslavia is great, the situation is not as
dire as in Kuwait and Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. According to
figures compiled by Human Rights Watch, 1,200 Kuwaitis and 400 Iraqi
civilians were killed by unexploded cluster canisters after the war;
the group estimates that between 24 million and 30 million bomblets
were dropped during the Gulf War, of which between 1.2 million and 1.5
million failed to explode.
In addition to NATO and the United Nations, about a dozen nonprofit
groups have begun arriving in Kosovo to remove mines and bombs and to
train civilians to help in the effort. About a fifth of all the mine
and bomb victims documented by the World Health Organization were
members of the Kosovo Liberation Army -- the ethnic Albanian rebel
group that fought for independence from Serbia -- who were attempting
to clear explosives from fields and villages without proper training.
At the dreary hospital here in Djakovica, where goats roam the grounds
and patients are stacked eight to a room, nearly half the current
caseload of 100 stems from mine and cluster bomb accidents. Western
Kosovo was one of the most heavily bombarded and mined regions of the
province.
Alfred Gjokaj, 20, also was showered with flame and shrapnel by the
cluster bomb blast at Jahoc, but he survived and is now hospitalized.
He can barely talk because of his swollen and torn face.
"We didn't know that they were dangerous," Gjokaj said. "We had seen
those things opened before, and nothing has happened. We were figuring
that they were not going to blow, after it didn't blow when it
should."
His mother, File Gjokaj, shook her head in disgust as she stood by his
bed. "There is still high danger here, even though the war is over,"
the woman said. "People just don't care when they see these types of
devices. The kids will push them, shove them, all kinds of things. . .
. I feel safe only in my yard -- and even then only in parts of the
yard."
Staff writer Michael Dobbs in Washington contributed to this report.
Deadly Fragments of War
NATO dropped more than 1,000 cluster bombs over Serbia, including
Kosovo, during the air campaign. They are particularly lethal because
they scatter hundreds of smaller bomblets designed to pierce armor,
kill personnel or start fires. Some of these bomblets did not explode
and now pose a more serious danger than land mines left behind in
Kosovo by Serb-led forces.
One of the cluster bombs widely used in NATO attacks over Serbia is
the U.S.-made CBU-87/B. This thin-walled cylindrical weapon is dropped
from attack aircraft, such as the F-16 (above).
The outer casing is set to open after several seconds of fall, or at a
preset height above ground. The 202 bomblets inside are scattered over
an area with a diameter affected by the spin of the casing as it
falls. The faster the spin, the wider the area.
The bomblets are packed with different types of explosives to achieve
various results:
Fragmentation bomblet: At detonation, the steel body of the bomblet
disintegrates, dispersing 1-ounce fragments capable of injuring people
490 feet away.
Shaped charge/incendiary bomblet: This charge can pierce
4.9-inch-thick armor plate and includes a zirconium ring that creates
burning particles that saturate the target, igniting fires from fuel
sources.
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