Yaacov this is especially for you, you will probably masturbate over something like this...
The Guardian(London)
Consigning their future to death George Monbiot warns that bombing
Belgrade's chemical plants will poison the unborn
Thursday April 22, 1999
The Nato commanders trying to explain what happened to the refugee convoy
they bombed sounded rather like the police at the Stephen Lawrence enquiry.
They did their utmost to appear contrite, without actually apologising.
Sorry, for the guardians of law and order, always seems to be the hardest
word.
But even as the alliance tied itself in circumlocutory knots, it continued
to engage in the slaughter of non-combatants. Slowly, largely silently, it
is killing thousands of civilians. They are being neither bombed nor shot:
the people of the former Yugoslavia are being poisoned.
Nato's immediate war aim is to destroy the Serb economy, in order to
restrict Milosevic's capacity either to attack the Kosovan Albanians or to
retaliate against Nato troops. This may or may not be working. But whatever
its impact on the Yugoslav Republic's economy might be, Nato is succeeding
in wiping out its ecology.
The Nato press office claims that it has 'no idea' how many chemical plants
and oil installations its bombers have hit. But it concedes that there have
been multiple raids on a vast oil refinery and chemicals complex in the
suburbs of Belgrade, on another chemicals facility close to the capital and
on an oil refinery at Novi Sad, in the north of the country.
Britain's Ministry of Defence told me yesterday that the bombers are
'keeping the risks of pollution to a minimum', but it was unable to explain
how, while blowing chemicals plants to pieces, they have achieved this
commendable feat. Nato informed me that 'the smoke from these fires is
barely comparable to the smoke caused by the Yugoslav attacks on several
hundred villages'.
It's clear that neither agency has the faintest idea what it's talking
about. The chemical tanks ruptured by Nato bombers on the outskirts of
Belgrade last week contained a number of lethal pollutants. Some held a
complex mixture of hydrocarbons called 'naphtha', others housed phosgene and
chlorine (both of which were used as chemical weapons in the first world
war), and hydrochloric acid. As the factories burnt, a poisoned rain,
containing hundreds of toxic combustion products, splattered Belgrade, its
suburbs and the surrounding countryside. Broken tanks and burst pipes poured
naphtha, chlorine, ethylene dichloride and transformer oil, all deadly
poisons, into the Danube. Oil slicks up to 12 miles long wound their way
towards Romania.
It could, it seems, have been worse. Scientists at the plant claimed that
one of the bombs 'grazed' a vast vat of liquid ammonia. If that had gone up,
it would have poisoned most of the people of Belgrade. These toxins are
unlikely to kill people immediately. But they will have soaked the soil
across hundreds of square miles and percolated into the aquifers. The people
of the former Yugoslavia, as a result, will be repeatedly exposed to them.
Many of the compounds released cause cancers, miscarriages and birth
defects. Others are associated with fatal nerve and liver diseases.
The effects of the bombing of Serbia's economy equate, in other words, to
low-intensity chemical warfare. NATO might also be waging an undeclared,
invisible nuclear war. During the Gulf war, the Allies deployed a new kind
of munition: bullets and bombs tipped with depleted uranium, or DU.
DU, being heavier than lead or steel, penetrates armour more effectively. In
lump form it is only moderately harmful, but when the munitions explode they
scatter thousands of particles, small enough to be inhaled.
The Atomic Energy Authority predicted that if 50 tonnes of DU dust were
released in Iraq, 500,000 people would die of cancer. In the event,
according to the Campaign Against Depleted Uranium in Manchester, some
700-900 tonnes of DU were deployed. The result, the investigator Felicity
Arbuthnot found, is a seven-fold increase in leukaemia and a massive rise in
the incidence of certain rare cancers in Iraq.
Thousands of Iraqi children have been born without eyes, limbs, brains and
genitalia. DU has also been associated by some scientists with Gulf War
Syndrome.
I asked the MoD whether DU is being deployed in the former Yugoslavia.
'Certainly not', the press office replied. I asked Nato. 'It's used in some
American munitions,' I was told.
This, in environmental terms at least, is perhaps the dirtiest war the West
has ever fought. Nato's scorched earth policy, which seeks to destroy
Milosevic's armed capacity by destroying everything else, places the
Alliance firmly on the wrong side of the Geneva Convention. For a war which
targets chemical factories and oil installations, which deploys radioactive
weapons in towns and cities, is a war against everyone: civilians as well as
combatants, the unborn as well as the living.
As such, it can never be a just one.
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