Isn't this an international crime?

THE INDEPENDENT (London)
23 January 2001

By Robert Fisk, in Kasindo, Bosnia


This is a medical horror story. Especially for those Nato officials who still claim that depleted uranium is virtually harmless.

The victims, in this case near Sarajevo, are Bosnian Serbs, many of them former soldiers. But their punishment is a sinister story of haemorrhages and tumours and cancers long after the Bosnian war has ended. You only have to visit the Kasindo hospital to learn the truth.

Manojlo Galinac was a brave but pitiful figure in the hospital yesterday, a man of 64 who looked at least 15 years older, calmly allowing Dr Nemanja Velikov to examine the terrible tumours around his neck, great envelopes of flesh that hung above his shoulders.

He was on the front line in the Bosnian Serb army when Nato attacked in 1995. One of the first missiles exploded 200 yards from his trench. One of the last blew a crater in the centre of the Lukovica army barracks where - after the war - 58-year-old Mr Galinac was sent to live with his family as nightwatchman for the furniture company that operated in the old military complex.

"The crater was very deep and, when rainwater filled up the hole, the people let their domestic animals drink from it," he says. "It was only 400 metres from our home. We took the cows there to drink. No one told us to be careful." Nato confirms that it used depleted-uranium munitions against Lukovica.

"In November 1998 I began to feel ill - the glands were swelling under my arms and around my neck," Mr Galinac recalls. "I waited a month because I thought it would go away. I don't smoke and I thought I was just getting fat. And then this happened." He gestures with his left hand towards the massive growth on his neck and smiles weakly at the doctor. "My neighbour got this same cancer," he says. "I won't die like him will I?" The doctor bleakly assures Mr Galinac he will not die, then looks at me to see if I know he is lying.

A few minutes later, Zjelko Samacic arrives for examination, the scars from his surgical incisions describing a railroad round his stomach and abdomen. He was also a soldier but only 28 at the time of the Nato DU attack - he is 34 now - and bears the livid scars of recent cancer operations. He tells his story in a kind of daze, stunned at the extent of the medical horrors afflicting him, amazed that he is still alive.

He talks to me in a loud voice, trying to make me understand what he still cannot fully comprehend. "I was at Bulaze when the Nato planes came. The nearest blast was no more than 100 metres from me," he says. "After it exploded, I and my comrades went to look at the crater. We picked up the shards of metal to examine them. No one told us they might be dangerous."

After the Nato raids, Mr Samacic went back to work as a timber cutter in the forest but began to feel ill about six months later. "I was sick a lot and I felt as if something was pressing on my head and chest and body. Then I got a pain in the stomach. I was bleeding in my faeces but all my family were healthy; I had always been in good health although I smoke 20 cigarettes a day, so I thought I'd get better. I lasted two years like this but then the pain got too much. I came to the hospital in November 1999 and they found I had a tumour in the bowel which they took out."

But the story did not end there. "I started getting headaches and vomited a lot and was very dizzy after the operation. Then I couldn't feel my left arm any more." Mr Samacic holds out his left hand. He now has only four fingers. "After they cut off my finger, I was ill again. I felt a pain in my right side in the area of my kidneys. Then, after examination, they found I had another tumour." It was, said Professor Trifko Guzina, of the Kasindo hospital, a tumour in the supra-renal gland. "It weighed 150g and was 6cm round," he says. "I took it out. In all my life, I have never experienced anything like this. Two different tumours afflicting a patient at the same time."

One of Mr Samacic's wartime comrades was Djeordjo Jokic. He has just died of cancer at 36. He was in perfect health but was wounded by a shard of the Nato missiles. A tumour grew and he died of carcinoma of the pancreas. Another of Mr Samacic's friends, Desimir Divlan, also picked up pieces of the missile that struck close to his position and developed bowel cancer. After three operations he died last year, aged 47.

The records of the Kasindo hospital are open for inspection by foreign doctors if any care to examine them. But, of course, not one has come. Dr Velikov runs his finger down the pages. "From 1992 to 1995, we had 46 people suffering from lung cancer," he says. "From 1996 to 2000 we had 116. Very few survived. The post-war statistics read: 1996, four cases; 1997, 16; 1998, 24; 1999, 39; 2000, 33."

Professor Guzina is convinced of the cause: "I'm going to be frank and say, yes, I'm sure this is because of depleted uranium. How else can I account for this? But it's not just soldiers who are suffering. Look at the list. Of the 18 cancer patients who have died since 1998, one is 28, another 26." I look down the list: a 15-year-old, another a year older, a 23-year old, a little boy called Nebojsa Tesanovic who was only three. All came from areas heavily attacked by Nato aircraft with DU munitions.

So isn't this the time for a full international epidemiological study among these people to find out the truth? But as usual, these extraordinary medical events have been of no interest to Nato or its doctors. That a clue to the sickness of its own soldiers might lie here, in these hospital statistics, is apparently of no relevance.

It is, but as you know the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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