CADU News 4 - Campaign Against Depleted Uranium

DU, NATO, UN and the WHO!
The following is an unedited article
from the San Francisco Examiner,
of May 1st, reproduced here because
it offers some insight into DU on
the world stage.
‘Depleted uranium’: A tale
of poisonous denial
By Robert James Parsons
GENEVA - When a United Nations agency
announced that NATO had officially confirmed
using depleted-uranium munitions
in Kosovo, the story hit the world’s media,
then quickly faded.
The agency went on record as saying that
there was too little information for firm
conclusions but no cause for serious concern.
The Pentagon officially echoed this,
and attention shifted elsewhere.
For those following the story, this was another
episode in a game of hide-and-don’ttell
that the U.S. government has been
playing for years, both at home and abroad.
But as the game continues, there is cause
for serious concern.
The U.S. government denies there is anything
harmful about depleted uranium that
would prevent its use in battle situations
anywhere. Numerous independent experts
say depleted uranium is deadly and will pollute
indefinitely those areas struck by the
munitions. They blame it for most of the
illnesses of Persian Gulf war syndrome.
The Military Toxics Project, a nongovernmental
organization that has been
tracking depleted uranium for years, has
just published an update. Dan Fahey, its
author and the project’s research director
for depleted uranium, draws primarily on
declassified government documents and
public statements, building a grim indictment
of irresponsibility that is nothing
short of criminal.
Since the first use of depleted uranium in
the Iraq war (a use that continues today
with the bombing of the no-f ly zones), the
controversy has spread into the international
arena, including the United Nations.
During the Kosovo war, the Pentagon
brought out a R AND Corporation think
tank study to prove once and for all that
depleted uranium is harmless. Independent
experts, contesting the use of depleted
uranium in Kosovo and Serbia, protested.
Later, in a paper entitled “Fear of Falling,”
Fahey analyzed the study in detail, showing
it to be a sham. Yet the U.S. government
still cites it as a proof that the depleted
uranium problem has been laid to rest.
But NATO’s admission, even unofficial, of
depleted uranium use in the Kosovo war
alarmed aid agencies operating there.
The World Health Organization was asked
to investigate. The WHO, however, has an
agreement with the International Atomic
Energy Agency giving the latter the last
word over anything touching public health
and radiation.
A fact sheet on depleted uranium announced
as in the works, was canceled.
(The Atomic Energy Agency was set up in
‘50s by the nuclear powers of the time to
push the nuclear industry on a public wary
of living with nuclear waste and with radiation
in general. The United States plays a
dominant role within it. Holding the only
mandate in the U.N. system to promote
a part of the private sector, it has been
repeatedly denounced by non-governmental
organizations as incompatible with the ideals
expressed in the U.N. charter.)
An initial U.N. mission to Yugoslavia in
May produced a report of serious contamination
by depleted uranium. The report’s
sponsor, the United Nations Environment
Program’s director, Klaus Toepfer, suppressed
it - under pressure from Washington,
according to inside sources. It nonetheless
eventually leaked out.
The program’s Balkans Task Force brought
out a major study in October, but the
section on depleted uranium had been
whittled down from 72 pages to two on orders
from Toepfer, again apparently under
pressure from Washington. The task force
had tried to involve the WHO, but the
Atomic Energy Agency, in keeping with the
agreement, excluded the WHO from the
radiation appraisal. Measuring was done using
Geiger counters incapable of detecting
the particular alpha radiation that depleted
uranium emits, and none was found.
Meantime, in August, the WHO had
announced it was undertaking a “generic”
(general) study of depleted uranium, but
no details were available. In March, it
became known that the study was under
the WHO’s Dr. Michael Repacholi, an
electro-magnetic field expert, who, it has
since been discovered, has delegated it to
Barry Smith, a consultant in England, who
is a geologist.
Faced with the Atomic Energy Agency’s opposition
to studying radiation and health,
the WHO has opted to study DU as a
heavy metal pollutant.
This is hardly of help to those exposed to
tons of virtually indestructible radioactive
dust particles, including the international
aid agencies awaiting an official pronouncement
from the WHO.
The recent NATO confirmation of depleted
uranium use in Kosovo, complete
with a map, should have finally sounded
the alarm.
After being put on hold for six months by
NATO, the task force finally had something
specific and official, but the pressure
was on to play it down. The publication of
the map in a Geneva daily on the day that
the task force was meeting to decide on
strategy forced its hand.
When the task force chairman, former
Finnish environmental minister Pekka
Haavisto, called a press conference to
disclose the map and its accompanying
letter, it was Toepfer’s spokesperson, the
man who had cut out the 70 pages from
the October report, not Haavisto’s, who
orchestrated the event.
Not surprisingly, Haavisto was kept on a
leash. Hence the announced conclusion: no
cause for serious concern.
But there are indications that not everybody
agrees.
The U.N.’s High Commissioner for
Refugees, the main coordinator of aid to
Kosovo, has quietly decided to refrain
from sending pregnant staff to Kosovo,
to offer those assigned there the option
of going elsewhere and to put a note into
the personnel files of those sent there - to
facilitate compensation claims for illnesses
that might develop from depleted uranium
contamination.
The German and Dutch governments,
whose occupation zones coincide with the
areas hardest hit by depleted uranium,
according to NATO’s map, have ordered
their soldiers not to eat anything outside
their post mess halls, especially not from
the surrounding countryside. This echoes
independent experts’ claims that the dust
has entered the food chain of the region.
Dutch soldiers stationed last fall in part of
the same heavily hit area (around Prizren)
had to hand in all clothing and equipment,
which was then shipped back to the Netherlands
sealed in heavy-duty plastic.
The government claimed asbestos contamination,
but a Dutch military source points
to DU, noting that the vehicles, also sent
back, ended up in a radiation decontamination
plant.
Fahey’s “Don’t Look, Don’t Find” discusses
a U.S. Army report issued well before the
Gulf War: “Though no anti-DU movement
existed at the time, the Army predicted that
DU munitions might be removed from the
arsenal by political force once the health
and environmental impacts of DU were
widely known.”
Although the U.S. government seems
intent on keeping those impacts unknown,