On September 21 and 22, the heads of the NATO alliance will be meeting in Toronto. They will tell tales of their recent war in the Balkans. There are some things they won't tell us.
€ The quantity of bombs that NATO dropped on Yugoslavia was the equivalent to several Hiroshima-type atomic bombs.
Besides killing numerous Serbs and ethnic Albanians these bombs wreaked havoc on the environment of Yugoslavia.
NATO hit oil refineries, petrochemical plants, chemical fertilizer plants, fuel storage tanks and power plants.
€ The arsenal of NATO's war planes includes the cluster bomb, gravity bomb and graphite bomb -- all of which are illegal under the Hague Conventions, Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Charter.
€ The use of Depleted Uranium (DU) will undoubtedly contribute to many deaths in the future. Indeed, the environmental results of NATO's 78 day "moral war" are only now coming to light.
The Danube
A single NATO attack released 1 000 tonnes of ethylene dichloride, 100 tonnes of vinyl chloride, almost 1,000 tonnes of a solution containing 33% hydrogen chloride, 50 tonnes of oil, 100 tonnes of liquid ammonia and 3,000 tonnes of a solution containing nitric hydroxide into the Danube River.
It happened on April 18 in Pancevo -- 16 kilometres north-east of Belgrade, and the next day the sun didn't shine.
The sun was blocked by a thick greyish fog containing 10,600 times above the limit considered safe for humans of numerous chemicals that the UN said could cause "cancer, miscarriages and birth defects".
Doctors in the town of Pancevo have warned women to avoid pregnancy for at least two years and have advised any woman less than nine weeks pregnant to immediately get an abortion.
The Danube river has been blocked by debris from three bridges that where completely destroyed and five that suffered serious damage.
This has halted the 100 million tonnes of goods that flow by barge through this continental artery. Over 10 million people depend on the Danube for drinking water and it is awash with chemicals "associated with fatal nerve and liver disease".
A team of European engineers has estimated the damage at over $100 million, also noting that if Serbia was left to its own construction companies it would take 13 years to finish.
One Western diplomat in Belgrade said "I cannot tell you how many phone calls I have been getting. The business community in Europe couldn't give a damn about Milosevic. What they want to talk about is the Danube".
"One single particle of depleted uranium lodged in the lymph node can devastate the entire immune system," Roger Coghill, an experimental biologist, told a conference investigating the links between DU and cancers in Iraq.
NATO has confirmed that anti-tank shells fired by the US air-force during the conflict contained 275 grams of DU each. This radioactive and chemically toxic substance that the UN calls "very dangerous and harmful" may, upon impact, turn into a mobile aerosol.
Depleted Uranium, a.k.a. uranium-238 is a dense, extremely hard metal that burns when it explodes.
This allows the shells to pierce and destroy their targets.
Canada stopped using DU in January, 1998, but the US continues to use DU even though the health risks are widely known.
The UN's preliminary report on the environmental damage caused by the air campaign describes DU as "perhaps the most dangerous" of the "carcinogenic and toxic substances" released into the environment as a result of the air campaign.
The US and NATO now claim victory in the first moral war in history. And so now, as the ruling classes of the NATO countries pat themselves on the back for a job well done, the impoverished working class of the entire Balkan region has only begun to realize the extent of imperialism's barbarity.