PANCEVO,
Yugoslavia, November 27 (IslamOnline & News Agencies ) - As the
United States prepares for another possible war on sanction-hit Iraq,
environmentalists have raised new concerns about the consequences of
precision bombing designed to cripple military-industrial
infrastructure.
An
independent study released earlier this month into the effect of NATO
bombing in Yugoslavia three years ago has concluded that the targeting
of industrial facilities, even those for civilian purposes, can have
unintended, long-term environmental impacts, said Agence France-Press
(AFP).
Experts
from the U.S.-based Institute of Energy and Environmental Research
(IEER) said the destruction of oil refineries and chemical plants used
for civilian purposes could also violate the international rules of
war.
"This
report does show that there is need for a sharp redefinition of how
target sets and collateral damage are evaluated," said Sriram
Gopal, an IEER scientist and the main author of a report on NATO's
1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.
"Currently
collateral damage is measured in terms such as the number of civilian
casualties or the cost of replacing property. Long-term environmental
harms can be much more difficult to quantify and evaluate, despite
their very significant costs."
NATO's
destruction of the oil refining and chemical complex in the small
Yugoslav town of Pancevo, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of
Belgrade on the western bank of the Danube river, caused thousands of
tonnes of highly toxic chemicals to spill into the environment in
April, 1999.
Nenad
Stojimirovic, an assistant technical director at the Petrohemija
chemical plant, was on duty during one of the bombing raids and
recalls the terrifying fires and toxic black cloud which hung over the
town for days.
"There
were flames hundreds of meters [feet] high which could be seen for
miles. It turned the night into day," he said.
"A
lot of the oil just went straight into the canal which flows into the
Danube. Nobody knows how much was burned and how much went into the
river, but it was catastrophic."
A
United Nations study released in the months after the 78-day NATO air
campaign identified the industrial complex at Pancevo as the worst of
four environmental "hot spots" in Yugoslavia.
It
found that the air strikes caused some 80,000 tonnes of oil and oil
products to burn at the refinery, releasing a poisonous cloud
including sulphur dioxide which stretched for miles over the
surrounding countryside.
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Victims
of precision bombing
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At
the petrochemical plant, it said 2,100 tonnes of toxic ethylene
dichloride and eight tonnes of metallic mercury leaked into the soil
and wastewater canal connected to the Danube, while 460 tonnes of
vinyl chloride monomer was incinerated, releasing more highly toxic
dioxins.
Managers
at the fertilizer plant deliberately released another 250 tonnes of
liquid ammonia into the open canal to prevent a deadly cloud which
could have killed thousands of nearby residents had those stocks
ignited.
Despite
the immediate impact, the report concluded that there was no evidence
of an "environmental catastrophe affecting the Balkans region as
a whole".
Both
the U.N. report and the more recent IEER study found that pollution
identified at some sites was serious and posed a threat to human
health, but they said it was difficult to separate bombing-related
damage from problems arising from years of environmental neglect.
"Of
course we are aware of what's happening [at Pancevo] but conflicts
have never been healthy for anybody. It was a military target, it had
a military value, it has been struck," NATO Brigadier General
Giuseppe Marani responded when questioned by a Serbian journalist at
the time of the war.
The
Atlantic alliance's then spokesman, Jamie Shea, added: "I think
there is more smoke coming from burning villages in Kosovo ... how
about the environmental effects of that?"
Shea
said the bombing of civilians in Kosovo was not intentional, but,
since the campaign against then Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic
had started to "save humanity", fifty days of nineteen
nations' missile airpower slaughter had created an unacceptable number
of civilian casualties, and as the conflict lengthened, more
disastrous calamities were arising, with an inevitable Serb military
increase offensive of the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from their
homeland in Kosovo, then close to one million people.
"It
is the only way the international community can stop the genocide in
Kosovo," Shea added.
But,
while the aim of the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia was limited to
forcing then president Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces from
Kosovo and end the Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians, a war in Iraq
could be far more complex.
Washington
has made it clear that it wants to change the regime in Iraq,
something that NATO did not attempt in Yugoslavia.
Military
analysts say U.S. weapons technology is vastly more superior today
than it was three years ago.
According
to the Center for Defense Information based in Washington, one program
under development is a high-temperature incendiary
"thermo-corrosive" filling for 2,000-pound precision-guided
bombs. The filling burns at extremely high temperatures for a long
time.
British
and U.S. scientists are also developing a "radio frequency
weapon" or "E-bomb" which would disable electronic
grids and electrical systems with powerful bursts of microwave energy.
Such
"bombs" would disable refrigeration and computer systems
used in chemical warfare and possibly "dual-use" civilian
infrastructure
