In early November, as
American B-52s pummeled Taliban positions, a
team of United Nations
scientists surveyed the wreckage of the
world's last major bombing
campaign, the 1999 siege of Kosovo. Since
the seventy-eight-day
NATO bombardment, researchers with the UN
Environment Program
have scoured the fractured Balkan landscape,
checking shell fragments
for radioactivity, sampling well water and
testing the soil of
bomb-pocked corn fields.
The results of these
studies are grim. The battle created severe
"environmental hotspots"
that pose "acute health risks" to the
residents of four major
cities, reports UN team leader Pasi Rinne. In the
eyes of Rinne and his
fellow researchers, a "new type of complex
humanitarian emergency"
is unfolding in post-war Kosovo. A key concern for
the UN is the use of
depleted uranium (DU) shells, 30,000 of which were
fired during the battle
for Kosovo. The UN fears that DU rounds, which
unleash clouds of toxic,
mildly radioactive uranium particles--and have
been dubbed "the Agent
Orange of this era" by greens--may be
contaminating drinking
water in the region.
Just as the ecological
damage done to Kosovo has been largely ignored by
the American media,
few have considered the long-term environmental
consequences of the
conflict in Afghanistan. Military analysts expect the
Pentagon to employ DU
in the Afghan theater, but in lesser amounts than in
previous wars. "You
won't see that much depleted uranium used because
there just aren't the
targets," says Philip Coyle, a senior adviser at
Washington, DC's Center
for Defense Information.
But that doesn't mean
this war is an eco-friendly affair.
Just ask Charles Cutshaw,
a former Army intelligence officer and
Vietnam vet. "A lot
of the chemicals in these weapons are toxic,"
explains Cutshaw, who
now works as a consultant for Jane's Defence
Weekly. "I've seen battlefields
and they are very dirty places." Even
purely conventional
munitions, good-old fashioned bombs and missiles, are
packed with toxins that
will be cast to the wind on detonation. The metal
components include heavy
metals like lead, a neurotoxin, and cadmium,
which causes lung disease
and organ damage. Then you have the explosive
charges, compounds like
cyclonite, a probable carcinogen used in a wide
range of ordnance. And
don't forget perchlorates, a family of
thyroid-damaging chemicals
used in rocket propellant.
The most significant
threat, however, is probably posed by the
targets hit by these
weapons. In Yugoslavia, NATO bombs obliterated
dozens of industrial
facilities--oil refineries, electrical
transformers, chemical
plants, a car factory--located along the
Danube river and its
tributaries. The strikes sent up plumes of
noxious smoke and spilled
hundreds of tons of hazardous chemicals
into waterways. Here,
culled from a 1999 report by Pristina's
Regional Environmental
Center, is a brief index of the poisons dumped into
the Danube: several
hundred tons of oil, 1,000 tons of ammonia, 330 tons
of caustic hydrochloric
acid and 1,400 tons of ethylene-dichloride, a
chemical that causes
cancer in lab rats. Unsurprisingly, the result of all
this was catastrophic.
Dead fish were strewn along the banks of the river
for miles. Scientists
think the water contamination reaches all the way to
the Black Sea.
The city of Pancevo,
ten miles outside Belgrade, suffered a
Bhopal-type disaster
when NATO planes incinerated a major
petrochemical complex.
The complex, which included a fertilizer
factory, an oil refinery
and a chemical plant, burned for five days,
as 80,000 tons of oil
and 460 tons of dioxin-laden liquid plastic
went up in smoke. Rain
the color of coal fell on the town of 80,000
people. The air was
filled with an array of lethal chemicals, one of
which, a liver poison,
clocked in at 10,000 times above safe levels.
The horror continues.
According to a grisly dispatch from Pancevo
that ran in the British
Guardian this May, eating root vegetables is
now banned because of
soil contamination, dogs are coming down with a
rare bone cancer, young
people are reporting heart problems and about 100
of the emergency workers
who rushed to the fire are ailing from permanent,
disabling lung damage.
Wracked by twenty years
of conflict, Afghanistan doesn't have the
modern infrastructure
of pre-war Yugoslavia--but the United States is
going after the the
country's remaining industrial targets. In early
November the BBC reported
that American bombs knocked out one of
Afghanistan's biggest
power plants, and in press briefings the Pentagon
has said it is aiming
for Taliban oil reserves and fuel depots.
"The cleanup problems
will be extreme," says Saul Bloom, executive
director of Arc Ecology,
a San Francisco-based group focused on the
military-environment
nexus. "Afghanistan as a country has no capacity to
deal with the environmental
impacts of this campaign, and as a result,
people who aren't yet
born will be paying the price. This war will create
second- and third-generation
victims."