Secrets and lies

Mythical maps, radioactive soil -- what isn't NATO telling us about the war in Yugoslavia?

by Patricia Axelrod

Crispy critters. That was what Selina Perez, who as a US soldier buried the Iraqi dead of Desert Storm, called the corpses burned to near-cremation. These were people whose blood had boiled and evaporated. Their uniforms burned away with their skin down to naked, blackened bones, leaving vacantly staring charcoaled skeletons brittle enough to break up into skull, torso, legs, arms, and ashes. Calling them crispy critters was Perez's way of dealing with the horror of disposing of the irradiated remains of death by depleted uranium (DU) in the Persian Gulf.

Perez went home, only to suffer a variety of symptoms that battered her into bed. Other members of the Graves Registration Unit became ill. She began to wonder if the crispy critters they helped bury were the cause of her illness. Eight years later, American DU was back on the battlefield. This time it was being used in NATO's war against Yugoslavia (see "Loose Cannons," News, April 9).

Last June 10, 78 days after the bombing began, NATO declared a cease-fire. DU use was downplayed by a NATO spokesperson, who said it had "not been used extensively." The Pentagon also claimed that there were minimal civilian casualties and that only one US plane had been shot down.

But I had reason to doubt that accounting. I have studied war for 16 years, and I have learned that when battle ends, the truth is left silent.

Think about the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia: the Pentagon story of the "old map" that led to the "accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy, the bragging about straight-shooting missiles that seldom miss their targets. And how did the Yugoslavs shoot that invisible stealth bomber out of their airspace? If they could pick off that plane, might not some of the more visible NATO planes have been shot down, too?

On August 1, I traveled to Yugoslavia. I wanted to see with my own eyes the untold suffering caused by the bombing.

Eager to learn the facts, I followed my curiosity hundreds of kilometers through the Yugoslav countryside. By foot, bus, car, and train, I went alone. Gasoline is rationed to 20 liters per month per family, so, like the Yugoslavs, I occasionally hitchhiked when buses ran out of gas. I always found people who wanted to talk to the first American they'd encountered since the bombing.

For food and lodging, I depended on the kindness of a people to whom I was an enemy stranger from a nation that had just bombed them. Equipped with a Geiger counter, I was ready to measure for DU. Over the course of two weeks, I successfully concluded a sample bomb-damage assessment. Helped by my experience in post-Desert Storm Iraq some seven years earlier, I saw a different war than the one seen on American television.

It was like returning to the scene of a crime.

Strangely, by journey's end, I had no clear notion of just how many civilians and soldiers had actually died. Many say that it's too soon to know how many were killed in the whole of Yugoslavia, including Kosovo -- too many dead, injured, and missing still haven't been accounted for. Estimates by official Yugoslav government and unofficial sources range from 500 Yugoslav soldiers and civilians to as many as 2000 to 5000 civilians alone.

After coming home to California, I called the US Department of Defense to ask about my findings. Pentagon spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Vince Warzinski was assigned to answer my questions about what Yugoslavs have dubbed "the Aggression" and NATO calls "Operation Allied Force." I queried Warzinski in detail about campaign strategy, tactics, misses, and aircraft crashes and losses. I asked him about extensive civilian cluster and carpet bombing of Yugoslavia.

And what about the depleted-uranium
A-10 rounds and radioactive cruise missiles the population is sure were used against them?

"You saw only what Belgrade wanted you to see, didn't you?" Warzinski asked.

Twice as glad that I had gone alone, I answered, "Not so. I went searching by myself, with no help from any government."

Unbowed

My first night in Yugoslavia, I met Nikola and his family. It was Nikola who took me to my first bomb site, the searchlighted otherworldly wreckage of the state-run pro-Milosevic TV station where a bomb dug down through the high-rise building into the basement, killing 16 or more employees as their shelter exploded into hell. "Body parts hung from the trees," an eyewitness taxi driver said.

Later Nikola brought me to a bombed-out house just a 600-meter walk from his home. It was a place of bustling reconstruction, and the handmade sign in front expressed the sentiments of the unbowed. SORRY. YOU MISSED US, it read.

In Batjenika, there was Vera, who took me to meet the parents of Milica Rakic, a three-year-old who died on her training potty. According to eyewitness accounts, a Yugoslav surface-to-air missile shot down an incoming US cruise missile. Bomb shrapnel exploded in the sky above the second-floor apartment where the baby girl was just being readied for sleep.

"I left her on her night pot to go to fix her bed," said Milica's mother. Gesturing from the bathroom to the bedroom and back, she pointed to the naked bomb-damaged window through which the shrapnel flew to the place where her child was slain. "She lived for five minutes. The heart was beating. It was very short. Now she was here, then she was not here."

When asked what she would say to Americans, her anguished reply was, "Don't kill our children no more. You didn't have to kill us."

Chemical warfare

My plan to travel to Yugoslavia began on day one of Operation Allied Force and coalesced when I called the Yugoslavian Mission to the United Nations. Initially, my request for a visa to enter Yugoslavia through Skopje, Macedonia, and then to travel north through Kosovo and up to Belgrade and beyond was met with little enthusiasm from the diplomatic powers that be. I finally entered Yugoslavia through Belgrade with an invitation to join a Ramsey Clark Humanitarian Mission as scientific adviser.

My first day in the theater of war began with the customary teaspoon of honey that my host Jovenka insisted upon and ceremonial briefings by the Yugoslav Red Crescent Society. But I learned more from an impromptu tour of the streets of Belgrade with Radjoe Lausevic, assistant
professor of biology at the University of Belgrade, and an unscheduled rendezvous with Rajika B. Bagajevic of the Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Lausevic concisely told me of the environmental disaster brought on by the bombing. He listed the chemicals released when NATO bombs hit chemical production plants, oil refineries, electrical power plants, substations, and transformers. The effect of all those toxins, plus the DU used in certain instances, was "equal to chemical warfare on a civilian population," he said.

The air pollution had abated somewhat, he told me, but the soil and water "remain heavily contaminated, as is the food, which, while still plentiful, may well be poisoned."

Fruit farmers would later confirm Lausevic's educated opinion. Pointing to burned leaves on the trees, they mentioned unnaturally heavy rains and floods. They would expect such weather to yellow -- but not wither -- their crops.

'Accidental' bombing

Foreign-affairs officer Bagajevic shed new light on the mysterious "accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy in New Belgrade. On May 7, the building was hit by a missile, killing two. Later, the US Department of Defense called the strike a mistake, pointing to an old Defense Mapping Agency graphic that the department claimed was wrongly used to identify targets. The map allegedly showed the Chinese embassy marked as a Yugoslav target of strategic importance.

Bagajevic was highly amused by this tale of the bad map and told me that everyone in Belgrade was laughing at the rationalization.

"Impossible," he said. "The parcel of land on which the Chinese embassy sits was undeveloped land before China built their embassy there about two years ago. It is not possible that any old map could show that address as anything other than empty land."

It didn't take long to discover that Bagajevic was right. A chat with Dejan, a freelance driver assigned to deliver construction material to the Chinese embassy while it was under construction, confirmed Bagajevic's assertion. Bagajevic and Dejan, like most of the Belgraders I spoke with, said there is no doubt that the embassy was intentionally bombed.

Some say this was done to warn China not to interfere in Operation Allied Force. Another popular theory is that Mirjana Milosevic, wife and indispensable helpmate of President Slobodan Milosevic, had been known to seek safe harbor there (expecting the sovereign Chinese embassy to be off-limits to NATO bombs), attracting the NATO missile like a bee to honey.

Collateral damage

Day two: I left the Yugoslav-government-sanctioned Ramsey Clark group and set out on my own. Moving from bomb site to bomb site, the first thing I noted was what appeared to be the improved accuracy of the precision-guided missiles. I had expected to see the same kind of damage and death I had seen in Iraq, where it took as many as 34 laser-guided bombs delivered from an altitude of 50,000 feet to bring down a bridge. So I was initially puzzled when I learned that in this war some bridges were toppled with as few as three or four bombs.

Other high-value targets, such as the Novi Pasar airstrip and the Novi Sad refinery plant, sprawled across acres of land, and required continuous bombing. In order to prevent the workers from making repairs to their airstrips and pump houses, these targets were bombed night and day, at any hour. The constant spray of cluster and dumb bombing achieved the goal.

Precision-guided-munitions targeting was a different matter. Although the Pentagon will not disclose how high NATO aircraft flew, Yugoslavs who watched the bombing from the ground say NATO improved target sighting by reducing strike altitudes from the 50,000 feet used in Iraq to as low as a pre-launch 3000 to 6000 feet, thereby putting the planes within range of Yugoslav anti-air defenses. Listening to them speak made reports from civilians who claim to have seen NATO aircraft shot out of the sky seem plausible -- an assertion that Pentagon spokesperson Warzinski dismissed as propaganda.

And Yugoslavs said that NATO used US Army Special Forces, along with a network of spies, to plant radio transmitters and laser designators at target spots. This X-marks-the-spot strategy, they said, dramatically improved the accuracy of the smart missiles, which worked as well as if they were on a Pentagon-rigged proving ground. (Warzinski responded with a terse "no comment.")

And what of the so-called surgical strikes and the misses the press euphemistically referred to as "collateral damage"? My visit to Belgrade's Zavod Za Ortopedsku (Hospital for Amputees and Prosthesis and Rehabilitation Clinic) and a chat with two young survivors of collateral damage answered that question. They were in the same room; one a curly-haired seven-year-old girl, the other a teen with dreams of playing synthesizer in a grown-up band.

Slava, the seven-year-old, was on a bus when it was hit by a NATO missile. She lost her leg; her mother has large pins holding one of her legs together. Slava entered the hospital during the first days of the war, and she'll be there for another three operations. She's a perky little creature who likes to watch cartoons on television.

But when I asked her to tell me about her leg, she began to cry, which made her mother cry, and I never quite learned what the mother and daughter said, because my interpreter was too sad and hurt to tell me.

The Yugoslav government would have its people believe that NATO missiles made no mistakes -- that the West intentionally targeted civilians to punish Yugoslavs for Milosevic's conduct. This belief has united Yugoslavia in a common sentiment: "No matter how much I hate Slobodan, I hate NATO more."

Helping to paint this picture of NATO as baby killer has been a charge from a Spanish NATO pilot, Captain Aldolfo Luis Martin de la Hoz, who has publicly condemned NATO for targeting civilians. The Department of Defense excused civilian casualties and property damage either as the products of rare misguided missiles or as caused by the propensity of the Yugoslav military to use human shields to protect troops, tanks, and weapons.

On the ground in the heavily bombed dirt-street villages such as Shangji, which is within eyesight of the Novi Sad refinery, and in destroyed Aleksinac, which is near an army barracks and tank depot, I began to understand the Yugoslav interpretation of this war.

I eyed the pockmarked, shrapnel-sprayed houses, interviewed survivors of the dead, spoke with the wounded but recovering father whose face was blown away, and talked to the old grandmother cut by flying debris and the children too terrified to eat or sleep properly -- as well as to the young mother, Biljana, who, imagining she heard the aircraft engines overhead, threatened to kill herself. Unable to comfort her child, she told me, "I just want to die."

Going underground

After decades trapped between Russia, the former Warsaw Pact countries, and NATO forces, Yugoslavs have grown accustomed to being under siege. They have prepared to survive war by burying their military assets and soldiers deep beneath layers of dirt, concrete, and reinforced steel. So NATO devised bunker-busting techniques to burrow deep and incinerate the shelters.

Those Yugoslav troops not at the front are trained either to go underground on base or to disperse to civilian homes. Sometimes they seek safe harbor with friends or family; other times they are taken in by supportive locals. The army forces gather in schools and churches that can be converted into military hospitals or tank depots.

What's more, the scarcity of Yugoslav real estate means that military munitions, barracks, and bases are in close proximity to civilian farmlands, homes, hospitals, and businesses.

With a network of spies on the ground reporting to NATO the arrival of army troops and resources in civilian communities, civilian homes and buildings became military targets. "This is war, and anything can happen," one young café patron I spoke with said.

Back home, on the phone with Pentagon spokesperson Warzinski, I asked about the blurred line between military and civilian targets.

"There were allegations that they were keeping some of their equipment in places like churches, schools, that sort of thing," he told me. "I think our campaign planners took account of all that and made the proper decisions."

"What about the numbers of Yugoslav soldiers and civilians killed?" I asked. He discounted initial tallies but declined to give the exact numbers, which he said would be found in an "after-action" Department of Defense report on the war due out this month. As for high numbers of civilian deaths, Warzinski rejected them as patently false: "Allied planners are very careful with what they choose to strike [and they have] a strong desire to minimize collateral damage," he said. "Ninety percent [of the firepower] was precision guided. That meant they could fly through the window of the building we chose."

Neglecting to mention the three-year-old who died when a piece of shrapnel flew through her bathroom window, I asked him to elaborate.

"Out of 23,000 weapons dropped throughout the campaign, approximately 20 weapons went astray," he said. "We used very accurate bomb drops. . . . [There was] no carpet bombing. . . . We dropped 1100 cluster bombs with about 200 bomblets each . . . but again, these were at military targets. . . . [Although] a certain number of cluster bombs did not go off when we dropped them, [they were] used as they should be to take out an airfield or fielded forces and basic stuff dispersed over an area."

Bleak winter

After the cease-fire, civilians began to believe they had been targeted by depleted-uranium cruise missiles.

When I visited bomb sites, onlookers told me a close-mouthed Yugoslav military detachment moved in shortly after missiles hit. Soldiers brought Geiger counters, hauled away soil from the craters, and filled in the holes with new dirt -- perhaps hoping that stray DU particles would disappear into the background radiation of the earth. This explains why my Geiger counter erratically beeped and spiked as high as 10 times above the normal background of the earth, then abruptly returned to normal.

Eventually I located one of these bomb-site inspectors. The 30-year-old chemical engineer and reserve police officer had been recruited for service against NATO as a member of the Yugoslav Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Detection Corps. His team rode in an air-controlled vehicle equipped with Russian detection tools. After cruise-missile bombing raids, he and his staff found "15 radioactive detections." Finding a hot spot, he'd radio to a contamination crew, which would pry radioactive shrapnel out of walls and clean up the area.

He asked me about American veterans of the Persian Gulf War who claim that the DU the United States used against the Iraqis may have made them ill. "My government covers up and denies the danger of depleted uranium and has refused to accept responsibility for the veterans' illnesses," I told him.

In response, the fellow reminded me that soldiers under any flag can fall prey to unscrupulous politics. "My government covers up your government's cover-up by cleaning up," he said. Milosevic, he said, is frightened of the debate surrounding DU radiation, which could destroy his government. And so "a decision has been made to hide confirmed DU detections, not only those found by my team but by others."

Knowing of DU's long-term effects -- as well as birth defects in children born to Persian Gulf War veterans -- this man sought postwar medical examination from the Vojno Medicincki Centar (Army Medical Center) in Nis. Doctors there did some blood and urine testing and determined that he was fine. He said he wasn't quite convinced. "I will not tell my wife of my concern," he told me, "but I will tell her we cannot have children for five years or more, until things get better in our country."

Throughout my travels I had been looking for indications of radiation burns and illness, so I was not surprised when the young chemist told me the human evidence had been stowed out of public sight in the largest military hospital in Yugoslavia, the Vojno Medicinsim Academija in Belgrade. This confirmed an earlier discussion with a doctor who also said that DU casualties could be found in military-hospital wards.

Here's what Warzinski had to say about the use of DU: "The only DU used in the Kosovo campaign was part of the A-10 Gatling gun, [which] fires a 30 millimeter [DU] bullet. . . . We did use some cruise missiles [to] strike at high-value targets [but] there was no DU involved."

I never made it to Kosovo. By my last day, after stopping in 19 villages and cities and traveling hundreds of kilometers, three kilometers and one more very unreliable bus ride was all it would have taken. But try as I might, I still had not gained cooperation from the UN peacekeeping force -- which, it was said, kept tabs on journalists in return for limited protection against renegade Serbian and Albanian forces. Time, as it is prone to do, had run out.

Humanitarian experts expect a bleak winter for Yugoslavia. Geneva-based Merete Johansson, the United Nations chief of the European Division for Humanitarian Emergencies, says "large segments of the population will suffer a substantial lack of electricity, heating, and water this winter."

To repair the devastated infrastructure, Milosevic's government has imposed a bomb-damage and reconstruction tax equal to one day's pay per worker per pay period. Even the pensioners are taxed. Johansson told me $119 million has been designated to repair the water and electrical power plants, but she doesn't know how much of the money actually has been released toward that end.

As for the land, FOCUS, a relief operation funded jointly by Greece, Russia, Switzerland, and Austria, has taken samples of the rich soil for testing of environmental contaminants, including depleted uranium.

The results have not yet been released.

Patricia Axelrod is the recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Award, which helped seed the Desert Storm Think Tank, where she is director. She is a veterans' advocate and a founding member of the California Reserve Officers' Association Committee on Persian Gulf War Illness. This story originally appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Copyright 1999, Patricia Axelrod.