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COVER UP
Deafening silence on depleted uranium
Article on DU from the February
Le Monde Diplomatique
More articles about Depleted Uranium
Subject: [du-list] English translation of the February 2001 Monde
diplomatique article
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 09:46:06
From: "robert james parsons" <rjparsons@hotmail.com>
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Le Monde diplomatique
-----------------------------------------------------
February 2001
UN-BACKED COVER UP
Deafening silence on depleted uranium
_________________________________________________________________
In spite of the growing number of unexplained
deaths and illnesses
among servicemen returning from the
Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo, UN
agencies have, to different degrees,
cast a veil of silence over the
chemical and radiological hazards of
depleted uranium. It was not
until this January that the World Health
Organisation proposed a study
of DU's effects on the peoples of the
Gulf region.
by ROBERT JAMES PARSONS *
_________________________________________________________________
The World Health Organisation's report on depleted
uranium (DU) has
still not materialised; since being announced,
it was postponed
several times and only put back on the agenda
because of pressure
from international aid agencies working in
Koso! vo. When news of
"Balkan syndrome" first broke, the WHO published
in January this
year a four-page "fact sheet" that claimed
to deal with the subject
(1). Designed to calm the storm and reassure
the public, the
information it contains is vague and often
at odds with current
scientific knowledge. If there is any radiation,
the fact sheet
claims, it is within acceptable levels: "From
the science it
appears unlikely that an increased leukaemia
risk related to DU
exposure would be detectable among military
personnel in the
Balkans."
How could the WHO, the world's highest authority
in health matters,
have produced such a document? It recommends
as "reasonable", f! or
example, such unlikely "clean-up operations"
as collecting the
thousands of billions of invisible radioactive
particles scattered
over hundreds of square kilometres and mixed
with hundreds of
thousands of tons of earth.
In fact, an agreement entered into with the
International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1959 prevents the
WHO from dealing with
radiation and public health matters without
the former's approval.
Approval that is hardly ever given.
In the 1950s in the United States the Eisenhower
administration
made much of the civilian spin-offs from military
research in order
to justify the enormous sums being spent on
the nuclear arsenal. In
1954 it started the Atoms for Peace programme, promising
the public
electricity that was not only "clean" but
so abundant as to be
"unmeterable".
At the time many members of the scientific
community, with little
or no involvement in military research, recalled
the work that had
earned Herman Joseph Muller a Nobel prize
in 1946. He had
discovered the terrifying mutagenic effects
of ionising radiation.
It was this very radiation that the power
plants envisaged by Atoms
for Peace were to introduce into the heart
of the civilian
population. Yet Dr John W Gofman, who led
the team that isolated
the first milligram of plutonium in 1942,
continued to hammer home
his point that "by any reasonable standard
of biomedical proof,
there is no safe dose" (2). In spite of such
warnings the US
pressed for the formation in 1956 of the IAEA
- a UN organisation
whose remit is quite simply to promote the
nuclear industry.
In 1957 the WHO organised an international
conference on the
effects of radiation on genetic mutation;
its basic premises,
derived from Muller's experiments, are found
in the papers
presented to the conference and subsequently
published (3). But in
1959 the debate was closed. The WHO accepted
the agreement with the
IAEA according to which "whenever either organisation
proposes to
initiate a programme or activity on a sub!
ject in which the other
organisation has or may have a substantial
interest, the first
party shall consult the other with a view
to adjusting the matter
by mutual agreement" (4). That "mutual agreement"
stipulation was
to allow the IAEA to block almost every WHO
initiative concerning
the relationship between radiation and public
health.
That is why, when the WHO proposed publishing
a fact sheet on
depleted uranium, nothing came of it. The
generic study, still
awaited, was to be confined to chemical contamination
from DU as a
heavy metal. Only when DU hit the international
headlines did the
WHO announce that the study would be extended
to radiation. The
addit! ional work would be done by experts
from such bodies as the
United Kingdom's National Radiological Protection
Board (much
criticised by British veterans suffering from
Gulf War syndrome)
and, of course, the IAEA. The humanitarian
aid organisations
working in Kosovo, such as the High Commission
for Refugees (HCR),
the World Food Programme, the United Nations
Department of
Humanitarian Affairs and the International
Organisation for
Migration, have to refer to the WHO for all
public health matters
since they belong to the UN system. So they
are still waiting.
The current standards for the "tolerable" radiation
dose presenting
no danger to the human organism were set on
the basis of studies! by
the Pentagon's Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission
on survivors of the
atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima;
one of the major
objectives of those studies, if not the main
one, was to determine
the bomb's effectiveness as a weapon of war.
The studies (details
of which were not published until 1965) began
in 1950, when many
victims who had initially survived had already
died from the
consequences of the bombings. The group studied
consisted mainly of
young sportsmen in relatively good shape.
Those particularly
vulnerable to the harmful effects of radiation
- children, women
and the elderly - did not appear at all.
These studies of survivors were soon! brought
to an end: there was
no waiting for the cancers that would take
decades to appear. They
were also carried out by physicists with no
training in biology. At
the time they knew nothing of the existence
of DNA, let alone how
it works, and they made no distinction between
the effects of a
single, sudden, intense explosion and those
of radiation from an
internal, slow, constant source - like that
given off by particles
of depleted uranium which enter the body by
inhalation, ingestion
or through open wounds.
The nuclear lobby has always claimed that the
effects of low-level
radiation are too small to be studied. They
therefore extrapolated
from the observ! ed effects of high dose irradiation
(Hiroshima and
Nagasaki), on the basis that if 1,000 survivors
became ill after
exposure to a dose of 100 (an arbitrary figure),
500 would be ill
when exposed to 50 and only one from a dose
of 0.5. Thus, below
that exposure no-one is affected (5).
'Safe' doses
But the British researcher Alice Steward showed
the danger of
low-level radiation to the human organism
in a study of children
whose mothers were x-rayed during pregnancy.
In the 1970s she
reached the same findings for employees of
the nuclear weapons
plant in Hanford, US. In 1998, still going
strong despite her 91
years, she published with George W. Kneale
an in-depth reappraisal
of the studies made of the 1945 survivors,
showing irrefutably the
errors present in the work on which the present
standards are based
(6). But it is these standards that allow
the WHO fact sheet to
speak of a "tolerable daily intake" for persons
exposed to depleted
uranium. Likewise, Dr Chris Busby, a British
researcher who has
written a number of works on the effects of
low-level radiation (7)
(disputed by the nuclear establishment), has
explained how chronic
internal low-level radiation systematically
destroys the DNA of
cells to produce the mutations that lead to
cancer.
The international standards have been revised
downwards several
tim! es, most recently in 1965, 1986 and 1990,
by the International
Commission for Radiation Protection - which
draws up the standards
that are then applied by the IAEA. The 1990
revision cut the
permitted dose by a factor of five. The US
has still not accepted
that revision. It is therefore on the basis
of doses five times
higher than accepted by the rest of the world
that they claim their
soldiers received "safe" doses during the
Gulf war.
The highest authority in the matter in the
US is the Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC), a civilian agency but in
fact headed up by the
military high command, which in that way controls
the development
of all nuclear technology. All the main sources
of ionis! ing
radiation are therefore controlled by persons
and institutions with
no interest in exploring their dangers. The
four most eminent
scientific authorities to have worked for
the AEC were John Gofman,
Karl Z Morgan, Thomas Mancuse and Alice Stewart.
Each in turn was
sacked for presenting findings showing that
exposure to low-level
radiation causes cancer (8). The WHO fact
sheet therefore comes in
the context of a history of general denial
of which the affair of
depleted uranium in Yugoslavia is only the
latest episode.
In May 1999, during the Kosovo war, the UN
arranged for
representatives of all the agencies involved
in the conflict to go
and make an initi! al assessment of the situation.
Each wrote a
report that was then shared with the other
agencies. The UN
Environment Programme (UNEP) took part, but
its report was
suppressed. After it was leaked, the document,
penned by Bakary
Kante, advisor to UNEP director general Klaus
Toepfer, was made
public on 18 June 1999 in two Swiss French-language
newspapers,
Courrier and Liberté. The report sounded
the alarm on the pollution
caused by the bombings, specifically mentioning
depleted uranium
(9).
Another report on pollution, funded by the
European Commission and
published that same June shortly after the
end of the war, takes
the trouble to identify its sources (exp!
erts in the field,
literature, specialist monographs, etc.) but
makes virtually no
mention of depleted uranium (10). The only
reference appears in a
brief list of the types of pollution: "DU"
followed by "in
Yugoslavia - claimed". One might have thought
that the working
party had been unaware of the Kante report.
But several paragraphs
of its report reproduce it word for word,
and the list of 80 or so
shelled sites is identical to that compiled
by Kante.
Not long after that, the UNEP set up a working
party, the Balkans
Task Force (BTF), to make a full report. Toepfer
appointed
Finland's former environment minister Pekka
Haavisto to lead it. He
was adamant th! at depleted uranium was part
of the overall pollution
picture and could not be left out of the enquiry.
If he was barred
from studying it as radioactive pollution,
he would study it as
chemical pollution (see box).
Where are the contaminated sites?
On completion, it was announced that the BTF
report (11) would be
released in Geneva on 8 October 1999. A journalist
who went to the
UNEP's Geneva office, where the BTF is based,
expecting to obtain a
copy, was received by Toepfer's spokesman
and right hand man Robert
Bisset, who refused him any contact with Haavisto's
team.
Eventually, he was told there had been a change
of plan and that
Haavisto would be giv! ing a press conference
on 11 October in New
York. Since the journalists who were closely
following the issue of
depleted uranium in Kosovo were all based
in Geneva, they were thus
denied any possibility of interviewing the
man who had written the
report.
Reworked by Bisset, the final part of the report
was cut from 72
pages to two (later, the missing parts were
posted on the UNEP's
internet site) (12). Its findings and recommendations
spoke of
cordoning off contaminated sites - while saying
simultaneously that
they could not be identified. The Canadian
expert Rosalie Bertell
had advised the BTF to take samples from the
air filters of
vehicles in Kosovo, from! armoured tanks that
had been struck and
from sites likely to have been affected by
DU weapons; but no such
samples were taken while the teams were in
the field.
Throughout this time a whole procession of
people directly involved
in the question came to Geneva. The HCR's
special envoy to the
Balkans, Dennis McNamara, spoke of refugees
returning to a "secure
environment". But by "secure" he meant "militarily
secure",
stressing at a press conference at the Palais
des Nations on 12
July last year Nato's assurances that depleted
uranium posed no
problems. US under-secretary of state for
population, refugees and
migration Julia Taft came to Geneva to boast
to the UN Economic and
Social Council of the success of this "humanitarian
war"; she
admitted during another press conference (Palais
des Nations, 14
July 1999) that she did not know what depleted
uranium was.
IAEA spokesman David Kyd claimed in an interview
that his agency's
mandate did not allow it to investigate DU,
saying that it was, in
any case, perfectly harmless. Dr Keith Baverstock
of the WHO
regional office for Europe came out with the
same weasel words
about there being absolutely no danger, though
he added that
depleted uranium could cause problems in a
battle situation.
Finally, former Swedish prime minister Carl
Bildt, now the UN
Secretary General's special envoy to the Balkans,!
abruptly stated
that depleted uranium was a "non-issue".
Last March the Military Toxics Project, an
American anti-nuclear
NGO, announced that Nato had, that January,
sent the UNEP a map of
targets affected by depleted uranium in Kosovo;
and this was
confirmed by a source at the Netherlands foreign
ministry (13).
Fearing a general outcry, Toepfer convened
a crisis meeting in
Geneva on 20 March to decide on a strategy.
But he was too late.
Switzerland's last independent French language
newspaper, Courrier,
published the map that same morning.
The next day Haavisto held a press conference.
Although he tried to
be reassuring, he referred to the recommendati!
ons of the October
report - that contaminated sites should be
cordoned off - while
adding that the map available was not accurate
enough to identify
them. A press release referred to the WHO
study that was still
being prepared and another commissioned by
the BTF from the UK's
Royal Society (that has not been heard of
since).
The map, purportedly showing the 28 sites affected
by 30 mm
anti-tank Penetrator missiles launched from
A-10 aircraft, raised a
number of questions. The targets were concentrated
close to the
Albanian border (areas occupied by Italian
and German forces) where
former Yugoslav leader Tito, fearing the irredentism
of the then
Albanian dicta! tor Enver Hoxha, had built
substantial concrete
military installations underground. According
to Swiss military
analyst Jacques Langendorf, who visited the
area in Tito's days, 30
mm Penetrators would have little impact on
the concrete, but
DU-reinforced Cruise missiles might be effective.
And according to
British analyst Dennis Flaherty, one of the
aims of the war was to
test such missiles equipped with a new technology
(known as Broach)
allowing as many as ten Penetrators to be
fired at a time in order
to penetrate underground bunkers more effectively.
Following insistent demands from UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan,
Nato gave Toepfer a new map in July last year.
It showed 112
targets and had a list of the munitions supposedly
released there.
For about 20 sites, the type of munitions
was given as "unknown",
which seems unlikely given the computer tracking
systems available
to Nato and the Pentagon. Apparently the map
was kept from Haavisto
until September. When he discovered it, he
wanted to send a team of
investigators to Kosovo straight away. Toepfer
apparently vetoed
such a move before the 24 October elections,
fearing a massive
exodus like the one during the war if worrying
findings were made.
Whatever the case may be, tired of waiting
for the WHO, the High
Commission for Refugees has drawn up its own
instructions for its
staff (14):! no pregnant woman will be sent
to Kosovo, anyone
approached about going there must have the
option of being posted
elsewhere, and any official sent to Kosovo
must have his file
marked "service in the field" to facilitate
any claim for
compensation in the event of illness resulting
from contamination.
According to Frederick Barton, deputy high
commissioner for
refugees, the HCR's efforts to draw the civilian
population's
attention to the risks of contamination met
with tremendous
resistance both from Albanian politicians
and from Nato and Unmik
(UN Mission in Kosovo) administrators.
For Rosalie Bertell, the "non-issue" of depleted
uranium is just
the latest ! episode in a long story that
is far from over. Watch
this space.
______________________________________________________________
* Journalist, Geneva
(1) " Fact sheet No. 257, Depleted Uranium
", 12 January 2001,
World Health Organisation (WHO), Geneva.
(2) Taken from his monograph " Radiation Induced
Cancer from
Low-Dose Exposure " and quoted in an open
letter dated 11 May 1999
signed John W Gofman, MD, PhD.
(3) "Effects of Radiation on Human Heredity:
Report of a Study
Group convened by WHO together with Papers
Presented by Various
Members of the Group", WHO, Geneva, 1957.
(4) Agreement between the In! ternational Atomic
Energy Agency and
the World Health Organisation, approved by
the 12th World Health
Assembly on 28 May 1959 in resolution WHA12.40.
World Health
Organisation, Basic Documents, 42nd edition,
World Health
Organisation, Geneva, 1999.
(5) Rosalie Bertell, " The Hazards of Low Level
Radiation",
http://ccnr.org/bertell_book.html.
(6) "A-bomb survivors: factors that may lead
to a re-assessment of
the radiation hazard", International Journal
of Epidemiology,
Volume XXIX, No. 4, Oxford University Press,
Oxford 2000, pp
708-714.
(7) Including Wings of Death : Nuclear Pollution
and Human Health,
Aberystwyth, Green Audit 1995.
(8) Jay M Gould, director, and Benjamin A Goldman,
assistant
director, Overview: Deadly Deceit, Low-Level
Radiation, High-Level
Coverup, Radiation and Public Health Report,
New York, December
1989.
(9) Bakary Kante, Senior Policy Advisor to
the Executive Director
of ENUP, "United Nations Inter-Agency Needs
Assessment Mission to
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Environment
and Human
Settlements Aspects", United Nations, May
1999.
(10) "Assessment of the Environmental Impact
of Military Activities
Duri! ng the Yugoslavia Conflict: Preliminary
Findings", June 1999,
prepared by the Regional Environmental Centre
for Central and
Eastern Europe, Szentendre, Hungary, for the
European Commission
DG-XI - Environment, Nuclear Safety and Civil
Protection (Contract
No B7-8110/99/61783/MAR/XI.1).
(11) "The Kosovo Conflict: Consequences for
the Environment & Human
Settlement", United Nations Environment Programme
and United
Nations Centre for Human Settlements, Geneva,
1999.
(12) http://www.grid.unep.ch/btf/pressreleases/unep21032000.html
and http://balkans.unep.ch/du/du.html
(13) See maps on Le Monde diplomatique's site.
(14) File of instructions of the HCR personnel department.
Translated by Malcolm Greenwood
______________________________________________________________
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2001 Le Monde diplomatique
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