JUSTIN RAIMONDO NATO's Poisoned Arrow T he consequences of the Kosovo war continue to rain down on the heads of U.S. policymak- ers—and those charged with carrying out those policies, namely U.S. troops in the field. With the Kosovo Liberation Army's United Nations (UN)-backed reign of terror in Kosovo, heightened tensions spreading out- ward to Macedonia, and U.S./North American Treaty Organization (NATO) troops increasingly caught in the crossfire between warring fac- tions, the delicate Balkan fabric con- tinually threatens to unravel. Now comes the news that, in the effort to "liberate" the Balkans and stop alleged ethnic cleansing, the NATO- crats have poisoned the entire region. The bombardment of Bosnia, Kosovo, and much of Serbia with depleted-ura- nium (DU) weaponry—also used in Iraq during the Gulf War—has appar- ently contaminated large swaths of land, which are now for all intents and purposes practically uninhabitable, at least by the health standards we are used to here in the West. More than a dozen European veter- ans of the Kosovo war, fighting on the NATO side, have died of leukemia, and more are ill. Death appears to be among the health consequences of "victory" for the victors. The proud "democracies" rained their spears on Belgrade in the name of humanity, declaring that theirs was a "humanitarian intervention," a felicitous phrase invented by the news anchors at Cable News Network and echoed around the world. Who could have known that their spears were dipped in poison? As a metaphor for the consequences of our recklessly inter- ventionist policy in the Balkans, one could not have found a better one than mass poisoning. Actually, this story has been perco- lating for years. It finally broke through to the surface back in March 2000, when the UN task force wrote to Secretary General Kofi Annan and warned that the sites of about a hun- dred NATO targets were dangerously contaminated. Depleted uranium is radioactive with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, twice as dense as lead, and ultra-toxic. The San Francisco Examiner, which broke the story, informs us that "depleted uranium burns when it hits a target, contaminating the tank and the surrounding area." Depleted uranium is the napalm of America's post-millen- nial Vietnam. It is almost incredible that the United States and its allied govern- ments to this day refuse to acknowl- edge the horrendous effects of DU on their own military personnel, as well as innocent civilians, and continue to deny its link to Gulf War Syndrome. As the soldiers of Belgium, England, France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, etc., fall ill and die from the effects of NATO's DU-bombing, the power of the poison metaphor becomes even more ap- pallingly apparent: we have poisoned not only our enemies but also our- selves, our own sons and daughters, who are dropping like flies in the face of official denials. But these denials ring hollow, as the relatives and loved ones of the poisoned soldiers cry out for justice. They ring especially hollow when even official military publications detailing the handling and use of DU emphasize the dangers posed to any- one who comes in contact with it. For years, everyone ignored the horror stories coming out of Iraqi hos- pitals—birth defects that seemed to mirror the demonic power of the Anglo-American assault: babies born with no heads, no genitals, no faces, limbs grown together, webbed feet, and stunted limbs. But such atrocities occurring in the third world are hard- ly sufficient to awaken the Western conscience: there is, after all, an embargo against all information com- ing out of Iraq, in tandem with the eco- nomic blockade, and so the informa- tion was summarily dismissed as pro- paganda by Western news agencies and ignored. But now that these same allegations are coming out in the Western European media—that DU has caused and is causing incredible damage to a whole generation of sol- diers and millions of noncombatants— the dangers of DU have been suddenly "discovered." Better late than never, but it is instructive to note that no one is raising the same amount of concern for the biggest victims of the NATO poison- ers—the people of the former Yugo- slavia, especially in Serbia proper, where the sheer volume of the NATO bombardment hit hardest. What will be the health consequences for these inno- cent civilians—and has anyone told Carla del Ponte, the chief inquisitor of the International Tribunal investigating war crimes in the Balkans, about this? Perhaps the mass poisoning of an entire people will be enough to divert Her Honor away from her exclusive obses- sion with proving alleged Serbian war crimes, although I doubt it. In signaling what we might expect from the incoming president of the United States, George W. Bush's for- http://www.secularhumanism.org Ill spring 2001
Transcript
JUSTIN RAIMONDO
NATO's Poisoned Arrow
The consequences of the Kosovo war continue to rain down on the heads of U.S. policymak-
ers—and those charged with carrying out those policies, namely U.S. troops in the field. With the Kosovo Liberation Army's United Nations (UN)-backed reign of terror in Kosovo, heightened tensions spreading out-ward to Macedonia, and U.S./North American Treaty Organization (NATO) troops increasingly caught in the crossfire between warring fac-tions, the delicate Balkan fabric con-tinually threatens to unravel. Now comes the news that, in the effort to "liberate" the Balkans and stop alleged ethnic cleansing, the NATO-crats have poisoned the entire region. The bombardment of Bosnia, Kosovo, and much of Serbia with depleted-ura-nium (DU) weaponry—also used in Iraq during the Gulf War—has appar-ently contaminated large swaths of land, which are now for all intents and purposes practically uninhabitable, at least by the health standards we are used to here in the West.
More than a dozen European veter-ans of the Kosovo war, fighting on the NATO side, have died of leukemia, and more are ill. Death appears to be among the health consequences of "victory" for the victors. The proud "democracies" rained their spears on Belgrade in the name of humanity, declaring that theirs was a "humanitarian intervention," a felicitous phrase invented by the news anchors at Cable News Network and echoed around the world. Who could have known that their spears were dipped in poison? As a metaphor for the consequences of our recklessly inter-ventionist policy in the Balkans, one could not have found a better one than
mass poisoning. Actually, this story has been perco-
lating for years. It finally broke through to the surface back in March 2000, when the UN task force wrote to Secretary General Kofi Annan and warned that the sites of about a hun-dred NATO targets were dangerously contaminated.
Depleted uranium is radioactive with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, twice as dense as lead, and ultra-toxic. The San Francisco Examiner, which broke the story, informs us that "depleted uranium burns when it hits a target, contaminating the tank and the surrounding area." Depleted uranium is the napalm of America's post-millen-nial Vietnam.
It is almost incredible that the United States and its allied govern-ments to this day refuse to acknowl-edge the horrendous effects of DU on their own military personnel, as well as innocent civilians, and continue to deny its link to Gulf War Syndrome. As the soldiers of Belgium, England, France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, etc., fall ill and die from the effects of NATO's DU-bombing, the power of the poison metaphor becomes even more ap-pallingly apparent: we have poisoned not only our enemies but also our-selves, our own sons and daughters, who are dropping like flies in the face
of official denials. But these denials ring hollow, as the relatives and loved ones of the poisoned soldiers cry out for justice. They ring especially hollow when even official military publications detailing the handling and use of DU emphasize the dangers posed to any-one who comes in contact with it.
For years, everyone ignored the horror stories coming out of Iraqi hos-pitals—birth defects that seemed to mirror the demonic power of the Anglo-American assault: babies born with no heads, no genitals, no faces, limbs grown together, webbed feet, and stunted limbs. But such atrocities occurring in the third world are hard-ly sufficient to awaken the Western conscience: there is, after all, an embargo against all information com-ing out of Iraq, in tandem with the eco-nomic blockade, and so the informa-tion was summarily dismissed as pro-paganda by Western news agencies and ignored. But now that these same allegations are coming out in the Western European media—that DU has caused and is causing incredible damage to a whole generation of sol-diers and millions of noncombatants—the dangers of DU have been suddenly "discovered."
Better late than never, but it is instructive to note that no one is raising the same amount of concern for the biggest victims of the NATO poison-ers—the people of the former Yugo- slavia, especially in Serbia proper, where the sheer volume of the NATO bombardment hit hardest. What will be the health consequences for these inno- cent civilians—and has anyone told Carla del Ponte, the chief inquisitor of the International Tribunal investigating war crimes in the Balkans, about this? Perhaps the mass poisoning of an entire people will be enough to divert Her Honor away from her exclusive obses-sion with proving alleged Serbian war crimes, although I doubt it.
In signaling what we might expect from the incoming president of the United States, George W. Bush's for-
http://www.secularhumanism.org
Ill spring 2001
PETER SINGER
Standing By, Again
eign policy advisors have given the impression that they intend to start withdrawing troops, slowly but surely, over the next four years. The news that Bill Clinton poisoned not only Kosovo but also large sections of Bosnia with DU, causing long-term and possibly fatal consequences for the occupiers as well as the occupied, gives "Dubya" every reason to speed up the withdraw-
I n 1998, President Bill Clinton visited Rwanda and made an emotional speech to survivors of the genocide
there. He told them: 'All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimagin-able terror." And then he added, "Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence." Today, another terror is engulfing parts of Africa. It has already killed far more people than the Hutus killed in Rwanda, but it kills more slow-ly. There is plenty of time to assess the evidence that it is happening, and to take action. That terror is AIDS.
Since the onset of the worldwide HIV/AIDS epidemic, more than 42 mil-lion people living in sub-Saharan Africa have been infected with the disease. About 17 million of these have died, leaving around 25 million, or almost 10 percent of the total adult population, currently HIV positive. In some coun-tries, including South Africa, one in five adults is infected.
In the rich nations, being HIV posi-tive is no longer a death sentence, because there are drugs that effectively suppress the infection. But the over-whelming majority of HIV positive peo-ple in Africa have no hope of being able to afford these drugs at the prices at which the manufacturers are prepared to make them available.
In this desperate situation, some
al process considerably—from four years to four days. If the new president knows what's good for him, he'll high-tail it out of Kosovo and environs but fast, or face the righteous anger of the same veterans groups that once sup-ported him.
How long must we all pay for Bill Clinton's sins? That is the question that must be put to anyone who now
African countries have considered other options. The South African gov-ernment has floated the idea of com-pulsorily licensing manufacture of the drugs in South Africa, so that they could be produced at a fraction of the cost now demanded by the pharmaceu-tical corporations. This procedure is permitted, in the case of a national emergency, under the intellectual prop-erty agreement of the World Trade Organization. If South Africa's AIDS crisis is not a national emergency, it is difficult to imagine what would be. Nevertheless, when it became known that South Africa was considering com-pulsory licensing, many of the major pharmaceutical corporations sued to stop the South African government from taking any action.
In the latest move in this tragic bat-tle, a drug distributor in Ghana called
continues to believe that we ought to maintain a military presence for one more week in the poisoned lands of the Balkans. f El
Justin Raimondo /s the editorial director of A ntin'ar.cont, and the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prome-theus Books, 2000).
Healthcare, Ltd., obtained a supply of a cheap generic version of Combivir, a drug that is effective in controlling AIDS. Combivir is manufactured in the United States by Glaxo SmithKline. It costs about ten dollars per pill there, a price that is totally out of reach of almost everyone in Ghana who needs it. (In many sub-Saharan African coun-tries, ten dollars is about the total annual expenditure on health care per person.) The generic version of Combivir, manufactured by the Indian company Cipla, Inc., costs about ninety cents per pill. At least some of the Ghanians who are HIV positive can afford that, certainly far more than could afford ten dollars. But, when Glaxo SmithKline found out that Cipla was exporting the generic version of Combivir to Ghana, they threatened to take Cipla to court. Cipla stopped ship-ping the drug to Ghana, although there are grounds for believing that the Glaxo SmithKline patent does not apply in Ghana.
Whatever the legal niceties of these issues, it is unconscionable for the major drug corporations to stop the manufacture or distribution of life-sav-ing drugs that would make the differ-ence between life and death to 25 mil-lion people. The drug manufacturers argue that, even though they have already made billions from selling anti-AIDS drugs in the developed world, they must protect their legal rights so that they can make still larger profits, in order to develop the next generation of drugs or vaccines. But the profits to be made by selling these drugs to a popu-lation as poor as that of sub-Saharan Africa are negligible compared to those to be made in the industrialized nations. It is reasonable for the phar-maceutical companies to protect their most lucrative markets, in the rich
