WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Alternativa Libertaria/FdCA #22: WHEN NATO BOMBED SERBIA - WAR POISONS, PROFITS AND LIES - Marilina Veca (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Twenty-four years have passed since the beginning of NATO's bombing and

savage aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. ---- NATO
unleashed that savage aggression - in which Italy took an active part by
sending its fighter-bombers - causing the death of over 500 civilians
killed "outright" in addition to the thousands of deaths that were added
over the course of 78 days of bombings and in the following days,
months, years, considering the military victims, and all the civilians
killed, kidnapped, destined for organ trafficking in Kosovo and Metohija
by the KLA terrorists under the "distracted" eyes of the multinational
forces of KFOR; also considering the deaths that continue to be added to
the list even today since the war unleashed by NATO with depleted
uranium projectiles was also a chemical and bacteriological war - just
think of the destruction of the vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) tanks of
petrochemical plant in Pan?evo - causing a very high increase in tumor
pathologies in the civilian population.
Military targets and "intelligent" bombings in official declarations,
massacres of innocent civilians in reality: innocent victims killed in
the name of "freedom and humanity". The lives they lost will not be
forgotten, they will live on in the memory of all those who condemn wars
and their lies. Years after the end of the aggression, Kosovo is an
unlivable place where only illegal trafficking thrives, ethnic
discrimination continues and over 250,000 inhabitants of the Province
(mainly Serbs) have not been able to return to their homes despite the
presence of NATO, the United, and now Eulex, despite the promises of the
international community. The so-called peace missions are nothing more
than a caricature of justice.
The words of a contemporary Serbian poet, Matija Be?kovi?, are as
relevant as ever: "We are only small crosses on the display of their
computers, we are only elements of their video games". Or we could quote
Tacitus to remember the victims of NATO's "humanitarian bombs": "They
create desolation and call it peace...".
Belgrade - years ago a target city for NATO planes which, for
seventy-eight days, bombed Serbia, in the first "humanitarian war" in
history - is still a wounded city. The planes have stopped dropping
explosives on the Balkans, now busy spreading death in other parts of
the world, but the wound remains open, bleeding. The agony of Kosovo
burns, the slow death of the Serbian community, determined to remain in
the land that has always been the "cradle" of the Serbian people, Kosovo
and Metohija. Even today, the gutted buildings in Belgrade remind us of
the other side of the "humanitarian" war, the dark zone neglected by the
media, the testimony of a nightmare, the hallucinated vision of an
unsustainable present.
No one has ever paid for the civilians killed by NATO aggression. NATO
does not judge itself. That NATO which in Serbia and Montenegro produced
economic damage that was estimated at 30 billion of the then German
marks, even if Western governments promised aid for 2 billion, not in
cash, but in goods. Help, which often resembled and resembles blackmail.
Pan?evo, just to give an example, had an industrial economy: now the
factories have been destroyed, work is missing or increasingly
precarious, wartime pollution continues to cause damage, the country is
struggling to recover.
Ordinary people everywhere have been affected, ordinary people are still
bleeding. Belgrade is still bleeding. And the underground rivers of
Kosovo and Metohija are bleeding, once a land rich in thermal waters,
healing establishments, extraordinary vines, and now a land of
desolation and death. The repeated, intensive and destructive bombings
have caused the destruction of factories and mines and the dispersion of
multiple toxic substances into the air and water. Volumes of toxic
substances were discharged into the evocative and magical blue Danube
which crosses its course with the Sava river in Belgrade: 1,400 tonnes
of ethylene dichloride, 1,000 tonnes of sodium hydroxide and an
unspecified quantity of mercury, as well as 200 tonnes of ammonia.

Munitions that use depleted uranium are used to increase the penetration
capacity, weapons that carry contamination deep into the earth, into the
aquifers, for years and years and years. Contamination and death. NATO
mainly bombed targets in Kosovo and Metohija: 101 contaminated sites are
in Kosovo and Metohija, one in Montenegro - Cape Arza (Lushtica) in Boka
Kotor - and nine in Serbia. The more years that pass since the end of
the bombings, the more uranium shows its presence and virulence. In the
period 2001-2011, the number of cancer patients increased by 20%, and
the mortality rate from cancer (mainly leukemia and lymph glands, which
in peaceful times did not exceed 5% of the total number of malignant
tumors) increased by 25%. Leukemia and lymph gland diseases increased by
110%, and their mortality increased by 118%. The average annual growth
of these diseases is around 11% and the mortality rate has risen to 12%.
The expansion of leukemia and lymph gland tumors began in 2006. The
number of malignant diseases is growing inexorably.
A list of numbers that tells a story in numbers, a story woven from many
numbers that correspond to many people that make up the image of the
"humanitarian" intervention that produced only death. Many are involved,
many are silent: soldiers, businessmen, politicians, private security
structures, armaments industries, linked by the big business of war
production. The depleted uranium case is one of the most atrocious cases
of silence and clouding of individual consciences. Silence, social
indifference, all-out protection of the intangibility of institutions.
It seems that the land in Serbia produces nothing but deaths. And death
spreads silently, it arrives traveling in the underground rivers
contaminated after the bombings which before the NATO aggression brought
wealth and well-being. And there is someone who claimed and maintains
that it was a "humanitarian intervention", "for a good purpose", the
same ones who are silent, silenced and criminal, sheltered behind their
rubber wall. And this creeping death actually has many names: fulminant
leukemia, lymphoma, tumors of all kinds. Quick and lethal types of
tumors develop inside the bodies of those exposed to depleted uranium.
The geography of Serbia now draws paths of death in a territory that
embraces a landscape of devastation and ruins.
Taken from: Marilina Veca, Depleted Uranium: the earth is all mourning,
Sensitivi alle Foglie, Rome, 2023.
Marilina Veca, journalist and writer, has worked in the international
relations sector for various institutions. She is an honorary member of
the National Association of Depleted Uranium Victims, she is involved in
peace projects and humanitarian support in Kosovo and Metohija.

Il Cantiere n. 20 ottobre 2023 ilcantiere@autistici.org

http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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