http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=252490"Cheap"
NATO Must Fund Uranium Cleanup, Russia Says
MOSCOW, Jan 12, 2001 --
(Reuters) Russian defense
officials accused NATO on Thursday of using
Serbia as
a dumping ground for depleted uranium ammunition it
needed to
get rid of and called on the alliance to pay
for any
cleanup.
Russia's air force chief General Anatoly Kornukov
denounced
the Western military alliance for
penny-pinching, saying NATO had used its
1999 air
raids to dispose of depleted uranium munitions rather
than
dispose of them properly.
"It is clear to me they dropped the
(munitions) they
needed to destroy, as purely destroying them would
have
been several times more expensive than dropping
them during bombing", he
said in televised remarks.
"Of course there is an (environmental)
effect, there's
no question about that. But at least we do not
have
these (munitions). We got out of this a long time ago
and this is a
totally incorrect approach," he said.
"All statements made on this
matter by the official
representatives of the U.S. administration,
including
(Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright, are aimed
at
amateurs," RIA Novosti quoted Kornukov as saying.
Colonel-General
Leonid Ivashov, the Defense Ministry's
international relations chief and
leading hawk, told
Interfax news agency that NATO had a duty to check
the
health of all Yugoslavs, not just troops in Kosovo,
and to foot the
bill for any cleanup operation in the
region.
"It is extremely
important that NATO countries pay
attention not only to damage which may
have been
caused to the health of servicemen in the...Kosovo
operation,
but to all damage caused in Yugoslavia, to
its people and ecology," he
said.
"All actions in assessing this damage and in dealing
with the
consequences must be conducted by countries
of the North Atlantic alliance
at their expense."
Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev will raise
the
use of depleted uranium munitions in Yugoslavia and
Bosnia during a
scheduled February 6-8 visit to the
Balkans, domestic news agencies
reported, citing
"informed sources."
Moscow has already called for a
thorough probe by
respected international organizations of the
possible
health risks associated with the ammunition.
On Wednesday,
NATO ambassadors promised to investigate
the effects of depleted uranium
but said it posed a
minimal health risk. It pledged to do all it could
to
reassure troops and civilians worried by cancer
scares.
Russia
fiercely opposed NATO's 11-week 1999 air
campaign on Yugoslav targets,
launched in response to
Belgrade's crackdown on the ethnic Albanian
majority
in Kosovo province. Moscow later contributed
peacekeepers to a
U.N.-backed force.
Russia says it wants to test as many as possible
of
its 10,000 Balkan veterans and the roughly 3,000
peacekeepers it has
in Kosovo and 1,000 men stationed
in Bosnia. So far, it has found no one
suffering from
leukemia.
