PANCEVO (Yugoslavia): As the United States prepares for possible war in Iraq, environmentalists have raised new concerns about the consequences of precision bombing designed to cripple military-industrial infrastructure.

An independent study released earlier this month into the effect of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia three years ago has concluded that the targeting of industrial facilities can have unintended, long-term environmental impacts.

Experts from the US-based Institute of Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) said the destruction of oil refineries and chemical plants used for civilian purposes could also violate the international rules of war.

“This report does show that there is need for a sharp redefinition of how target sets and collateral damage are evaluated,” said Sriram Gopal, an IEER scientist and the main author of a report on NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

“Currently collateral damage is measured in terms such as the number of civilian casualties or the cost of replacing property. Long-term environmental harms can be much more difficult to quantify and evaluate, despite their very significant costs.”

NATO’s destruction of the oil refining and chemical complex in the small Yugoslav town of Pancevo, some 20 kms northeast of Belgrade on the western bank of the Danube river, caused thousands of tons of highly toxic chemicals to spill into the environment in April, 1999.

Nenad Stojimirovic, an assistant technical director at the Petrohemija chemical plant, was on duty during one of the bombing raids and recalls the terrifying fires and toxic black cloud which hung over the town for days.

“There were flames hundreds of metres (feet) high which could be seen for miles. It turned the night into day,” he said.

“A lot of the oil just went straight into the canal which flows into the Danube. Nobody knows how much was burned and how much went into the river, but it was catastrophic.”

A United Nations study released in the months after the 78-day NATO air campaign identified the industrial complex at Pancevo as the worst of four environmental “hot spots” in Yugoslavia.

It found that the air strikes caused some 80,000 tons of oil and oil products to burn at the refinery, releasing a poisonous cloud including sulphur dioxide which stretched for miles over the surrounding countryside.

At the petrochemical plant, it said 2,100 tons of toxic ethylene dichloride and eight tons of metallic mercury leaked into the soil and wastewater canal connected to the Danube, while 460 tons of vinyl chloride monomer was incinerated, releasing more highly toxic dioxins.

Managers at the fertiliser plant deliberately released another 250 tons of liquid ammonia into the open canal to prevent a deadly cloud which could have killed thousands of nearby residents had those stocks ignited.

Despite the immediate impact, the report concluded that there was no evidence of an “environmental catastrophe affecting the Balkans region as a whole”.

Both the UN report and the more recent IEER study found that pollution identified at some sites was serious and posed a threat to human health, but they said it was difficult to separate bombing-related damage from problems arising from years of environmental neglect.

They also agreed on the urgent need to clean up the damage and linked this to humanitarian assistance and general conflict management. IEER specifically questioned the military targeting of “dual-use” facilities.

The UN appealed for $20 million from donors to help pay for the post-war cleanup in Yugoslavia, but so far only some $12 million has been forthcoming, raising more questions about post-conflict responsibilities to repair damage which directly affects civilian populations.

NATO officials were dismissive of the environmental damage at Pancevo in the days after the attacks, when the consequences for the Danube and the people living around the complex were overshadowed by news of bombing errors.

“Of course we are aware of what’s happening (at Pancevo) but conflicts have never been healthy for anybody. It was a military target, it had a military value, it has been struck,” NATO Brigadier General Giuseppe Marani responded when questioned by a Serbian journalist at the time of the war.

The Atlantic alliance’s then spokesman, Jamie Shea, added: “I think there is more smoke coming from burning villages in Kosovo ... how about the environmental effects of that?”

While the aim of the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia was limited to forcing then president Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo and end the Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians, a war in Iraq could be far more complex.

Washington has made it clear that it wants to change the regime in Iraq, something that NATO did not attempt in Yugoslavia. There is also the prospect of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein unleashing his alleged stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

Military analysts say US weapons technology is vastly more superior today than it was three years ago, and special attention has been paid to the development of bombs which limit the leakage of toxic chemicals.

According to the Center for Defence Information based in Washington, one programme under development is a high-temperature incendiary “thermo-corrosive” filling for 2,000-pound precision-guided bombs. The filling burns at extremely high temperatures for a long time to destroy chemical and biological agents.

British and US scientists are also developing a “radio frequency weapon” or “E-bomb” which would disable electronic grids and electrical systems with powerful bursts of microwave energy.

Such “bombs” would disable refrigeration and computer systems used in chemical warfare and possibly “dual-use” civilian infrastructure.—AFP