Several European nations including the current holders of the European Union presidency, Sweden, echoed Prodi's concerns, intensifying pressure on NATO to investigate the so-called ''Balkan Syndrome.''

 In Bosnia, the NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) dismissed the claims, saying ammunition with depleted uranium used during the 1992-95 war there posed only a ``negligible hazard.''

 The syndrome came under the spotlight following reports that six Italian soldiers who served in the former Yugoslavia had developed leukemia and died after exposure to spent ammunition.

 France became the latest country on Thursday to announce that it was conducting its own inquiry into the syndrome, after four of its Balkan veterans contracted leukemia. It noted that as yet no link to spent ammunition was apparent.

 Depleted uranium is used in the tips of missiles, shells and bullets to increase their ability to penetrate armor and can be pulverized on impact into a toxic radioactive dust, defense experts say.

Nato Says No Plans To Change

 Prodi said that even if there were the slightest risk from the munitions, they should be abolished.

 ``I want the truth to be ascertained, not only concerning the soldiers, but also for the people who lived near them, the population,'' Prodi told Italian state radio.

 U.S. attack jets fired some 31,000 rounds of depleted uranium ammunition against Serbian tanks and armored vehicles during NATO's 1999 Kosovo campaign, according to a United Nations expert. Some 10,000 were fired in neighboring Bosnia in 1994-95, NATO officials reported only last month.

 NATO spokesman Mark Laity ruled out any immediate plans to destroy stocks of depleted uranium munitions.

``The onus is on those who call ill health to prove it, rather than on us, who don't,'' he told CNN.

``If things change, NATO will change.''
 
 In a bid to establish the facts, Belgium has urged EU defense ministers to analyze and debate peacekeepers' health problems for the first time at EU level.

 Sweden welcomed the proposal and said it would be discussed at a meeting next Tuesday of the interim Political and Security Committee. ``It is important that we act,'' Swedish Defense Minister Bjorn von Sydow said in a statement on Thursday.

 He said that Sweden's ambassador to NATO would consult with the alliance, although the country is not itself a NATO member.

 NATO ambassadors are expected to discuss the issue at their regular meeting next Wednesday, NATO sources said.

 Mystery Ailments
 
 Belgium has reported that five peacekeepers who were in Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia have died from cancer.

 It said that other soldiers who had been on Balkan peacekeeping missions during the 1990s reported a variety of unexplained ailments, including headaches and insomnia.

 The Netherlands reported that two soldiers who served in Kosovo and Bosnia had died from leukemia and Portugal has raised concerns over the death of one of its Balkans veterans.

 Both countries, along with Bulgaria, Finland and Greece, said tests were being conducted among troops who served in the Balkans and who are still in Kosovo.

 Germany and Spain said tests among their peacekeeping troops had so far turned up no evidence of ``Balkan Syndrome.''

 Concerns Grow For Civilians
 
 Concerns over the risks of depleted uranium shells during the Kosovo campaign have been voiced by civilian aid workers in Britain, the Netherlands and Italy.

 An umbrella group called the Italian Consortium for Solidarity, comprising some 100 non-governmental organizations active in the Balkans since 1992, cited a study by British scientist Roger Coghill which estimated some 10,000 possible future deaths from cancer due to use of uranium in the Balkans.

``I think the local people are in most danger,'' said Martina Iannizzotto, the Belgrade-based coordinator of the group's activities in Yugoslavia.

 Italian fishermen urged their government to investigate whether any of the bombs dumped by planes during the Kosovo campaign and dredged up in nets contained depleted uranium.

 A U.N. report in May warned that much of Kosovo's water could be so contaminated as to be unfit to drink, and that a clean-up of the province could cost billions of dollars. It warned U.N. staff not to approach any target which might have been hit by a depleted uranium weapon.

 Prodi proposed setting up immediate contact with the governments of Bosnia and Serbia to discuss pollution and problems linked to depleted uranium.

 SFOR said a U.N. Environmental Program was due to report early in 2001 on any possible risks after measuring radiation levels in soil samples.

[The BBC-NATO revolving door]

January 17, 2000
Journalists must always fight spin
'What is it about defence correspondents that they so often come across as mouthpieces for crude military propaganda?'
By Robert Fisk

WHO COULD possibly be surprised by reports that Mark Laity, the BBC's defence correspondent, has been offered the job of second-in-command to Nato's spokesman James Shea? "I did not feel that Jamie Shea lied to me at all," Laity announced. This is said after a war in which Nato told fibs about its attacks on refugee convoys, bombing the centre of Pristina, hitting a hospital in Surdulica, the number of Serb tanks destroyed and - awesomely - refused to answer a UN commission's questions about the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Kosovo bombardment.

But what is it about defence correspondents that they so often come across as mouthpieces for the crudest military propaganda? It is certainly nothing new. Back in the First World War, correspondents dutifully reported on the German crucifixion of babies on church doors and the cheerful Tommy taking the slaughter on the Somme in his stride.

Jamie Shea, in fact, wrote his PhD on British propaganda in the First World War. It shows. Nato ran its propaganda campaign out of Brussels as a populist bandwagon in which Shea quoted Shakespeare - "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" - to illustrate Slobodan Milosevic's problems, and then called the Serbian leader Al Capone. As this cheerful theatre was staged, the defence correspondents who gathered for the daily briefings were putty in his hands. The Serbs were committing war crimes, atrocities - and indeed they were - so who would dare to criticise Nato?

Laity is, in fact, a personable sort of chap, his constant and confident appearances from Brussels a soothing balm to the BBC's viewers who wondered - reading their more critical newspapers - if something might just be amiss in a Nato bombing campaign that began with barracks and then spread promiscuously to bridges, a train, railway lines, factories, refugee convoys, hospitals, and even the occasional Serb tank. So, when Nato slaughtered dozens of Albanian refugees in the first of its massive "mistakes", Laity knew where his judgement lay.

Shea urged journalists to hold their fire, not to accuse Nato of killing the refugees until he could produce an explanation. He had no problems with Laity. "I took, right from early on, that there was a propaganda war here," Laity was to admit later. "And my judgement was that the Serbs were quite capable of deliberately misleading; we knew - and subsequent events proved beyond doubt - that the Serbs were killing a lot of Albanians. Deliberately. So if they killed Albanians deliberately and could blame it on Nato as well, it's a kind of 'double whammy'. So what I wanted people to do was pause."

Only after journalists taken by the Serbs down to Kosovo, and the evidence they unearthed - The Independent carried the computer codings from bomb parts at the scene - proved that Nato was responsible, did Shea produce the commander of the US jets that bombed the convoy. For the most part, our colleagues in Brussels were fed the Nato line and parroted it over the air. "They [Nato] are very confident that they attacked a military convoy," Laity initially reported. Note the language. He didn't report that Nato "say" they are confident. Their confidence was treated as fact - exactly Shea's line.

We can understand the problems of defence correspondents, especially if they work for the BBC. They don't want to lose their contacts. "These were good people I was speaking to, not PRs," Laity would later say about his sources. If journalists became unduly sceptical, they might be regarded as off-side, cynical, even unpatriotic. Nothing new here. I can still recall how a plethora of defence corrs attempted to justify the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972 by repeating the British Army's lies. In the 1992 Gulf War, it was the same.

The BBC World Service gradually bleached out any critical comment from its coverage of the Gulf. I recall coming across a British Army medical convoy, sent off to the Kuwaiti border without maps, about to cross into occupied Iraqi territory. A bunch of US special forces, a French photographer and myself came across them as they actually tried to negotiate their way through the Saudi frontier station at Khafji, their commander - from Armagh in Northern Ireland - pleading to use my map because he had none.

When I reported this, the BBC chose not to interview me. Instead, two reporters went on air to disparage the report. "Anecdotal", they called it. One of them was Mark Laity. Maybe that's a defence correspondent's job: to put the army's point of view. Which is why - cruelly, I'm afraid, but truthfully - I referred in this newspaper to Laity's Kosovo performance as that of "a sheep in sheep's clothing". I haven't changed my view. The defence correspondents failed to challenge Shea about the use of depleted uranium shells, the civilians killed at Surdulica hospital in which Serb soldiers were hiding, the eyewitness reports that the Nato pilot who rocketed the Yugoslav train at Gurdulice returned for a second attack, and Nato's critical demand to the Serbs to allow alliance troops to move throughout Yugoslavia - which was simply abandoned at the end of the Kosovo war. No Brussels reporter asked what protection Nato intended to give the Serb minority in Kosovo, post-war. In the event, most were "cleansed" by the Albanians before the eyes of Nato.

ITV reporters showed far more gumption. Anyone who watched Jonathan Dimbleby's superb LWT dispatch last night - Inside Kosovo - can see what TV reporting should be about. His coverage of the Serb evictions, the KLA intimidation of their own people, and the inability of Nato to impose order was a model.

Dimbleby, along with Keith Graves of Sky and others, may be wolves in wolves clothing, but they are doing their job. Not so others among our colleagues during the war. Take that train, seen speeding into the bomber's sights at Gurdulice, too late for him to abort the strike. Going a bit fast wasn't it, for an electric train rumbling across a viaduct over a river gorge? It looked like it was moving - on the video Shea showed the defence boys - at Eurostar velocity. Now, it turns out, Nato notched the film up to three times the real speed. The Brussels reporters didn't spot it. They trusted Nato. They thought Nato never lied.

On 30 August last year, scarcely two months after the Kosovo war ended, television journalists met in Edinburgh to debate their coverage. There were a few "mea culpas" and a lot of back-slapping - the TV boys are not made of modesty - and when I suggested that the Nato coverage had been on the level of a boy's military magazine, there was much shaking of heads. Laity referred to my criticism as "ranting" - I had repeated the "sheep" description - and tried to justify Nato's war by comparing the number of "mistakes" to "successful" strikes - a ratio, I recall, that supposedly came out as around one in a thousand. At one point, Laity revealed that in the later stages of the war, Nato had made a tactical decision to stop apologising for its killing of civilians in Yugoslavia. It was the first I had heard of this. Why were we not told this at the time?

But it's not Laity I'm against. It's the culture of the defence correspondents' profession - as if their raison d'etre is to give the military side of the argument rather than challenge the powerful generals on a subject on which they, the correspondents, are supposed to be experts. Defence correspondents work hard. Laity, I recall, said he'd made more than 800 broadcasts from Nato headquarters during the bombardment - he probably made far more in Brussels, and at little cost, of course, to his employers. But then, with a big smile, Laity added humourously: "I was easy - I was cheap."

Reports of Laity's job offer from Nato say that he's still negotiating a higher figure than the £100,000 thought to be on offer. Easy perhaps. But certainly not cheap.