The after-effects of the bombing of Yugoslavia by US forces in March-June 1999 are now being felt. Chief among these is the linkage between the use of depleted-uranium ammunition and deaths due to leukaemia among peace-keeping personnel posted in Kosovo. The fall-out of the warheads tipped with radioactive material has caused alarm in several European countries. The UN environment programme has found evidence of residual radioactivity in eight of the 11 sites where depleted-uranium ammunition was used. Political leaders of Italy, Portugal, Holland and Belgium have taken up the issue with the secretary-general of NATO under whose aegis the US air force had carried out the bombing operations. Even the British have been compelled to take note of the issue. Predictably, the first reaction of NATO has been to deny any link between the use of such ammunition and the outbreak of what is called the Balkan war syndrome. This is not surprising. It took years before the US and British servicemen who suffered from the Gulf war syndrome could convince the authorities to accept its reality. The affected US servicemen have won a class action suit in US courts and obtained compensation. Then as now, depleted-uranium ammunition was suspected to be one of the causes. Because of the metal's high density and its quality to ignite readily at high temperatures, depleted-uranium is used in the casing cone of the warhead to give it increased penetrability into steel armour and concrete bunkers.

The present controversy recalls the extensive use of Agent Orange, the defoliant chemical, in Vietnam. While the chemical's release did not generally result in immediate fatalities, its effect was long lasting. Agent Orange led to large-scale birth defects in succeeding generations and increased cancer deaths both among US soldiers exposed to it and the Vietnamese who were living in the areas sprayed with the defoliant. In that case, too, the affected US soldiers went to court and, through a class action suit, succeeded in getting compensation. But the Vietnamese victims, running into hundreds of thousands, have been ignored. The bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 caused extensive ecological damage as chemical plants and oil refineries were targeted; as a result the river Danube became highly polluted. While European countries have raised the issue of their Kosovo-returned soldiers dying of leukaemia, there has not been similar concern about the people of Yugoslavia who have been subjected to strikes by 31,000 depleted-uranium shells. Apart from residual radioactivity, such shelling also caused extensive environmental damage with long-term effects on the health of the population. In western countries, public opinion has been moulded to react strongly against war crimes and human rights violations. However, it has not been sensitised adequately to the consequences of such wars; lasting environmental damage and lingering deaths as in the case of Vietnam or Yugoslavia. This is of a piece with the double standards of the international community which, rightly, prohibits the use of anti-personnel landmines but has legitimised nuclear weapons. And which has remained unmoved by sanctions against Iraq which have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children for want of access to life-saving medicines.