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an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace.”
On the other hand, the Germans who caused two world wars in the 20th century have this proverb: “A great war leaves the country with three armies – an army of cripples, an army of mourners and an army of thieves.”
Why write about war again, as if the wars that are taking place aren’t sickening enough? Simple! Why do some people have that propensity to want to wantonly kill, maim and destroy as is currently happening in different parts of the world?
I have my fair share of experiences of the war of liberation and in July 2009, I relived those experiences when I had to do a feature story about two Rushinga boys, seriously injured after detonating a landmine along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border. One of the boys’ hands were severed within seconds of handling the weapons of war leftover from the armed struggle.
But, I am also writing because recently, a friend sent me a book, “The World of Robert Fisk; Volume 2, 1999-2008: From Kosovo to Baghdad”.
Fisk is a celebrated journalist under the ambit of the UK’s The Independent on Sunday. The book is a compilation of some of Fisk’s eminent pieces.
Reading through, I wondered what the psyches of people who are fascinated by war are like, and why people in the so-called developing world continue to be on the receiving end from Western nations’ bravado for war.
One story in particular made me understand why my friend had sent me the book – he wanted people to know that there are some journalists out there who care to tell the war narrative as is. This writer tried without success to write to the publishers to get permission from the author to reproduce the piece titled: “Sick, bleeding and losing nails: the girl who played with Nato uranium: the hidden cost of war in Bratunac”. However, the scholar’s courtesy is to acknowledge.
Wrote Robert Fisk on January 14 2001:
“Sladjana Sarenac remembers the pieces of a depleted-uranium bomb that she picked up outside her home in Sarajevo. ‘It glittered and I did what all children do,’ she says. ‘I was six years old and I pretended to make cookies out of the bits of metal and the soil in the garden. Then I hid the pieces on a shelf because my puppy Tina was playing with it.’
“Sladjana is now 12 and has been seriously ill ever since. Her nails have repeatedly fallen out of her fingers and toes. She has suffered internal bleeding constant diarrhoea and vomiting. When her Serb parents fled their home in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici after the Dayton Accord, she took her dog with her. It had three puppies. Then Tina died. Then the puppies. Sladjana has a desperately pale face and tired eyes.
“Everyone tells her she will be all right. I tell her that too. Sladjana’s parents spend 450 German marks a month (140-pound sterling) for her medicines – she takes 2mg of Benesedin twice a day, 600mg of magnesium tablets once a day – but the family are too poor to pay the bills. In their refuge home in Bratunac the electricity has been cut off.
“The landlady wants them out. And, needless to say, no one from Nato has bothered to enquire about Sladjana’s mysterious sickness.
“Nato’s raids followed the shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace and the Serb massacre of thousands of Muslim refugees in and around Srebrenica. Sladjana did not see the American A-10 aircraft that dropped the bombs around her home in the summer of 1995, including the round that exploded on her family’s small farm.
“She was hiding downstairs. But her father Jovo watched the planes, so low that he could see the pilot of each aircraft as they dived. ‘The houses in our street were very close to a (Serb) army base which made the bombing very intense,’ he says. ‘From 30 August to 15 September 1995, we not only got Nato bombings but also shells fired by the (Nato) Rapid Reaction Force on Mount Igman. The pilots were breaking the sound barrier and Sladjana never slept.’
“Sladjana’s sickness yet again places a heavy onus upon Nato to disclose all it knows about depleted uranium munitions and to start an immediate investigation among Bosnian Serbs from Hadjici about how those closest to the bombings in 1995 became so frequently the victims of cancer and leukaemia.
“Nato has already acknowledged that ingestion of DU particles in the immediate aftermath of a bomb explosion can have a serious effect on health. Here are civilians who clearly were only metres away from DU explosions who are suffering a devastating incidence of cancer, who would willingly speak to Nato investigators, but who Nato has not made the slightest effort to talk to.
“Jovo and his wife, Sretanka – and Sladjana herself – believe that her fascination with the bomb parts was her undoing. ‘She was playing with them like all children do,’ Sretanka says. ‘Out of curiosity, we all went to see what it looked like after the bombings. We went into the fields where the craters were. Then in the middle of October Sladjana had this kind of yellow sand under the nails on her hands and toes. Then the skin round the nails became red and it hurt her a lot. She was upset, crying a lot, vomiting and suffering diarrhoea.’
“That’s when Sladjana began her calvary of hospitals; a clinic in Sarajevo, a clinic in Bratunac, medical examinations in Belgrade. Sretanka produces a wad of fading, thin carbon copies of typed hospital reports. In a hospital at Blazuj, she was given two days of blood transfusions.
“Doctors told her she had somehow been irradiated. Her fingernails and toenails fell out. She spent 30 hours in a coma. ‘In the early stages, we didn’t think it was anything to do with the bombing,’ her father says. ‘Now we are aware of the kind of bombs that were fired and of what happened to other people from Hadjici.’
“Up to 300 men, women and children who lived close to the site of the bombings in 1995 have died of cancers and leukaemia over the past five years. It does occur to me – though I do not say so – that there are doctors aplenty in S-For, the Nato force now controlling Bosnia.
“And that those doctors must know all about depleted-uranium munitions and its risks. I have a feeling they will not be visiting the dark house in Bratunac where Sladjana lives.”
I checked on the Internet to see whether Sladjana Sarenac is still alive, but there was no information. However, this first person account about the effects of depleted uranium bombs is an indicator that as they continue to be dropped among innocent civilians in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and many other places, they are nothing but “petals of blood”, never mind what the proponents of these wars would want us to believe.
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Online Reporter