NATO'S DEADLY LEGACY IN KOSOSVO WILL CAUSE YEARS OF SUFFERING By W F Deedes in Pristina
A TOUR round some of Kosovo's ubiquitous minefields makes painfully clear that many of the casualties suffered by civilians are being caused by cluster bombs dropped by Nato from the air rather than mines sown by the Serbs or Kosovo Liberation Army.
Since the refugees returned to Kosovo in June there have been 232 casualties attributed to mines, or around 80 a month. It is officially admitted that at least a third of these have been victims of the cluster bomb; and some estimates put it higher.
Nato is known to have dropped a total of 1,300 containers of cluster bombs over Kosovo. Each container carried 208 of these bomblets. So something like 270,000 of these deadly weapons were scattered over the country.
It is not precisely known how many of these failed to explode on impact, but it is accepted that the failure rate was not less than 5 per cent. That would leave around 14,000 bomblets scattered over Kosovo of which some 3,500 have been traced and cleared. However, experienced professionals engaged in mine clearance in Kosovo are positive that the failure rate was a good deal higher, partly because the cluster bombs were dropped from 15,000 feet rather than the optimum height of 9,000. So the chances are that there are considerably more than 11,000 still to be traced and destroyed.
Unlike the countless cluster bombs dropped over Vietnam and Laos by the Americans in the Vietnam war, which are about the size and shape of a cricket ball, the cluster bomb in Kosovo looks more like a long thin beer can. They are yellow, innocent in appearance and, fatally, almost bound to arouse curiosity in the passer-by. They are also highly volatile, and have to be exploded on the spot.
Touring the minefields with two leading British groups, Halo Trust and the Mines Advisory Group, I watched one of these bomblets being expertly detonated. It produced a bigger bang than most anti-personnel mines. Because of its power, it probably causes a higher death rate. The death rate from mines is in the region of one death to three injuries.
Two main types of cluster bombs were dropped, the anti-tank bomblet and the anti-personnel bomblet. The anti-tank bomblet is constructed to pierce armour on impact. Walking along a road where both types had fallen, one observed that the anti-tank bomblets had drilled holes to a considerable depth. The anti-personnel bomblet had burst like a mortar bomb on impact with a wider lethal range on impact than most a/p mines.
We looked at a Serb tank struck by a anti-tank bomblet which must have scored a direct hit on the ammunition locker. The turret of the tank had been blown 50 feet away. It is going to take the combined efforts of Kfor engineers and some 16 mines clearance organisations now working in Kosovo some time to clear Serb mines and Nato's cluster bombs.
The Kfor map of minefields shows the western side of Kosovo to be worst affected, but cluster bombs have been found in most of the country, making a great deal of land too dangerous to cultivate. In consequence much of rural Kosovo will remain dependent on humanitarian feeding for a long time to come.
While these conditions prevail, a number of organisations such as United Nations Children's Fund and Save the Children are making mines awareness propaganda a priority. Save the Children has organised a course of instruction, in which the children participate, which will eventually cover 200 villages.
As winter sets in and the search for wood intensifies, the expectation is that casualties from mines and cluster bombs will rise.
When all the facts become known, the cluster bomb, manufactured in this country as well as America, is likely to arouse controversy. It can be argued that legally it is a weapon exempt from the land mine ban to which Britain is a signatory. Given the high failure rate, the question of whether it is ethically defensible is harder to answer.