HEALTH: ROMA DYING OF LEAD POISONING IN KOSOVO REFUGEE CAMP

HEALTH: ROMA DYING OF LEAD POISONING IN KOSOVO REFUGEE CAMP
IPS-Inter Press Service - May 19, 2005, Thursday

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, May 19 2005 - Jenita Mehmeti, aged four, died last summer in the refugee camp of Zitkovci in Kosovo. She was the second child among 60 born there since 1999 to die of suspected lead poisoning.

Twenty-seven Roma have died in the three camps of Zitkovci, Cesmin Lug and Kablare in the southern Serbian province since that year. Lead poisoning is suspected in many of these cases. Lead is known to cause severe damage to the brain and the nervous system.

Some 500 Roma were brought to the camps from the town of Kosovska Mitrovica eight kilometres away after their homes were burnt down by Albanian extremists who went on a series of bloody rampages after the NATO invasion took control of Kosovo away from Belgrade.

Roma, also known as Gypsies, are migrants from Asia who settled in Europe in the 14th century. The four million to eight million Roma in Europe face widespread persecution and miserable living conditions.

The camps present a gruesome picture. Some children and adults walk dizzily, some have problems with speech.

The three camps are situated on the outskirts of the giant industrial mining complex Trepca, 320 km south of Serbian capital Belgrade., seized by NATO troops and turned over to a Western consortium.

No autopsies were carried out in the 27 deaths, but in the face of visible lead poisoning several Serbian and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have started a campaign to resettle the Roma refugees. They accuse authorities of grave negligence and of covering up a tragedy.

"It is a medical emergency," the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC), a leading Serbian NGO, said in an appeal. Together with the European Roma Rights Centre, the HLC called for "immediate evacuation of Roma camps, as Roma children need to be removed from the source of poisoning, now."

World Health Organization (WHO) experts had asked for immediate removal of the Roma after visiting the camps last year.

Blood tests they carried out on 75 people, including children and pregnant women, showed that 44 had more than 65 micrograms per decilitre of lead in their blood; this was the highest level their instruments could measure. Levels above 10 micrograms are considered a threat to the brain or the nervous system.

Rokho Kim, a WHO expert on lead poisoning who visited the camps in February this year, said he had never encountered "such high lead levels in children's blood."

Paul Polansky, head of mission in Kosovo for the Society for Threatened Peoples and for the Kosovo Roma Refugee Foundation, says that the United Nations "in its rush to proclaim its assignment a success, ignored or covered up a medical tragedy there for which it is directly responsible."

Faced with sharp criticism after Polansky wrote an article on the lead poisoning of Roma refugees in The International Herald Tribune, Kosovo Prime Minister Bajram Kosumi said his government would allocate 250,000 dollars for resettlement of the Roma refugees and decontamination of the three camps.

There is little sign of resettlement yet. Children in the camps still walk the dirty streets and grow up in contaminated mud.

But international officials and peacekeepers have stopped jogging in the neighbourhood. They have been warned about the health hazards of Trepca.

The Roma in the camps who suffered at the hands of Albanian extremists, who killed hundreds and destroyed dozens of ancient churches and monasteries, were brought to the three improvised camps built by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in late 1999. At the time UNHCR officials said the camps would only house them through the upcoming winter.

The UN took over Kosovo in 1999 after the U.S. ended its 11-week air campaign against Serbia, which killed hundreds of civilians, mostly in urban areas, purportedly due to alleged repression of Albanians, the largest population in Kosovo.

UNHCR officials plead helplessness. "Our hands are tied," one of them told IPS, insisting on anonymity.

The Roma at the camps, he said, are treated as "internally displaced persons" - from one place in Kosovo to another. No Albanian community in the region was willing to allow their resettlement near them.

Their old Mahala neighbourhood is being developed into a shopping mall. That neighbourhood is in the southern part of Mitrovica town, which is divided between Serbs in the north and Albanians in the south. The Serbs do not want the Roma either.

"The main reason for these people to be treated in such manner is simply the fact that they are Roma," Marek Novicky from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the ombudsman for Kosovo, told Serbian media.

Officials from the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) say they have started holding "regular weekly meetings" to deal with Roma refugees in the camps. The outcome of these meetings is not known.

UNMIK spokesman Geogy Kupak admitted to media that "the UN administration was somehow reluctant to deal with the matter."

UNMIK head Soren Jessen Petersen told Kosovo media that "the only solution would be the safe and dignified return of Roma refugees." But he failed to say where the refugees should go.