LATEST NEWS – May 28th 2017
UN SECRETARY GENERAL’S STATEMENT EXPRESSING REGRET IS UNIVERSALLY CONDEMNED.
KOSOVO’S TOXIC CAMPS DESTROYED
CHILDRENS’ LIVES FOR 12 YEARS
EUROPE’S LARGEST-SCALE CHILDREN’S MEDICAL EMERGENCY – ROMA CHILDREN HOUSED BY THE UN ON EUROPE’S MOST TOXIC RESIDENTIAL SITE WERE ABANDONED TO LEAD POISONING, PARALYSIS AND SLOW DEATH CAUSED BY LEAD AND MANY OTHER DANGEROUS HEAVY METALS
International and local activists fought the United Nations for years before getting the families re-housed safely. A US Lawyer, Dianne Post has continued the fight tirelessly to the present day to obtain an apology and adequate compensation for the families. And they are still waiting!
In October 2010, eleven years after the war and the NATO intervention in Kosovo, 160 Roma refugee families, including 200 children under ten years old, were living in two displaced persons’ camps built for them by the United Nations on the most toxic waste tip in Europe.
Despite promises that they would be moved from their “temporary” accommodation on waste tailings at the Trepca mine complex within 45 days, they were left there to survive in poverty and a poisoned environment until 2012, a period of thirteen years before all were finally rehoused. The children had some of the highest measured levels of lead, arsenic, & cadmium in their blood ever recorded. They showed symptoms of severe neurological and physiological damage. Blood Lead Level tests conducted on the children over a four year period, some signed by the WHO country chief at the time, were leaked publicly via this website, yet no-one did anything.
By April 2011, in spite of 8 million euros being allocated by USAID and the EC to relocate and medical treat the families, there were still 40 families still living in Osterode Camp. 100 families had been relocated at Roma mahalla, their former neighbourhood. (Another 38 families in a third contaminated camp, Leposavic/ Leposaviq, were also affected.) Few children had received any medical treatment. None were receiving a nutritious diet and none given help for cognitive impairment. Such was the abuse of these children by those empowered and financed to help them. The children and their families, members of the second largest ethnic minority in Kosovo, were trapped in N. Mitrovica, a polluted no-man’s land of ethnic conflict.
Despite warnings from international human rights organisations and agencies including the World Health Organisation and the International Committee of the Red Cross the United Nations Mission in Kosovo failed to take any effective steps to protect the lives of these desperately vulnerable children.
THOSE CHILDREN WERE BETRAYED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY. THE KOSOVO MEDICAL EMERGENCY GROUP AND KOSOVO ROMA REFUGEE FOUNDATION DEMANDED THEIR IMMEDIATE EVACUATION AND APPROPRIATE EMERGENCY MEDICAL TREATMENT. ALTHOUGH FINALLY REHOUSED, NON RECEIVED PSYCHOLOGICAL SUPPORT FOR THE MENTAL INJURIES INFLICTED UPON THEM.