WRITTEN QUESTION E-1946/01

by Jonas Sjöstedt (GUE/NGL) to the Commission

(3 July 2001)

Subject: Environmental devastation in Yugoslavia following NATO bombardment

Interest in the events in Yugoslavia has waned but there is every reason to raise the issue of the environmental devastation directly caused by NATO bombing. There has been some discussion of depleted uranium ammunition and its harmful effects, mainly on KFOR soldiers serving in Kosovo and Bosnia, but the fate of the permanently resident population has not attracted the same sort of attention.

In its issue No 5/2001, the newspaper Die Zeit reports that the United Nations Environment programme (UNEP) has made studies of the environmental pollution caused by the NATO bombing of the oil refinery and other chemical installations in the town of Pancevo and considers that that pollution was more dangerous than the pollution produced by depleted uranium. According to the UNEP's investigations, 80 000 tonnes of oil and oil products were destroyed by fire during the bombing of the refinery in Pancevo alone. The attack released aromatic hydrocarbons, which cause cancer and genetic damage in humans.

Die Zeit also reports that a bombed petrochemical factory discharged 2 100 tonnes of ethylene dichloride into the soil and water. The limit value for ethylene dichloride in one litre of drinking water is one microgram, whereas the UNEP team measured 5 960 micrograms in one litre of water in Pancevo! The reading in the Danube is a concentration of 65 micrograms per litre and high readings have also been recorded in groundwater. At the Pancevo refinery, 460 tonnes of vinyl chloride, which is carcinogenic, was also destroyed by fire and a major health risk is posed by a leakage of 8 tonnes of mercury.

NATO bombed not only the refinery, the petrochemical factory and the fertiliser factory in the town but also the industrial sewage treatment plant.

Is the Commission aware of the above problems and what does it propose by way of a remedy?

Answer given by Mrs Wallström on behalf of the Commission

(3 September 2001)

The Commission assumes that the article refers to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Balkans Task Force Report on the environmental consequences of the Kosovo conflict that was published in October 1999. This report has received extensive media attention. It identified Pancevo as one of a number of environmental hot-spots where bombing added to the existing environmental situation resulting from poor industrial standards. UNEP made a statement on the follow-up to this report at the recent Donors' Conference for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia organised by the European Commission and the World Bank, in Brussels on 29 June 2001. Full details of the Conference are available at the website of the Joint Office of the European Commission and the World Bank (www.seerecon.org). In this statement (available at www.unep.org), UNEP reported that it was fully involved in clean-up operations in the cities of Novi Sad, Pancevo, Kragujevac and Bor. The Commission, which is supporting many other priorities and projects in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is not financing these operations, which are being funded by other, bilateral, donors.