BELGRADE, March 24. /TASS/. The Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals, an organization embracing influential Serbian diplomats, political analysts, and military and medical professionals, has called for the resumption of the work conducted by the parliamentary commission investigating the consequences of the use of depleted uranium bombs during NATO’s aggression against the former Yugoslavia in 1999.
"[We plan] to submit three requests to the government: first, to demand that the work of the parliamentary commission and inter-ministerial body for the investigation of the consequences of the use of depleted uranium weapons during NATO’s aggression be resumed. Second, that work on compiling an exact list of all civilian victims of the aggression be completed by the 25th anniversary of NATO’s aggression in March of next year. And third, we demand that the chapters covering NATO’s aggression in all textbooks for educational establishments at all levels be analyzed to ensure that they are providing a truthful interpretation of events," the Forum said in a statement released on Friday.
On March 24, 1999, NATO began a military operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. NATO leadership claimed that the prevention of genocide against the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo was the main rationale for launching the operation, dubbed Allied Force. NATO said that during the 78-day operation its aircraft flew 38,000 sorties to carry out 10,000 bombing strikes. According to Serbian data, the bombardments killed 3,500-4,000 people and injured another 10,000, two thirds of them civilians. Material damages totaled $100 billion.
According to Serbian experts, NATO dropped 15 tons of depleted uranium munitions over the three months of the bombing campaign. After that, the country ranked first in Europe in terms of the number of cancer cases. About 30,000 new cancer cases were registered in the first ten years after the bombings, with a mortality rate from 10,000 to 18,000 patients.