Long-term effects

Kosovo’s Roma seek justice for lead-poisoned children.

MITROVICA: Kosovo’s Roma minority “are not treated like humans”, laments Florim Masurica, who is seeking justice for his disabled son, one of the children suffering from suspected lead poisoning contracted at post-war United Nations camps.

Kosovo’s pro-independence ethnic Albanian rebels saw Roma people as guilty of cooperation with Serbs during the 1998-1999 conflict – a gratuitous accusation as the Roma largely kept out of the fighting. Some of them faced summary executions, fled their homes that were looted and destroyed after the departure of Serb forces from Kosovo following Nato bombings.

That was the case in the Roma neighbourhood of Mahalla in Kosovo’s northern city of Mitrovica.

Around 600 of its inhabitants were given shelter by the UN mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) in five camps, initially meant for 45 days, but they ended up staying six years.

Living near a heavy metal mine, these displaced people were unaware that they were exposed to soil contaminated with lead and other toxins, as scientific tests showed.

In 2005, human rights groups became concerned by the symptoms of Roma children in the camps, such as black gums, headaches, learning difficulties, convulsions and high blood pressure.

UNMIK then evacuated the camps – but for some of its residents this was too late.

Bajram Babajboks, 65, claims that there was no single member of his family – four daughters, seven sons and 60 nieces and nephews – “who is not a victim of lead toxins”.

“It’s the doctors who say it,” he said, showing the latest blood test results.

In February 2006, a panel of experts appointed by the UN came up with a 79-page report examining the claims of poisoning, following complaints by 138 Roma.

It cited tests conducted by the World Health Organisation in 2004, showing most children in the most exposed camps had “above acceptable” lead levels in their blood and that “more than 80% of soils in the camps were unsafe”.

An environmental medicine specialist, Klaus-Dietrich Runow, took hair tests in the camps in 2005 with “the highest ever seen (results) in the values of heavy metal in human hair samples”.

The panel concluded that UNMIK failed “to comply with applicable human rights standards in response to the adverse health condition caused by lead contamination in the camps and the harm suffered by the complainants”.

According to the WHO, children are “particularly vulnerable to the neurotoxic effects of lead, and even relatively low levels of exposure can cause serious and in some cases irreversible neurological damage”.

But no exhaustive survey of the camps’ victims has been done – which, to the Roma community, is additional evidence of discrimination. — AFP

Marginalised lot: A Roma woman walking with her children in a Roma neighbourhood in the town of Mitrovica, Kosovo. — AFP