BRIEFING BY CHAIRMAN OF UNEP/HABITAT BALKANS TASK FORCE

Press Briefing

BRIEFING BY CHAIRMAN OF UNEP/HABITAT BALKANS TASK FORCE

There was an urgent need to include environmental action as part of humanitarian assistance to the Balkans in the wake of the Kosovo conflict, Pekka Haavisto, Chairman of the Joint United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)/United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) Balkans Task Force (BTF), said at a Headquarters press briefing this morning.

Introducing the BTF report on the conflict’s consequences for the environment and human settlements, he said field missions between July and September had focused on five areas: (1) environmental consequences for industrial sites; (2) environmental consequences on the River Danube; (3) consequences to biodiversity in protected areas; (4) field assessment and project development relating to consequences to human settlements and the environment in Kosovo; and (5) possible consequences for human health and the environment of depleted uranium weapons used in the conflict.

Mr. Haavisto, a former Minister for Environment and Development Cooperation of Finland, said that while the conflict had not caused an environmental catastrophe for the Balkans region as a whole, pollution detected at four environmental “hot spots” targeted during the Kosovo bombing campaign posed a threat to human health.

He said that those hot spots -– Pancevo, Kragujevac, Novi Sad and Bor -– were all connected to the River Danube. In the oil-refinery town of Pancevo, which also hosted a petrochemical plant and a fertilizer factory, dichloroethane (EDC) and mercury were leaking into the Danube. The BTF had recommended that the two-kilometre Pancevo channel be cleaned as soon as possible to stop the leaks.

At the Zastava car plant in Kragujevac, which had also been targeted during the bombing campaign, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins had contaminated the soil, he said. The Task Force had recommended a clean-up because people were already returning to work there and faced an immediate risk to their health.

The BTF also recognized an immediate threat to the drinking water of the Danube town of Novi Sad if the soil were not cleaned in time, he said. The town’s water wells were very close to areas that had experienced huge leakages of oil and oil products into the soil. And sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere could be sensed even 50 kilometres outside the mining town of Bor.

He said that although the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had never been an environmentally clean country, the bombings had added remarkably to the pollution in the four towns.

The Task Force had recommended the isolation of areas contaminated by the use of depleted uranium weapons during the air war, he said. The reason

Haavisto Press Conference - 2 - 15 October 1999

for that recommendation had had more to do with the toxicity of uranium than with the fear of radioactivity.

Asked how many people were threatened by contaminated drinking water in Novi Sad, he said that about 150,000 people lived there. The wells were situated between the river and the oil refinery. Not even in normal situations were drinking water supplies situated so close to a refinery.

Another correspondent asked whether there had been any attempt to monitor the effects of chemical and petrochemical fires on the atmosphere.

Mr. Haavisto replied that the fires had released a lot of sulphur dioxide and lead into the atmosphere, but the levels were not alarming.

In response to a question about environmental aid as part of humanitarian assistance, he said that many Governments were discussing that issue and would decide in the coming weeks or months how it would be dealt with. If environmental problems arising from the conflict were not tackled in the next six months, they would cause problems for a huge number of people in the region.

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