News

Today Brian Flynn reports the following in the Sun Newspaper:

- Youngsters are being poisoned by dust blowing into a stinking refugee camp from a mountain of toxic lead waste towering above them They were packed into the contaminated site by the UN ten years ago after British soldiers went in with our allies to rescue Kosovo from Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic.

Their families, burned from their own homes by ethnic cleansing as the conflict ended, were assured it would be for just a few months until a safer place could be found.

But the UN High Commission For Refugees and sister agency UNMIK - the UN Mission in Kosovo - abandoned them behind the barbed wire of the filthy Osterode camp in Mitrovica when they pulled out two years ago and left the Kosovo government with the problem.

Around 400 of the 650 refugees at Osterode are youngsters, with more than 200 under the age of ten.

After a decade in the hellhole, tests show the children now have so much lead in their blood that medical equipment cannot accurately measure it.

The World Health Organisation and humanitarian campaigners say only immediate evacuation and medical treatment will save the children.

Yet the UN and its agencies STILL refuse to act.

Last night British scientists and humanitarian campaigners called on Foreign Secretary David Miliband to intervene.

Leading toxicologist Professor Alastair Hay, a UK Government adviser, said: "I have never encountered a situation in all the years I have been looking at lead where the situation is so catastrophic as it is for these children. "I think this is absolutely criminal. It is such a disgrace that these children are exposed."

So far, at least 84 refugees have died in the camp - many of them children whose organs simply packed up. -

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/2771943/Un-left-hundreds-of-Kosovo-kids-to-die-of-lead-poisoning.html#ixzz0ZltTpWUz

KMEG / STPI
Kosovo Medical Emergency Group
Society for Threatened Peoples International
www.toxicwastekills.com