FEATURE - Serb town still waiting for NATO bombing clean-up
Date: 02-May-02
Country: YUGOSLAVIA
Author: Fredrik Dahl
The town's 140,000 residents are still waiting for a clean-up - and their fate is reflected elsewhere in poverty-stricken Yugoslavia as it struggles with the poisonous twin legacies of war and dirty socialist-era industry.
"This town has a huge ecological problem," Pancevo's Mayor Borislava Kruska told Reuters. "I'm very, very concerned. We are dealing with toxic, carcinogenic material."
She complained that U.N.-led efforts to clear the hazard had moved too slowly, but acknowledged that the dilapidated complex was already an environmental headache before the Kosovo war.
Pancevo's pollution woes show the reformers who ousted Slobodan Milosevic as Yugoslav leader in 2000 have their work cut out for them to improve environmental standards, which have until now been largely ignored.
They need to redress years of neglect and under investment in new technology as well as the impact of sanctions and air strikes against Milosevic's Yugoslavia, which left traces of depleted uranium munitions at several locations.
"We are facing a very big task," said Andjelka Mihajlov, who heads the environmental protection unit of the health ministry of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.
BELGRADE NO WHITE CITY
Beograd means White City in Serbian, though these days that name belies its familiar grime-encrusted concrete.
A Western consulting firm recently ranked it among the dirtiest cities in the world, an indication of the scope of the challenge to narrow the environmental gap with the European Union, the wealthy Western bloc it hopes to join around 2010.
"Belgrade has never been so dirty," said Bane, a 31-year-old born in the city of two million. "It has become a lot worse in the past 10 years."
Like others in eastern Europe in the Cold War, old socialist Yugoslavia focused on industrial growth, paying little attention to green issues in comparison to Western countries. But its environment standards were still higher than in the Soviet bloc.
During the Milosevic era, when Yugoslavia plunged into poverty, the over-riding priority for many Serbs was staying alive, not keeping rivers and forests clean.
"Environmental issues were sleeping during these 8-9 years," Mihajlov said. "Some things were put on paper but not implemented."
Eleven weeks of NATO bombing caused more damage, especially in Pancevo, just a few miles up the road from Belgrade, and three other "hot spots" that a U.N. expert mission identified as in need of urgent action after the war.
U.N. scientists said in March they had also found widespread traces of depleted uranium from NATO munitions at five other sites in Serbia and the coastal republic of Montenegro.
They said the level of contamination posed no immediate health threat but still urged precautionary measures.
Mihajlov said the government was stepping up its environment efforts with plans to create a dedicated ministry. It has also drafted a protection law with the help of Western experts.
But Serbia faces a tricky balancing act with so many pressing priorities. Most factories would have to close if strict standards were introduced overnight, a social disaster in a country with a jobless rate of at least 30 percent.
"The environment is a high priority for the government of Serbia but not the first priority," Mihajlov said.
SEWAGE IN THE DANUBE
In its quality of life survey published in March, Mercer Human Resource Consulting said Belgrade scored an environmental rating of only 53 points, based on the level of air pollution and the efficiency of waste disposal and sewage systems.
It came nowhere near the cleanest city, Calgary in Canada at 166, and was also below other eastern European cities.
That will come as no surprise for visitors to Belgrade, a run-down city where battered old cars spew out fumes and sewage is dumped into the rivers.
"Air pollution is worse than it was before," Mihajlov said. "No city in Serbia has a waste water treatment plant.
