Gypsy families in Kosovo on toxic land

NORTH MITROVICA, Kosovo | No one seems to care about the gypsies.

Displaced by conflict and stranded by bureaucratic inertia, dozens of gypsy families remain on toxic land 10 years after they were relocated there by the United Nations after the Kosovo war.

Lead blackens the children’s teeth, blanks out memories and stunts growth. Other symptoms of lead poisoning include aggressive behavior, nervousness, dizziness, vomiting and high fever. The children swing between bursts of nervous hyperactivity and fainting spells. Some have epileptic fits.

The two resettlement camps — the Osterrode and Chesmin Lug — were established by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1999 for gypsies, or Roma, as they are more commonly known in Europe. A traditionally nomadic people, the Roma share a common heritage that sets them apart as an ethnic group, with their largest populations in Central and Eastern Europe.

The camps, near a closed mining and smelting complex that includes a slag heap of 100 million tons of toxic materials, were intended as a temporary measure after a neighborhood that had been home to 9,000 gypsies was destroyed by ethnic Albanians as Serb security forces pulled out of the area in the final days of the Kosovo conflict in June 1999.

The neighborhood was on the southern shore of the Ibar River, which separates Serb-dominated northern Mitrovica from a southern, Albanian-dominated part.

The Albanians, furious at what they called atrocities by the Serbs during the war, accused the Roma of collaborating with the Serb army. The Roma say they hardly were in a position to do anything but struggle for their own survival and that the Albanians used them as a scapegoat.

Whatever the truth behind the accusations and denials, moving Roma families next to a slag heap of toxic materials including lead, zinc, arsenic and other metals has made dozens of families suffer severe health problems and spawned a generation of brain-damaged children.

When the World Health Organization tested the camp residents’ blood for lead in 2004, the readings for 90 percent of the children were off the scale, higher than the medical equipment was capable of measuring. The measurements from the camps were much higher than in the surrounding population and at levels that exceeded any region WHO had previously studied. Twelve children had exceptionally high blood lead levels, greater than 45 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, more than four times the amount that causes brain damage.

Such children fall into the category of “acute medical emergency” and require immediate hospitalization. Instead, the Roma children have remained in the camps, ingesting lead through the air, the dirt they play in and through their clothes dusted with lead tailings while drying on laundry lines. Even before their birth, lead enters them as they grow inside their mothers’ wombs from the water they drink.

‘Conceived in lead’

“They are conceived in lead,” said Paul Polansky, head of mission for the Society for Threatened Peoples International. The Switzerland-based organization is dedicated to publicizing the plight of people who are menaced by such threats but have few prominent advocates.

“They have to be immediately evacuated from the camps and medically treated. The only hope is to get them abroad,” he said.

One reason the situation has become so dire is that the Roma are not considered refugees by the U.N. but rather “internally displaced people.” That means they do not fit U.N. criteria for financing their resettlement abroad.

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