Italy: Commission to investigate effects of depleted uranium on soldiers
01 August 2004
On 15 September 2004, the establishment of a parliamentary commission to investigate the effects of depleted uranium on Italian soldiers deployed in missions abroad was agreed. The Commission will be formed by ten senators and ten MPs appointed by the presidents of the two chambers. It will have a year to reach its conclusions, and powers of investigation that are similar to those of judges, including access to documents and the possibility of calling witnesses, authorities and experts to testify on this issue. The main scope of the Commission will be to investigate whether there is a risk of contamination in the region where Italian military personnel is deployed under UN control in Kosovo (KFOR), on the precautions adopted by the Defence ministry before, during and after their deployment, and whether there are cases that could be assessed as being similar to the so-called “Gulf War syndrome” among members of the Italian armed forces who have returned from Kosovo. The notion of “official State secrets” cannot be used to withold information from the Commission, although the Commission will be responsible for deciding what elements of its investigations will be divulged, and what elements will be subject to a regime of secrecy. Once its work has been completed, it will present a report to parliament and pass on its findings to the ordinary prosecuting authorities. Domenico Leggieri, a spokesman for the
Osservatorio Militare welcomed the decision, because “For the first time we will be able to submit all the documentation we have collected, from figures to medical assessments”, although he expressed “perplexity” over the possibility of the commission being purely formed by doctors and scientists.
Members of the families of military personnel claim that 30 Italian soldiers have died as a result of exposure to depleted uranium (DU) in peace-keeping missions in Somalia and the Balkans. They report that up to 300 persons may be suffering the consequences of exposure to depleted uranium. They compared their lack of protection with the hi-tech equipment worn by US soldiers who were operating in Somalia in 1993 and subsequently in the Balkans, reportedly dismissed as “exaggerated” by Italian officers on the ground, and complained about the fact that the Italian government and army refused to admit any responsibility for the deaths. In Somalia, gas masks were reportedly kept in a storehouse rather than being available for use by military personnel. In 2000, a ministerial commission (the Mandelli Commission) found that there was no relationship between leukaemia and tumours and depleted uranium, although it also noted that there was an anomalously high incidence of Hodgkin’s disease among military personnel deployed in the Balkans. The payment of damages has been blocked because it has not yet been ascertained whether depleted uranium on its own is sufficient to cause these health problems, or whether it acts in association with other factors.
On 14 September 2004, a delegation of relatives and members of the armed forces who are suffering from these diseases was heard in the Senate. They asked for the rights of their relatives to be upheld, and for the real responsibilities behind this phenomenon to be discovered. “They explained [to us] that our dead were already ill when they left, that every possible precaution had been adopted in the Balkans”, claimed the widow of a
carabiniere (member of Italy’s paramilitary police force) from a parachute division who died in 2000. They claimed that military hospitals took part in the erection of a “wall of silence” around their cases, by discharging and failing to carry out the necessary exhaustive tests on them. In one case, an officer who died in 2001 was released from a military hospital and chose to go to a civilian hospital for further tests, where he was found to have a tumour. The doctor who carried out the tests asked him: “Where have you been? It looks like you co