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fields Kouchner

In January 2009, the BBC journalist Nick Thorpe visited with his team the former concentration camps Roma / Ashkali Office in north Mitrovica (Kosovo), to report on children who suffer from lead poisoning. The World Health Organization had already said that this was the worst lead poisoning never occurred in Europe and perhaps in the world.

After visiting several families and children who watched the movie camera with them brown eyes without hope, he turned to me with disgust and asked: "Who is responsible for this tragedy? I know!"


Although the Kosovo Liberation Army (ALK) and the ethnic Albanian extremists started this senseless tragedy during the summer of 1999, could do so simply because the French NATO troops allowed this ethnic cleansing took place. It did not happen in one night. It took three months for all the Roma and Ashkali families (about 8,000 people, the largest Gypsy community in Kosovo) to abandon their homes.

A month after the start, I felt the diaspora of the Roma in Mitrovica who sought refuge in the UNHCR camp where I worked as a consultant to the UN for their problems "gypsies". I took a car loan and drove toward the scene. It was a torn heart to see parents carrying terrified children cried, dragging suitcases and all they could bring along: a pot, a mattress, a radio. When I arrived, many Gypsies were begging French soldiers armed to the teeth to save them. I joined them, asking the French soldiers to intervene. A French officer told me rudely that NATO troops were not a police force. Then I was detained and taken to the headquarters of the French army in a hotel in the city center. I seized the photos and told me that I was not allowed to return to the French sector of Kosovo.

A week later I returned, using a permit printing with a different name. I found some 800 Gypsies Mitrovica Serb refugees in a school on the opposite side of the river Ibar. They had no food, no soap. The bathrooms were overflowing. Still no aid agency had discovered them, or, some say, ignored them. Through Oxfam Pristina to bring water for drinking and hygiene products, and then report their situation to UNMIK. A few days after the UNHCR brought to the Gypsies of food parcels.

Serbs in mid-September she wanted the building for the school year. So French troops and UN police moved the Gypsies in tents on an area near the village of abandoned toxic Zitkovac.

This time I protested directly with the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (RSSG), dr. Bernard Kouchner. David Reily, head of the UNHCR, was with me. Deposits of toxic waste surrounding the gypsy camp. You could smell the toxic elements. When the wind blew, the lead dust covered everything and made it difficult to breathe. Dr. Kouchner, a popular French humanitarian activist, he assured me that Gypsies were left alone on that site for 45 days. Then were returned to their homes, protected by French troops or taken as a refugee in another country. Said to be a doctor. He understood the danger of a threat to the lives to live on or near toxic waste repositories. He said: "As a doctor, and as chief administrator of Kosovo, I would be miserable if this threat to the health of children and pregnant women continue for one more day." He also said that the situation was a crime.

In November I returned to the United States to write about my experiences in Kosovo. When I returned the next spring to visit the settlements of minorities in Kosovo and report their conditions to the Society for Threatened Peoples (GFBV), I visited these Gypsies of Mitrovica. They were returned to their homes or in a third country. Now they were housed in temporary barracks, all on contaminated land.

I was also shocked to discover that my friend David Reily, 50, died in January in his apartment in Pristina for a heart attack. His replacement, a New Zealander named Mac Namara, refused to receive and discuss the plight of these 800 Roma / Ashkali UNHCR camps contaminated by lead. However, I was encouraged because the dr. Kouchner had ordered to the UN medical team to take blood samples from gypsy children living on toxic deposits, to see if their lives were in danger.

went back in the USA before the results were disclosed. But when I returned to Kosovo the following spring (2001) and found that the Gypsies were still living in these three areas, administered by the Swiss Relief Act and by their development partners: Norwegian Church Aid, I imagined that the medical team had Kouchner found a secure site.

Although I Kouchner and in 2000 we exchanged correspondence on the situation of other Roma and Ashkali, their lack of freedom of movement in other parts of Kosovo and the lack of humanitarian aid, I did not see Kouchner.

Now living full time in Kosovo, I kept in regular contact with Gypsies in the fields placed on toxic land. NCA and the ACT in 2002 when they stopped delivering food and hygiene products, began to provide aid to Gypsies little I could find. Romany also took two sisters (Tina and Dija) to teach better hygiene for women and children of the camp, although it was difficult to keep the children clean the dust that rose from the heap, as they passed outside the most time.

not realized that there was something tragically wrong in the field until the two sisters told me that no Romani women in the field complained about a high number of abortions and that many of the children were always sick (vomiting and fell in coma). Then some of the children died.

Death I made clear ideas about what was happening in the camps was to Jenita Mehmeti, aged four. Kindergarten of the field when her teacher realized that Jenita was losing his memory and had difficulty walking. He was taken to the local hospital in Mitrovica, and from there moved to emergency by ambulance to a hospital better equipped to Kraguevac (Serbia). Jenita stayed there for three months before his death. The cause of death was diagnosed as "herpes" infection is not fatal unless a malfunction of the immune system. As for AIDS, lead poisoning destroys the immune system especially in children under the age of six years.

Immediately after the death of Jenita in 2004, a UN medical team led by the WHO (World Health Organization) had a blood test to many children in all three fields, to see if they had lead poisoning, as their symptoms pointed him out. The results shocked everyone. The levels of lead in many children were higher than medical equipment could measure. In November, a WHO report indicated that some of the lead levels in children of those fields were the highest ever recorded in medical literature. Adapted from

Mahalla

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The man who will

It is not easy. I had already decided to start this post so then I remain, rigorasamente, faithful to the line. True to the line because this set of religious images, but more mystical and religious, Giovanni Lindo Ferretti like the good (to you both, of course). I'm not saying that there is a Giovanni Lindo Ferretti good and bad ... there are just two.

Religion here is a religion of the Apennines, is a religion of sweat and toil, is a religion of people who love their neighbors and their land, is a true religion, far from the marble Roman amphitheater and the Baroque Bernini. And 'real people, people of flesh and bone, blood and tears (such as financial maneuver tremontiana) makes you want to split the screen in front of you and go there, to them, ask how did they resist at remain straight in front of the most disgusting of total war and violence for its own sake. E'una fiaba forse, vicina a quella raccontata da Guillermo del Toro (Il Labirinto del Fauno), una fiaba italiana però, più dura di quelle che vengono raccontate fuori dai nostri confini, più essenziale, povera di effetti speciali e animali antropomorfi. Antropomorfo. Mi viene in mente Lombroso, mi vengono in mente le sue deliranti teorie che per il cinema vanno benissimo; il regista lo sa e allora il traditore è li, Pepe, faccia da traditore. Faccia da culo. Un pò assomiglia a Tarantino, questo Pepe.

E'un film in cui non si salva nessuno ma si salvano tutti. E' forse questa la grande metafora della storia che ci viene raccontata. Muoiono tutti ma se ne salva uno, il più importante, si salva la speranza, si salva Gesù Cristo di noi altri, si salva l'uomo che sarà più che verrà. Si salvano tutti e non si salva nessuno: non si salvano i partigiani e la lora inconscienza ma si salva il loro amare la terra in cui abitano, non si salvano i tedeschi ma l'ufficiale della Wermacht si (è l'eco neorealista), non si salva la chiesa ma si salva la fede e via proseguendo.

Della tecnica non mi va di parlarne, il film è perfetto così com'è. Parlarne sarebbe inutile. Scusate per la fretta e l'approssimazione quasi bozzistica (??) ma l'ora è tarda e io sono tardo.

Saluti