David Norris (Independent)

I am glad the Minister of State is in the House. I am sure he will be interested in what I have to say on this significant matter.

On 18 November, only a week ago, I attended a meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee on Human Rights at which a presentation was given by Mr. Polansky, head of mission, Kosovo Roma Refugee Foundation. He told an unimaginable story about the establishment of death camps in Europe. These were established not by the Nazis at the end of the Second World War but by the United Nations allied with a group called Action by Churches Working Together. I do not wish to impugn the Christian religion or even these people who may have been well intentioned in the beginning, but what they did was absolutely incomprehensible. They built what effectively is a death camp on one of the most polluted tailing stands from lead mines that exist throughout Europe — a toxic slag-heap of 100 million tonnes of lead waste.

To date 77 people have died in the camps. More than 50 women have aborted because of the lead poisoning. One mother and her child died in childbirth. Two of her surviving nine children were found to have the highest levels of lead pollution in their blood in medical history. Medical experts from Germany and the United States visited the camps and have said that every single child conceived or born within these camps will have irreversible brain damage. Articles appeared in the international press, in the International Herald Tribune and Bild Zeitung, the German newspaper which took eight children to Germany for medical treatment, and the body scans taken showed that the children had damaged organs and irreversible brain damage.

I will outline what happened. Ironically, on Bloomsday, 16 June 1999, the gypsies living in the Kosovo area, of whom there are approximately 130,000, were attacked by Albanian nationalists and driven out. More than 100,000 fled, 14,000 were left and some of them took refuge in a Serbian school house and were subsequently rehoused by the UN on these tailing ponds. Protests were made at the time but they were told they would be there for only 45 days. They are there nine years later.

The reason given was a legalistic one. The UN had signed contracts with local contractors so it was a case of to hell with the health of these people, they are expendable, they are only gypsies. This was a group who had already been targeted by the Nazis.

The United Nations health office for Mitrovica was asked by the UN administrator, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, who is now the French Foreign Minister, to do a medical survey of Mitrovica because so many UN personnel and French soldiers had been affected by the lead poisoning. He concluded that the entire city of Mitrovica was subject to lead poisoning and all its citizens had some degree of it. They were evacuated, but the gypsies remained. Instead of doing what various reports suggested should be done, namely, that the camps should be closed, they simply opened a jogging track, which they call the "alley of health". This kind of lead poisoning is singly contracted through the lungs, through breathing in, yet they have this alley of health. It is like the safe havens we were told about, a complete abuse of language, as is the alley of health.

With the assistance of the Action by Churches Working Together and the UN, they cut off the food supplies and then cut off the water supply. The people were drinking water from the tailing ponds and scavenging in heavily polluted rubbish tips. How Christian was that and how much was that in the line of the work of the United Nations?

In summer 2004 a special investigation was undertaken after a girl of four years of age died of lead poisoning. Blood samples showed that many of the children had lead levels higher than the World Health Organisation's analyser could register. They were off the scale. Nothing like that had been seen before. If lead levels are above 40 mg/dl of blood, irreversible brain damage occurs — it usually begins at the level of 10 mg/dl of blood — but these people had levels of 120 mg/dl of blood.

The United Nations then decided to study the problem. First, there was the legalistic approach, then the UN was out of its tree as far as medical knowledge is concerned and then it decided to undertake a study. The UN moved the people to a new camp, supposedly lead free, called Osterode. This was even worse. The UN spent €500,000 refurbishing the camp. It cemented over the ground and declared it lead free. The poisoning comes from the air so cementing the ground is no use whatever. Inevitably the people became more infected.

Then the UN tried tinkering with the people's diet. Dietary changes in the case of lead poisoning only affect 20% maximum and only then when they have been removed from the source of the contamination, but the UN did not do that. It carried out another study complete with some medical blood tests and so on, the findings of which it refused to share either with the gypsies or with international organisations. Random blood tests of 105 children in April 2008 showed staggering results. For many of the children living in the alleged lead free camp of Osterode, their lead levels had doubled since moving from the one that was now recognised to be polluted. In other words, the situation had become significantly worse.

A report was then completed by the USAID/Mercy Corp project. It called for the resettlement of 50 of the 120 families in the camps. There was no immediate medical solution and no proper evacuation — evacuation was not mentioned. The author had not even visited the camps. He did not know what he was talking about. Yet having spent €500,000, on the nonsensical refurbishment of an earlier death camp, they now spent €2.4 million on useless interventions.

I mentioned the legalistic futile approach of the authorities there and their seeking studies and reports, the findings of which they ignored. There is a compensation system under the UN rules, but the United Nations lawyers have steadfastly fought against the compensation claims. They have refused to co-operate with lawyers representing the gypsies. They have made no attempt to do so. The UN does not deny responsibility but it simply refuses to comply with its own ethical standards.

In 2005 the Society for Threatened Peoples, the largest NGO in Germany after the Red Cross, brought the leading German expert on toxic poisoning, Dr. Klaus Runow, to the camp. The UN tried to ban him but he managed to get 60 hair samples. They were sent to a well-known laboratory in the city of Chicago. The results showed that most of the children had the highest level of lead pollution in their blood in medical history and all of them had toxic levels of poisoning of 36 other heavy metals as well.

I will end by outlining something that happened in the past few months. Mr. Paul Polansky gave this account:

A few months ago another Gypsy baby died in Osterode. It was one month old and had been born with a large head, swollen belly and miniature legs. It woke at six in the morning, vomiting, and died twenty minutes later in hospital. Lead poisoning is a hideous and painful death for children. Four-year-old Jenita Mehmeti was attending the camp kindergarten when her teacher noticed she was losing her memory and finding it hard to walk. Jenita was sent back to her barracks where for the next three months she vomited several times a day, before becoming paralysed and dying.

When her two year old sister came down with the same symptoms the United Nations doctor for the city of Mitrovica refused to accept her as a patient or treat her because she was living one kilometre outside his jurisdiction. That is an appalling reversal and denial of the hippocratic oath. Luckily an NGO that has a conscience took her to Belgrade and saved her life. The United Nations intervened to save Albanian nationalist forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army and evacuated them to the United States of America, yet it has supervised the imprisonment of these people in unspeakable conditions.

I appeal to the Minister of State to take up this matter in the strongest possible way with the United Nations. It is an organisation for which I have great respect. It has its difficulties. It is the only fallible instrument we have to protect us against the likes of George Bush or Saddam Hussein and we need it, but when it is wrong, it must be slapped down and told that it must not behave in this barbarous fashion.