NATO Faulted on Data for Unexploded Kosovo Bombs

One of the top U.N. officials in Kosovo criticized NATO on Friday for its failure to reveal the location of cluster bombs that have killed or maimed hundreds during the last year.

Dennis McNamara, the United Nations head of humanitarian assistance in Kosovo, said weapons-clearance experts are increasingly frustrated because they have insufficient information about the location of last year’s NATO strikes to enable them to remove unexploded bombs.

“Kids are picking up the cluster bombs and getting blown up because the cluster bombs have bright canisters which are very attractive,” McNamara said in Switzerland.

Since the end of the war a year ago, 94 people have been killed and more than 400 injured by land mines and unexploded bombs. McNamara said cluster bombs account for about 40% of the total casualties.

Unexploded mines and bombs account for the approximately 15 injuries a month that occur as people tend their crops, he said.

“It’s too high,” McNamara said.

He said he wrote to alliance commanders two months ago and renewed his concerns at a meeting with North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials in Brussels this week. Although some information had been passed on, it was much too slow, he said.

“We need information quickly because we need to clear the maximum number of cluster bombs this summer,” he told journalists.

A NATO spokesman in Brussels said that it is the United Nations’ responsibility to clear Kosovo of mines and cluster bombs and that NATO and the alliance-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo are providing all available information on the location of the bombs to the U.N. team.

Cluster bombs are made up of numerous small “bomblets” that scatter to create a wider area of explosion. NATO dropped many of them in its campaign last year to drive Serbian forces from Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic. Serbian forces in turn left a legacy of land mines.