FYI
http://tinyurl.com/ys8may [Indybay]
Despite Continuing Threats
DU Expert Pushes on with Pursuit of Truth
By Brian Covert
Independent Journalist
August 6, 2007 San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/08/06/18439097.phpKYOTO, JAPAN - If it seems that Dr. Asaf Durakovic's visits to Japan are
always preceded by violent threats and harassment back home in North
America, it is only because that is a constant reality for him.
Just before coming to Japan last year to appeal the deadly dangers of
depleted uranium to the Japanese government and public, his family received
a spate of threats by telephone back in the U.S. His latest Japan visit, his
third to this country, was preceded earlier this year by the ransacking of
his Washington D.C. home.
"Nothing was stolen from the house, but every single paper in my house was
scrutinized," Durakovic, 64, said in a recent interview here. "And I don't
know who did it. I have no idea. It was reported to the police [but] the
police were helpless" in finding the culprits. The windows of his car, he
adds, were smashed out earlier this year at his home in Canada.
And that's not counting what Durakovic calls the "betrayal" of the
organization he heads, the Toronto-based Uranium Medical Research Centre, by
outside infiltrators over the past year or the mysterious hit-and-run
incident in Toronto that targeted some of his colleagues in front of a
church on a quiet Sunday morning.
These anonymous acts of violence over the past year, he says, are the kind
of unfortunate price that all conscientious scientists throughout history
have had to pay in trying to get the truth out - in his case, the truth
about depleted uranium (DU), a lethal waste product of the uranium
enrichment process that has become a critical part of modern-day warfare.
Many doctors and scientists have joined the soup kitchen because of speaking
up against the obvious injustices that are going on in the world," Durakovic
said. He says he intends to keep on talking publicly about DU despite the
ongoing pressures to quit.
He was recently in Kyoto, the ancient Japanese capital, to do just that
before an audience of a couple hundred students and scholars at the
prestigious Doshisha University. His speaking appearances are generally
warmly received by the public in Japan, if not ignored by the Japanese
government and mainstream media.
Durakovic's troubles, of course, date back far beyond this year or last: As
a military insider, he had served at the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army
Medical Corps during the 1990-91 "Operation Desert Shield" phase of the
Persian Gulf War attack on Iraqi military forces. Upon returning to the
States, he was appointed chief of nuclear medicine at the Department of
Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Wilmington, Delaware. He recalls that a
group of American veterans who had served in Iraq were referred to him with
apparent traces of uranium in their bodies. Durakovic ordered diagnoses on
the soldiers and the tests, he says, came back positive.
The test records later were supposedly lost somewhere along the line by U.S
military officials; Durakovic then did more tests and came up with the same
positive results. "So it was obvious the [U.S.] government lied," Durakovic
told this writer in an interview in Osaka, Japan last year.
The pressure on Durakovic to immediately cease his testing of American
veterans for depleted uranium poisoning in their bodies was steadily raised,
including from the chief of the military hospital where he worked. Durakovic
was fired from the hospital in February 1997. He never got his job back. He
went on that year to found the nonprofit Uranium Medical Research Centre in
Toronto to continue testing for depleted uranium and to challenge official
claims of DU's minimal risks to humans and the environment. His team has
since gone to Afghanistan and Iraq to collect and test DU samples directly
from civilians, as well as from U.S. military veterans who are now
Stateside.
Over the past year, Durakovic and his colleagues have continued presenting
their findings at scientific gatherings and public forums around the world.
Durakovic himself last year won the "2004 Nuclear-Free Future Education
Award" in India in recognition of his work.
His team's tests for DU contamination continue to come up positive, he says.
The evidence has hit especially close to home for Durakovic: Two of his UMRC
field staff members fell ill after spending a few days in Samawah, Iraq,
collecting DU samples in 2003. One of them, Tedd Weyman, remains nearly
incapacitated to this day with severe respiratory problems. "It is alarming
because he [Weyman] only stayed in the area for eight days," Durakovic said.
"Now, I'm asking everybody to use their common sense and think of what might
have happened to people who were stationed there for three, four, six
months."
That includes the hundreds of Japanese Self-Defense Force soldiers still
stationed in Samawah, the same area in Iraq where Durakovic's team had
confirmed DU contamination. An estimated 500 Japanese soldiers recently
departed for Samawah with great fanfare from an SDF base in Itami, Hyogo
Prefecture in western Japan. How DU will affect those and other Japanese
soldiers now based in Iraq - ostensibly to help shore up the U.S.
occupation - remains to be seen, as the Japanese press and even opposition
political parties are mostly mute on the subject of depleted uranium. But
Durakovic says he would "very much appreciate an opportunity to be
introduced to some of those [Japanese] veterans" and hopefully test them for
DU someday.
His fight to reveal the truth about DU, he maintains, is not about merely
confronting the Pentagon or the U.S. Department of Defense, but also
standing up to what he calls the "political-industrial complex" of other
countries - such as Britain and Canada - that he sees as stonewalling or
trying to whitewash the facts and data surrounding depleted uranium.
"The Department of National Defence of Canada conducted a worthless study
[of DU] in which millions of dollars were spent, using the wrong population,
the wrong methodology and wrong specimens to come to the wrong conclusions,"
Durakovic said. "And their wrong conclusions were that there is no risk of
DU because they found nothing. But our team found DU, our team found sick
people, our team found catastrophic dimensions of radioactive warfare. .And
I asked the people from Canada: 'Why didn't you use a washing machine to
measure uranium isotopes? Because your methodology is as equally insensitive
as a washing machine'."
If Durakovic has faith in anything, it is in the power of science to rise
above all forms of politics. "Eventually, the truth of scientific
information will prevail. Political parties rise and fall. Governments and
kingdoms rise and fall. Swords and crowns can be dug [from] the mud of dirty
rivers But scientific facts will always remain unchallenged."
"That is what we have to encounter today," he adds. "In the unpleasant
reality of radioactive warfare, somebody has to be taking the consequences
for the work that is not according to the tastes of the current political
opinions." His plans for the coming year include continued testing of the
remaining 120-plus DU samples his team has taken from people in Iraq, as
well as DU testing of civilians in Port Hope, Canada and Padukah, Kentucky
in the U.S. - places in North America with their own histories of nuclear
contamination and cover-up.
So for now, despite all the threats and harassment, Dr. Asaf Durakovic
pushes on with his DU research, undeterred by the ideological winds of time:
"We were not afraid of the communist secret police. I lived in communist
Yugoslavia and I was not afraid of that. So I'm not going to be afraid of
free countries either."
Brian Ohkubo Covert is an independent journalist based in Hyogo, Japan.
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