Sick, bleeding and losing nails: The hidden cost of war in Bratunac

14 January 2001: Robert Fisk meets the children who played with Nato’s uranium

A Bosnian Serb soldier measures radiation levels at a factory in the town of Bratunac (EPA)

Sladjana Sarenac remembers the pieces of a depleted-uranium (DU) bomb that she picked up outside her home in Sarajevo. “It glittered and I did what all children do,” she says. “I was six years old and I pretended to make cookies out of the bits of metal and the soil in the garden. Then I hid the pieces on a shelf because my puppy, Tina, was playing with it.”

Sladjana is now 12 and has been seriously ill ever since. Her nails have repeatedly fallen out of her fingers and toes. She has suffered internal bleeding, constant diarrhoea and vomiting. When her Serbian parents fled their home in the Sarajevo suburb of Hadjici after the Dayton Accord, she took her dog with her. It had three puppies. Then Tina died. Then the puppies. Sladjana has a desperately pale face and tired eyes.

Everyone tells her she will be all right. I tell her that, too. Sladjana’s parents spend 450 German marks a month (£140) for her medicines – she takes 2mg of Benesedin twice a day, and 600mg of magnesium once a day – but the family are too poor to pay the bills. In their refuge home in Bratunac, the electricity has been cut off. The landlady wants them out. And, needless to say, no one from Nato has bothered to enquire about Sladjana’s mysterious sickness.