Military pollution casts shadow over paradise Sardinia

 "My son died at 29 after he did military service in Capo Teulada. He got cancer. Medical records showed there were thorium, steel, iron, strontium and all and some in his pancreas and liver," Giancarlo Piras, a desperate father from Sardinia island, told Xinhua.
Why is Sardinia the less populated but also the most allegedly polluted region of Italy? Capo Teulada, along with Salto di Quirra (PISQ) and Capo Frasca are the three military bases which along with other smaller ones comprise a total of 24,000 hectares in this paradise of the Mediterranean with beautiful beaches and diverse wildlife.
Sardinia only has roughly 1.6 million inhabitants, but is host to 60 percent of Italy's state-owned lands used by NATO, non-NATO forces and weapon makers for all kinds of live testing and exercises which are suspected by experts to have a dramatically adverse impact on the local population and environment.
ABNORMAL DEATHS AND DISEASES
"My husband used to work in our plot of land adjacent to the military base of Capo Teulada. In 1998 he was affected by cancer," Elisa Monni of the Amparu (Protect me) organization, whose goal is the protection of the health of Sardinians, said.
Monni recalled she used to play in the military lands when she was a small child.
"It was normal. In my life, I have always seen soldiers around me," she said.
"After my husband got ill, I started collecting the dramatic stories of many residents and I found out the truth," she told Xinhua.
With 13,000 hectares also used by local shepherds to graze their sheep, the PISQ is the biggest scientific military base in Europe. Analyses run by the national medical authority have shown a clear link between the military experiments and the high incidence, some 65 percent, of tumors among shepherds working within 2.7 km of the shooting range of the PISQ.
"In a built-up area near the PISQ inhabited by out of less than 150 people, leukemia has killed 21," said Mariella Cao, a middle school teacher of French and head of the Gettiamo le Basi (Throw the Bases) organization which wants the demilitarization of Sardinia, citing official analyses.
Veterinary investigations have also highlighted a connection between the military presence and the birth deformities registered in the livestock, some of which "distressing," Cao said.
Nevertheless, the local people sell cheese for a living and it is still possible to freely enter the PISQ.
"Authorities want to give an idea of openness and so they let the sheep graze on contaminated land," she added.
MILLIONAIRE BUSINESS OF MILITARY BASES
Italian Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti pledged at a parliamentary briefing last month to start a dialogue with Sardinia "aimed, if possible, at reducing the weight of military presence in the region."
She restated, however, that the military exercises are "indispensable."
Meanwhile, Cao told Xinhua "The answers provided so far by the Italian governments have been deceptive since we started to denounce the situation early in 1999. Some officials have even openly denied the health risk of living close to the military bases."
NATO regulations require that they are cleaned after each test to eliminate contamination, but this is not done, she said.
Military information leaked to the press in 2003 revealed the rent money of the bases for weapon makers was 50,000 euros (63,000 U.S. dollars) per hour.
"But as the bases are generally rent for 10 or 15 days uninterruptedly, it means that the Italian state makes around 1.2 million euros per day, or much more considered that up to three different companies often operate in PISQ at the same time," Cao noted.
"The rent money is unknown for troops, which since the 1950s - when the bases were created - can use this land to test everything they want on the only condition that they pay good money," she stressed.
Military forces from Libya, the United States, Israel and other countries have all quartered in Sardinia over the past years, she added.
The Italian Defense Ministry, Health Ministry and Agriculture Ministry all declined comments on the issue of Sardinia's military bases when recently contacted by Xinhua.
MILITARY OFFICIALS PUT ON TRIAL
In 2011 publicity to the case given by the Sardinian press and grassroots organizations led public prosecutor Domenico Fiordalisi to start an investigation.
Fiordalisi sought to exhume the bodies of shepherds in the area for further analyses, which showed that the unexpectedly high levels of cancer incidence and other diseases, problems not normally seen there in the past, could be linked to the military experiments.
Extremely fine dusts, which experts said do not stop in the lungs when breathed but penetrate into other internal organs, were even found in the brain and bone marrow of some dead shepherds.
The investigation led to eight military top officials of the Italian army being committed to stand trial for alleged environmental disaster. The trial, due to start in September, has been postponed and is set to begin at the end of this month.
SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE OF CONTAMINATION
"When I found heavy metals inside a number of people, also young, with leukemia and malformed animals, all living in places which are extremely clean except for the military industry, I obviously asked myself whether there could be a correlation between those diseases and the tests," Maria Antonietta Gatti, a renowned scientist who along with other experts conducted the analyses ordered by Fiordalisi, told Xinhua.
Gatti, who is International Fellow of the Union of the Societies of Biomaterials and Engineering and professor at the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), highlighted the scientific evidence of such correlation.
"We used new inter-disciplinary diagnostic techniques which are the result of top-level European projects," she said.
"Brass, steel, iron, tungsten and other materials such as aluminum, which is linked to Alzheimer's disease and other pathologies, are being released in military experiments of which we do not know anything," she warned. The activities in Sardinia's bases are covered by military and industrial secrets.
"Nobody should go there nor should eat the cheese or drink the milk of those livestock. There are cows which continue to slip, they are contaminated. The environmental disaster is even visible from the satellite. You can see an area close to PISQ where a blade of grass does not grow," Gatti said.