(Recasts, adds air force chief quote in 4th para)
By Tara FitzGerald
MOSCOW, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Russian defence officials accused NATO on Thursday of using Serbia as a dumping ground for depleted uranium ammunition it needed to get rid of and called on the alliance to pay for any cleanup.
Russia's air force chief General Anatoly Kornukov denounced the Western military alliance for penny-pinching, saying NATO had used its 1999 air raids to dispose of depleted uranium munitions rather than dispose of them properly.
"It is clear to me they dropped the (munitions) they needed to destroy, as purely destroying them would have been several times more expensive than dropping them during bombing," he said in televised comments.
"Of course there is an (environmental) effect, there's no question about that. But at least we do not have these (munitions). We got out of this a long time ago and this is a totally incorrect approach," he said.
"All statements made on this matter by the official representatives of the U.S. administration, including (Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright, are aimed at amateurs," RIA Novosti quoted Kornukov as saying.
Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, the Defence Ministry's international relations chief and leading hawk, told Interfax news agency that NATO had a duty to check the health of all Yugoslavs, not just troops in Kosovo, and to foot the bill for any cleanup operation in the region.
"It is extremely important that NATO countries pay attention not only to damage which may have been caused to the health of servicemen in the...Kosovo operation, but to all damage caused in Yugoslavia, to its people and ecology," he said.
"All actions in assessing this damage and in dealing with the consequences must be conducted by countries of the North Atlantic alliance at their expense."
NATO ambassadors promised at a meeting on Wednesday to investigate the effects of depleted uranium but said it posed a minimal health risk. It pledged to do all it could to reassure troops and civilians worried by cancer scares.
Russia fiercely opposed NATO's 11-week 1999 air campaign on Yugoslav targets, launched in response to Belgrade's crackdown on the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo province. Moscow later contributed peacekeepers to a U.N.-backed force.
Russia says it wants to test as many as possible of its 10,000 Balkan veterans and the roughly 3,000 peacekeepers it has in Kosovo and 1,000 men stationed in Bosnia. So far, it has found no one suffering from leukaemia. ((Moscow newsroom +7 095 241 0101, fax +7 095 941 8538, moscow.newsroom@reuters.com))
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