CZECH GULF WAR VETERANS ORDERED TO UNDERGO EXAMS.

Byline: Jan Stojaspal The New York Times

The Czech Defense Ministry has announced that it has ordered medical examinations for all Czech soldiers who served in the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf in light of recent reports that many of the veterans may have fallen ill from exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons.

Several of the Czech veterans have come forward in recent days to say that they have ailments similar to those reported by thousands of American troops who served in the Gulf War, including gastrointestinal problems and chronic fatigue.

In announcing the checkups, the ministry said this week that the medical examinations of the estimated 150 Czech soldiers who served in the Gulf War would be ``complex and comprehensive'' and that investigators would review related medical records.

Vladimir Suman, the Czech deputy defense minister, said he decided to order the checkups after meeting with a group of ailing Gulf War veterans at an awards ceremony earlier this month.

In an interview, he said the decision had nothing to do with an article last week in the New York Times about chemical detections by Czech troops during the war and how many of those veterans had subsequently fallen ill.

The article has been widely circulated in government circles in Prague, the Czech capital.

The Czech army is renowned for its chemical detection equipment and training, and its sole responsibility in the Gulf War was the detection of Iraqi chemical agents.

The government here has insisted that there is no evidence of a link between the illnesses of Gulf War veterans and the chemical weapons they detected during the war. The defense ministry shut down a program to monitor their health two years ago because of what it described as a ``lack of interest'' among the veterans.

Suman said that only 39 soldiers had come for follow-up health examinations after the war and that ``not a single one of these examinations have indicated that there were any health problems that would have come from the gulf.''

He said that the new round of checkups would begin next month. ``We hope that our investigation will settle the matter once and for all,'' he said.

While the defense ministry has refused to release a roster of Czech soldiers who served in the gulf, 30 of the veterans were tracked down for interviews. And of those, 11 say they have suffered serious ailments since the war. Seven of them attribute their ailments to their service in the Gulf War.

``I'm not the man I used to be,'' said one of them, Jozef Jakubec, 30, who had been a lieutenant in the army and quit three years ago to become a police officer. ``When I returned from the gulf, I suffered from stomach problems.''

He said he used to jog 10 miles a day. ``Now,'' he said, ``I get out of breath when I walk up the stairs.'' He said the skin on his face kept drying and peeling off.

Jakubec said his chemical detection team in the gulf twice detected sarin, a nerve gas, and he worried that biological agents may have been released as well, given the severity of his health problems. ``My stomach gets upset when I eat anything,'' he said. ``I feel like vomiting. My head spins.''

Emil Kratochvil, 61, a 40-year army veteran who retired in 1992 as a colonel, said he had no health problems when he first returned home from the gulf. ``But in May 1993, two years after returning, I started having muscle pains, and in the fall I stopped walking.''

``I couldn't put my socks on,'' he said. ``My wife had to help me. I couldn't slice bread or unlock the door.'' Doctors at the Central Military Hospital in Prague ``told me I was just getting old,'' he said, ``but I had no problems before the war.''

One of the Gulf War veterans, Jan Huzan, died last year of stomach cancer at the age of 52, and his widow, Eva Huzanova, 50, said her husband fell sick about a year after he returned home. ``He got terrible cramps of the stomach and his vomit was black,'' she said. ``The doctors took out three-fourths of his stomach, but the scar would not heal.''

``It's terrible to see your husband who used to be healthy and weighed 80 kilograms (176 pounds) lose weight to 50 kilograms (110 pounds),'' she said. ``He believed he contracted it in the gulf. He never complained about stomach problems before.''

Like Gulf War veterans in the United States, soldiers here have long complained that their government has no interest in determining the cause of their health problems, and several said they had no confidence that there would ever be an honest evaluation of whether chemical or biological weapons had made them sick.

Peter Zelinsky, a spokesman for the Association of Gulf Veterans, said, ``We don't trust the defense ministry.''

``Why are they interested in our health condition now?'' asked Zelinsky, 36, who resigned from the army about six months after he returned home from the war. ``Why weren't they interested a year or two ago?''

He continued: ``The whole effort is pointless. Do you think they will acknowledge that some of us are sick? I would really like to know what they are after. And even if they find somebody who is sick, they will say it is not connected to the gulf.''

Lt. Col. Lubomir Smehlik, who commanded the Czech troops in the gulf and said he had had no health problems, said he believed Czech officials ``want to give the impression that they are working quickly and effectively, but they are not willing to look at the core of the problems while they continue to use people as test rabbits.''

Lt. Col. Peter Fuzak, a spokesman for the defense ministry, rejected the suggestion that the Czech government was not interested in finding the truth about the health of Gulf War veterans. He said that in ordering a new round of medical examinations, ``our purpose is to show goodwill'' and to demonstrate ``that the army is not covering anything up.''