UNMIK began relocating people from the worst-affected camps in 2006 -- moving them to other camps that remained open until 2010 to 2013 -- but for some residents this was too late.

Bajram Babajboks, 65, claims that there was no single member of his family -- four daughters, seven sons and 60 nieces and nephews -- “who is not a victim of lead toxins.”

“It’s the doctors who say it,” he told AFP, showing the latest blood test results.

In February 2016, a panel of experts appointed by the UN -- following complaints by 138 Roma -- came up with a 79-page report examining the claims of poisoning.

It cited tests conducted by the World Health Organisation in 2004, showing most children in the most exposed camps had “above acceptable” lead levels in their blood and that “more than 80 percent of soils in the camps were ‘unsafe’ because of lead contamination.”

An environmental medicine specialist, Klaus-Dietrich Runow, took hair tests in the camps in 2005 with “the highest ever seen (results) in the values of heavy metal in human hair samples.”

The panel concluded that UNMIK had failed “to comply with applicable human rights standards in response to the adverse health condition caused by lead contamination in the IDP camps and the consequent harms suffered by the complainants.”

Piles of industrial waste still litter the ground where the now-dismantled tents of the Zitkovac camp once stood. Contaminated dust “covered the camp as soon as the wind blew,” recalled Veli Jashari.

“My son was born disabled, with his legs paralyzed,” said the 58-year-old, as his son Jetullah, seated in a wheelchair, watched other children playing with a small stray dog.

"I dream of standing on my feet someday. I want to be like the others. I want to go to school,” said Jetullah, now 16.

Jashari said his second son, five-year-old Sejdullah, was also paralyzed -- although he was born after the family left the camp. His father suspects he inherited the lead-poisoning.

According to the WHO, children are “particularly vulnerable to the neurotoxic effects of lead, and even relatively low levels of exposure can cause serious and in some cases irreversible neurological damage.”

But no exhaustive survey of the camps’ victims has been done -- which, to the Roma community, is additional evidence of discrimination.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in May this year expressed the organization’s “profound regret for the suffering endured by all individuals” living in the camps.

As an “exceptional measure,” he decided to set up a trust fund to implement assistance projects for the Roma community.

But Kujtim Pacaku, a former Roma MP in Kosovo’s parliament, said it was “immoral to make up for the mass abuse only with money.”

Like other Romas calling for justice, he wants the case investigated and accountability established before sending “a message to everyone: you cannot treat people like that just because they are Roma.”

In June, Human Rights Watch said that the “UN’s refusal to take responsibility here undermines its ability to press governments to remedy their own human rights abuses.”

Artan Bajrami, 36, said he “would have never agreed to go to a camp” if he had known about “the danger that was waiting there.”

Born in one of the camps, his 15-year-old son walks with a limp because of a deformity on his foot.

Another teenager, 16-year-old Erduan Masurica, has a similar affliction.

In addition, Masurica cannot go to school “because he stutters, is mentally behind, and plays only with small kids,” said his mother Elhame, 33, who gave birth to him in 2001 in the Cesmin Lug camp.

Thanks to international aid, particularly from the European Union, permanent new houses have been built in Mahalla.

But in addition to the unemployment and poverty that face Roma people throughout the Balkans, those in Mitrovica still deal with the area’s toxic fallout.

“This is not the Roma Mahalla any longer. It is a lead-poisoned neighborhood,” Babajboks said.