BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

23/04/2006

20 years on, Chernobyl accident still festers in Belarus

SABALI, Belarus, April 23, 2006 (AFP) - As the food delivery truck rolls into Sabali on its twice-weekly visit, elderly residents emerge from among the wreckage of this near-deserted village, the men red-faced and scruffy, the women neatly turned out in shawls and headscarves.

"Twenty years have passed and our organisms have got used to it, but for young people there's no way to live here," said Piotr Ivanenko, 79, as he recalled the mass evacuation that followed the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and his later decision to return, a decision that a few others also took.

When the village was evacuated, looters arrived and "sold everything off for a few bottles," recalled 75-year-old Antonina Dedenko bitterly, as she remembered the traumatic process of evacuation and surveyed the caved-in wooden cottages that now line Sabali's roads.

Sabali's 72 residents appear determined to stay put in this village that lay directly in the path of the radiation that on April 26, 1986 spewed from the Chernobyl nuclear power station, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of here in neighbouring Ukraine.

But the decision to let residents return to areas that were long considered too contaminated for habitation has fuelled a bitter dispute in which Belarus' authoritarian leader, President Alexander Lukashenko, sometimes appears closer to Western governments than some of his opposition critics.

Lukashenko was expected to ram home his support for rehabilitating contaminated zones this week on a visit to southern Belarus marking the accident's 20th anniversary.

The government is aiming at the "sustainable development of afflicted regions and the multi-faceted rehabilitation of living conditions for people in the contaminated territories," Lukashenko said in a statement on April 20.

Western scientific bodies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) have for several years been saying that more harm than good might have been caused by the traumatic process of evacuation to ill-prepared new towns.

In a controversial report last autumn the WHO said that Belarus' substantial health problems might have less to do with radiation than with lifestyles that are common to many ex-Soviet states, such as high rates of alcoholism, smoking and abortion.

"People are still deeply traumatised from the whole episode and we want to see them getting decent, accurate information and put the accident behind them and get on with their lives," the head of the WHO's radiation programme, Michael Repacholi, told AFP in Minsk this week.

"When you go to contaminated areas, radiation levels are not much more than background levels" elsewhere in the world, he said.

But such comments are not welcomed among opposition groups in the southern provincial capital Gomel, whch have long accused Lukashenko of playing down the scale of Chernobyl's consequences.

Since 1989, opposition groups have taken to mounting annual anti-government protests on the anniversary of the accident calling for greater openess and democracy.

At the Gomel office of the opposition United Civil Party, officials complain they have been forbidden from mounting a protest this year. One of the organisors, Vladimir Katsora, was handed a 10-day jail term last Thursday for distributing leaflets calling for a protest.

Activist Viktor Karneyenka points to a camera that has appeared on the roof of a neighbouring building in recent days and is trained on the United Civil Party's office, placed there, he believes, by the KGB secret service.

The authorities' treatment of Yury Bandazhevsky, a cancer scientist who accused the authorities of downplaying the Chernobyl disaster, has also heightened suspicions on the part of the opposition about almost anything the government says about the nation's health.

Bandazhevsky, a former head of Gomel's Medical Institute, was arrested in 1999 and jailed on charges of taking bribes from students that his supporters say were trumped up. He was released in August 2005 after suffering severe weight loss and other health problems due to his treatment, and this week took up the offer of a research post in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand.

Another issue serving to alienate the opposition from the authorities is a long-standing suspicion that when the Chernobyl accident occurred, Soviet authorities used cloud-seeding technology to cause radioactive clouds to release their rain over southern Belarus rather than over Moscow.

"We know this was a political decision of the politburo.... The concept of forcing people to inhabit the most polluted regions, to continue to produce food there is bad and dangerious for our nation, for future generations," said Vintsuk Vyachorka, leader of the Belarussian Popular Front.

On one thing the opposition and the WHO do agree: that a lack of free media is inhibiting this country on Europe's eastern edge from moving forward.

"We recognise that lack of media openess is a problem," said Repacholi. "We want to give people what the science says."

Source:

http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read/8818

Google