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The winds of Chernobyl: disappearing Belarus Trevor Mostyn First published by English PEN, 7 October 2004, www.englishpen.org IN JULY 2004 CAROLE SEYMOUR-JONES AND I WERE commissioned by English PEN's Writers in Prison Committee to go to Belarus. Our task was to visit Professor Yuri Bandazhevsky, a pathologist who had been given an 8-year sentence on highly questionable charges of accepting bribes from his students. Bandazhevsky had blown the whistle on a government cover-up of the impact of cesium 137 radiation from the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.Before landing in Minsk, we were warned, we should abandon all documents related to human rights and prepare for constant surveillance by the KGB, so we were surprised to be waved through the airport with smiles. Neither in the clean, neoclassical streets of the capital or in Grodny near the Polish border, was surveillance apparent. Belarus’s few remaining independent journalists see President Lukashenko’s regime as increasing demagogic. They believe that this forgotten country, sandwiched between a Europe that does not want it and a Russia that they believe threatens to absorb it, may become another Chechnya. In Grodny and Gomel we spoke openly with journalists recently released from prison for ‘insulting the president’ and for seeking information about ‘disappearances’, in particular that of a cameraman in1999 who had revealed that Belarus soldiers had fought on both sides in Chechnya. They told us that a reign of terror was developing. They said that President Lukashenko, elected ten years ago this last July, is turning into a demagogue and dragging Belarus into an unreal Soviet past. By manipulating the media and imprisoning journalists he is posing cynically, like a Tzar, as the country’s saviour from imagined enemies in the West. He is now calling for a referendum, which many believe will be rigged and which would give him a third term from 2006. Two new EU countries Poland and Lithuania, run along Belarus’s Western border, Ukraine along its Southern and Russia along its Eastern. The Russian border is open,and suppressed Belarusian newspapers are printed secretly in Russia’s Smolensk. We watched Belarusians queuing up for visas outside the Polish and Lithuanian embassies, a new and wretched experience. In the early days of his presidency,during the Yeltsin era when he had his eyes on the Russian presidency, President Lukashenko sought union with Moscow and became popular with Russians disgusted with the break-up of the Soviet Union and early defeat in Chechnya. Now he seeks federation and his relationship with Putin is humiliating. Putin regards Belarus as Russia’s potential 90th state. Europe does not want us, said the journalists, noting that EC President Romano Prodi had reassured the old EU countries that Belarus was not in line to join the club. Belarus is a country that has suffered. In the heart of the 18th century Pale of Settlement to which Jews expelled from Catherine 11’s Russia were forced to settle,Minsk was razed by the Nazis who slaughtered its numerous and brilliant Jewish population. Some two million Belarusians died and 90% of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed. Stalin had Minsk rebuilt as a Soviet showpiece by architects influenced by 19th century Italian city architecture and after 1991 an independent democracy appeared a reality but since 1994 Lukashenko has neutralised his enemies. As one writer in Minsk put it, “In Belarusian we have 51words for ‘pain’”. Although Chernobyl is in neighbouring Ukraine, seventy per cent of the radiation fell on Belarus. Much of the area has been evacuated but some have remained in villages along the edge of Belarus’s 30-kilometre exclusion zone. Thousands died from the accident and thousands more have contracted cancers and radiation-related diseases of the thyroid, heart and kidneys since then. Some scientists believe that much worse is to come. Belarus journalists, constantly harassed by a regime which makes criticism of the President an imprisonable offence, believe that 20 years are needed to reveal the full extent of the impact. All eyes, therefore, are now on the year 2006, a crucial year for Belarus. Bandazhevsky is now in a penal colony near Lida in the west, cut off from his family and his vital research facilities. Shortly before our arrival nine EU ambassadors had visited him without informing the government, flags flying from their cars. It caused a scandal and the government promptly ordered that permission must be sought for future visits. His wife Galina, a cardiologist, lost her job in a Minsk hospital to a girl just out of university and now works with Belrad, a radiation unit in Charity House, a building owned by the Russian Orthodox Church in a birch forest outside Minsk. She told us of her visits to the southern villages where the berries and mushrooms on which poor villagers depend are 300 times higher in Cesium than is normal. When we visited her auditors were trawling through her offices – probably an attempt at intimidation – and we had to interview her sitting on logs among the trees. We never received permission to visit Bandazhevsky so had to speak with him cautiously by telephone. We were determined to see the contaminated zone for ourselves. Sitting in a restaurant in Minsk’s neo-classical Frantsisk Skorina Street, we planned our trip with Olga, a young democracy activist. We chose from a menu headed ‘Soviet-style dishes’. The menu bore the picture of a woman in red. In her raised hand exhorting forward her comrades was a tray inscribed, “You can eat better today”. Across the road was Minsk’s popular Macdonalds. “Why do you want to go to the Chernobyl villages?”, asked Olga. “You can’t see radiation, you know. Do you expect to see horns growing out of the heads of the villagers?” From Minsk we drove down through deep forests to Mozhye, a town of wooden dachas with ornate, painted architraves. We expected to see a dying landscape but as we approached Narovlya close to the Chernobyl exclusion zone we saw fields of rye, orchards and herds of healthy cows. In Narovlya, with its huge statue of Leninand stand-alone golden hammer and sickle in the main square, we met Sergei, the guide Olga had organised, a charming 70-year-old. He had walked through the forests the day after the accident. Two weeks later he developed a radiation rash all over his legs but suffered no further complications.  Sergei took us to the banks of the Pripyat River and to the memorial to those who had died immediately after the accident. Despite high levels of radiation people were swimming and sunbathing. He pointed through the trees across the river where he said deadly plutonium patches had been identified. From Narovlya we drove forty kilometres on to the village of Kirov. The forest looked green and healthy and apples lay heavy on the trees behind the colourful wooden fencing. The centre of the village was like a ghost village with houses boarded up and grass growing in the streets so we were astonished to meet one family of farmers who seemed to be flourishing amid the silence. On a pole beside the farm was a nest with a family of storks. The young woman, Svetlana, held a tiny baby and was barefoot as was her 93-year-old grandmother. Svetlana, who ran the collective farm, said that the government was pretending that the problem was over. The only hospital had recently been closed down, subsidies to people who had stayed on had been lifted (only children now qualified), the machine to clean cars entering and leaving the villages had been stolen and not replaced and the government no longer took away the village milk to purify it. Back in Narovlya we went to the hospital. Outside stood a van marked “Chernobyl Children’s Project, Ireland”, similar to a radiation monitoring van we had seen outside Charity House. We expected to see people with leukemia and other radiation related diseases but the clinic’s buoyant doctor pointed out that this was only an emergency clinic. She smiled and shrugged, “The whole country is poisoned with radiation. Not just here.” Later we saw from a radiation map that the road we had taken to Kirov passed through zones of high density radiation. In a bar off one of the belle époque streets of Gomel, the southern capital where Bandazhevsky had headed the medical hospital until a colleague had betrayed him, we met a young reporter called Natasha. She had written for the independent newspaper BDG on Bandazhevsky and had criticised President Lukashenko for his increasing heavy-handedness. “I began receiving telephone calls at 3 am. A voice just said, ‘We will bury you’. It was obviously the KGB. When I went to the police they argued that he had threatened to bury me, not to kill me. So, of course, they took no action”. She also told us how Bandazhevsky, two days before his conviction, had been kidnapped by KGB agents posing as Ukrainian MPs and had been saved from possible death by Belarus border guards when he cried for help. We dined in a restaurant full of dancing couples and loud music; “Much too Soviet”, said our young translator dismissively. Outside, the tall girls of Gomel in their tiny skirts were doing the Passeggiata along the broad pavements. We were served pork in pancakes, a local dish, but avoided short-rooted vegetables such as mushrooms and avoided milk. Belarusians seemed to take no precautions but as Olga had said,“The problem is that you can’t see radiation.” Chernobyl all happened a long time ago and Belarusian journalists told us that the Western nuclear lobby supports the government cover-up. They also believe that catastrophe lies ahead. For more information on the Writers in Prison Committee, click here © Trevor Mostyn 2007 - www.trevormostyn.com |
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