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The invisible poison
TREVOR MOSTYN
Trevor Mostyn
reports on his visit to Belarus to try to
secure the release of a scientist who blew the whistle on nuclear
contamination.
The Oxford Writer, no 36, February 2005
As well as being a WiO
member, Trevor Mostyn is deputy chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of
English PEN. In July of last year he and PEN’s Carole Seymour-Jones,
visited southern Belarus, where 70% of the radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl
accident fell. Much of the area has been evacuated but some people have remained
in villages along the edge of a 30-kilometre exclusion zone. Thousands died from
the accident and thousands more have since contracted cancers and
radiation-related diseases of the thyroid, heart and kidneys. Some scientists
believe that worse is to come.
SITTING
IN A RESTAURANT in Minsk’s neo-classical Frantsisk Skorina Street, we
planned our trip to southern Belarus with Olga, a young democracy activist. We
chose from a menu headed ‘Soviet-style dishes’. It bore the picture of a woman
in red. In her raised hand exhorting her comrades forward 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 think the villagers will have horns growing out of
their heads ?’
We had come to try to help
secure the release of Professor Yuri Bandazhevsky, formerly head of the Gomel
medical university in the south. Bandazhevsky had blown the whistle on a
government cover-up of the impact of the accident. Imprisoned on improbable
charges of accepting bribes from his students, he is now in the Peskovsky
Village penal colony, to the West of Belarus, cut off from his family and his
research facilities. Before our arrival, nine EU ambassadors had visited him,
flags flying from their cars. Angered by this, the Belarus government ordered
that permission must be sought for visits. His wife, Galina, begged us not to
visit without permission. We never received it so we had to speak with him by
telephone from central Minsk. Galina told us about her visits to the southern
villages where the berries and mushrooms on which poor villagers depend are 300
times higher in radiation than normal, but as everyone kept telling us, ‘You
can’t see radiation.’
Deciding to visit the danger
zone along the Ukrainian border ourselves, we drove down through deep silver
birch forests to Mazyr, a town of wooden dachas with ornate, painted
architraves. We expected to see a dying, brown landscape but as we approached
Narovlya close to the Chernobyl exclusion zone we saw fields of rye, orchards
and herds of healthy-looking cows. In Narovlya, with its huge statue of Lenin
and stand-alone golden hammer and sickle in the main square, we met Sergei, the
guide Olga had organised, a vibrant 70-year-old. Sergei had entered the forests
the day after the accident. Two weeks later he developed a radiation rash all
over his legs.
We walked to the banks of the
Pripyat River to the memorial to those who had died immediately after the
accident. Despite high levels of radiation, people were swimming and sunbathing.
Sergei pointed through the trees across the river where he said deadly plutonium
patches had been identified. We drove 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 town with its painted
wooden 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
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’. We
expected to see children with cancers and other radiation-related diseases but
the clinic’s buoyant doctor explained that this, the town’s only hospital, was
only an emergency clinic. ‘The whole country is poisoned with radiation. Not
just here’, she told us with a smile and an evasive shrug. Later I saw from a
radiation map that the road we had taken to Kirov passed through zones of high
density radiation.
We met Natasha in a bar
off one of the fin de sičcle streets of Gomel, the southern capital. She
had written for the independent newspaper
bdg on Bandazhevsky and had criticised President Lukashenko. ‘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 told us how the
kgb had drugged Bandazhevsky and,
posing as Ukrainian mps, had driven
him to the Ukrainian border. Bandazhevsky had managed to alert the Belarus
border guards who took him into custody and saved him from being murdered in the
forest over the border.
In Gomel we went to 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. The girls in the
restaurant we dined in only had each other to dance with. We were served pork in
pancakes, a local dish, but avoided short-rooted vegetables such as mushrooms
and avoided milk. Belarusians take no precautions but as Olga had said, ‘You
can’t see radiation.’
You can, however, trace it through the censored works of Bandazhevsky,
which English PEN are currently translating. On 2 February 2005 the Belarus
press announced that the labour colony-settlement commission had refused to
grant him an early release on parole on the grounds of his refusal to confess
guilt and his inability to pay off his legal costs. Bandazhevsky remains at the
Peskovsky penal colony to serve out the rest of his eight-year sentence. He has
recently undergone surgery and is in very poor health. □
____________________
To read the
report which Carole Seymour-Jones compiled for English
pen
after she and Trevor had
completed their visit, click
here (PDF).
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