Is it in conformity with the statutes of organisations such as UNDP, the European Commission, the Directorate for Development and Cooperation of Switzerland, UNESCO, the World Bank to finance a mock aid programme rather than demand from its promoters a targeted and commensurate programme of action to combat the evil that is ravaging the population and threatening their descendants?
CORE.—“In this perspective, the approach will be implemented through the access of the population and local specialists to the operational and effective means of measurement and evaluation of the radiological situation”.
What is the point of knowing the radiological situation without providing preventive measures and qualified medical care unless the aim is to gather just enough statistical data to fill publications justifying the expense131 without any benefit to health. The effective operational methods to protect the population were, and are those used by the independent Institute of Radioprotection, Belrad, directed by Professor Nesterenko and the Medical Institute of Gomel directed by Professor Bandazhevsky, that have shown, over ten years of work in the field, what can be done for people’s health. Health which, apart from the mention of the word, is an invisible problem in this programme that is being financed by the European Commission.
131 Daily allowance for French specialists on mission for CORE. 400 euros is more than the monthly salary of a member of staff at Belrad.
CORE.—“an important aspect of the programme CORE is to encourage rehabilitation based above all on initiatives taken by the inhabitants of the contaminated territories”.
According to the rationale “Every man for himself” denounced by Bandazhevsky, it will fall to the peasant community itself to take responsibility (above all) for the secret wounds to their bodies caused by caesium-137 and strontium-90. But surely Nesterenko, at Belrad, and Bandazhevsky, with his research at the Gomel Institute, were precisely members of this contaminated community in Belarus who took their own initiative and responded to the disaster? Initiatives that CORE seeks to sabotage rather than to encourage or to support.
CORE.—“The accent is put on prioritising autonomy among the local people and on allowing them to fulfil themselves personally. The aim is to encourage the abilities of local men, women and families in the contaminated territories to meet basic needs and to reinforce their capacity to take control over their own lives. CORE aims to encourage the emergence of a “critical mass” of projects that will bring about change within families and their communities to bring about a process of sustainable development”.
In an area that is contaminated for generations to come . . .
CORE.—3.1 Medical follow up and quality of health
“People living in the contaminated territories are concerned about their state of health, especially the health of their children. Local health professionals are aware of the existence of these problems. However, the information gathered is fragmented and incomplete, and this reinforces the feeling of abandonment among the population, and leads it towards an attitude of fatalism and risky behaviours. It seems necessary therefore to implement a project on health problems”.
The most effective use of their tax payers’ money in the area of information about health, which is currently fragmented and incomplete, would be for the countries that fund CORE to ask the Belarusian authorities to re-establish the Gomel Institute of Medicine with Professor Bandazhevsky as its rector, in such as way as to avoid squandering the large quantity of information and knowledge—accumulated with scarce resources—over nine years of rigorous scientific research on the illnesses caused by the Chernobyl disaster.
CORE.—Individual health monitoring of children.
“The aim of this project to monitor the health of individual children is to make an objective assessment of their health to address the concerns of the population. This project will provide the means for local health professionals to undertake a health assessment of children, in collaboration with experts from Europe. The health assessment in the contaminated districts (Chechersk then Bragin) will be conducted in parallel with health assessments in an uncontaminated district sharing the same socioeconomic characteristics, which will serve as a reference (this region has not yet selected).”
Back to square one
Seventeen years after the disaster, with research at the Institute of Gomel interrupted and its rector in prison, a health assessment is to be undertaken by local health professionals, who dare not even mention the word radioactivity in relation to the illnesses that they see.
Galina Bandazhevskaya tells us that one of her husband’s pupils, appointed chief medical officer in gynaecology in a contaminated area and appalled by the number of birth defects, abortions, and perinatal deaths she was coming across among her patients, began to measure radioactivity in placentas, and received the following warning from a local superior: “So, what happened to Bandazhevsky isn’t enough for you? Describe these pathologies any way you like but don’t link them to caesium-137”. This young woman has a child to feed. She cannot risk losing her job. She gave up her analysis. [These words were spoken in March 2003]
What is more, these local professionals will be working under the supervision of European experts. What do these expensive European experts know about these problems? They have never undertaken medical research around Chernobyl and they will arrive with their mathematical formulae based on the Hiroshima model, according to which only external exposure to high doses of radioactivity can cause illness. Who pays for their travel, their conferences and other events? And who will benefit in the end? The comparison between the amounts allocated in the CORE budget for “indigenous” staff and for “experts” needs no comment.
The rule to apply when providing technical assistance to a poor country—and Belarus, following the accident at Chernobyl, is one of the poorest countries in Europe—is to strengthen local structures and not to replace them. The lobby has managed to get rid of Bandazhevsky’s institute. Now it is Professor Nesterenko that they are trying to neutralise.
Two years have passed since Le Figaro wrote: “ In about a year we may finally know whether these illnesses are due to chronic contamination at low doses, or not. Does Ms. Luccioni, who stated that “The Belarusians do not define the illnesses in the same way, so we do not really know”, know anything more today?
First assessment, in October 2005—The ineffectiveness of CORE.
In his Bulletin d’information No. 28 of October 2005, sent to the Belarusian authorities, the ambassadors of France, Germany and Great Britain, the Directorate for Development and Cooperation of Switzerland, and to the IRSN, responsible for the expert evaluation of the efficacy of pectin-based adsorbents, Professor Nesterenko presents the results of CORE’S first year of activity in the district of Bragin.
A comparison of results obtained by the programme CORE, without pectin and of those obtained four years before by the Belrad Institute, using Vitapect, in the same villages in the district of Bragin, shows the failure of CORE’s strategy and an unforgiveable loss of time for the contaminated children who are still being deprived of an effective preventive treatment because CORE refuses to finance it.
Proceedings of the Belrad Institute:
“The medical programme of the CORE project limits itself at present to the collection of data on the health status of inhabitants and the health effects of low doses of radiation.
It is highly regrettable that the proposal of Belarusian experts to implement the first steps of the project on practical measures for radiation protection of the population (mostly children), such as the introduction into the diet of a regular intake of pectin-based adsorbents, was not accepted as part of the CORE project.
Analysis of the measurements made by the BELRAD Institute for the CORE project (under contract with the Agency for Development and Cooperation of Switzerland), shows that the rate of accumulation of Cs137 in children’s bodies measured during ex
aminations between spring 2004 and spring 2005 remained unchanged (eg. in the villages of Komarin, Mikulichi, Khrakovichi) or even increased (in the village of Burki) ... Whereas in 2000–2001 the BELRAD Institute monitored levels of Cs137 contamination in children from the same villages in the Bragin district where they had been given the pectin-based food additive (Vitapect) between examinations. In one month, the rate of Cs 137 in children’s bodies had decreased on average by 27%. In the villages of Burki, Mikulichi and Khrakovichi, it had declined by 32% and in the village of Komarin, by 35%”.
V. Nesterenko, “The Chernobyl Catastrophe”
Bulletin d’information, No 28, Minsk, 29th August 2005.
The question that has to be answered is this: do we have the right to leave untreated, contaminated children that are the subject of our observation, while an effective and safe treatment is available?
CORE.—The health education of pregnant women
“This project aims to reduce the radiological risk posed by the ingestion of food through teaching pregnant women who are being monitored at the hospital in Stolin to control the risk themselves To allow pregnant women to reappropriate their environment, this project will build on the approach developed and implemented in the program ETHOS. This process of reappropriation will be based primarily on the integration of a module of practical radiological culture and of operational dosimetry that is already in place for pregnant women.”
Chernobyl has severed the natural biological link between life and the environment that it has poisoned. Now life is summoned to reappropriate this environment under the direction of well-fed experts from Paris. Young women are to be taught to cope by themselves in this contaminated gulag. To their burden, is added the guilt of being fatally bad mothers, because inevitably they will be poor pupils taught by poor masters. The poisoned mother will be a source of poison to the new life inside her—new life that trustingly takes all its sustenance from her. This happy symbiosis has evolved into a monstrosity. What reappropriation are they talking about, these blind counterfeiters?
Young mothers should be evacuated from contaminated areas throughout the period of pregnancy and lactation. Levels of radionuclides in the placenta should be measured systematically. The correlation between these levels and congenital malformations and perinatal mortality needs to be studied scientifically132.
132 See Michel Fernex’s note at the end of the chapter, p. 297.
CORE.—“A retrospective study of dosimetric data should be undertaken. For each child, medical and dosimetric data will be correlated to determine whether chronic contamination with caesium may have played a role in the pathologies observed”.
Making this correlation is a step forward. But who will undertake the work? Using what methodology? Will Bandazhevsky’s work be taken into account? In any study, it is essential to know who is behind it, what are the curriculum vitae of the authors and co-authors of the projects. As for retrospective dosimetry, this is a farce. Direct measurements should be taken today. The children are ill today. Caesium-137 is present today in their organs.
CORE.—3.2 Agriculture, rural development and management of the living environment.
Project for the development of family income in rural areas in economic recession after Chernobyl (English)
Summary of the translation.—“The radioactivity circulates mainly within the food chain, in other words from agricultural production, but it is also transmitted to the families through the exploitation of forests (wood, fire, fruit and game).
The project involves teaching agricultural techniques to produce potatoes, vegetables, and dairy products containing fewer artificial radionuclides. This method of production is expensive.”
Who will be given this aid?
These projects are difficult to manage. They will need a new bureaucratic structure.
The feasibility of such a project needs to be demonstrated in terms of safety, low prices, job creation. It makes use of the region’s biomass. What remains will be used in industry.
Nothing is said about protecting workers, loggers, sawmill workers, and heating engineers, chimney sweeps, etc. It is not clear what kind of forestry work will be developed, in which all grades of wood are supposed to be “renewable”. There is no mention of filters for Cs-137 and Sr-90 and for transuranics. Is there not a risk of transporting the radioactivity stored in the forest, into an urban environment, with dust and smoke that could contaminate people who have so far been relatively protected?
CORE—3.4. Project in radiological culture, intergenerational and international memory and education
This is the cultural section. Chernobyl will be turned into a museum of “intergenerational and international memory and education”.
It is here that the West’s investment in ideological pretence seems most significant.
The emptiness regarding the problems of health is at its most apparent here. A stupefying void!
This part of the project has a delusional character, as the reality of Chernobyl, and the only thing that justifies all this effort, is made an abstraction: the consequences of radiation, mainly internal, on children, on pregnant women, and on men whose descendants will suffer health and genomic effects.
CORE.—3.4.1. Context.
“The economic difficulties encountered in the contaminated territories of the Republic of Belarus result in the inhabitants being dependent on farming in small family plots, gathering produce from the forest, fishing and hunting to meet their daily needs. All these products are likely to have very high levels of contamination according to the locality. In everyday life, information about radioactivity and recommendations regarding food and the environment are not well disseminated and even where they are, not applied.”
Does this mean that CORE recognizes that contamination at low levels of exposure is largely internal, via the food chain, and that sometimes levels of contamination are very high? If so, we have to ask why, not only nothing is being done to research and offer radioprotection against this internal radiation, but obstacles are put in the way of this research and radioprotection.
The ETHOS approach
“This is an original initiative that is in marked contrast to previous approaches. It is a decentralized approach, based on the strong involvement of local people in the rehabilitation process. The initiative aims to create conditions that will allow the residents of the contaminated territories themselves to recreate their quality of life and, within this framework, to manage the radiological risk generated by all their activities on the contaminated territories. The reconstruction concerns all aspects of their daily lives that have been affected by contamination: health (in particular of children), the environment, safety at home, living standards, professional activities, social and cultural activities, individual and collective identity”.
Incredible! The risk from radiation was not caused by the explosion at the nuclear power plant. The people themselves are guilty.
The text in italics speaks for itself. It is at least true, it tells the whole truth. From now on, the residents really are responsible themselves, trapped in their everyday activities—in their lives!—for the harm that will come to them. As for the contamination of their land, that is now simply a fact of nature according to CORE. With instructions from the experts, the inhabitants must learn how to accommodate it. It is they who will be responsible and it will be their fault alone if it does not work.
It has to be understood that CORE represents through and through the moral stance and the policy adopted by the European Union and all of us who belong to it. We have financed and continue to finance this lie and this arrogant deception; the complacency and wilful ignorance of the United Nations agencies responsible for nuclear power, using European citizens’ money.
No-one is more qualified than Professor Fernex to conclude this chapter. He is a doctor, and he worked for the WHO. He has compiled the
list of what needs to be done at Chernobyl:
“All research must have a clearly expressed purpose. We are beginning this research seventeen years after the disaster. For whom? To protect children who are ill? To protect the nuclear industry (and so neglect the victims of that industry)? If representatives from the nuclear industry are involved in projects for the victims, then we will have the same results that we got from WHO’s IPHECA project, which was planned and prepared by the IAEA (just as studies of smoking related illness were planned by the tobacco industry that financed them). The IAEA gives priority to the study of dental caries and ignores genetic effects.
If the aim is to find out whether ionising radiation from artificial radionuclides from Chernobyl is playing a role in the deteriorating health of the population, we must formulate a set of hypotheses and a clear research objective. For each hypothesis, the protocol requires a double blind study, detailed questionnaires, finalised and available before the study begins. Statisticians need to specify how many subjects need to be included in the studies. The radiometrists must collect anthropogammametric measurements from the indigenous rural population and the data must be kept (secretly) on the computer.
Clinicians need to study the pathologies that relate to their own areas of expertise:
—Ophthalmology: Cataracts, number of opacities in the lens of children, retinitis.
—Cardiology: Medical history: ability to take part in sport, etc.. Pain, fatigue.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 41
