The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  207 Professor Francois Jacob, President of CODHOS took a stance and wrote to President Lukashenko.

  For her part, the physicist Bella Belbéoch, secretary of GSIEN, continued to challenge the scientific community and the Belarusian ambassador, Vladimir Senko. On 20th January, she addressed the following scientific and political report to him “[…] on the necessity of freeing Bandazhevsky in the interests of your country and from the point of view of progress in scientific knowledge […] It should not be forgotten that your country has the sad privilege of having experienced a level of contamination unknown up to the present day, and whose harmful effects on the inhabitants will continue for many generations to come.[…] We would like to bring to your attention an experimental programme on animals, ENVIRHOM, that has just been launched by the IPSN (Institut de protection et sûreté nucléaire) to study the effects of chronic ingestion of caesium-137, using Bandazhevsky’s hypothesis as a basis. Bandazhevsky has played a pioneering role in this type of research, but the exchange of scientific information that is indispensable in a project like this cannot take place when the principal contributor is in prison”.

  In September 2005, CRIIRAD laid down a challenge to civil society and to our political leaders that Yury Bandazhevsky be provided with his own scientific laboratory in the Republic of Belarus and be made the director. CRIIRAD is appealing to all those who support independent research into the health consequences of the Chernobyl accident: individuals, associations, elected politicians, local authorities.

  President Lukashenko seems to have been able to shrug off all this considerable show of support…Or rather, he was fed up of the whole story.

  DE FACTO EXILE

  In April 2006, three months after his release, within the planned time frame, Yury Ivanovich Bandazhevsky, with the help of the French Ambassador, Chmelewsky, was sent abroad on his own. It was “humanitarian” France, with more nuclear power stations per head of population than anywhere else in the world that offered him a temporary home, in Clermont-Ferrand. His wife, their two daughters and their granddaughter remained in Belarus, as potential hostages.

  According to the experts in this kind of problem, who were involved in Solzhenitsyn’s extradition from the Soviet Union to the West, this was a calculated move to put an end to all the excitement generated by international public opinion, to eliminate the witness, to make it impossible for Bandazhevsky to publicise his scientific discoveries. And as expected, France did not offer him any opportunity to continue his research. But again, like Solzhenitsyn before him, they had underestimated the man with whom they were dealing. His sense of duty to the truth would not allow Bandazhevsky to remain silent.

  Partly because of the situation in which they found themselves and partly through choices they made themselves, the physicist V. Nesterenko, the pathologist Y. Bandazhevsky and the cardiologist and paediatrician G. Bandazhevskaya became “dissidents” in a world ruled by force, money and fear. They did not hesitate to defend science against the shameful deceit and silence that emanates from the international scientific community and from governments. All three risked their lives and the well-being of their families. Vassili Nesterenko died prematurely in 2008 as a consequence of the serious contamination to which he was exposed, his body having resisted, extraordinarily, for so long. He devoted himself, until his strength gave way, to saving the children. The Bandazhevsky family, humiliated and dispersed across Europe remain faithful to the Hippocratic Oath. The two daughters have enjoyed brilliant success in their medical examinations.

  The lessons of Chernobyl were debated at length at the Kiev conference. I would like to quote from Professor Michel Fernex whose concise but comprehensive assessment of the situation has guided my thinking for the last fifteen years.

  The destruction of scientific organisations in Belarus

  As long as the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the WHO, does not amend, or even denounce, the Agreement it signed with the IAEA in 1959, that holds it hostage to the nuclear lobby with regard to the medical consequences of radiation, there is no hope of any substantial support for the research groups that need it most.

  In Belarus, we are witnessing a dramatic dismantling of those organisations that are researching the consequences of Chernobyl most effectively.

  Professor Nesterenko is the physicist who intervened immediately at the nuclear reactor when it was on fire. As a highly qualified physicist, but also on this occasion working as a fireman, he flew in a helicopter in the midst of the radioactive fumes, to investigate the possibility of pouring liquid nitrogen onto the core of the reactor. It is incredible that he survived; of the four other passengers in that helicopter, three have died as a result of the radiation they received and the radioactive contamination. Together with the colleagues at his institute, Nesterenko drew up a map showing the radioactive contamination of the whole territory and formulated proposals to protect the population.

  He continued with his work, until his data and his recommendations (including the demand that children, particularly, should be evacuated from within a radius of 100km) were no longer considered acceptable, because they were too alarmist. He lost the institute, his post and his source of income. With the help of Ales Adamovich, Andrei Sakharov, the chess champion Karpov, the Foundation for Peace, Chernobyl Children International of Adi Roche and other donors, Nesterenko, fortunately, was able to set up the independent research institute “Belrad”. The Institute helps the victims, and teaches them to protect themselves as much as is possible, given that they are forced to live in a contaminated environment, and attempts, with a medical team, to treat the children The survival of such an organisation depends on the international support it receives, but the nuclear lobby also recruits its detractors.

  The Minister of Health, Dr. Dobrishevskaya, who supported the most effective research groups in this field, according to a joint report published in 1996, was also removed from his post.

  Professor Okeanov witnessed the same dismantling of the research unit that he directed. It was an irreplaceable organisation revealing the truth about the epidemic of cancers at Chernobyl. In this case, the coincidence of the interventions he made to WHO in 1995, in Minsk in 1996, and above all his refusal to remain silent at the IAEA conference in Vienna the same year, is a clear indication of the identity of those who wanted to see his research unit destroyed.

  Professor Bandazhevsky’s removal is just the latest in a series. This pioneer of research into the health consequences of the Chernobyl accident has revealed the mechanisms generated by radionuclides incorporated into the organism: after I-131, Cs-137 and Sr-90. With the doctors that he trained at his Institute at Gomel and a number of volunteer researchers, Bandazhevsky has described the illnesses affecting a very large percentage of the population and nearly 90% of the children living in the contaminated territories.

  Who will help to bring out into the open this series of destruction of brilliant institutes, these promising careers brought to an end? These systematic repeated attacks that have a negative effect on the country and its people, are no doubt encouraged by those who are put out by work of such quality: there are always people who are jealous or perhaps ambitious. However, in this case it is the richest countries with the most advanced nuclear industry, and the nuclear lobby who have the most to gain, and will benefit most from these attacks.

  Given the omnipresence of nuclear power in the world, medicine needs to reclaim its vocation of prevention, care and research. WHO must regain its independence so that it can take action within the terms of its admirable constitution, even in this controversial area. Epidemiological studies need to be undertaken again, and not find themselves interrupted arbitrarily with such destructive effect. Who will monitor the genetic mutations that will start appearing in children born over the next five generations in those countries that have received radioactive fallout? Who will care for the victims and take responsibility for their tr
eatment, or provide better protection for children and pregnant women? The rich countries that have nuclear power stations should be coming to the aid of those populations that are suffering the effects of Chernobyl, in Belarus of course, but also in other countries that have been affected.

  The IAEA’s current mandate for the promotion of commercial nuclear power should be withdrawn. There are other far more important tasks for this UN agency: the control of plutonium and uranium, and of fissile material from the dismantling of nuclear warheads, and from military and commercial nuclear installations. The IAEA, that should have prevented the proliferation of nuclear weapons in a growing number of countries, has failed to do so. In the future, the IAEA should monitor the management of all the nuclear waste that humanity has already accumulated, within the space of two generations, since the nuclear age began. This monitoring will need to continue for centuries. 208

  208 The Chernobyl catastrophe and health.

  This book was published in France in 2006, nine years ago, but the story is still unfolding. The narrative continues as it began, recounting real world events. Opposition to the nuclear lobby has been growing among the public and the scientific community.

  Chapter V

  POST SCRIPTUM

  WHAT CAN BE DONE?

  1. THE VIGIL OUTSIDE WHO HEADQUARTERS209.

  209 http://independentwho.org/en/

  Since 26th April 2007, every working day from eight in the morning till six at night, two or three people, take part in a silent vigil outside WHO headquarters in Geneva, to remind this United Nations organisation of its constitutional duty. Every day, for more than eight years now, women and men from different countries in Europe and also from the United States, maintain this Hippocratic vigil as representatives of the group “Independent WHO—Health and Nuclear Power”. They will do so until the World Health Organisation recovers its independence from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The vigil is held at a crossroads where a great many cars pass by, some with diplomatic corps registration plates. The demonstrators respond politely to the passers-by and distribute information leaflets.

  On 20th April 2008, three scientists from Russia and Belarus, A.V. Yablokov, R.I. Goncharova et V.B. Nesterenko stood at this crossroads facing the WHO building and held placards with the following questions and slogans:

  • WHO 22 years of SILENCE and LIES about CHERNOBYL

  • WHO must honour the terms of its CONSTITUTION

  • Cover up and non-assistance = CRIME

  • WHO must fulfil its mandate to protect HEALTH

  • REVISE the agreement WHA 12–40 between IAEA/WHO

  • For the independence of WHO from the IAEA

  • Chernobyl—50 deaths or 985 000 deaths. What is the truth?

  • CRIME of Chernobyl—WHO accomplice

  • 1,000,000 children around Chernobyl, irradiated and ill, ignored by WHO

  2. SCIENTIFIC AND CITIZEN FORUM ON RADIOPROTECTION

  In the absence of an adequate response from international organisations and from their own government, Japanese citizens called on independent scientists from other countries for information and advice. It was in order to share knowledge and experience of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters that the “Scientific and Citizen Forum on Radioprotection” was organised in Geneva on 12th May 2012 by IndependentWHO. It challenged the issue of “norms” and confronted the official figures with real lived experience, and offered alternative theoretical models that have been put forward by independent scientists. On two occasions now, WHO has rejected, by failing to respond, propositions from IndependentWHO to hold a joint conference between its own experts and independent scientists.

  After Remy Pagani, city councillor and mayor of the city of Geneva, which had supported the Forum financially, had welcomed visitors to the Forum, Paul Roullaud (France), co-founder and representative of the collective IndependentWHO described the philosophy of the movement in the following way:

  We have come together today because all over the world, people are suffering the effects of radiation, whether from the fallout from nuclear weapons testing, from the explosion of the nuclear reactors at Chernobyl, at Fukushima and other accidents, from the use of depleted uranium weapons, or from the so called “normal” emissions, in water or air, produced by the nuclear industry. We have chosen to meet here, 200 metres from the World Health Organization headquarters because, in defiance of its own constitution, this international institution denies the victims’ suffering, and in this way adds to their tragedy. There is a large body of research documenting the suffering of radiation victims but the WHO, continuing to disdain scientific rigour, chooses to ignore it.

  This scandalous attitude has been regularly denounced over the years but in 2006, a group of people from all over Europe decided that not a day should go by in which the criminal consequences of WHO’s implacable and intolerable denial of so much suffering, not be denounced as a crime. Many months of preparation went by and then on 26 April 2007, the first Hippocratic Vigil, as it came to be called, was held, 22 years after the start of the Chernobyl health catastrophe.

  Since then, more than 300 people have taken part in the Vigil in front of the WHO’s headquarters, demanding that this CRIME not be met with indifference one single day more. The Collective IndependentWHO makes sure that this silent vigil is maintained, through rain, wind, snow and ice. For five years, we have denounced this crime, without changing WHO’s attitude. From the first day, we knew it would be a very long battle because we are challenging a very powerful international lobby. These five years of the Vigil have at least begun to reveal to the public the relationship between the WHO and the IAEA. WHO’s lack of independence from the IAEA, dates from the agreement WHA 12–40, which the two agencies signed on 16 May 1959.

  At our twice yearly annual general meetings we unanimously and enthusiastically agree to continue with the Vigil. It would be untrue to say, however, that we never get discouraged or exhausted, and this is mainly because we still have not really got any political support. Yet it is because we still believe in political action that we challenge WHO about its activities in the area of radioprotection. These can be summed up quickly—there are none—which is, in part, the reason we are holding this Forum.

  The proceedings of the “Scientific and Citizen Forum on Radioprotection—from Chernobyl to Fukushima” that brought together 15 independent scientists and doctors from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Japan, France, Switzerland, Belgium and the United Kingdom have been published. They can be downloaded from the site http://independentwho.org/en/.

  This international forum, organised 27 years after Chernobyl and one year after Fukushima, is the first independent conference on the consequences of a Level 7 nuclear accident. It should be emphasised that this was an independent scientific and citizen forum. It is open to everyone. It keeps the debate alive within international public opinion, because people can read it. The same independent scientists and doctors had spoken at two previous conferences organised by WHO on the subject of Chernobyl. Those two conferences are dead because they took place under the WHO’s auspices. WHO is completely subordinate to the IAEA and so these independent voices were stifled: the proceedings of those conferences were never published so no-one could learn from the discussions and the contradictory opinions expressed in the lively debate between high level intellectuals and the ignorant authoritarian representatives of the nuclear lobby.

  The Fukushima disaster happened on 11th March 2011. Every year, in the middle of May, all the Ministers of Health come together in Geneva for the World Health Assembly. On 4th May, after four years of blinkered indifference and a few rather pathetic attempts to dislodge the “Hippocratic Vigil” by the Geneva police, the Director-General of WHO asked us to meet with her, and her five other directors in her office “to listen to [our] concerns and to discuss matters of common interest on the subject of radiation
and health”. After two hours of sterile discussion, fundamentally contradictory but respecting the formalities, she was then able to issue her press release210, presenting the democratic face of WHO, in which she reaffirmed her independence from the IAEA, congratulated us on our commitment and our determination and promised to keep open the dialogue regarding WHO’s competence (in the area of radiation and health) and to find out why the proceedings had not been published.

  210 WHO Director-General meets with advocates for people affected by radiation. See p. 588.

  On 12th May, in a polite and detailed letter211, we outlined our dissatisfaction with the legal explanations that she had provided to demonstrate that WHO was fulfilling its statutory obligations in the face of the Chernobyl health catastrophe and informed her that we would be continuing our action in which we accuse the organisation, of which she is the director, of the crime of non-assistance to populations in danger.

  211 Letter from IndependentWHO to the director general dated 12 May 2011. See p. 589.

  On 4th July, Maria Neira, director of the Department of Public Health and Environment at WHO, wrote to us claiming that the proceedings of the two conferences had been published.

  On 7th November 2011, in a letter jointly signed by the 5 members of IndependentWHO who had attended the meeting, we sent Madame Chan and her directors the irrefutable proof that this was a lie212.