Q.—And you, Yury Bandazhevsky, were accused of being an “enemy of the people”?
Y. Bandazhevsky.—Yes, they wanted to label me as an enemy of the State, of the country. In reality, anyone who knows me at all knows that I work only for the State, and have done so throughout my career. I have never been involved in politics and hope I never am for the rest of my life. I have devoted my life to scientific research and to nothing else.
5. IRRESPONSIBILITY OF POLITICIANS
Y. Bandazhevsky.—The 92 scientists who signed the famous letter to Gorbachev on 14th September 1989, stating that Chernobyl had had no serious consequences, continue to work in their posts. The National Radioprotection Commission of Belarus continues its work with the same staff and the same president. These are the people who formulate this opinion and defend the official line. As for Nesterenko and myself, we are portrayed as cranks.
Q.—Is it true that there are plans to build nuclear power stations in Belarus?
V. Nesterenko—It’s true.
Q.—Is it the IAEA that wants this?
V. Nesterenko—Obviously.
Q.—Who has the power to make that decision in Belarus?
V. Nesterenko—According to the Constitution, it is Parliament that decides whether or not to build a nuclear power station. Lukashenko dissolved Parliament and cut its numbers by half; there are now only 110 deputies. Eighty of them were willing to vote yes. The deputies who were opposed to the project knew this and asked me to intervene. I spoke at the parliamentary hearings on the question, and laid out my arguments. I said that it was a technology for rich countries. Chernobyl had shown that when an accident happens we are unable to protect the population. The government has no right to adopt a technology when it has shown itself incapable of protecting the population from its consequences; it’s immoral. That was the first argument. Secondly, the cost. It would be much better to choose gas, which is two or three times cheaper. Third, we would need to spend billions of dollars. We would be indebted to the West and we would lose our independence. Parliament adjourned the vote until later and set up a commission made up of supporters and opponents of nuclear power stations to look at the question. They were to examine the question and report back to Parliament and the government. The commission was made up of 32 people. There were 7 against and all the others were in favour. It was people from the Ministries, from the Academy of Science etc. We started to “work” on them. I was glad that one of the deputies, the President of the Commission for Scientific Research, was on the Commission. There was also Mr Smoliar, who had been President of the Chernobyl Committee under two governments, Professor Lepin, a liquidator from Chernobyl and now an invalid, and myself. The others tried to show that there were no gas or oil reserves and we could not do without nuclear energy. We worked on each of them separately: interviews, discussions, presentations on the subject. On 30th December we voted. 8 people were in favour of building a nuclear power station, all the others were against. We had convinced them. In the end, they were all happy, relaxed: no more nuclear power stations. I gave an interview, I wrote an article for a German newspaper: “Belarus says no to nuclear”, in which I explained everything. The next morning, the Minister for Energy and the President of the Academy of Sciences brought together the Praesidium of the Academy without inviting us and adopted a contrary resolution that was sent to President Lukashenko. We had heard about it by chance, and told the media to alert the public. Lukashenko was forced to say: “I cannot go against the will of the people”. We proposed a ten-year moratorium before examining the question again, and we repeated what we had always said: “If you want nuclear energy, you need to call a referendum”. They were frightened. The Prime Minister called up the Ministry, things calmed down for a bit before it all began again.
Chapter IV
THE LOBBY FIGHTS BACK
The nuclear lobby in Belarus is represented by people who gravitate around the Ministry of Health. No one tries to hide this.
In June 2001, at the International Conference in Kiev, Mr Gentner of UNSCEAR referred to Professor Kenigsberg as the trusted confidante of his own organisation and of the IAEA. He was commissioned to transmit information and official epidemiological data from Belarus to these two UN Agencies and they accepted the validity of this information, relying exclusively on it when they formulated their conclusions and recommendation for governments. Professor Kenigsberg refers to the IAEA every time he is in disagreement with Professor Nesterenko, and in particular, when he opposed the use of apple pectin for children. The European Commission dutifully rejected all Nesterenko’s requests to TACIS to fund the use of this effective, natural adsorbent.
Understandably, the dynamism and energy of Nesterenko and of Bandazhevsky, two highly qualified scientists, constituted a threat to the civil servants at the Ministry of Health. In concert with the Moscow ‘nucleocrats’ and the ‘experts’ from the IAEA these civil servants had been lying to the government and to the people since 1986. Their counterattack was not long in coming and was hastened by the arrival in power of Alexander Lukashenko. He had not dared to demand compensation for damages from the owners of the Chernobyl power station (Ukraine) nor from the designers and manufacturers (Russia). Lacking the financial means to deal with the problem openly, and protected politically by the pseudoscience emanating from the Ministry of Health and the UN Agencies, Lukashenko chose to bury his head in the sand: deny the scale of the disaster, hide the catastrophic deterioration in health among the inhabitants, and advocate the resettlement of evacuated territories. In 1993, towards the end of the “Belarusian Spring”, the local radiological monitoring centres (LRMC), set up by Nesterenko and financed by ComChernobyl, numbered 370. The year after, there were 180. Within five years, from 1995 to 1999, they had been reduced to 82, of which 21 were financed by German NGOs, to whom Nesterenko, in the meantime, had appealed for help81. At the end of 2005, all the LRMCs financed by the state of Belarus (ComChernobyl) were closed; 12 were financed by German NGOs, 1 by the Association Enfants de Tchernobyl d’Alsace, 1 by CRIIRAD and 6 within the CORE programme, though the latter would not use the food additive pectin as a protective measure for children, for reasons which will become clear.
81 There have been two distinct responses to the Chernobyl disaster from Germany. The nuclear establishment influences the work of the independent institute Julich, which undertakes government contracts and is dependent on them financially. On the other hand, organisations from civil society, and especially the younger generation, sons and daughters of those who occupied Belarus during the Second World War, are very sensitive and supportive to the population on whom the nuclear scourge of Chernobyl hs been inflicted. The Julich Institute itself, some years after their initial “error” when they omitted to measure the contamination of people living in the rural areas, undertook a project with Nesterenko’s institute, using an impeccable methodology, that confirmed the stability of plasmatic microelements after pectin treatment, thus contradicting Nesterenko’s German detractors. (see Part Three, Chapter VI, 2, p. 239–240)
1. TORTURE
Yury Bandazhevsky does not like to remember the hell that he went through. His wife told us about the nightmare of his arrest and the torture which he endured during his first pre-trial detention, that lasted for a period of five and half months, and ended on 27th December 1999.
Galina Bandazhevskaya—I wasn’t in Gomel on the night of 13th July 1999 when he was arrested. About fifteen armed police entered the house. They turned the place upside-down for hours. The search lasted from 11 in the evening until 4 in the morning. First in the apartment, then at his office at the institute, and at 4 a.m. they threw him in a cell, where he stayed until 4th August, completely cut off from the outside world. He slept on the floor. He was given a meal once a day. He lost 20 kg in 3 weeks. The lawyer was only able to see him twenty-two days later when he was informed of the charge. At this point, he should have been transfer
red to the normal prison. The lawyer warned me. I was behind the bars of the courtyard when they pushed him into a van. I didn’t recognise him. He had a long grey beard. He was completely hallucinating. When he saw us he cried, “You won’t abandon me the way everyone else has!” I was with our two daughters. We weren’t allowed to even come close to him. He just had time to shout this one sentence to us. They put him in the van and took him away.
We thought they had taken him to the ‘normal’ prison in Gomel. When the lawyer went there the next morning, he was told he wasn’t there. “Look for him, he must be somewhere”. Afterwards, we realised that they had extended this period of solitary confinement to get him to confess. They had put him in an identical cell but in Mogilev, 120 km from Gomel.
Before he was transferred, they read the charges against him in the presence of his lawyer, whom he was seeing for the first time. The lawyer told me that while it was being read, Yury came under heavy police pressure. They told him I was ill in hospital, and that his mother was close to death: “If you confess, you can go home. If not… ” It was a very long interrogation. When he understood that they could keep him in prison for an indeterminate period, the lawyer saw Yury go white, press himself against the back of the chair; he was very close to giving in. He felt that if Yury had been handed a pen, he would have signed anything. The lawyer reacted. “What are you doing? You know it’s illegal, what you’re doing? Do you realise that?” Because his lawyer had dared to say that, Yury regained control. It was the first time since he had been arrested that he felt someone was on his side.
The cell in Gomel measured 2 metres by 2 metres. He shared it with another detainee who did not stay long. It was a “dungeon”, a holding-cell where petty criminals were held for a maximum of 2–3 days. The floor was painted entirely in red, who knows why? Afterwards, his clothes stayed this colour because he was sleeping on the floor. He didn’t even have a toothbrush, a razor or a towel.
During these twenty-two days, I asked if I could give him some clothes. The prosecutor said, “I’m not running a laundry..”. When they realised they hadn’t broken him, they hadn’t got what they wanted, instead of transferring him to the ordinary prison as the law prescribes, they put him in the cell at Mogilev.
During this time, we looked everywhere for him, we didn’t know where he was. I wrote a telegram to Lukashenko, telling him my husband had disappeared, that after being taken into custody, he should have been transferred to a prison but he had never arrived and I was frightened for his life. Perhaps he was dead? I begged him to find my husband, who was Rector of the Gomel Medical Institute. After the lawyer had appealed to the Gomel prison, he finally got a reply that they had decided to put Bandazhevsky in preventive detention, which was why he had been transferred to the detention centre of the regional executive committee of the Mogilev region.
Yury was very ill there, completely exhausted. To avoid complications, they ended up taking him to hospital. The doctor in charge was a young woman. She said: “I can’t hospitalise you because you are a prisoner. Our hospital is not designed for this…” I learnt afterwards that Yury was on his knees in front of this young intern, who could have been his pupil, saying: “Listen, take me, because I’m about to die”. She called the surgeon, and they decided to give him an endoscopy. They discovered two haemorrhagic ulcers and the surgeon ordered his immediate hospitalisation. They put him in a ward. They put two policemen at the door and they handcuffed his foot to the bed! The policemen wanted to take him straightaway but the consultant intervened: “When I have a patient in this state, it’s me who decides when he can go. He is absolutely not capable of leaving at the moment”.
After eight days, they took him to Minsk where he was hospitalised for three weeks. After that, he was transferred to a remand prison. It was there, for the first time, that I was able officially to see my husband. Fifty days after his arrest. They took me into his cell with a priest. The meetings took place in a room in the prison. He was already wearing a black prisoner’s uniform that hung off him like a clothes-hanger. Close up, I could see that he was completely disoriented. He didn’t understand why I was there, why the priest was there. We didn’t manage to have a conversation. He cried the whole time. He had a handkerchief that he folded and re-folded at least twenty times.
2. AFTER-EFFECTS
G. Bandazhevskaya.—He was released on 27th December 1999, almost a broken man, terrorised. He would repeat at least a hundred times a day the same words: “Are they going to put me in that hole again?” On the street he thought he was being followed all the time. In the house, he would speak in a low voice. If he had something really important to say, he would find a corner somewhere in the house and write it on a piece of paper. He didn’t want to set foot outside. He would take the car. Enclosed within it, it felt like a little home. Our daughter, the youngest, who went out with him a few times, said that when they went out on foot, if he saw someone he knew from afar, he would make a big detour to avoid meeting them. He tried to avoid any contact with people he knew. He thought these people had betrayed him. He told me “I don’t want their pity. I can hear their words already “We’re on your side. What a terrible thing to have happened! You, with the job you had, what a terrible thing to have happened!”
He was totally immersed in the situation. He had not distanced himself from it. He was absolutely incapable of escaping his experience. It was very trying for me and for the children. I understood eventually that it was absolutely useless to get angry with him. He wasn’t being self-indulgent. He repeated a hundred times a day “Are they going to put me back in that hole?” For example, in the evening when he went to bed, he would say: “I close my eyes and I can see this narrow cell. There were eight of us in there. There was nothing to do the whole day. We stayed there the whole time”. Here’s an example: he spent a lot of time staring at his hand in front of him. He didn’t have anything else to look at. It became a kind of image association, an obsession when he went to bed, and this image haunts him today. “I spent hours looking at my hand when I was there. I’m sick of the sight of it. I want to cut it off. When I close my eyes, it’s always my hand that comes back to me and then I think of the prison”. It’s because he had to put his hand somewhere, given how narrow the cell was, with so many other prisoners in it. It became his horizon.
We asked that he be put in another cell where people weren’t smoking, but there wasn’t one. “That’s the best cell” they said; “you can have up to forty people in the same space”. There was one bed for three people. They slept in shifts. They passed infections onto one another all the time. They constantly itched. The bacteria and the humidity causes furunculosis. When he was released at the end of five and a half months, his body was covered in pustules.
He was so terrified by the experience of being thrown in gaol and everything else I’ve just described, that all he could do was keep repeating “Are they going to put me back in that hole?” He didn’t say “I’m going to end it”. He didn’t talk about suicide, although he did say “I won’t be able to stand it”.
Three or four months after his release, he began to regain some normality. He was less afraid. He started to do some scientific work. He started to breed some Syrian hamsters at home, in the bath, for experimentation purposes. He actually completed a study which was published. But he still kept his distance from people. He had no contact with the institute. On the other hand, he took great pleasure and was very grateful for the visits he received from journalists, visitors and doctors from abroad.
Once, the judge came by. I think he wanted to get to know this person whose case he would be dealing with: not to interrogate him, but to allow him to tell the story in his own words, to get to know him better. I think this judge would have made a good psychologist. He said to me “Bandazhevsky has spent four hours telling me his life story and all he talked about was science, and his research. If they wanted to get a confession out of him, they wen
t about it the wrong way”. He didn’t tell me what the right way would have been. Our police had been very brutal with him, whereas he is someone that would have had to be manipulated in a different way, if they wanted to get something out of him. He didn’t say all this literally, but that’s what I understood from what he said.
The subtler method would come later, during the long period of detention, and still the prisoner would not bend.
3. THE PRISONER’S TESTIMONY
Yury Bandazhevsky was reticent and evasive at the beginning but finally one evening he opened up to and gave us an account of the events that had turned his world upside down. Only his wife knows, and even she does not know everything, the innermost secrets of the life he led behind bars.
Yury Bandazhevsky.—You had to live it. Imagine coming home one summer evening, in a white shirt, tired, from a meeting of the regional executive committee to decide on admissions to the institute. And suddenly fifteen armed men have broken into your apartment, when you’re alone, have just taken a shower, before the pandemonium begins. At five thirty in the morning, after all this searching and ransacking, I find myself in a cell, in the basement, you know? After a night like that, can you imagine? I would have understood if they’d handed me some kind of arrest warrant and said “There you are, you’ve been accused of this”. Things could have been done differently, there are correct procedures. But I was literally just grabbed. And now they’re presenting me with a paper saying I’m the leader of some criminal gang. Criminal!!! It was in writing. That explained the way I’d been handled, you see. It was terrible… Twenty two days in prison in inhuman conditions. I wouldn’t say I was frightened. I wasn’t frightened at all. In fact, that annoyed some of them, the fact that I didn’t cry, that I didn’t get in a state…But it was awful.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 29