This morning G. Bandazhevskaya telephoned the governor of the penal settlement, Vassili Koliada, and read article 90 of the penal code to him, according to which, after serving two thirds of his sentence, in other words on 6th January 2005, “the administration of the re-education relegation colony is obliged, within a period of one month, to examine the possibility of applying to the court for parole for Yury Bandazhevsky199”. Koliada replied: “I understand. Before the end of the month, the commission will meet and present his case to the court; you must understand that I cannot make the decision by myself”. G. Bandazhevskaya asked him why Ravkov, who was given exactly the same sentence in the same trial, has been granted his legal rights, without encountering the slightest problem?” “Ravkov is Ravkov. Bandazhevsky is Bandazhevsky” was his response.
199 Reply from the Belarus government to the UN Human Rights Council (Geneva), stating that Bandazhevsky’s complaint was admissible.
Yury Bandazhevsky really is “the personal prisoner of the president”, as Garri Pogonyailo, lawyer and vice-president of the Helsinki group in Minsk, observed. G. Bandazhevskaya recalls the words spoken by the Friend during one of his visits. “If you don’t recognise your guilt, you will serve the whole prison term”.
11. ORDERS FROM ABOVE
20th January: Galina Bandazhevskaya telephones the governor of the penal settlement again. He seems to be at the end of his tether: “I can’t carry on like this. I’m caught in the crossfire. I’m under pressure to keep the prisoner here, but I am obliged by law to refer his case to the court within the time limit, and to present an objective assessment of the detainee. I know my job, and at the required time, I will arrange for the commission to meet, we will make a decision on the basis of my report, it will go to the court, who will give their ruling and I will release the detainee. I have never had a case like this, it’s the first time. It’s one thing after another! I’m afraid. I’m going to resign”.
21st January: G. Bandazhevskaya calls the governor of the penal settlement again. He has slept on it and has had an idea. He says: “On 3rd February, I am going to call a meeting of the commission anyway. Article 90 gives him the right to parole, but there is also article 92, which deals with the detainee’s state of health and which would mean he could even be released before the end of his term”.
Behind all this could be a remark made by Lukashenko, that he slid into a televised interview, broadcast just today, during the nominations for Vice-Minister of the Interior: “You shouldn’t hide behind me—“The boss said so!”—don’t cover yourself by using my name. You have the prerogative. You need to take responsibility. You should not involve me in your affairs”. They all cover each other, including the “boss”. The prison governor knows the system well: Lukashenko only has to raise an eyebrow and the word goes down the line till it reaches the last man, and he will take the rap unless he sorts the matter out in secret. No-one else cares.
Friday 28th January: G. Bandazhevsky calls the governor of the penal settlement. He replies: “We have brought forward the date of the commission to 31st January and WE ARE REFUSING PAROLE. The order came from above. Please understand that this is not my personal whim. The reason that I have to give for the refusal to grant parole is that he does not admit that he is guilty of the crime and has not paid back the money that he owes to the State”. G. Bandazhevskaya: “But you are not qualified to make this sort of judgement. You are not a court. You can only base your arguments on the behaviour of the detainee while he has been in your care. He has served his sentence correctly, he deserves parole…”The governor: “Yes, I am violating the law. I have been put in a situation in which I have to violate it. This is the first time this has ever happened to me”. When Yury arrived in the settlement, the governor told him he had asked his legal experts to examine his case: they had been dumbfounded at the total lack of consistency in the legal arguments, and the absence of any justification for the verdict. For these people too, it was the first time they had experienced anything like it. Galina allowed herself a little hope. During the weekend she had very high blood pressure and vomited several times.
Today is Monday 31st; the commission is meeting at 14:30 hrs local time (13:30 hrs here).
At 16:30 hrs, I telephone G. Bandazhevskaya. “They have refused” The commission met according to all the regulations, the quorum present. The governor read out a positive report about the prisoner and asked him “Why do you not acknowledge your guilt? Why will you not compensate the state financially for the damage you have caused?” Bandazhevsky replied that he was not guilty, and that he would confirm this fact before any court, and if not him, his children and his grandchildren would make sure that the truth prevailed. As for the money he owed the State, it was simply ridiculous: “I have not worked for five years. What money are we talking about?”
14th February 2005. Over the weekend G. Bandazhevskaya wrote to Lukashenko and to the Minister of the Interior, asking them to put an end to the breaches of the law committed by their subordinates; then she wrote her reply to the UN Human Rights Council and contacted the Western press. None of this convinced Yury Bandazhevsky. He believes he will serve another two years and he is preparing himself for it.
In reality, Bandazhevsky’s state of health remains worrying and requires appropriate care and specific monitoring.
Given this situation, we decided that the best target for action was the Minister of the Interior, Naumov. We suggested that an avalanche of individual letters be sent to him, based on a text written by those associations who would sign it together200. Other organisations could add their signatures.
200 Amnesty International, Enfants de Tchernobyl Belarus, Bandazhevsky Committee, France-Libertés, ACAT, IFHD, GSIEN, Enfants de Tchernobyl, Illzach, the network Sortir du Nucléaire.
Everyone was encouraged to write to their own newspapers asking them to use the “Newsletter from relegation” to publicise information about Bandazhevsky, and the action we were taking. We made contact again with as many politicians as possible, asking them to bring the question up again, particularly in Parliament, or in any other public sphere.
A certain number of Academies of Sciences had written to the president of the Republic of Belarus demanding the release of Bandazhevsky.
On 22nd March 2005 the ambassadors of France and Germany visited him. In a joint communiqué, they underlined “the growing attention and support across France and Germany for him, expressing the hope that the Belarusian authorities would commute his sentence as soon as possible or at least modify it in such a way that the professor could receive medical care as effective as could be found abroad”. They insisted that he be permitted to pursue his scientific research.
Finally, on 5th August 2005, after three and a half years in prison and fifteen months in relegation, Yury Bandazhevsky was given parole with the expectation of being totally free on 6th January 2006.
Chapter IV
CIVIL SOCIETY
HOW THE WAVE GREW
It was a very small group of people, from France and Switzerland, that had direct contact with scientists from the East and were able to pass on information about them to the West. At the beginning they knew very little about the humanitarian, political, medical, and environmental issues, against which Nesterenko was struggling. But after receiving information from him, they set their networks in motion quickly. In 1999, for example, we alerted Amnesty International who recognised Bandazhevsky as a prisoner of conscience. France-Libertés, Danielle Mitterand’s foundation, came to our aid too and financed Nesterenko’s projects in the Chernobyl villages.
On 2nd July 2000 in Paris, the 14th International Congress of IPPNW (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War) honoured Professor Bandazhevsky for his work. The President of the Congress, Professor Abraham Béhar, gave Galina Bandazhevskaya the Congress medal, awarded to the Belarusian scientist. The Greens at the European Parliament nomi
nated him for the “Passport for Freedom” which was awarded to him by the European Parliament in June 2001.
The first information about the two “dissident” scientists from Belarus led to a meeting and then collaboration between Belrad and CRIIRAD. The two organisations were born in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, without knowledge of each other, and shared the same aim of exposing the truth and protecting the population from artificial radiation and the government lies. Thanks to CRIIRAD’s generosity, the meeting proved to be a lifeline for Nesterenko at a time when he risked having to close his institute, our primary source of information.
In February 2001, CRIIRAD began a support campaign for Bandazhevsky. On 25th May 2002, together with other associations, it organised a demonstration, in front of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. Fifteen organisations including human rights groups, environmental groups and health protection groups, launched an appeal for the scientist to be released from prison. Those participating included Amnesty International, France-Libertes, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW France and Switzerland), the network Sortir du Nucléaire, Greenpeace, GSIEN, Friends of the Earth, Amandamaji (Finland), of Grandmothers Against Nuclear Power (Finland), Women Against Nuclear Power (Finland), Jose Bové and the Peasant Farmers’ Confederation and the Association française des malades de la thyroide (AFMT)201.
201 Concrete action was taken, in particular: Bandazhevsky’s lawyer, Pogonyailo, along with other organisations brought the matter to the attention of the Human Rights Council at the UN as a matter of urgency; a fund was set up to support Bandazhevsky’s family and to allow G.Bandazhevskaya to continue her work on the subject of the alterations in children’s health at the independent institute Belrad; an appeal was made to French, European and Russian politicians to intervene with the Belarusian authorities; international support for the petition launched by Amnesty International.
Following the demonstration, on 18th July 2002, a “frank” conversation took place at the director’s office at WHO between on the one hand, representatives of IPPNW Switzerland (Professor Michel Fernex and the president, Dr Jean-Luc Riond), and WILPF France (president Solange Fernex), and on the other hand, Dr David Nabarro, executive director of WHO, with Dr R. Helmer and Dr M. Repacholi assisting.
During the interview, the revision of the agreement between WHO and the IAEA was mentioned and Professor Fernex presented an impressive list of WHO’s failures at Chernobyl, from the medical point of view. The executive director of WHO was completely taken aback; he had never been informed about the situation that had been described. In the conclusion of the memorandum of the meeting (which is worth looking at on the Chernobyl archives site202) Fernex notes: “Dr Nabarro states very clearly that scientists involved in WHO projects should be independent. He demands objectivity and transparency and rejects all outside interference, including from the IAEA. The offer by Dr Nabarro to continue to communicate by Email or by letter is also very constructive”. Unfortunately, very soon after this “constructive” meeting, Nabarro was replaced as executive director of WHO. In a similar way, Mme Brundtland was replaced as Director General of WHO. (Following the admission of censorship by Dr Hiroshi Nakajima, she had appointed a commission to verify what had happened at the WHO conference of 1995). It is all very unfortunate. Hardly has a dialogue been initiated than the participants disappear. Perhaps they had been made to disappear?
202 “Memo: Meeting at WHO, 18th July 2002” at the director’s office at WHO between representatives of IPPNW Switzerland and Dr David Nabarro, executive director of WHO.
The only tangible result was the arrival at the Fernex’ house, of a heavy and mysterious package, with no indication of who had sent it. It was Christmas and they were on holiday in the mountains when it arrived; the package contained the original files (incomplete) that made up the proceedings from the 1995 WHO conference. Some of them were too old to be published, since they had been piled under Dr Sushkevich’s desk for seven years. We had filmed Dr Sushkevich at Kiev. He had explained to Solange Fernex, in a meeting, that WHO did not have the money to publish its documents! If these papers had been published the day after the conference they would have become best sellers overnight and would, no doubt, have had lively repercussions.
As for the Bandazhevsky family, persecuted, thrown out on to the street, and no longer able to remain in Gomel, they found support and protection through Nesterenko. He welcomed Galina Bandazhevskaya to his Belrad Institute and gave her a job, which was commensurate with her professional qualifications, since she had been removed from her chair at Gomel where everyone had avoided her as if she had the plague; she also received material support from our own organisation, Les Enfants de Tchernobyl Belarus and from CRIIRAD, who helped her to find a home in Minsk.
But the network of organisations that had demonstrated in Geneva, although sympathetic by their very nature, did not know very much and had only a superficial understanding of what was really going on in the countries that had been contaminated by Chernobyl. We needed to get our information out to a wider audience in a more systematic way. Preaching to the converted made no sense. Apart from two excellent radio programmes—Ruth Stegassy’s “Terre à terre” on France Culture and Arnaud Jouve “Fréquence Terre” on RFI—there had been more or less nothing in the mainstream national French press. Then three dynamic women came to the rescue and filled the gap. It was exactly what was needed.
Maryvonne David-Jougneau (who had been involved for a long time with the problems of dissidents in French institutions) had worked very hard creating the Bandazhevsky Committee, with a group of human rights activists in Grenoble. They, along with France-Libertés and Amnesty International, had kept up the pressure on the Belarus authorities to release Yury Bandazhevsky, and also on the national press, in order to broaden support for Bandazhevsky in the West. Teacher of philosophy and sociology, Maryvonne-David Jougneau had already published an analysis of dissidence within the French administration203, and another entitled Antigone ou l’aube de la dissidence204. She was preparing a third book on Socrates, when a friend from Amnesty International gave her a copy of “News from prison” that I had begun to distribute. Outraged by the fact that a scientist had been imprisoned for having said things that upset people, and above all, by the lack of any reaction from his peers and from the Western media, she put her pen down, asked me to give her more information and set up a support committee.
203 Le Dissident et L’Institution, L’Harmattan, 1989.
204 L’Harmattan, 2000.
The Bandazhevsky committee, set up in June 2002, organised its first public demonstration in October in Grenoble, with the help of the Museum of the Resistance and Deportation of Isère, and based around Mensonges nucléaires (Nuclear lies), the televised version TSI of the film of the Kiev conference,
“The Right to the Truth” was the theme that united the committee in Grenoble, and the local branch of Amnesty in Isere, and then Amnesty at the national level. Dagmar Daillant, who was responsible for the coordination of Amnesty in Belarus, Carine Hahn, who later replaced him, and Anne Guérin, director of France-Libertés, the Danielle Mitterand Foundation, joined Maryvonne in the appeal to scientists to sign the “Manifesto for the release of Bandazhevsky and for freedom of research”. On 25th April 2003, the “Manifesto” appeared in Le Monde with 2000 signatures, with this declaration of principles: “The independence of research in the service of humanity is as fundamental a principle as the independence of justice. Bandazhevsky’s imprisonment violates both these principles. This is why we, the undersigned, demand Bandazhevsky’s release so that he can continue to pursue, without hindrance, his work at his institute”. Over the next few months, another 15,000 signatures, including those of eminent scientists, were collected for the manifesto. At the beginning of August 2003, all the supporting organisations came together to present a dossier to the European Parliament to nominate Bandazh
evsky for the Sakharov prize. He would be one of seven nominees.
It took two years of hard work before there was any reaction in the press. For weeks and months, we collected written information and films that the group in Grenoble had used in its various initiatives and in its contacts with newspaper editors and local authorities all over France. In June 2003, he was awarded Honorary Citizenship by the city of Paris205, and it was on this occasion that the first articles appeared in the national press. On 24th June 2003, the wall of silence was finally broken with an excellent article by Hervé Kempf in Le Monde206. The evening before, the daily newspaper Liberation published an interview with Galina Bandazhevskaya by Veronique Soulé on its back page. At the end of the year, Bandazhevsky’s work began to be published and gradually, he began to regain confidence and hope. He needed it. The mobilisation of public opinion that he learned about through the thousands of letters he received proved effective.
205 After Clermont-Ferrand, a total of twenty four local authorities followed suit.
206 “La faute de Youri Bandajevsky” (Yury Bandazhevsky’s fault). This article made him very happy. He reread it several times and said enthusiastically. “It is almost as if this man had lived though it with me. He understood everything, he talked about everything that mattered, and did not get any of it wrong”.
With the creation of an Internet site in French and in English, the Bandazhevsky committee became a centre for information and initiative. It established dynamic links between the varying viewpoints to publicise the affair and broaden the action, asking citizens, organisations, and political and scientific authorities to work together to get Bandazhevsky released from prison in conditions that would allow him to continue his research207.
The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag Page 73