BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

27/04/2006

'Half-life ain't half bad', Belarus to resettle 'dead zone'

By Tatiana Shebet

Minsk - Human inhabitation in the Belarusian village Krasnoe ended twenty years ago in mass evacuations, after the deadly Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Now the people are coming back.

Aleksander Lukashenko, Belarus' authoritarian leader, earlier this year targeted Krasnoe and regions like it for resettlement, although ambient radioactivity continues to make such places unlivable for hundreds of years, according to scientists

Lukashenko isn't waiting. Officials from Belarus' southern Gomel province already have signed up 225 families willing to return to Krasnoe, the first village slated for resettlement in the so-called dead zone. The government is offering state-financed housing, and above-average salaries to attract the colonists.

And Krasnoe is just the beginning for Lukashenko.

'We must work to bring these (polluted) regions back to life, to restore them to their former state,' Lukashenko said. 'In ten to fifteen years these lands will be no worse than they were before the atomic tragedy.'

Kazmir and Marina Peshkovich are participants in Lukashenko's resettlement programme. Chernobyl evacuees themselves, they plan to buy a small house in the radioactive zone, once re-colonization is permitted. They want a summer cottage, and to visit relatives' graves.

'Krasnoe's a nice place in the country, it has an unspoiled nature with fresh air.' Marina Peshkovich said. 'You can get away from the city.'

Other families intend to live in Krasnoe permanently, working at state-run agricultural companies, or retiring in the area.

Scientists from the Belarusian Institute of Nuclear Science say Peshkovich's optimism has its reasons, although still-active radioactive isotopes in Krasnoe and the surrounding regions had first been expected to keep the area uninhabitable for a century or more.

The Belarusian nuclear scientists argue that twenty years of rain, snow, and natural soil erosion have washed much of the relatively radioactive top soils away, leaving areas once badly polluted by Chernobyl's radioactive dust often quite safe.

More controversially, research from the institute made public last year concluded some radioactive elements - particularly isotopes of Strontium and Cesium - were losing their ability to emit harmful rays almost twice as fast as expected, due to exposure to weather.

Certainly, many Belarusians do not believe that the irradiated areas have suddenly become safe.

Still, Belarus is a poor, authoritarian country. Apartments are assigned by the state, and new housing is chronically short. For Belarus, Chernobyl is as much a housing, as a health problem.

Roughly one-fifth of Belarus' entire population, some two million people, was uprooted after the Chernobyl explosion o April 26, 1986, leaving 27 towns, more than 3,600 villages, and close to one-fifth of all of Belarus' territory uninhabited.

Even 20 years later, only half of the Belarusians who lost their homes have managed to find jobs and move out of low-cost housing built in the late 1980s to hold the refugees, according to statistics by the Belarus Academy of Science.

As a result, Lukashenko's plans to re-colonize the irradiated territories has sparked a bit of a land rush. Even before the government bulldozers and construction crews have begun construction, squatters have returned to stake their claim to their bit of the 'new territories,' local analysts said.

'It's a terrible problem,' said Svetlana Shulga, regional coordinator for a Chernobyl assistance group. 'More than 100 families have moved back into the Chernobyl restricted zone, into their old homes or apartments.'

Officials in the Belarusian capital Minsk have, in the nineteen years since the disaster, built permanent housing for some 40,000 Chernobyl families - roughly one out of every ten persons displaced by the accident. The great majority of Belarus' Chernobyl victims, an estimated 1.8 million people, still live in temporary tenements hastily cobbled together during the last days of the Soviet Union.

One such micro-region is Shabany, an ugly Minsk suburb of pre- fabricated apartment houses built of bare concrete and tar seams.

The district has the highest crime record in the entire country, and is just about the only place in law-abiding Belarus where it is unsafe to walk at night alone, or where drunks openly sleep on sidewalks. Unemployment levels are three times the national average.

'There are tens of thousands of Chernobyl victims who have never fitted into society elsewhere, and who lack normal housing,' Shulga said. 'The are perfectly happy to go back to a nice home in the 'zone', if the government will tell them it is safe.'

Source:

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/europe/article_1158688.php/Half-life_aint_half_bad_Belarus_to_resettle_dead_zone