Theoretically, no one can enter this area. Approaching the town of Yasen, one passes warning signs with bright red clover-leaf symbols–symbols of radiation danger. The sign on the rusty tin booth standing by the road screams ENTRY FORBIDDEN! But the napping policeman can’t be bothered to halt the few cars that drive by. After several hours in the zone one’s mouth goes dry and one’s head starts to hurt. No birds sing in the eerie, unimaginable silence. Geiger counters register 10 roentgens an hour–five per year is considered safe–rendering a swathe of country the size of Warsaw uninhabitable.
The area affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is much larger than the “dead zone,” of course. More than 100,000 people were resettled after the accident in 1986. But today, in ruined villages scattered throughout the zone, one can meet new “pioneers” who are taking over long-abandoned homesteads. Here and there, hard as it is to believe, there are even new construction sites. At the end of April, President Aleksandr Lukashenko dumbfounded his countrymen with an official declaration: much of the area contaminated by Chernobyl is no longer dangerous. More, the state would give each family willing to settle there a house and a job in a collective farm or dairy plant.
Lukashenko has gone on to call for the establishment of huge plantations to grow onions and green peas, and to raise cattle. His motivations are unclear. Are these pioneers meant to put uncultivated fields to use, or rebut “Western propaganda” claiming that large parts of Belarus remain uninhabitable? Either way, foreign experts and opposition leaders at home are unanimous in their verdict: this is going to end very badly. Contaminated food will flood the country. Hospitals will be swamped with the ill.
Ivan Chernyak and his wife came from Moldavia at the end of the 1990s after hearing that the government was giving houses to “Chernobylians.” Back then, the campaign was discreet; the authorities in Minsk didn’t want the world to learn of the “settlement experiment,” as officials called it. And so the Chernyaks arrived in Yasen. It’s well within the dead zone, where radioactivity and contamination are the highest. The house they expected to find turned out be a wooden hut, more a glorified chicken coop. They subsist in it with their two small children. Raisa Chernyak has no job; she collects and sells old bottles. Ivan gets some part-time work at the collective, where he earns the equivalent of $15 a month. Do they know it’s dangerous? “Sure,” he shrugs. “What are we supposed to do? You can’t feel the radioactivity.”
One hears such words again and again. “What’s to be afraid of? The trees are growing everywhere,” says Dima Romaniuk, 23, in the village of Ostroglyady. He and his young wife made their home in an abandoned hut. “I’ll have children here,” she says. “Why wouldn’t I?” Many of the 80,000 or so who have moved back are old people, returning to their original homes. “Leave me alone. I just want to live out my days in my home village,” says 84-year-old Vladimir Danchenko.
The government’s promotional campaign doesn’t tell returnees about soil contamination. Right next to comparatively safe areas are others where nothing should be grown for hundreds of years. In his TV appearances, Lukashenko instead insists the area is perfectly safe and encourages settlers from Kazakhstan, Ukraine or Moldavia to come. So far, 36 families have done so. Only later do they find out that the promised government assistance is largely a myth. There is no public transport; inhabitants frequently walk distances up to 20 kilometers. Services, stores, rudiments of civilization? Raisa Chernyak laughs bitterly. A store-on-wheels comes once a week. Where work is to be found, wages rarely exceed $80 a month. As for the promised family subsidies and relief benefits, there is little sign.
In the maternity ward at the hospital in Brahin, Natasha Vrogina, 30, counts her daughter’s fingers and toes. It’s typical for children to be born with serious birth defects. In 2001, not a single completely healthy child was born in the areas most affected by Chernobyl’s fallout. When a reporter asks about radiation-related health disorders, doctors turn their backs. “Data on the effects of the disaster have become one of the biggest official secrets of the Lukashenko regime,” says Viktar Karnejenka, a local opposition activist.
Environmentalists warn that Lukashenko’s experiment could end in tragedy. But impoverished and desperate Belarussians may be deaf to the dangers. Or perhaps they simply can’t afford to ignore the president’s promises.
