by SAMER ELATRASH
photos by VACLAV VASKU

1:23 a.m., April 26, 1986. A blast, and red light that flared the sky for miles, announced the calamity. An experiment in one of Chernobyl’s four nuclear reactors, 10 miles inside the Ukrainian side of the border with Belarus, set off an explosion and fires that took days to quench. For millions of people, it was too late. The winds had scudded radioactive clouds across Europe and the shores of North America.

For 10 days, helicopters droned above Chernobyl, disgorging sand and lead to smother the burning granite from the reactor. Clouds, laden with poison and moved by a north-westerly wind, softly dropped snow and rain above Scandinavia. In the Kremlin, Soviet officials tried to bury the accident under a blanket of official silence. Thirty-one people, mostly emergency workers and soldiers, had died by then, and over 100,000 villagers were evacuated.

Joanna Survilla, a Belarusian exile who has lived most her life in Canada, recalls the moment she heard about the accident. “We were in bed at that time. I thought, God make it that Belarus will not be affected again. We have known so many terrible things in the 20th century.”

Dictators and other calamities

Seventy per cent of the nuclear radiation fell on Belarus, a former Soviet republic of 10 million people that became independent in 1991. For three years after the accident, the extent of the disaster was hidden from the Soviet public. “Everybody was telling me, ‘If something really bad had happened we would have known,’” Survilla says. By 1989, an easing of restrictions on the Soviet press allowed more details to emerge. The reactor exploded owing to a faulty design—no containment building sheltered the nuclear plant. And the fallout would eventually claim thousands of lives.

“Belarus was unprepared for a catastrophe of that kind,” says Survilla, who at the age of eight fled Belarus with her parents before the Red Army invaded in 1944. Now based in Ottawa, she co-founded the Canadian Relief Fund for Chernobyl Victims in 1989 to send medical supplies to Belarus hospitals. In two years, the aid group started to bring Belarusian children for visits to Canada, where they would stay for six weeks with Canadian families to shed the contamination they accumulated in Belarus.

Survilla broke off her active involvement with the aid group in 1998, when she was elected to head the Belarusian exile opposition group Belarusian Democratic Republic. In 1994, Alexander Lukashenko, a former Communist party leader, was elected president of Belarus. Lukashenko has served as president ever since, winning elections, most recently last month, that human rights groups say were marred by violations.

Survilla sees a link between her opposition to Lukashenko and her work for Chernobyl victims. Lukashenko says Western countries are not doing enough to help Belarus cope with the Chernobyl disaster, but Western aid groups say laws initiated by Lukashenko that place taxes on funds and force aid groups to work through government agencies have hindered relief work. Lukashenko has also tried to end visits by Belarusian children to Western countries, saying they risked contamination by capitalist culture.

Death toll debates

As the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident approaches, controversy over the aftermath of Chernobyl hasn’t subsided. A September 2005 report compiled by several United Nations agencies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization, was heavily criticized for estimating that there were fewer than 50 deaths attributable to Chernobyl, and predicting that an estimated 4,000 people would die from the radiation spewed from the reactor. The Green bloc in the European Parliament commissioned a study in response, which was released earlier this month. The study estimated that between 30,000 and 60,000 people would die of the radiation, and accused the drafters of the UN report of playing down the fallout for political reasons. This week, Greenpeace said 200,000 were killed as a result of the accident, and another 93,000 could still die.

The exact number of the casualties, and abiding effects of the disaster, may never be known. As stretches of land in Europe remain immersed in radiation, Survilla says the disaster that captured the world’s imagination is fading from attention. “People don’t realize that it’s as present as ever.”

Survilla will speak at a day-long forum on Chernobyl on April 26 at UQÀM (200 Sherbrooke W., room SH-2800), which will feature photos by Czech Greenpeace activist Vàclav Vasku and a film screening. The free event starts at 2 p.m.