The Battle of Chernobyl Page #7

Accompanied by Igor Kostine, Yulia wanted to see the apartment where she lived with her family up until the fateful day of their evacuation.

Contrary to what they'd been told not a single inhabitant was ever able to come back to live in the deserted buildings.

For Igor Kostine as well, the visit stirs up painful memories.

He was fatally exposed to radiation during the seven months he spent covering the battle.

Since then, he's had to be hospitalized for over two months each year.

For the hundreds of thousands of atomic refugees,

as for the hundreds of thousands of veterans from the Battle of Chernobyl the fight against the invisible enemy hasn't let up.

Everyone who went to Chernobyl is still suffering from the radioactivity their bodies absorbed.

In the months following the accident the liquidators flooded into hospitals all over the Soviet Union.

Twenty years later, those who are still alive continue to frequent hospital number 6.

They're all victims of what specialists have since named "The Chernobyl Syndrome."

We've all got a bunch of symptoms: heart, stomach, liver, kidneys, nervous system.

Our whole bodies were radically upset by the metabolic changes caused by radiation, and chemical exposure.

When the liquidators went back home, they were exhausted, incapable of going back to a normal life.

Twenty years later, many of those who survived are disabled and unable to work.

And the authorities appear to be ignoring their plight by cutting down their welfare money.

The veterans of the war in Afghanistan are still alive, while we are slowly wasting away.

l have written a poem about this:

"Sadness fills me, nostalgia and anguish,

Like a bullet in the temple,

Nothing can ever stop.

The mother prays in secret to God,

To spare his life... "

These men weren't even thirty when they were sent in to battle the atom.

Today, the survivors are not yet 50 years old, but they struggle like senior citizens.

According to the military, of the 500,000 Chernobyl liquidators 20,000 have already died.

200,000 are officially disabled.

You don't know how long you have to live, or what disease is going to kill you.

You don't know what effects it will have on your children, if you have any.

We know all that, and we know the invisible enemy is eating away inside of us like a worm.

For us, the war continues, and little by little we're slipping away from this world.

Yet for two decades, only 59 deaths had been officially attributed to the Chernobyl disaster.

Not a single study has been carried out on the 130,000 refugees from the zone.

Not a single statistic on the state of the 500,000 liquidators.

No figures on the population that continues to live around Chernobyl and in the contaminated areas.

The real amount of radiation these people were exposed to has never been revealed to them.

A deputy of the Supreme Soviet discovered the systematic cover-up of the true consequences of Chernobyl when the Soviet Empire dissolved in 1991.

Taking advantage of the anarchy in the country she managed to get her hands on a copy of top secret documents.

600 pages of a report to the Central Committee written while the Battle of Chernobyl was still raging.

When I read these documents, I discovered everything happened differently.

I realized just how huge a lie the Party leaders told.

Decree No.12 stated that on May 12, 1986, 10,198 people had already been hospitalized,

345 showed signs of radio-lesions.

Yet at the same time, they were telling us everything was fine, that it was nothing serious, and I realized the scope of the lies.

According to Alla, another passage reveals that authorities had arbitrarily changed the standards.

Multiplying by five what was considered the acceptable dose of radiation for the human body.

When they raised the standard, suddenly people were miraculously cured.

They were released from the hospital and sent home.

It was criminal.

The tendency to manipulate the numbers was not unique to the Soviets.

In late August 1986 the first international conference assessing Chernobyl took place behind closed doors.

It was presided over by Hans Blix, No journalists or outside observers were admitted into the amphitheater.

The Russian delegation was led by Legassov the man who'd been in charge of the governmental commission during the Battle of Chernobyl.

When we put him in charge of preparing the report for the IAEA, we gave him the duty of reporting everything.

He came up with a very detailed report that put everybody in a state of shock.

Legassov spoke for three hours.

His report concluded that in the decades to come, about 40,000 deaths from cancer caused by Chernobyl were to be expected.

The Western world refused flat out to accept this estimate which spurred a genuine East-West negotiation.

These are theoretical calculations based upon the Hiroshima model.

That you say that if you have certain radio-activity, you know from Hiroshima,

that the long term effect, that so or so many would die from it.

And if you then increase it by tenfold, you assumed that it will be tenfold.

That's the calculation.

This is not I think an exact, it is not empiric...

There again, the figures were surprisingly flexible.

By the end of the conference, people were no longer talking about 40,000 but rather 4000 probable deaths.

Nearly twenty years later in September 2005, this figure became the official death toll of the disaster.

The staunchest opponents to the Soviets' policy of transparency were the French,

who went as far as to deny that the radioactive cloud passed over their country.

Twenty years later in France and especially in Corsica,

cases of thyroid cancer of the same nature and severity as those around Chernobyl are being reported.

The most dangerous element that came out of the Chernobyl reactor wasn't cesium or plutonium, but lies.

"The Lie of '86", that's what I call it.

A lie that was propagated like the radioactivity - throughout the whole country and the entire world.

On the 27th of April, 1988 the second anniversary of the disaster,

Legassov who'd worked so hard to unveil the entire truth decided to put an end to his life.

Today, as perfect metaphors of the institutionalized lie the radioactive particles hurled from the reactor in the explosion continue to poison the land.

Twenty years after the disaster, the area of Chernobyl remains uninhabitable.

In five years, the radionuclides sink five centimeters into the contaminated soil.

So twenty years later, they're 20 cm under the ground.

They continue to contaminate all the plants.

To clean it up, we'd need to remove 20 cm of soil and seal it underground in burial sites.

And that's too big of a job to do.

It's impossible ...

Today, eight million people live in contaminated areas of Ukraine, Russia and especially Belorussia.

For twenty years, they've lived off the radioactive food that continues to contaminate them little by little.

This issue, raised in 1986 by the Soviet delegation at the Vienna conference, has been systematically ignored.

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