JL: Adi, can you tell me about professor Yuri Bandazhevsky?

Adi Roche: Professor Yuri Bandazhevsky pioneered the work on low dose exposure through the food chain on the human organism and he very clearly talks about the fetal and placental damage and how iodine and cesium and all these different elements actually pass from the mother through the placenta; which somehow by some quirk of nature actually accelerates the damage straight into the unborn fetus.  I mean, just extraordinary stuff that none of us could have predicted. 

 

JL: So does the main problem lay in the soil and the clean up?

Adi Roche: The huge problem does lie in soil cleanup and decontamination and even twenty-one years later any of their efforts have been a dismal failure.  They’re not even attempting to tell us that they can even do the cleanup – and like when you talk about cleanup – that’s how you sort the amount of farmland.  What about the marshes, the swamps, the woodland areas. There’s a very famous place called the Pripyat Marshes and I write about this in the book and the flood plane land; which are really uncontrollable because in addition to what we know is contaminated in the land you have the rivers, the rivulets, the networks of rivers which is very complex. The lakes, the ponds, the dams, ALL OF THAT, I mean that provide the drinking water to millions of people in Ukraine; and an awful lot of those are closed areas.  But how can you tell  people not to swim, not to fish when they need to exist or they need to do something ordinary like swim in a local river that looks healthy.

JL: Right. I know you talk about the beauty of the land in your book?

 

Aid Roche:  This was one of the first things that struck me when going to Chernobyl all those years ago.  I wish I were a writer that I could write this in a poetry or in a play because there is a deceptive beauty, a deceptive tranquility about these beautiful lands because these were extraordinary lands ever before Chernobyl. You could say untouched by the mechanism of the twentieth century, unspoiled by the pollution of so much of the industries that we have become so familiar with.  You’re talking about Medieval villages, beautiful timber little houses that were one hundred years old, villages that were eight and nine hundred years old and a lot of these were swept away by bulldozers; bulldozed into the ground and covered in mountains of concrete and literally physically taken off the map as if they don’t exist or never existed.  I mean the death culturally and spiritually is so strong because in each of these little villages they had different versions of their language, which is Belarussian, and they had little dialects, none of which of course were written down; and huge traditions in crafting and herbal medicines in so many things.   And all of these communities were broken up and wiped away.

 

JL: What was it like when your first went there in the early days?

Adi Roche:   When I went up in the early days when many of them were still standing - it was like walking into a movie set.  It was just extraordinary.  A surreal experience.  And it’s just a loss for those who have been evacuated from these areas.  People who had never seen electricity, who had never seen a moving car; who traveled by horse and cart only from one village to another; dumped into high rise buildings in suburbia which they cannot relate to. Their skills are medieval farming skills and so alcoholism, social breakdown, distrust among people, family breakdown, suicide rates rocketed and huge abandonment of children as the parents disappeared into despair and into a deep dark sense of paralysis, as the world – like the holocaust deniers from the second world war in Dachau and Buchenwalt.  There are those that are the Chernobyl deniers as well.

You know, prove it to me – show it to me.

 

JL:  What do you mean Chernobyl deniers? Who’s denying this?

Adi Roche:  The nuclear industry.  The military industrial complex would rather you and I didn’t have this information particularly in relation to the damage of iodine 131 which I deal with effectively in the book because I actually quote why, particularly in America.  They don’t want people to know the information on the research from Belarus because of deliberate exposure to see the effects on human bodies in America of iodine 131 done very specifically in the last couple of decades. 

They don’t want us to have the information, John.  They don’t want ordinary people to know that there is a 2400% increase in cancer of the thyroid gland there; they don’t want people to know that one in four of all newly born babies is born with a thyroid abnormality. They don’t want people to know that there is a 200% increase in birth defects and this is according to the experts from the University of Hiroshima who have analyzed the 30,000 fetuses of still born babies in a short amount of time. They don’t want people to know that there is a 200% increase in breast cancer.  They don’t want people to know that there is a 40% increase in all kinds of cancers in Belarus alone in a very short four year period.  It’s extraordinary, they don’t want to know that between 30 and 60,000 cancer deaths will happen worldwide as a result of Chernobyl.

JL: That’s really frightening.

Adi Roche: Yes. Basically, John, you and I are going to know people – if we don’t know them already; we certainly know people because even in the United States – in the testing of milk in 1986, they even picked up radioactivity from Chernobyl even as far away as the United States.  The four corners of the earth has got radioactivity.

JL: Yes, I can imagine how much radioactivity Hiroshima and Nagasaki has spread.

Adi Roche:  I remember reading that heavy fallout was even measured 8000 kilometers away in Hiroshima in Japan. I mean as if they didn’t get enough in 1945 for God’s sake.  They had to end up with further contamination all these years later.  This is an extraordinary story – I remember in 1986 there was this wonderful nuclear physicist, Valery Legasov, an extraordinary guy.  Only heard about him after the fact; but he was taken by Gorbachev and he and the top scientist who had been working down at the reactor; who were kind of in a state of shock – as he said in his memoirs “this is the accident that we had so lulled ourselves into believing would never happen” that they weren’t able to cope with the reality when it happened.  He was to head up a team that went to Vienna to speak to the International Atomic Energy based in Europe, the IAE; and he was to go to look for support and to look for help in the weeks afterwards.  It was either May or June of 1986; and what he saw was what he called the glazed look.  None of them wanted to know.  They went to say – we need help, this is a disaster, it’s spreading all over the world, it’s killing off the area, we need help with evacuation, we need help with medicine, people are dying, etc. etc.. 

 

A monument to the victims of the Chernobyl disaster at Moscow's Mitino cemetery, where some of the firefighters who battled the flames and later died of radiation exposure are buried.

 

 

JL: What happened?

Adi Roche: Basically they were met with a stone wall, and he came back and then he realized that things had changed in the intervening days when he went back to Moscow. It was still the Soviet Union and the KGB kicked into place and Gorbachev unfortunately (and he is one of my heroes), he helped to sign forty pieces of secret legislation and each one was about keeping the truth from the world.  Really, and this legislation of course is now publicly available and is extensively written about; but they were like nails in the coffin of the truth and they altered the internationally acceptable levels of radiation in order that they didn’t have to go to the expenditure of evacuating villages. 

JL: That’s awful.

Adi Roche:  Yes, they did criminal things – talk about the Nuremberg trials - it should be held or something like it after what they did.  But then of course, the Soviet Union broke up so therefore nobody is responsible.  It’s like Pontius Pilate washing his hands – not my problem, because all of the states became independent.  But what happened to this man afterwards is what’s interesting; he found that when he went back the culture of secrecy had kicked in. The denial had kicked in and the initial pleas for help – they were actually closing ranks within the Soviet Union and that suited the vested interest of the West.  That man did his level best  to try and tell the truth about what was happening and what would happen and eventually when nobody would listen, he hanged himself.

Continue to Part 3