AN ILL WIND

Imagine going to Moore Street to buy some vegetables and before you pay for them, having them checked by a radiation scanner. That is the reality for the two million plus citizens of Belarus, The Ukraine and Russia, who live within areas contaminated by the Chernobyl reactor disaster.

The long finger of Chernobyl's radiation reaches further than the contaminated areas. It travels in the bodies of wild animals. It travels in the food sent to relations in the cities. It travels in the furniture and other belongings stolen from the deserted villages and then sold on black markets. And it travels in the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of people who were evacuated from the severely contaminated areas and moved to cities within what was then the U.S.S.R. Chernobyl's legacy began its journey in 1986, and it will be 2,500 centuries before its long finger of death will snap and disappear.

At 1.23 am on April 26, 1986, the No. 4 Chernobyl Reactor exploded. Immediately before the explosion, tests were being carried out to see for how long the reactor could still produce electricity if it was undergoing a shutdown procedure. To carry out this test many of the safety measures had been overridden. Suddenly there was a power surge in the reactor. Operators attempted to insert 'control rods' into its core in order to bring the surge under control. The rods had an opposite effect. The surge mushroomed and the reactor exploded.

Black Wind, White Land: Living with Chernobyl is an hour long documentary by Dreamchaser Productions. It investigates what it is like, seven years on, to live in Belarus, the by now independent republic, which received 70% of the fall-out from the Chernobyl disaster. The documentary was produced by Liam Cabot and directed by Gerry Hoban. It is presented by Ali Hewson and will be broadcast on RTE 1 on Tuesday 19th October, at 9pm.

Black Wind, White Land is a documentary worthy of its subject. It brings you into Chernobyl's world and lets you look. It brings before you Chernobyl's people and lets you listen. Perhaps the most chilling aspect of Black Wind, White Land is that to the eyes, Chernobyl's world is like any other world. "Chernobyl the power station is the only tangible evidence of what went wrong," director Gerry Hoban points out. "Everything else is totally invisible. The grass is still green. There's no black earth. There's no 'glowing' buildings. There's no devastation of the extent that you might have seen in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. This was a much more insidious form of radiation."

HEAVILY CONTAMINATED

The seven-member Dream-chaser team spent three weeks in Belarus, from April 19th to May 10th, 1993. When they were in heavily contaminated areas, they wore dust suits and breathing devices. In the three weeks they were there they received the equivalent of a year's worth of normal background radiation. Medical experts informed them that the risks to health were minimal. However, as producer Liam Cabot explains, "What you can't tell through body scans or any form of preventative medicine is if one of your cells in your body has mutated. And that's always the risk, that in twenty years time something may happen."

Of course, the risk the Dreamchaser team took was infinitesimal in comparison to that taken by the 600,000 'Liquidators' conscripted to clean-up after the disaster. 70,000 of them are now classified as being permanently disabled. 13,000 are dead. "We lost everything," a Liquidator states with a desperate anger, in the documentary. "Our youth, our health, we lost everything. And the government just threw us aside, abandoned us… and no-one wants us." However, as Liam Cabot points out, without the heroic efforts of the 600,000 Liquidators, the disaster would have been much, much worse. He goes on to make a further point in relation to these heroic people and the Soviet policy of 'collective responsibility.' "If Sellafield goes up, the Irish or the British government aren't going to put out a radio announcement and go: 'Anybody who's willing please turn up in O'Connell Street and go and clean the place up'. We'll all head off out of the country. Nobody will clean the place up."

Radiation is most dangerous to children because their growing cells are very sensitive. "We were sitting in a hospital which is the same distance from Chernobyl as Dublin is from Sellafield," Liam Cabot recounts. "And this doctor was telling me that to protect children from radioactive iodine 131, [which is particularly damaging to a child's thyroid gland] they would need to have tablets administered within six hours of the release to the 800,000 children affected." The fact that the authorities waited for over twelve hours before acknowledging that the disaster had in fact occured, made an impossible situation even worse, Liam pointed out.

Those of us who were reared on a farm will understand the power that land can have over people. For some of the farmers of Belarus, the pull of the earth was simply too strong. They refused to leave. In perhaps one of the most poignant scenes from Black Wind, White Land, a farmer who has stayed behind, grips some soil in his fist. "I'm going nowhere," he states passionately. "Maybe I'm a fool or a fanatic, but I'm not going anywhere. Liepa is my home. The land, I kiss it. I'm not going anywhere. I won't go. That's all…"

The camera can be a pimp. You walk a very dangerous line when you document a person's soul. However, Black Wind, White Land has managed to walk that line with sensitivity, decency and purpose. The purpose was to tell a story to the world, so that the world can learn. It was a story that the people of Belarus wanted to be told, as Gerry Hoban explains. "The weird thing was that they were desperate to tell us. They hadn't seen a camera before. They saw the camera very much as some sort of catharsis."

HARROWING EXPERIENCE

Gerry goes on to recount how, when the people who had been moved to high-rise flats in cities, started talking about their homes in the country, many of them, "burst out crying. And it was an uncontrolled mixture of anger and sadness. There was one particular old woman who… She didn't even have shoes. She had bits of plastic wrapped around her feet. She had received compensation of about $10 for her house and her garden, which she grew a lot of her own stuff on. And we asked her about her old house, and after a while we had to stop the camera." Seeing this woman and hearing her words is a harrowing and disturbing experience. "I have lived through a very hard war," she says in a low, weary voice. "And now I must live through this radiation. I wish I'd just fall and never get up."

"Human error was responsible for the Chernobyl disaster," Gerry Hoban emphasises, "and human error can happen anywhere in this bloody world. And another thing that I hope the documentary will do is to make people realise that it can happen near you, and I'm not just talking about Dublin and Sellafield. I'm talking about anyone near Three Mile Island or anyone in Japan or Australia or anywhere. Anyone in a nuclear rich country. That it's not just those within 40 km; this exclusion zone around Chernobyl. We were in places over 200 km away from Chernobyl that were 60, 80, 100 higher radiation-wise than what would be regarded as normal background levels. The wind carried the radiation."

Liam Cabot agrees. "If Sellafield went up and if the wind was blowing in a westerly direction Dublin would now be evacuated."

Black Wind, White Land: Living With Chernobyl will be broadcast on RTE 1 on Tuesday October 19th, at 9pm.