The Chernobyl that nobody wants
23 Apr 2011 Lasă un comentariu
“At this point it is worth making yet another digression. By the time the authorities started on enlarging the exclusion zone and moving people out of ever wider circles away from the reactor, it became clear that the evacuation was not temporary but permanent. People started to ask to be resettled as a whole village or at least as a street in a new place of settlement. They did not wish to be separated and scattered among several families, so as not to mix strangers with strangers. The authorities did not listen. They “resettled”, or rather scattered people from 415 villages in the “zone” among thousands of villages and towns across Belarus and so dispersed the memories of these people and any memory of their existence… Yet each village is unique in itself, an authentic and inimitable world with its own traditions, legends and linguistic features. Each village has its own names for places in the locality, for distinctive natural features, streams, headwaters and fields… After twenty-five years no one has got around to collecting the heritage of Chernobyl or to setting up an all-Belarusian museum of the villages that have perished and been lost.
The fact that the authorities made no concessions to the evacuees is evidence of their “farsightedness” and just how well informed they were about the consequences of the accident. As I have said already, most of the “Chernobylites” from the 30km Belarusian exclusion zone died within ten, fifteen or twenty years of “being moved”. It would have been immediately obvious that something was wrong if whole villages or streets had died out, leaving empty houses behind. As it is, the “Chernobylites” died off quietly, one by one, almost unnoticed, without spoiling the national statistical picture even at district or local level…”
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-04-22-piatrovich-en.html
