Denied right to environmental information: voices from contaminated Russia

by Silvia Musso

Ulitsa Sadovaja has been just published. It is a book wanted by the Italian voluntary association “Mondo in Cammino” and edited by “Carlo Spera editore X MIC”, editor aimed to sustain works to denounce and raise awareness about the topic of nuclear.
The authors, Elisa Geremia and Veronica Franzon, are two young researchers who spent one month in Novozybkov, one of the Russian cities most contaminated by the explosion of the nuclear reactor of Černobyl in 1986. This passionate book, developed from their experience of research, contains many different voices who have found a space to express themselves. The situation of this town of the Russian province is introduced throughout the experiences of its witnesses, people who live there and have to daily face the risks leaded by radioactivity in a mixture of clashing feelings, such as resignation, anger, hope, indifference. Throughout the point of view of the anthropology of risk – the analysis of human behaviours and cultural constructions in situations of risk to overcome the limits of “technical” definitions of disaster given by geologists, physicists and engineers – the authors try to answer to some questions: why have not 40.000 inhabitants of the town been evacuated? What does daily contact with radioactivity mean? How is the contamination linked with the local culture and inhabitants’ habits? The situation they saw is characterised by a bad institutional and environmental information: «In the libraries of Novozybkov – the authors underline – there are ten years old reports. The press offers a specialised magazine, but it focuses most on pensions and indemnities. Medical information are difficulty found. In Russia “ecology” is still an unknown concept; in Novozybkov you speak of environment and you study the nuclear disaster of Černobyl as an event that belongs just to the past. There are no reflections and just empty memories and abstract commemorations remain. The State indifference, the weakening of international interests and the obscurantism of disaster’s consequences are making the story of Černobyl over», against the real awareness of radioactivity among the population.
Many hints are in the book: from the host project of children from Černobyl, to radioprotection courses for students and teachers – sort of environmental education to teach how to manage the daily life in a contaminated area – organised, with many difficulties, by local and international associations, to the environmental communication on nuclear in Russia, Europe and Italy.
About this last topic Massimo Bonfatti, president of “Mondo in Cammino”, claims: «Inside the contaminated areas the minimization of nuclear risks matches with the lack of attention towards the existing pathologies, interpreted as bad consequences of wrong stiles of life and not as immunodeficiency». About the right of the citizen to environmental information again Bonfatti says: «The discussion on nuclear has different points of view. “Mondo in cammino” thinks that it should be a favourite point of view: the citizen one, who has rights, duties and legitimacy to participate to the debate and choices. Democracy, transparency and information are main rights for citizens. And in nuclear these rights have been denied for 50 years. May 28th 1959, at the beginning of the programme “Atoms for Peace”, the World Health Organization adopted an agreement (law WHO 12-40) with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that subordinates the WHO to the decisions of IAEA, the main promoter of commercial nuclear. This agreement has allowed that all the dates, known by WHO, about medical consequences of nuclear disasters of last years have not been communicated. The agreement WHO/IAEA denies the right to information, founding principle of democracy».
To fight against the lack of information about nuclear question, “Mondo in cammino” is involved in the organisation of a raising awareness campaign sustaining the petition for the autonomy and independence of WHO by IAEA.