Chernobyl children facing ban from ‘harmful’ Britain :: Charter'97 :: News

More than 4,000 child victims of the Chernobyl disaster legacy are expected to be banned from visiting Britain in case they pick up what are considered to be dangerous Western ideas. The children growing up in Belarus, who hope to visit Britain to recuperate from the effects of radiation, face disappointment after their President attacked the “consumerist” influences that he says are corrupting his country’s youth.

Doctors from Britain and the former Soviet state say that even a few weeks’ stay in this country can boost a sick child’s immune system for up to two years. They said that cancelling such trips would be “astonishingly cruel”.

Belarus, which shares its southern border with Ukraine, received 70 per cent of the contamination from the 1986 nuclear disaster, which was carried by northerly winds.

Belarus is still heavily contaminated and the charities Chernobyl Children’s Lifeline and the Chernobyl Children’s Project arrange around 4,500 recuperative holidays in Britain for its children every year.

But Aleksandr Lukashenko, President of Belarus and Europe’s last dictator, said in a speech last week that countries such as Britain were corrupting the minds of Belarussian children. His rhetoric was reminiscent of Soviet-era isolationism.

“Only in extreme cases should we allow our children to leave the country,” he said. “Don’t you see the state in which children return from there? . .. Our children return from abroad completely different people.”

A statement from the Belarussian Embassy denied that Christmas trips this year would be cancelled, but could confirm nothing more than that children would be entitled to travel abroad “for the time being”.

It is thought likely that Mr Lukashenko will follow his comments with action. This month he halted foreign adoptions of Belarussian children.

Legislation introduced over the past year also makes it difficult for Western countries to donate second-hand medical equipment. Meanwhile, Belarussian children returning from abroad must pay up to 30 per cent tax on any money received as a gift.

Mr Lukashenko also accused foreign charities of underhand financial dealings. “(It) is the fact that money is extracted from parents for extra services and excursions,” he said.

David Walker, co-founder of Chernobyl Children’s Project, said of the President’s speech: “It was completely out of the blue. We hope and pray that it’s just posturing. The children are eating contaminated food, they are very impoverished and these holidays are very important for them physically and psychologically.”

The only serious attempts to measure the effect of the Chernobyl disaster in Belarus resulted in the eight-year incarceration of one of the country’s most respected scientists. Radiation experts around the world estimate that 80 per cent of Belarusian children are ill.

Crops in the south grow in contaminated soil and mutated genes caused by exposure to radiation can be passed from generation to generation. The high incidence of illnesses caused by radiation — thyroid cancer, deformity, leukaemia, heart defects, liver damage and sudden-death syndrome — is thought to be increasing.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials are frustrated by Mr Lukashenko’s anti-Western attitudes. One unnamed source said that he feared that Mr Lukashenko intended to close the country’s borders altogether. “These children are undernourished and badly in need of medical treatment and for them to go away is pretty essential,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the good it does these children to come to Britain on a holiday is secondary to what Mr Lukashenko percieves to be the political undermining of his consolidation of power.”

Chris Busby, Science Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk and an expert on the effects of Chernobyl, said that visits abroad were essential.

“Effectively, the radiation is rapidly ageing the children,” he said. “In Belarus a child of 16 has the cells of a 65-year-old in the UK.

“For the children to have a month in a country like Britain and experience a temporary reduction in radiation is like flushing out the system.

“It also gives them a little bit of hope and enhances their well-being, and we do know that a happier person is in a better position to fight cancer. To cancel these excursions seems astonishingly cruel.”