Nuclear Families; Lukashenko urges citizens to return to Chernobyl.

Byline: Michal Kacewicz

How many years has it been since Chernobyl? Eighteen? In the contaminated zone of southern Belarus, time seems to stand still. Thick woods. A forest path. Slowly, the village of Dubrovannoye comes into view--or rather what's left of it. Empty black windows peer out from half-ruined houses. All that remains of the former schoolhouse is a single wall with holes in it. It is a ghost village, stripped bare long ago of anything useful or moveable.

Theoretically, no one can enter this area. Approaching the town of Yasen, one passes warning signs with bright red clover-leaf symbols--symbols of radiation danger. The sign on the rusty tin booth standing by the road screams ENTRY FORBIDDEN! But the napping policeman can't be bothered to halt the few cars that drive by. After several hours in the zone one's mouth goes dry and one's head starts to hurt. No birds sing in the eerie, unimaginable silence. Geiger counters register 10 roentgens an hour--five per year is considered safe--rendering a swathe of country the size of Warsaw uninhabitable.

The area affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is much larger than the "dead zone," of course. More than 100,000 people were resettled after the accident in 1986. But today, in ruined villages scattered throughout the zone, one can meet new "pioneers" who are taking over long-abandoned homesteads. Here and there, hard as it is to believe, there are even new construction sites. At the end of April, President Aleksandr Lukashenko dumbfounded his countrymen with an official declaration: much of the area contaminated by Chernobyl is no longer dangerous. More, the state would give each family willing to settle there a house and a job in a collective farm or dairy plant.

Lukashenko has gone on to call for the establishment of huge plantations to grow onions and green peas, and to raise cattle. His motivations are unclear. Are these pioneers meant to put uncultivated fields to use, or rebut "Western propaganda" claiming that large parts of Belarus remain uninhabitable? Either way, foreign experts and opposition leaders at home are unanimous in their verdict: this is going to end very badly. Contaminated food will flood the country. Hospitals will be swamped with the ill.

Ivan Chernyak and his wife came from Moldavia at the end of the 1990s after hearing that the government was giving houses to "Chernobylians." Back then, the campaign was discreet; the authorities in Minsk didn't want the world to learn of the "settlement experiment," as officials called it. And so the Chernyaks arrived in Yasen. It's well within the dead zone, where radioactivity and ...