Фото: t.me/viasna96
On the 40th anniversary of the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a number of Belarusian organisations adopted a joint resolution warning of growing nuclear risks and calling on the international community and the Belarusian authorities to take concrete action.
The authors of the document recalled that Belarus suffered the most from the disaster. Radioactive contamination affected a quarter of the country’s territory and impacted many Belarusian families.
“Forty years on, the consequences have not disappeared, but the testimonies are fading along with the people, and new narratives are downplaying them. Their burden still lies on the affected lands and families. Armed conflicts, in particular Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and attacks on nuclear facilities, have demonstrated the vulnerability and underestimated danger of nuclear power plants. Russia’s deployment of nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus increases the risk of nuclear escalation and their possible use in local conflicts”, the statement says.
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the world today is closer to nuclear conflict than at the most tense moments of the Cold War, the resolution notes.
“Chernobyl as a fact and an ongoing disaster is losing its urgency against the backdrop of new wars. However, the scale and millennia-long duration of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident exceed social upheavals and wars — except, perhaps, a global nuclear conflict. That is why today we speak about Chernobyl — and not only”, the document explains.
The signatories stress the growing risk of new radiation disasters of a similar scale and call on the international community, governments and citizens to do everything possible to prevent them.
The authors of the resolution propose that the Belarusian authorities restore citizens’ right to information about radioactive contamination, reinstate social protections for liquidators and victims, disclose data on incidents at the Astravets Nuclear Power Plant, and return Belarus to its non-nuclear neutral status.
In addition, the authors call for all possible measures to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation, including coordinated and decisive actions to protect the peoples of Belarus and the world from nuclear war, as well as urgent steps to protect operating nuclear power plants in risk zones from military attacks, or, if this is not possible, to shut them down.
The international community is urged to create an independent international radiological registry, to consider the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus as a violation of the principles of collective security, and to ban trade in nuclear materials with aggressor states.
The resolution was adopted by the Green Belarus alliance, Ecohome, Green Network, the Belarusian Green Party, the Belarusian National Platform of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum, Belarusian Christian Democracy, the solidarity movement “RAZAM”, “Dapamoga” and “A Country to Live In”.