ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-JAPAN: Human Toll of Nuke Tests A Lesson for South Asia
http://www.ips.org/Critical/Enviroment/Environ/env1209003.htm
By Beena Sarwar

HIROSHIMA, Japan, Sep 9 (IPS) - ''Kazakhstan is full of sick children,'' said women's rights and peace activist Urkuz Ileyeva, showing paintings by children of beautiful green fields and valleys.

''This is our land, once so clean and pure -- and now full of environmental hazards,'' added Ileyeva, who is from Almaty in Kazakhstan.

The Semipalatinsk Polygon, the nuclear test site there, was closed in 1989. But the vast, sparsely populated Kazakhstan steppe, which has 17 million people in an area of 2.7 sq m, has seen more than 400 test explosions above, on and underground between 1949 and 1989.

At an anti-nuclear conference organised by the Japanese NGO Gensuikyo here recently, Russian and Kazakh experts made it clear why they found South Asia's nuclear tests in May so disturbing.

''We are still suffering from the radiation effects of tests done by China and Russia,'' explaied Tatiana Leschenko, an eye specialist who is also president of the Union of Nuclear Test Victims in Barnaul, capital of Russia's Altay region bordering Kazakhstan and China.

''We have suffered from the Semipalatinsk test site. We cannot be indifferent to these latest tests by India and Pakistan who have many other problems to solve,'' she added.

Her husband Alexander Leschenko, a former Soviet army officer, joined the anti-nuclear movement in 1989 while still in service: ''I knew about the problems of my fellow army men who served on the Semipalatinsk test site, and illnesses of their children.''

He joined the international anti-nuclear movement known as Nevada-Semipalatinsk, and then the Union of Nuclear Test Victims which lobbied for a law to entitling officers and soldiers in Altay with radiation illnesses to medical compensation and care.

Altay and Kazakhstan are affected by the operation of the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan and the Labnor site in China. Radiation has hurt agriculture near these areas, say activisits.

Studies show an unusually high ratio of people there with cancers and other soft-tissue diseases, as well as nervous system imbalances, neoplasma and congenital abnormality.

Maidan Abishev, president of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, talks about Renata Ismailova, a bright-eyed, smiling 17-year-old who is just 55 cm tall because of exposure to radiation while in her mother's womb.

Japanese activist Shunji Tsuboi, who led an 18-member team to Kazakhstan in May to study nuclear test damage there, says between 1.2 to 1.5 million people have been affected by them.

The group divided into two, one for Semipalatinsk near the Russian border, and the other for Zharkent near the Chinese one. The team based itself in Kurchatov, a secret city constructed 150 km from Semipalatinsk for the purpose of keeping military secrets on nuclear testing.

Testified Tsuboi: ''We saw the shocking ruins where the first nuclear test explosion took place, in 1949. People think that the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima City is the only existing testimony to the damage caused by nuclear weapons.''

''They should see the Polygon ruins, which have been exposed to broad daylight. A mountain blown up, its remains lying around -- it looked like a scene from hell. I am not exaggerating,'' Tsuboi added.

''And as we interviewed the village people at schools, hospitals, institutes, we learnt of the terrible consequences of the nuclear tests which affected virtually everyone in the vicinity of the Polygon,'' the activist continued.

One activist, Maidan Abishev, called radiation-related illnesses and deaths as ''genocide of the people of Kazakhstan''.

Across the globe, in what was once the former Soviet Union's arch enemy, the effects of the U.S. nuclear tests and its uranium mines are also claiming victims.

Among them is a Navajo Indian from New Mexico, Dorothy Purley, who worked as truck driver delivering high-grade uranium ore to the mill site in order to support her family in the Indian reservation where she has lived all her life.

''Every day we bury somebody,'' she said sadly, referring to the deaths by cancer and other radiation-related diseases that have depleted her community. Accompanied by her daughter Carlotta, Dorothy spoke of her three miscarriages, caused, she believes, by eight years of high exposure to uranium.

The U.S. government began mining for uranium in her village, Laguna Pueblo, in 1935. But Purley, who has cancer of the immune system, says her people were not told when the uranium would be used for, or that mining it would be dangerous to health. ''Now my people and myself continue to suffer as the Japanese Hibakush do,'' said Purley, using the Japanese term for 'witness- survivor of the A-bomb'. ''We are also Hibakusha.''

Also calling themselves Hibakusha are the Chernobyl clean-up workers -- more than 7,000 Lithuanian men aged, between 18-40 years, who took part in the decontamination and clean-up operations (1986-1989) after the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine on April 26, 1986.

Dr Gediminas Rimdieka, director of the Sapiega hospital in Lithuania, says 5,709 or 79.8 percent of all Lithuianian Chernobyl clean-up workers are registered at his hospital.

The 1,569 cases of diseases presented to the State Chernobyl Expert Commission include 390 cases of psychic disorder related to the cleanup. A total 259 of the registered workers have died, including 48 who committed suicide.

Permanent personality disorders were diagnosed in 26.8 percent of the workers
and 71 percent had post-trauma stress disorders.

''While treating them, one feels that they think themselves as the condemned' because of their work at Chernobyl,'' he said. Rimdieka says some workers had been on 'military' training as a pretext for drafting them to Chernobyl without informing them of the real situation.

Nearly half are unemployed because' 'employers don't want to hire 'Chernobyl Hibakusha-ho' who are perceived as being often ill, hence bad workers,'' he added.

The continuing human fallout from nuclear testing and accidents around the world mean only that they are paths to be shunned today, activists argue.

''The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, despite the growing world opinion against such testing, will not bring only physical but psychological harm, especially for those who have faced the effects of ionising radiation before,'' Rimdieka said. (END/IPS/ap- ip/bs/js/98)