Radiation, loneliness haunt chornobyl's neighbours

The sunlight reflects dully off a sign along the road «ATTENTION: Forbidden Area». It is a wasteland disguised as rustic paradise.

This is a place where an invisible poison of radiation released during the 1986 ChomobyP meltdown has seeped into the land and people's psyche. Yet some know no other home. «We were born here and we will die here,» says an elderly peasant woman. «There can be not other way. It is our fate».

It is a ghost-town life for many who remain in Ukraine's forbid­den areas more than a decade after the world's worst nuclear acci­dent. International health authorities estimate nearly five million people in Ukraine and neighbouring countries were exposed to wind-borne radionuclides. Thyroid cancer has increased greatly in children, but officials are unsure how many people have died or been affected by Chornobyl'-related cancer, chromosome damage or post-traumatic stress. The disaster still haunts Ukraine, taking 15 percent of its bud-

get to operate damaged power complex, provide medical care for vic­tims and pay other expenses.

Some people refuse to leave the contaminated areas, while others return years later out of economic desperation or a longing for their forefather's home. Authorities allow them to stay, and weekly food deliveries are sent to some areas. One forbidden zone is the Narodychi district, about 45 rniles west of Chomobyl'. Here, past check­points manned by bored police, villages are abandoned, window shut­ters bang in the wind against crumbing houses, door-ways stand open like missing teeth. Silence is on the land, the whitewashed houses like scattered skeletons, the bones still there but the flesh gone. A few figures move furtively, dogs and people, birds startled up, like survivors of an apocalypse, only without the crude damage of war, fire or flood.

In Loznydtsya, where the population dropped from 200 to 60 after the accident, Maria Zymuha still opens up the village library for a few hours a day. It is a cold little room in the village's theatre, which closed years ago. Large drama masks symbolizing comedy and trag­edy still hang on the building's facade.