Belarus has released from prison a well-known professor who had accused government officials of playing down the health consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The professor, Yuri I. Bandazhevsky, is a former rector of the Gomel State Medical Institute. He was unexpectedly freed last month while serving the fourth year of an eight-year term at a prison in the capital, Minsk.
He was convicted in 2001 of instructing a vice rector at the institute to demand bribes from the parents of potential students, charges that he has consistently denied.
Observers outside Belarus regarded the trial as unfair and saw the sentence as punishment for Mr. Bandazhevsky’s having openly criticized the government’s response to the radioactive fallout from the 1986 explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, in neighboring Ukraine.
Medical research that he conducted with his wife, Galina, a physician, had found direct pathological effects of the radiation on children’s health -- findings that contradicted the government’s official position.
After he was jailed, Amnesty International declared him to be a prisoner of conscience and began a worldwide campaign for his freedom. Some 6,000 people from the United States sent e-mail messages seeking his release.
Neither Mr. Bandazhevsky nor his advocates had anticipated his recent release, which came when Belarus’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, declared a general amnesty to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Under the terms of his sentence, Mr. Bandazhevsky’s property was confiscated and he is forbidden to hold administrative positions for the next five years. In May the Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity, a nonprofit group based in France, announced that it would raise funds to build a biomedical research lab in Minsk in cooperation with the Bandazhevskys.
“It’s unlikely that I will undertake anything different than the struggle for public health, for the realization in society of that which threatens them,” the professor said after his release in an interview with the Belarusian service of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe.
While imprisoned Mr. Bandazhevsky wrote a book, The Philosophy of My Life, which is scheduled for publication in France.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 52, Issue 2, Page A68
