I enter a room and the first thing I hear is silence. In a rush
to turn on the CD player I drop my bag, move some clothes around, and
step on some books. I don't want silence to disturb my comfort.
Silence screams and makes you think about this world and about the questions
you never find answers for. So you stop looking.
Besides silence is annoying in many other ways. I could never use to
my advantage. When a child I had this remarkable capability to get into
trouble for speaking up when I needed to be silent and to be reticent
when I needed to justify myself or tell about what was oppressing me. I
would get hurt, but I would never tell anybody about it. I would cry
on my own. Words and thoughts would stuck in me, and...silence.
I have never known how to fight this dumb muteness, in myself or in
others. While my introversion affected me, I saw that I was a satellite
of my whole culture. For as long as I lived, I saw how people in Belarus
chose to be silent because of the fear to speak up against oppressive
regimes.
In the Soviet era, anyone who dared to disagree was declared as an enemy
of the state. One morning a person would wake up and his/her neighbor,
friend, or a relative was gone. State enemies were dealt with
in most brutal ways. Some were sent to isolation in Siberia, which
meant struggle to survive in Arctic conditions; others ended up in jail.
In Belarus, there is a place known as Kurapaty, a forest some kilometers
away from the capital where ''enemies of the state'' were brought.
After being ordered to dig a pit, they were put around it and fired
at. All together about 30, 000 common people were estimated to
be killed. Although such repressions occurred mainly in the 30s
under Stalin's rule, the first public acknowledgment of the event took
place only in 1989 with the archeological discoveries of the bones and
skeletons. Those who, realizing that dead would not speak for themselves,
tried to organize events to attract people's attention to the historical
tragedy, were chased by the state militia.
A decade past since that discovery, but no public recognition of the
tragedy arrived. On the contrary, this is where garbage gets dumped
and dogs are taken for a walk. Not only are the ruling authorities
silent about the place and event, but they are also building a highway
through Kurapaty, disregarding the sacredness of the place. I know how
hard it is to speak up, but at the same time I realize that if more
people were vocal about what happened to their neighbors and members
of their families, many sacrifices would not have been made and the
devastating machine could have been stopped.
The Charnobyl accident is an example of how silence of the government
can have devastated consequences on human population as well as on the
environment. With four working reactors and two more being built, Charnobyl
was to be one of the most powerful nuclear power stations in the Soviet
Union. At 1:24 on the fateful April morning, 1986, one or possibly
two explosions blew apart reactor No. 4. The government, keeping
the danger of the disaster a secret, evacuated the population in the
30 km zone around the Charnobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Within a
month thousands people were removed from their native villages.
However, within only a few days after the disaster, radiation clouds
crossed not only this area, but also the national borders of the Soviet
Republics. Other governments — Sweden, Great Britain, Denmark,
Germany — became alarmed when they detected higher radiation levels.
But the U.S.S.R. denied that something happened. Moreover, on
the sunny day of the 1st of May demonstration, organized by the state,
many people were exposed, but unaware of the radioactive dust around
them. Plants, animals, soil, and water were contaminated too.
In addition to primarily exposion, their consumption over the next years
led to bith defects, newborns with genetic mutations, cancer, and other
health problems. These effects will be present for thousands years.