Diplomatic bid to stop ban on Chernobyl children’s travel
Officials at the Irish Embassy in Moscow met with their counterparts in the Belarussian Embassy in the city yesterday to plead the case of more than 1,000 Irish host families who bring children here for rest and recuperation breaks.
A spokesman at the Department of Foreign Affairs said embassy officials also hoped to travel to Belarus to speak directly with government representatives there in the next week or two.
Fears of a travel ban were sparked for the second time in four years this week as Irish charities working with children from the radiation-polluted region began making preliminary arrangements for visits to host families at Christmas.
In 2004 the warning was not followed through, but the Government here is taking the renewed threats seriously and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin is to meet with Adi Roche, founder of the Chernobyl Children’s Project International (CCPI), to discuss how best to respond.
CCPI national coordinator, Norrie McGregor, said its offices were flooded with calls from anxious host families fearful that the children they waved goodbye to in the past few weeks after the summer break would not be able to return again.
“The breaks are so important to the children to boost their health, and the idea of having to suddenly abandon those children — because to the children it would seem like abandonment — would be devastating,” she said.
Two unrelated issues appear to have sparked the clampdown which applies to all of Europe and the United States. Belarus took issue with authorities in the US after a teenage Belarussian girl in her last year of eligibility for an overseas break failed to board a plane to return home as scheduled last month.
Separately, Belarus wants the Government here to sign an agreement setting out where and how the children are recuperated during their stay. Currently, the agreements are between the Belarussian government and the charities which run holiday programmes.
The request for an intergovernmental agreement, and the wording used in it, has raised some legal questions here that have yet to be fully teased out. The department spokesman said there was cause for optimism that the current talks would be productive.
“Nobody thinks this is insurmountable. Everybody thinks this is a issue that can be resolved and we’re confident that it will be sorted.”
Simon Walsh, chairman of the Chernobyl Children’s Trust, which recently hosted 110 children for summer breaks, also said he was urging members not to panic.
“There is upset about what happened in the US and the immediate reaction of the Belarus government is to talk about a blanket ban, but I think they will pull back from that once they’ve got assurances from individual countries.”
