Professor Youri Bandajevsky is currently (July 2006) in Clermont-Ferrand (France), at the invitation of the University of Auvergne and various local institutions. He is in conditional freedom since August 2005, after four years of hard conditions in Belarus.

Let me recall that Bandajevsky, former Director of the Medicine Institute of Gomel (Belarus) and an anatomopathologist scientist, was sentenced in June 2001 to eight years of imprisonment by a military court, accused, without proof, of corruption. It was his scientific work which was intolerable to the Belarus government: Bandajevsky and his colleague physicist Nesterenko had studied the effects of radio Caesium on animals and humans, after the Tchernobyl catastrophe, and shown that various severe troubles develop when people - and specially children - eat contaminated food.

The sentence of Bandajevsky was shortened by two years. He was then (May 2004) in relegation 200 km from Minsk until conditional freedom was granted to him, after a vast international movement in his favour had grown (see the book by the journalist W. Tchertkoff who coordinated this campaign: Le Crime de Tchernobyl, ed. Actes Sud, 2006).

Euroscience participated in this movement by informing its members and readers of Euroscience News of the situation, by writing a formal letter from our President to Belarus President Lukatchenko, by subsequently denouncing, again in formal letters from our President, the attitude of the Government of Belarus to the Presidency of the Council of Europe, and by sending issues of Euroscience News regularly to the prisoner.

Being horrified that in our day and age a European scientist has been mistreated and suffered years of intense pressure and humiliations from his own government, we feel that Euroscience’s actions were modest but that we have nonetheless been effective in keeping a number of European scientists and authorities aware of Bandajevsky's scandalous situation.

F.P.

We received nevertheless in June 2006 the following beautiful letter (in French):

" Chère Madame Praderie,

Wladimir Tchertkoff m'a transmis votre lettre. Je désire vous remercier de tout cœur pour le soutien que vous m'avez donné pendant mon emprisonnement. Grace à vous, je recevais régulièrement les journaux Euroscience, qui me faisaient connaitre le monde de la science européenne. Les fils tissés par vous et par nombre de mes amis de différents pays me reliaient au monde extérieur. Ce lien n'a pas permis que je succombe comme homme et comme scientifique, il me donnait l'espoir d'un avenir meilleur. En informant la communauté scientifique sur moi, vous consolidiez mes liens avec la société.

Je n'ai pas péri et maintenant je peux vous exprimer directement mon immense reconnaissance pour tout ce que vous avez fait pour moi.

Je vous souhaite santé et bonheur.

Avec mon profond respect et mon immense gratitude,

Youri Bandajevsky"