Cloud hanging over the reindeer people

Press, 29 August 1986, Page 22

Cloud hanging over the reindeer people

COLIN SMITH

reports for the London

“Observer” from Tarnaby, Swedish Lappland, on how the deadly fall-out from Chernobyl is threatening an ancient way of life.

Just as the steam at Chernobyl began to come together with zirconium to create the hydrogen which cracked the core’s outer defences and ignited its graphite soul, the Lapps in Scandinavia were herding their reindeer to the summer pasturelands above the treeline.

They have done this every spring for the last few miilenium, certainly long before the people they call the “Big Swedes” came to live among them. Oleg Omma, aged 23, a well-off Lapp who wears expensive-looking leather jerkins and a baseball cap with the words “heli-ski” on the front, recalls that this year the reindeer were particularly hungry. There had been a heavy snowfall at the beginning of April making it difficult for the animals to dig down for the springy grey lichen called renlav which carpets the floor of the pine forests. Not all reindeer will eat the hay and food pellets the Lapps scatter around their winter grazing to try to keep the herds together. Towards the end of April, as the temperature began to rise in Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl, the thaw in Lappland set in with a vengeance. The Lapps’ snowmobiles began to bog down, although cross-country skis could still be used.

On May Day it rained heavily over most of the Swedish province of Vasterbotten which has a northern boundary just below the Arctic Circle. The reindeer munched contentedly on the fresh grass coming through the remaining snow. At Chernobyl, Reactor No. 1 had been spewing its westwarddrifting radioactive cloud for days and the Kremlin was still insisting that there was no cause for alarm.

“When we’re moving the herds up the mountains we’re out of contact with the outside world,” Oleg says. “It was at least 10 days before we knew anything about the disaster at Chernobyl. By then it was too late.” Prior knowledge could have stopped the Lapps drinking the rainwater in their mountain streams, but nothing on earth can protect a large proportion of Scandinavia’s half-million reindeer from the effects of the Chernobyl cloud. Veterinary checks have revealed concentra-

tions of cesium 137 more than 30 times the permitted limit in the bloodstream of reindeer. The radioactivity comes from their diet — particularly highly absorbent renlav lichen which might remain contaminated for the best part of a decade. Despite the prospect of generous compensation from the Swedish and Norwegian Governments, it is undoubtedly the greatest single disaster the Lapps have suffered — the equivalent of the destruction of the buffalo to the North American Plains Indian. For although no more than 5 per cent are actually involved in breeding reindeer it is an occupation which has preserved the Lapps’ identity. About a quarter of their language is related to deer. Most Lapps understand the husbandry skills necessary to produce reindeer meat even if they are not actively engaged in it. Now much of this meat, which has had increased export sales in recent years, is unfit for human consumption and likely to remain that way for some time.

The initial reaction in both Norway and Sweden — the Finns do not admit that they have a problem — was to slaughter most of the existing herds and then rot the carcases in 10-foot-deep pits. This has now been abandoned. Instead, both Governments have agreed to pay the market price for on-the-hoof reindeer. All carcases will then be tested by Government inspectors and those found to contain above the permitted levels of radiation, sold off to fox and mink fur farmers.

“You can imagine how bad the publicity would have been if they had gone ahead with the original plan,” says Jorgen Bohlin, a lawyer who works for the Swedish Union , of Samernas, as some Lapps prefer to be known. “People would have got the impression that reindeers are for burying and not for eating. At least this way we keep the infrastructure of the industry

intact — the transport, the slaughterhouses." Bohlin was attending a meeting in the town of Storuman where some po-faced civil servants, two of them Lapps, were trying to explain the compensation terms. Most of their 40strong audience were economically built people with slightly slanting eyes and small ears veiy close to their skulls as if their faces had been modelled in a howling blizzard. Lapps probably come from the same Central Asian stock as the North American Indian. They make almost identical tepee tents which are nowadays mainly used for smoking the meat, and some of their leatherwork and what has become their ceremonial dress look very similar. But whereas one group migrated east across the Bering Straits to Alaska, the Lapps travelled west along the tundra until they intermarried with the ancient Finns whose language they more or less adopted. Lapp is from the Finnish word Lappalaiset. Now there are about 70,000 of them spread in an arc across what can be some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. Most of them live in northern Norway and Sweden.

About 5000 are in Finland and

another 2000 on Russia’s Kola peninsula. The latter have the same freedom of movement as most citizens of the U.S.S.R. Even in Norway and Sweden they are not free from taxation and conscription, the young men usually being posted to Alpine units.

The Lapps are frequently described as Europe’s last nomadic tribe. This is not really true, and probably never was in the sense that they were a people perpetually on the move. In Sweden, those involved in reindeer breeding seem to maintain at least two, and sometimes more, wellappointed homes for the purpose of following their half-wild stock.

Oleg Omma’s family maintains four homes. Oleg’s summer place is a wooden bungalow overlooking a broad stretch of the river Umea, near the SwedishNorwegian border. Outside can be seen a wigwam, a reindeer skin nailed up on a frame to dry, a turf-roofed hut where they keep cured skins, the fine “shoe

hay” the Lapps prefer to thick socks, and the target on which Oleg has been testing the new sight on his Carl Gustaf rifle in preparation for the opening of the elk-hunting season. There is also a wind surfboard, . a badminton racket alongside the tub of pink geraniums on the garden table and his father’s motor mower which has just trimmed a lawn that would not disgrace suburban Britain. In the garden Oleg demonstrated the Lapp way of casting the lasso they use during round-up. “Unlike the cowboys, the arm never goes above the head. It’s like making a forehand shot at tennis.”

The Omma family has grown prosperous on the reindeer trade which, in recent years, has seen the growth of a gourmet clientele in Western Europe, particularly West Germany and the United States. Weekly shipments are airfreighted to New York and, via Los Angeles, to the Far East.

At first there was some difficulty with the American market where restaurant owners thought they might never be able to overcome the meat’s yuletide association with Rudolph and Santa Claus. Now, no matter how often they stress the infallibility of Government radiation tests,

the Lapp breeders realise that it might take years to get over the stigma of Chernobyl.

There are fears that even the South Koreans might become wary of buying powdered reindeer antler they consume as an aphrodisiac. (Privately, the Lapps will tell you that they claim no such qualities for the antlers, which are grown by both male and female reindeer. However, they do swear by a potion brewed from the gall bladder of a bear.) “I have built up my herd so that I could make a living,” says Oleg, who was brought up to speak Swedish because his parents speak different dialects of Lapp. “The future looked quite bright. Today, I don’t know if I’ve got a future.” Oleg was among several Lapps who seemed to think that the Swedish Government would secretly welcome what has happened to them as part of what they regard as a general policy of encroachment and assimilation. They resent anything that disturbs their land — tourism, roads, electric pylons. All these are blamed for forcing predators like wolves and lynx higher into the mountains where they cause havoc among the reindeer calves. Now they feel that even

their fish and drinking water is unsafe. Some Swedish confectioners have already banned a local fruit, the cloudberry, from their products. “It is not just the material things,” says an old man called Johannes Blind. “It’s the psychological damage — what it’s done to our sense of freedom.”

It was this sense of freedom that made Lapps fight — sometimes literally — grandiose hydro-electric schemes which flooded some of the wooded valleys where their reindeer used to graze. But, in the space of a few days, nuclear power may have effected a greater change than every high dam in Scandinavia. ’

Slaughter plan abandoned

Fears for the

future