Prague - Mayors of municipalities near the planned U.S. radar base in Brdy region demand an urgent explanation after the credibility of an expert report, which the government used to prove this military facility is of no harm to public health, has been called into question.
If their call is ignored, the mayors threaten to file a criminal complaint with the police.
The study in question was done by army hygienists, who stated that the radar in Brdy cannot have any negative impact on public health.
However, as Aktualne.cz reported as early as last Friday, some experts from Brno Technological University called the above mentioned study useless in their own appraisal.
"The work which went into making this study might be considered low-quality and superficial. It cannot be taken for a credible one," says the expert´s report, prepared by Jiří Šebesta and Zbyněk Raida from The Institute of Radio Electronics.
A call for credible analyses
Mayors thus call for new and credible analyses.
"On 17th November we will ask the government at Wenceslas Square to stop further negotiations with the Americans, until the radar's impact on population is reassessed," Jan Neoral, the mayor of Trokavec municipality, told Aktualne.cz.
They also plan to file a criminal complaint if the Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek´s cabinet refuses to talk with them about the impact of the radar.
"In case the government is not willing to do so and leads further negotiations, it could be classified as an abetment of a threat to public safety. We therefore asked our lawyers to specify, whether it is possible to file a criminal complaint against the government or other responsible parties," added Neoral.
Government says: the radar is harmless
The government has already admitted that the army study is not of the best quality. Yet they still insist that all the existing analyses and studies carried out abroad come to the same conclusion - that the radar poses no health risk to the people living nearby.
Last Friday, the Ministry of Defence at first refused to give Aktualne.cz any comments on the case, but later released a statement admitting that the study is not good.
The Prime Minister Topolánek repeated that if it was proved otherwise and the radar could be of some health risk to people, this military facility simply wouldn't be placed in the Czech Republic.
Harmful effects of the radar weren´t tested only by the army hygienists but also by other Czech experts right on Kwajalein Island in the Pacific, where the radar is currently placed and has been in use for more than nine years. They also claimed the radar is not harmful to human health.
"Measuring density of radiation flow at ground level in front of the antenna and at various distances from the radio locator, which the team's experts carried out using their own device, revealed that side lobes of radiation are reduced so effectively, that for all measurement points, which were located at distances from 50 to 2670 meters from the antenna, the density of radiation flow didn't exceed Czech limits for humans," says Deputy Minister of Health Luděk Pekárek in the scientific journal ATM.
An informed silence
It almost seems as if the politicians knew from the beginning that they couldn't really make big use of the army experts' study. In August this year, only soldiers were informed about its results, presented by the leading author military hygienist Petr Navrátil.
"Provided that we respect protective zones and operating rules and regulations, there cannot be any over-limit exposure of people and thus there cannot be any health risk to people in the vicinity of the radar caused by the electromagnetic radiation. In other words, if the radar station was placed in the Czech Republic under these conditions, it would then meet Czech and European hygienic standards," said Navrátil in August.
The Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra was the only government official to refer to the experts' report in any significant way:
"We published the study of health impacts, which says that there will be no negative health impacts," he said in an interview for the radio station Frekvence 1, when he was talking about the ways the government uses to explain the issues surrounding the radar to public.
When the government communication coordinator for the radar Tomáš Klvaňa was asked at the same radio station if he would stake his life on the fact that the radar is harmless, he said:
"It is obvious from all the information available, from all health impact studies and experience from the United States and other countries, where they have radars in use, that the radar is not harmful. That means, but not literally of course, that I would stake my life on it."
