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United Nations -- Fourteen years after the frightful nuclear accident and ensuing ecological disaster at Chernobyl, seven million people in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia still live in the ominous shadow of the tragedy. What’s worse is that while 125,000 people have become permanent invalids and farm and forest contamination remains, the world community has not followed through with its assistance pledges to aid the victims of Chernobyl.
In 1997, the United Nations launched a publicized joint appeal of multifaceted aid--focused targeting of sixty projects costing $90 million. So far the Inter-Agency Program of International Assistance to the Chernobyl Disaster has collected just over a million dollars. Plans have been scaled back to nine projects for $9.5 million. Projects include screening and treatment for children with thyroid cancer and rehabilitation of run-down Soviet era medical facilities..
Belarus is the worst of the contaminated countries with twenty percent of its forest land still affected; nine percent of all government spending is targeted at Chernobyl cleanup. Ukraine, with nearly 3.5 million people affected--half children-- desperately needs held. Nearly 73,000 Ukrainians are permanent invalids. In Russia too, three million people suffer after-effects of the accident with 46,000 invalids. Many result from the cleanup and denomination among crews which performed heroic if perhaps futile actions to seal the reactor after the meltdown.
Millions of people still live in highly contaminated areas in the three countries-- only 250,000 have been evacuated. Ironically one reactor at Chernobyl is still operating and is only due for shutdown at the end of this year!
The 1986 Chernobyl tragedy was compounded by the profound incompetence of the Soviet State to recognize failure and to react to the alarm with alacrity. Instead the local officials fell back on obfuscation, denial and allowed the local population to fall victim to the double tragedy of both a nuclear accident and ferociously incompetent response. The accident at Chernobyl represented the apotheosis of Soviet stupidity--an initial denial of reality and there was an accident and then a clumsy coverup and cleanup.
The people still pay. In a joint statement of the Belarus, Russian, and Ukrainian U.N. Missions, “Fourteen years after the catastrophe, Chernobyl is still a major environmental and humanitarian problem.” Seven million people including half of them children have been affected and “as a consequence of the disaster a total area of 155,000 sq. kms of the three affected states was contaminated with radionuclides.”
The accident released 100 times more radiation into the atmosphere than the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 ending the Pacific War.
Was Chernobyl unique? Consider for a moment that earlier this year massive cyanide pollution from a Australian-owned mine in Romania, spilled tons of highly toxic liquid into the Szamos and subsequently the Tisza River. The Tisza which flows through Ukraine, eastern Hungary and then into the Danube, became a river of death for fish and wildlife. Despite a looming ecological threat downstream, notification of the accident by the Romanians came painfully slowly--nearly twenty hours after the spill!
Hungary thus bore the brunt of the cyanide poison spill; both the Szamos and Tisza Rivers will only see full recovery in three to five years. Dr. Loyola de Palacio of the European Commission, described the pollution “a European catastrophe.”
A blind worship of technology and a reliance on a stratified response system allowed the Chernobyl meltdown to magnify. In a more limited way we witnessed the same mentality with the recent Tisza fiasco; any foolhardy use and abuse of science can court disaster. Such is compounded by the culture of cover-up.
In a tragic sense, Chernobyl remains a monument to the former Soviet Union; a society which extolled science, pseudo-science and production goals over safety. Sadly people in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia itself are cruelly cursed by Chernobyl’s lingering legacy.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
