YAVORIVSKY IN WALL STREET JOURNAL: Suppression of Chornobyl truth could deprive us of a future (12/31/89)

YAVORIVSKY IN WALL STREET JOURNAL

Suppression of Chornobyl truth could deprive us of a future

by Volodymyr Yavorivsky

Below, The Weekly reprints an article from the Tuesday, December 12 issue of The Wall Street Journal by Volodymyr Yavorivsky, a deputy of the Supreme Soviet Congress of Peoples Deputies, who represents a Kiev neighborhood, where many victims of Chornobyl were resettled after the tragedy of April 1986.

Mr. Yavorivsky, who spent one month in the United States in October, on the invitation of Sen. Bill Bradley and Rep. James Florio, both Democrats of New Jersey, is also the Kiev regional Rukh chairman.

KIEV - When radiation leaked from Chornobyl in May 1986, parents in Ukraine placed their children onto trains, buses and airplanes. My seven-year-old daughter went to stay with friends in the Carpathian Mountains, but, eventually, I learned that it was precisely there that a plume of dangerous radioactive fallout had fallen. Meanwhile the elite had their children evacuated to safe zones on the first day of the accident.

Later we learned that people living in the city of Prypiat (about 20 kilometers from Chornobyl) had been forced to remain behind for two days; that weddings were held, while radioactive particles fell; that they were walking on nuclear fuel scattered by the explosion. Radiation levels in Prypiat reached 80 rems (the standard measure of radiation dosage) per hour. The lifetime safe limit is 35 rems.

Yet at the time Ukraine's minister of public health, Mykola Romanenko, simply advised the people of Prypiat to wash their hands and feet to protect themselves from radiation. Today, we in Ukraine can state with bitter confidence that the leadership betrayed its own people.

As one elderly Ukrainian woman, forcibly evacuated from Chornobyl in May, 1986, told me: "During the second world war, the Germans conquered Ukrainian territory and openly killed millions of inhabitants of this land. The catastrophe of Chornobyl, however, is destroying our soul, our land and our air, and even our future."

When the Chornobyl nuclear reactor spilled its radiation, we Soviets did not yet comprehend the poverty of our state. Our government, headed at that time by the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, refused to accept help from the foreign countries that reached out to us. Mr. Shcherbytsky's "pride" in refusing to admit to the danger of the Chornobyl accident is costing the Ukrainian people dearly today.

Today, the Kiev reservoir, close to this city of three million inhabitants, is filled with radioactive particles. The Dnieper River, which traverses Ukraine from north to south, is distributing radioactive waste from Chornobyl to the Black Sea. Radiation levels in Narodychi, 50 kilometers west of Chornobyl are 450 times above normal. In Stare Sharne, a village just north of Narodychi, cesium contamination of the soil exceeds 50 curies per square kilometer. Human life is in danger at 15 curies. In other areas of Zhytomyr province, (west and southwest of Chornobyl) 18,000 people continue to live in zones where cesium contamination is as high as 200 curies.

When the disaster occurred, Mr. Shcherbytsky wanted to convince the people of Ukraine, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and the entire world that nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. A nuclear plant had an accident, a commonplace occurrence, which should not even be discussed.

By manipulating popular ignorance and promoting disinformation in the press he managed to succeed for a certain period of time. People continued to live in contaminated regions. The government gave them a monthly allotment of just 30 rubles apiece for "recuperation" and the purchase of clean food. So people continued to live as in the past. They gathered mushrooms and berries from contaminated forests; they drank milk from cows that ate radioactive grass.

Only when horses were born with six legs and piglets without eyes, when children contracted illnesses, when young women feared to give birth and aborted their pregnancies instead, when our government began hiding statistics on mortality rates and sicknesses - only then did we begin to fear for ourselves.

During my visit to the United States in October, I had numerous discussions about Chornobyl with members of Congress. I implored America's help in forestalling a tragedy of immense proportions. Medicines of all kinds, medical equipment, vitamins, other supplemental foodstuffs such as powdered milk - everything that is elsewhere taken so very much for granted - are unobtainable in Ukraine.

I had made the same pleas to government officials in Ukraine and in Moscow but was not successful; the apparatus that strangles truth is still strong. The hoarse voice of a nation ill from radiation is not heard in offices of bureaucrats who have their clean food brought in from afar, who periodically send their children to clinics for the privileged, who have access to scarce vitamins and medicines.

Meanwhile, ordinary people have to wait in line for months for a check-up at a clinic. One hundred thousand people have been evacuated from a 30-kilometer radius around Chornobyl. A much larger number still live in dangerous regions and conditions. It is only now, thanks to the pressure of mass meetings organized by the Popular Movement for Perebudova in Ukraine and speeches in the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, that a second, agonizingly slow evacuation has begun.

What will become of us? This silent question can be seen in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of children of all nationalities who live in Ukraine - Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Crimean Tatars. Radiation does not discriminate when choosing its victims. We are ready to suffer economic shortages, to wait in lines for necessary goods, but not to remain indifferent to the danger that hangs over our heads. The suppression of the truth about the consequences of Chornobyl could deprive us of a future.