Ukraine underlines Chornobyl's aftereffects at United Nations special session on children (05/19/02)

Ukraine underlines Chornobyl's aftereffects at United Nations special session on children

by Andrew Nynka

UNITED NATIONS - As world leaders gathered here on May 8-10 for a historic General Assembly Special Session on Children, Ukraine continued to underline the effects of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear catastrophe on the plight of its almost 11 million children and affirmed its commitment to the U.N. Final Outcome Document, which stemmed from the three-day conference, with a proposal to help promote the rights of children.

In her statement at the Plenary Meeting on May 9, the chair of the State Committee of Ukraine for Family and Youth Affairs, Valentyna Dovzhenko, called the special session "an event of historic significance," and added that Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma "put forward a proposal to reduce the world arms expenditure by 10 percent and to direct funds that would be released for the needs of education, health, environment protection and combating poverty."

"The realization of such a proposal," the Ukrainian delegation's leader to the special session said, "would become a concrete manifestation of our care for the future of children."

Although only days after the conclusion of the special session there had been no action on President Kuchma's proposition, officials at Ukraine's permanent mission to the United Nations put President Kuchma's offer into perspective and called it, "an attempt - one of many among heads of state and government - to foster new and creative ways to help children."

The United Nations first set concrete goals to improve children's lives in the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Ukraine subsequently ratified as one of its first legislative acts one month after declaring its own independence. However, this was the first time in the U.N.'s nearly 58-year history that children were given the opportunity to directly address the General Assembly during a conference deemed by a U.N. spokesman as "a landmark review of progress since the 1990 summit."

According to Ms. Dovzhenko's statement, Ukraine views the provisions in the final document that underline the need for protecting children from man-made disasters as "very important" and, she said, "Ukraine, on its part, demonstrated resolve to prevent the recurrence of such tragedies in the future by voluntarily renouncing [the] third largest nuclear military arsenal [in the world] and by fully decommissioning the Chornobyl nuclear power plant."

Over the past 16 years the Chornobyl accident has affected some 1.2 million children, or every 10th child in Ukraine, Ms. Dovzhenko said. Sixty percent of thyroid cancer cases among children were diagnosed on the territories affected by the accident, with general morbidity among children experiencing a threefold increase.

However, even after overcoming the environmental aftereffects associated with Chornobyl, Ukrainian children must also face other concerns. Among them, Ms. Dovzhenko said, are an AIDS epidemic currently on the rise in Ukraine as well as a persistent problem of homelessness and orphaned children.

As of 1999 an estimated 200,000-240,000 people in Ukraine had been infected with the HIV virus, according to the U.N.-sponsored UNAIDS organization that is working on the AIDS epidemic in Ukraine, along with an additional 7,500 children age 15 and younger - a number that many experts agree is increasing at an alarming rate due to illegal drug use, sexual activity among children as young as 10 years old, as well as insufficient education regarding safe sex and drug use.

According to a national progress report on the goals established at the 1990 convention, published by the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine along with the United Nations, Ukraine is also experiencing a clear-cut increase in the number of orphans and children deprived of parental care.

Asked to elaborate on the problem during a press conference at Ukraine's Permanent Mission to the U.N. in New York City on May 7, Ms. Dovzhenko said that parents and guardians of Ukrainian children are "not actively engaged in their children's upbringing," but that cooperation between various international aid organizations is beginning to show signs of increasing children's health and welfare.

According to data provided by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, in 1999 orphans numbered 103,400 - almost twice as many as at the decade's onset. The situation is further aggravated by an increasing tendency towards what Ms. Dovzhenko called "a structural erosion of the family and by drawbacks in child- and parent-oriented educational activities."

Over the past five years, Ms. Dovzhenko said, a series of urgent measures was taken in Ukraine to prevent child homelessness and lack of care. The major thrust in this work was on getting children away from the streets and preventing them from becoming street children. Currently, she added, 83 shelters for minors operate in Ukraine and are capable of accommodating about 4,000 children.

However, the state of many of those shelters - whose buildings have long been regarded as outdated Soviet-era relics with deplorable living conditions - leave questions about the extent to which such shelters can provide for Ukraine's youth.

"The number of children in shelters is growing annually and in 1999 amounted to 25,000 children. Nonetheless, Ukrainian law so far has no legal definitions for a 'homeless child' and a 'child devoid of care,' " said the report.

The special session document, which had been negotiated intensively over the course of the meeting, was adopted on the evening of May 10 without a vote, signaling that delegates had bridged their differences over sensitive language in the text.

The text confronts pressing issues of child mortality, AIDS, exploitation and poverty. Building on promises made at international conferences during the 1990s, the document's goals aim to pull hundreds of millions out of poverty within a generation, while including new targets in the areas of HIV/AIDS and child protection, reflecting the changing nature of the challenges facing the world's children.

However, delegates from the United States and a host of other countries underscored that none of what was agreed to in the conference is binding on individual countries.

In her concluding remarks to the special session, Ms. Dovzhenko expressed the conviction of the Ukrainian government that "consolidating the efforts of the world community on securing favorable conditions for children's development in the world would be the best guarantee of achieving ... appropriate conditions for rendering immediate humanitarian assistance to the civil population - in the first turn, children."

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