Campaigner Adi Roche delivered an impassioned plea to the United Nations general assembly in New York on the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, urging countries not to forget the continuing suffering of its victims.
Speaking for her first time before the general assembly, Ms Roche, founder of the Chernobyl Children charity, used the high-profile stage afforded to her in an unprecedented invitation from the government of Belarus to remind the UN of the threat still posed by the disaster of April 26th, 1986.
“Chernobyl is not from the past. Chernobyl is sadly forever,” she said.
“The impact of that single shocking nuclear accident cannot be undone. Its radioactive footprint is embedded in our world forever and countless millions of people are still being affected by its deadly legacy.”
Wearing a service medal of Chernobyl "liquidator", former Soviet Army officer Valerii Zaytsyev (64), one of thousands who worked on the decontamination efforts, Ms Roche likened these workers to the "heroes of 9/11 in New York's terrible catastrophe".
"They, the Chernobyl liquidators, these noble-self-sacrificing men ought to be rightly honoured and recognised as heroes who not just saved Europe but who really saved the world from greater catastrophe," said the Cork resident, whose charity has delivered more than €100 million in aid to areas affected by Chernobyl.
During an at times emotional speech that lasted 15 minutes, the former presidential candidate requested six actions from the world body to commemorate “one of the blackest, darkest moments of human history”.
She asked that a fund be set up to pay for the liquidators' medical needs and for April 26th to be designated UN Chernobyl Day when new initiatives would be considered each year "to alleviate further the suffering of the people in the affected, stricken lands".
To “prevent the next Chernobyl becoming Chernobyl itself”, she urged the UN to use its influence to expedite the completion of the giant sarcophagus being built as a protective shield over the exploded reactor number four.
She requested funds for clean food and food monitoring for residents of contaminated areas in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia; regular medical check-ups, particularly for children and pregnant women; and that radioactive land be kept free of cultivation and repopulation.
Chernobyl is often consigned to history because its images are so different from the bombs, bullets and starvation of other world tragedies, said Ms Roche.
The war waged since 1986 by Chernobyl is “a silent, invisible, but nonetheless deadly one”. It has “no small, no taste, nothing to forewarn you of danger”, she said. “It beats in the hearts of every innocent man, woman and child still living.
“It beats in their rivers, their towns, their streams and their forests – the deadly radiation clicking endlessly, ferociously in geiger counters into the silent numbness that is and always will be Chernobyl.”
