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An Interview with Volodymyr Aleksandrovych Yavo- rivsky, president of the Committee to the National Council of Ukraine on the Chornobil disaster, comment ing on the situation of the 30-kilometer “zone.” The interview was printed in Zinka, January, 1992. It is loosely translated from Ukrainian. Q. What will happen to the “zone”? A. The question is right to the point and today it no longer can be avoided. However, I would place myself and the Committee in an inconvenient position if I promised to give a very clear and definitive answer. I say, that each of the five variants not only does not solve the problem, but actually reinforces it. Each var iant has the effect of a boomerang. The most frighten ing one to me is the fifth one. To bring tourists into the zone is immoral! They will view the people who live there as objects in a museum of the absurd, thereby making the self-settlers even angrier. I visited the “zone” many times. It was there that I heard the unexpected, “Go back to your Kiev, be in charge there — you are not needed here!” These people were already beyond the critical border of separation from normal life. They seemed to exist in another one, different from ours. Q. What is your position? A. I am categorically for getting these people out of there. There is only one humane way to do this: drive around every village and try to convince each individual to move. Let us lose a week or a month for this, it is not necessary to hurry. If given a free hand, our executive agencies can also come to this conclusion: have the mil itary conduct the evacuationn. Am I saying terrible things? But the five variants are also terrible, as is the reality in which we live. The peo ple who live in the “zone” are elderly. Don’t they have the right to make decisions about their own lives? About their own — yes! But it is known that in the summer their children and grandchildren visit with them. And this, this is unforgivable. These grandfathers and grand mothers cannot be entrusted with these young lives, with this delicate branch of the Ukrainian nation. Here the government should say “no.” If we do not relocate people from the “zone” to where they want to go, if we do not give them the kind of life they want, then the whole world will laugh at us. And then for real foreigners will come to look at us, like in a zoo! Do we want this? My suggestion, in effect, infringes on human rights, for even the Americans don’t keep the lunatics in cages against their will. Yet I don’t see another way out. If we keep delivering bread, milk and doctors to the “zone” no one will ever want to leave. Q. Can you not give a guarantee that the people from the “zone” will be resettled soon? A. Those are the problems of the executive branch of the government. Q. I understand. Then tell us how we can, Kievan people, protect ourselves from the “zone?” As you know there has not been any radiation control in the markets for a long time now. We continue to buy mushrooms, potatoes, berries which have been cultivated in the “zone.” A. The academician Viktor Hryhorovych Baryach- tiar said in effect that the radiation controls of 1986 and 1987 frightened grandmothers. Now we have come to the point where no one can frighten us with anything. I have unsubstantiated facts about how trucks sneaked into the “zone” and were loaded with apples — red cheeked, with no worms (they do not mature in the “zone”), while in Kiev long lines of people formed, wait ing for these apples. This noncontrol is prevalent and it’s a crime. Can our committe in which five to six peo ple really work (the rest are just for show) care for all the problems associated with Chornobil? I will take the opportunity to use your fine journal as a stage, and call everyone to participate. Let us question things together and find answers together. Our helpless nation nurtured in all of us a scary trait — consumerism. At first all that is earned is taken away. Later if you beg, something may fall your way. We have become accustomed to relying on someone else, some one else will protect us, help us, tell us what to do. Aren’t the Kievan people themselves worried about the fate of their children? Shouldn’t the Kievan people put pressure on the city government to secure strong radia tion control in their marketplaces? Our people are like this: if they find out that products are inspected, no one will touch the “dirty” fruit. And if you cannot sell the meat or the berries, then why bother growing them? It becomes nonproductive. Hence, the mechanism of self regulation. Q. Perhaps the grandmother, a bit scared, will not take her dill from the Polissia district to Kiev to sell in front of the metro station. What about the collectives? Five years ago they planted and today they are still planting grains for bread on contaminated fields. The “zone” in fact stretches throughout Ukraine. A: It seems to me that the law which we passed concerning contaminated territories does not encour age production there. If the farm people knew that the suspect products would not sell... The meat produced in 1986 was mixed with the ingredients for sausages in the Novhorod-Volynsky and Szczytomyrsk meat processing plants. The people ate all of it. You cannot achieve any thing by forbidding it. The old machinery of behavior is still working today, following old rules and habits. For five years we kept quiet about the effects of Chornobil, the machinery gathered momentum, and now what — can it stop on the spot? 20 ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, КВІТЕНЬ, 1993 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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