Aid for 2 Million Chernobyl Victims Asked

A Soviet republic Tuesday asked for international help to relocate and give medical aid to more than 2 million people, including 600,000 children, affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident.

The sudden plea--more than four years after the accident--comes after Soviet scientists acknowledged that the situation is much worse than Moscow had portrayed.

One-fifth of the republic of Byelorussia’s more than 10 million people have to be moved from areas contaminated by radiation, said Victor Borovikov, a Byelorussia diplomat. He said this includes 27 cities and more than 2,600 villages.

“We have no energy, no transportation, no communications” in these regions, he told reporters. He was in Brussels for the departure today of a truck convoy carrying donated children’s medicine to Minsk, the republic’s capital.

He noted that thousands were moved after the April 26, 1986, accident in the Ukraine. But he added: “Then Moscow said there was no panic, no danger. In the past four years, we’ve realized the situation was not so simple.”

Byelorussia, which has no nuclear power plants, got 70% of the fallout from the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl.

He said the republic had planned to spend $14 billion to move 180,000 people from the high-radiation zone by the end of 1995 but would now try to do it by the end of 1991.

Soviet scientists recommend that all people in all the contaminated areas be evacuated at an estimated cost of $70 billion.

Borovikov said experts now say it could take up to 200 years “to totally wipe out” effects of the accident in the area.

“We have no experience in this field, which is why we’re asking for international help,” said Borovikov, the republic’s U.N. ambassador in Vienna.

Borovikov said that after the accident, people were paid by the Soviet authorities to stay in the contaminated zones, but they are now demanding immediate relocation.

BACKGROUND

Human error was blamed in the blast at Chernobyl, 60 miles north of Kiev, in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986. First word of the disaster came from Finland and Scandinavia, where high radiation levels were detected. The Soviets did not acknowledge that a nuclear disaster had occurred until April 28. About 135,000 people were evacuated, Soviet officials reported. Hundreds of people were treated for severe cases of radiation illness; 18,000 more were briefly hospitalized. The death toll at Chernobyl was 31.