Haunting night-time vigils marked the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl
disaster, the world's worst nuclear accident that shocked the globe, ravaged
this corner of eastern Europe and affects millions of people to this day.
Young
cancer patients look on in a hospital for oncological diseases in the
Ukrainian city of Donetsk April 25, 2006.
[Reuters] |
Clutching candles and carnations, hundreds of people silently poured into the
central square of the Ukrainian town of Slavutich, built 50 kilometers (31
miles) to the east of the defunct nuclear power station to house its staff and
others evacuated following the accident.
A shrieking siren pierced the silence around the time that two explosions
ripped through reactor number four at the Soviet-designed plant on April 26,
1986, releasing a huge radioactive cloud into the air.
"This is a night of remembrance and tragedy," said Borys Ulavin, a
59-year-old who participated in the clean-up of the disaster.
Somber-faced, many with tears in their eyes, the human stream made its way
toward a monument honoring the 30 people who died in the first year after the
accident that became a grim symbol of the hazards of atomic energy.
"I knew all of these people," Mykola Ryabushkin said, pointing to the
portraits hanging on the monument.
The 59-year-old was an operator at the station and was working the night of
the explosion that bathed the station in an otherworldly bluish light.
"I look at them and I want to ask them for forgiveness," he said, tears
rolling down his cheeks. "Maybe we're all to blame for letting this accident
happen."
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko led another 300 people who attended a
memorial service at a church in eastern Kiev that features memorial plaques of
many of those who died fighting the immediate aftermath of the accident.
The cloud released by the Chernobyl explosion settled mostly in Ukraine and
neighboring Belarus to the north, but parts of it drifted across Russia and a
large swathe of Europe, and its effects were felt from Scandinavia to Greece.
"The explosion affected half of the planet, but Belarus and Ukraine suffered
worst of all," Terry Davis, secretary general of the Council of Europe, said in
a statement on Tuesday.
"For these countries, Chernobyl is not an historic event, it is a problem of
today and of tomorrow," Davis said.