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‘Sometimes I can’t sleep at night’: Adi Roche warns of nuclear risks of Ukraine conflict as she picks up peace award

“It’s a war crime to weaponise a nuclear facility,”

CCI’s medical volunteers treat children for illnesses such as “Chernobyl heart”, a cardiac condition prevalent in the region and thought to be caused by the fallout.

Founder of Chernobyl Children International, operations of which have been upended by Russian invasion, honoured by Ahmadiyya Muslim community

Mark Paul, Irish Times, Sat Mar 9 2024

Ukraine is “sitting on a nuclear powder keg” and the western world must not abandon it to its fate, said peace activist, charity founder and former presidential candidate Adi Roche as she received a major international peace award in London on Saturday.

Ms Roche, the founder of Chernobyl Children International (CCI), which has delivered more than €108 million of aid to Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus since the 1986 nuclear disaster in the region, has been awarded the Ahmadiyya Muslim Peace Prize.

The award is presented each year by the Ahmadiyya community, a south Asian Muslim movement, at a grand ceremony at one of Europe’s biggest mosques, the Baitul Futuh complex in south London.

Previous winners include Hiroshima bomb survivor and anti-nuclear campaigner Setsuko Thurlow and Buddhist nun Cheng Yen, the founder of the Tzu Chi humanitarian organisation in Taiwan.

Ms Roche was originally selected for the award in 2020 but the ceremony was postponed due to the pandemic.

Speaking to The Irish Times in advance of the peace symposium at the Baitul Futuh mosque, she said the award had “given her heart a little bit of a lift”, after CCI’s operations in Belarus and Ukraine were upended by Russia’s 2022 invasion of its neighbour.

But she also accused Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces of issuing a discreet nuclear threat by invading Ukraine from Belarus on a route directly through the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone in the north of the country – the power plant was captured on the first day of the war.

“It’s a war crime to weaponise a nuclear facility,” she said. “The Hague Convention should be invoked. Russia issued a nuclear threat without having to say it by going through that area. It made them triumphalist and so they went on to Zaporizhzhia [a nuclear plant in southeast Ukraine that has been the scene of fighting and is now controlled by Russia].”

Before the war, CCI operated mostly in Belarus, working with medical teams to provide care for children in the region whose health was affected by the nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster. Some of the kids were brought to Ireland each year to stay with host families.

Ms Roche said her Cork-headquartered charity has been unable to go into Belarus ever since sanctions were put in place against the regime there of Aleksandr Lukashenko, a close Putin ally.

The CCI operation in Belarus is now run entirely by 60 local staff.

Before the conflict, CCI also operated from the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which was captured by Russia early in the war and subsequently liberated by the Ukrainians. The charity has since had to shift its operations to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv to avoid the fighting.

“In Ukraine we have a different set of problems. We are on the frontline of child cardiac services there,” said Ms Roche.

CCI’s medical volunteers treat children for illnesses such as “Chernobyl heart”, a cardiac condition prevalent in the region and thought to be caused by the fallout.

“With Chernobyl heart, the children can’t live with it, and they’ll die without help. Our surgeons there tried to stay working in Kharkiv after the invasion but they had to pull out two years ago and move to Lviv. The risk was too great – it would have been suicidal to stay. The surgeons were literally chased from east to west by the war,” said Ms Roche…………………………  https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2024/03/09/sometimes-i-cant-sleep-at-night-adi-roche-warns-of-nuclear-risks-of-ukraine-conflict-as-she-picks-up-peace-award

March 11, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Ukraine