Thirty-four years have passed since the nuclear power plant in Chornobyl exploded, spreading from Ukraine invisible but harmful radiation across the world. Now, the world faces another invisible but harmful threat – the novel coronavirus.
For Serhii Plokhii, a Ukrainian-American historian and author of “Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy,” it feels “like a deja vu.”
“It’s like repeating what I felt back in 1986 in Ukraine, when I was entering the house and thought about invisible enemies. I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t smell them, I couldn’t feel them,” said Plokhii during an online discussion Zero Corruption Talk: Lessons of Chornobyl in Times of Pandemic on April 26, the anniversary of the catastrophe.
Different disasters, same issues
The Chornobyl explosion was a result of a badly designed Soviet reactor operated by inadequately trained engineers. The reason for the rapid global spread of the coronavirus, in turn, is “technological conditions of our age – globalized system of international travel and trade,” said Francis Fukuyama, a world-renowned political scientist.
But both disasters have tested the world’s governments on the ability to impose adequate steps in order to have the number of victims as minimal as possible.
“It’s very easy for the governments to deny that it exists,” said Plokhii. “We certainly had that in the Soviet Union in 1986 with controlling the information, denying the impact of radiation on people, on children.”
Countries are still divided on those where governments hide information on what is happening and those where governments are transparent, Fukuyama said. The last ones “take advice from appropriate experts and then design public policy responses” and the first ones only “looked at their short-term interests,” he said.
Today, when the Chinese government is accused of forging statistics on the number of people infected and killed by the coronavirus, it appears to be an example of a non-transparent state. “In that perspective, we are seeing a replay of Chornobyl, where we discover which government is capable (of frauding the data) and which are not,” said Fukuyama.
The expert is also sure that the right decisions don’t necessarily depend on whether it is a democracy or an authoritarian regime. In some democratic countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, governments have been effective in fighting COVID-19. The opposite situation is observed in developed democracies like the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, Brazil.
“I think what really matters is two things – state capacity and leadership to be able to make right choices,” said Fukuyama.
At the same time, according to Roman Borisovich, a former Russian banker and present anti-corruption activist, authoritarian regimes have more resources to misinform the global communities than democracies.
“The Soviet Union lied about Chernobyl in the first days after the catastrophe. Now, we are realizing that the Chinese government withheld the information on the scale of the disaster in Wuhan,” said Borisovich.
Lessons of Chornobyl
As the world’s routine economic life is falling apart by strict quarantine measures needed to stop the COVID-19 pandemic, financial threats – especially in emerging economies – are growing fast.
Borisovich believes the real amount of money withdrawn from such economies is huge. He is sure that there is already a “flood of dirty money coming from kleptocracies like Russia.”
“It is ‘normal’ amid economic crises when people are trying to steal and stash (money) away in offshore zones – wherever they illegally could get their hands on it,” said Borisovich. However, it will be possible to see the financial losses of such economies only by the end of the year, when central banks publish their annual statistics.
Speakers of online conference discuss lessons of Chornobyl in times of COVID-19 pandemic on April 26, 2020. (Hromadske international)
But what the world can really try to learn from the Chornobyl tragedy is to bring more transparency and better rule of international law.
According to Plokhii, the Chornobyl case produced a significant body of international legislation on early warning and sharing information. As a result, even during the last years of its existence, the Soviet Union became open for international advisers and international inspections for all its nuclear industry, which “was super secret.”
“I personally believe that we would have another Chornobyl if that opening wouldn’t happen,” said Plokhii.
Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic, it might be the lesson of how to get more open to China, the country that’s allegedly been hiding information from the rest of the world.
According to Miranda Patrucic, an investigative reporter and regional editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the current strict control on information and lack of transparency in China makes it almost impossible to find the truth since the government is able to “hide easily what needs to be hidden.”
“By the time when anybody goes back to investigate, there won’t be any documentation on what was actually happening,” said Patrucic.
Ruining such informational barriers, however, will help other countries to understand pandemic nature better, its sources, and coming up with better responses, Fukuyama said.
Plokhii, in turn, said: “Now, we are all trying to save ourselves by building the walls, closing the borders. But I don’t think this is the way we can move forward.”
