It may seem strange and somewhat morbid that the environmentalist group Vedegylet is seeking to name a street in Paks after Chernobil.
But it is far more grotesque that the Health Ministry's records concerning the accident in 1986 are still inaccessible. The historical review Rubicon has also revealed that the state security archives have similar inaccessible material. It seems that people in charge think Hungarian society has no right to know about government lies and deceptions that followed the Chernobil disaster.
But the people mentioned in those documents are not long-dead Communist officials or Rakosi-era activists, nor senile retired security services officers. Many of them continue to play a role in public life, as ministers and senior civil servants.Some of them are senior party officials who have ordered the media into silence. Others edit sections of newspapers and have, with some notable exceptions, bowed down before this censorship. There are some who work in health and radiation biology centres, who have violated their oaths by keeping silent about the real levels of danger.
Research indicates that there will be a huge jump in the number of cancer cases by the end of this decade as a direct result of Chernobil. Those who failed to tell us what was going on continue to enjoy a sense of moral invulnerability, even the ones who happily sent workers into the vicinity of the active zone. They had people wash down lorries heading towards Austria without wearing protective clothing. During the crisis, the security services and their informers went into overdrive. Anyone who spoke honestly about the growing danger was risking their job and their freedom. Yet a secret central committee report stated: "The level of radiation in the air is many times higher than normal, the radiation level of surface water is five times higher than normal, and that of drinking water twice as high."
Milk was also dangerously radioactive.
With breathtaking cynicism, Janos Berecz, secretary of the Central Committee continues to say: "We were seen with greater respect in the West. They could trust us. We kept our word, keeping them informed, regardless of the differences between our two systems." It is true that for weeks the foreign ministry received no information worth taking seriously from its Soviet sister-state, so it had no information to pass on. Gyula Horn was state secretary at the Foreign Minister. The Central Committee's state secretary for foreign affairs was Matyas Szuros. When he was greeted with rapturous applause at Fidesz's party conference recently, not one of the party's professional anti-communists asked him if he was even slightly ashamed of the role he played back then.
Regime change cannot be said to have been completed until the Chernobil files have been released. We know the accident caused enormous damage. It may also have had at least one positive
consequence: it made it clear that dictatorships should not have access to nuclear power stations, heavy water plants, and uranium-enriching reactors. Because dictatorships have no feel for industrial safety or environmental protection. Political success and megalomaniac plans are always more important to a dictatorship than human lifes.
Tamás Papp László