Chernobyl Certificate No 000358

This is Annya. She is more than just a number.

Being a victim of the Chernobyl disaster means more than just a number. Often, it's a lifetime of suffering due to a dirty and dangerous industry still being promoted with our tax money.

Annya was born in 1990 in a village highly contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown of April 26, 1986. A cancerous brain tumour at the age of 4 marked the end of Annya's childhood, and the beginning of a life of pain and illness. Annya, now 15 and bed-ridden, has spent her life in and out of hospital between tumours and life support. Every 15 minutes of every night, she must be turned in order to prevent further pain and bedsores.

Twenty years after the Chernobyl disaster, Annya and her parents battle everyday with the cruel and personal legacy of Chernobyl. Their home village in the south of Belarus, irradiated and uninhabitable, was razed and buried years ago. Gomel, the region where they live now, is economically and socially depressed and work is hard to find.

Annya's is just one story. In Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and beyond, there are 100,000's of people who lost a chance of a normal life to nuclear disaster on a quiet spring night in 1986. Thousands of stories. Thousands of certificates. Thousands of lives forever and irreparably scarred.
Nuclear technology is inherently dangerous. Today, thankfully, it is also unnecessary. Our energy needs can be met with safe and efficient renewable energy technologies so why are so many politicians peddling nuclear power at the very time we need it least when we have safe and sustainable sources available to power the world?

Why does the UN, through its International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), continue to promote the nuclear technology that creates the very materials used to make the nuclear weapons it is mandated to stop? Is it the role of a UN agency, funded by your taxes, to advance the profits of the nuclear industry? Do we not have the right to expect the IAEA to focus only on the values and principles of the UN - peace, security, and human rights - and not on private industry's profits?
In some ways, sadly, Annya is just a number. She is one of hundreds of thousands of victims living the devastating aftermath of Chernobyl. For Annya and for the thousands of children like her, WE need to speak out and say NO more nuclear, NO more Chernobyls. If WE don't, who will?

[This article copyright of Greenpeace and not my original creation. However, I couldn't agree any less with the message conveyed in the article. The article has been edited a bit here and there but overall content remains the same]