You're reading: Environmental whistleblower beaten to death

A prominent environmental activist was fatally beaten on Aug 1, days after warning the public about the health threat posed by improperly transported and stored toxic waste.

The activist, Volodymyr Honcharenko, died in a hospital on Aug. 3, two days after two men beat him with a blunt iron object after their car collided with his near Dnipropetrovsk, according to police reports.
Whether Honcharenko’s murder is connected with his role as a whistleblower is under investigation. His death is mourned by those who say Ukraine has lost a strong voice on environmental issues.

“The topics he was covering irritated many people,” said Natalia Kozhyna, editor-in-chief of Eco Safety, an environmental newspaper founded by Honcharenko. “He obviously managed to make a lot of enemies.”

His last sensational warning came five days before his death, when he held a July 27 press conference.
Honcharenko, who headed the nongovernmental organization For the Rights of Citizens to Environmental Security, warned that 183 tons of toxic scrap metal had been illegally transported and stored in Kryvyi Rih. He said the material includes 90 tons of the highly dangerous chemical hexachlorbenzol. It was transported in 2006 to a Kryvyi Rih steel plant from the western Ukrainian city of Kalush and was to be melted down for metal.

Honcharenko called this scrap metal a “chemical time bomb,” saying that when heated it immediately releases toxic gases.

He said that several workers of Mittal Steel, now ArcelorMittal, were poisoned when they tried to cut this scrap years ago. Honcharenko also claimed that Ukr-Euro, the company that owned the material, moved it to another enterprise in Kryvyi Rih whose staff was also poisoned as a result.

Eco Safety editor Kozhyna said that Honcharenko appealed to local authorities, including the Ministry of Emergency Situations, for prosecution. He also asked the road police to stop transports of dangerous metals through Kryvyi Rih, a city of almost 700,000.

She says authorities did not respond. Only after environmentalists and local media identified the location of the hazardous stockpiles did the authorities organize a special commission and seize the material, Kozhyna added.

Honcharenko was driving on a village road to his country house on Aug. 1 when two men in a car blocked his path. When he left his car, the men started beating him on the head with a blunt iron object. He managed to drive his car away and call for medical help, but died on Aug. 3 of severe head trauma, authorties said.

His supporters suspect that he was killed because of his investigations, particularly those examining the corrupt business of making money on toxic waste in Ukraine.

Petro Prystromko, Honcharenko’s deputy at the environmental group, believes the murder is somehow related to the scrap metal, although he says his ex-boss reported threats from earlier years.

“He told me about these [calls]. It was happening for many years,” Prystromko said. “Problems would appear after he raised an issue about rechargeable batteries, or after he started to work with radioactive metal,” he added.

Kozhyna said Honcharenko didn’t pay attention to the threats and even joked about them. But she thought his investigations could be a “thorn in the side” of vested interests.

Ihor Bohush, a representative of Ukr-Euro, denied the scrap metal was dangerous, saying it didn’t contain hexachlorbenzol. The claim is refuted by Dnipropetrovsk ecologists.

Bohush also claimed Honcharenko, who headed the association of metal recyclers Vtormet, was “protecting his business interests” when criticizing Ukr-Euro, allegations  that Honcharenko’s colleagues also dismissed as nonsense.

A representative of Ukr-Euro refused to talk to the Kyiv Post this week.

Police have changed their classification of the criminal probe, after first telling the public they were looking into an attack by hooligans. Subsequently, police said they are now investigating whether he was the victim of a contract killing, according to prosecution press service officer Oleksandra Sarayeva.
Ukraine’s heavy reliance on polluted heavy industries, including chemical, nuclear power and steel plants, offers no shortage of targets for environmentalists.

In other cases over the years, Honcharenko had fiercely criticized metallurgical plants – owned by some of richest and most powerful people in the nation

He claimed that some of the plants were melting radioactive scrap metal from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant’s highly radioactive 30-kilometer exclusion zone and accused government authorities of turning a blind eye. “The radionuclide gets into slag. And what do we do with the slag today? We build roads; we make building materials and construct houses from them,” he once wrote.

He also complained about toxic rubbish stored openly around Ukraine, saying the material could contaminate the soil and underground aquifers. He favored the creation of waste-processing plants in Ukraine, rather than the current practice of shipping toxic waste abroad.

“If we sort out this issue, we could create business worth Hr 15 billion a year. And it’s not difficult,” he said. “But these changes would stop the current kick-backs. And I openly told it to the ministry,” he added.

Many of Honcharenko’s warning letters to government bodies went unanswered, Prystromko said.
While several hundred people attended his funeral, nobody from the local authorities was present.

A number of civil activists and environmental groups said they plan to picket Kyiv police and prosecutors’ offices, demanding that law enforcement pay more attention to Honcharenko’s murder.

Yaroslav Movchan, head of the National Ecological Center of Ukraine, said there have been other deaths of environmental activists. Movchan cited the 2009 murder of Oleksiy Honcharov, who was fighting illegal extraction of sand on Zhukiv Island in Kyiv, in violation of its landscape reserve status.

Honcharov’s murder remains unsolved.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].