Environmentalist Volodymyr Honcharenko
did all in his power to inform the Ukrainian public, and the authorities, about
toxic chemicals, dangerous levels of radiation, excessive concentration of lead
in the region’s water supply and much more.
His death on Aug. 3, following a brutal attack, has
made real access to information that much harder. Nor can it become easier when
so painfully little is even now heard about Honcharenko’s murder and when there
are worrying signs that, for whatever reasons, not all of those in authority appear
to want the truth to come out and those responsible to be held to answer.
Honcharenko was killed in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, not
in Kyiv, and he wasn’t officially a journalist, “just” an environmentalist. Environmental
issues are never exactly “sexy,” and they more often than not require extra
reading, reference material, etc.
So although there are strong grounds for assuming that
the environmentalist’s murder was directly linked with his civic activities, thus
far most of the national media sources have confined themselves to one brief
report.
This, in honesty, was fairly predictable. However if
there is no increase in media and public scrutiny now, one can just as safely
predict that in around six months we’ll see a journalist account of all the
versions of Honcharenko’s “mysterious death” followed on the first anniversary
by a few more pathos-filled articles, and so on, and so forth.
Honcharenko was beaten on the head and body with a
blunt instrument on Aug. 1 by two men who blocked his car as he was driving to
his dacha out of Dnipropetrovsk. He died two days later.
The attack came four days after a press conference
where he warned of three “chemical time bombs” in a district of Kryvy Rih. What
was – and almost certainly still is – involved was 180 tons of scrap metal from
three heat exchangers contaminated with a huge amount of the highly toxic
chemical hexachlorbenzol.
The rules of the information age are brutal, and
environmental scandals are fairly often ignored throughout the world. They
don’t attract media attention, that is, until somebody dies, especially if the
death is violent and comes just days after the
person exposed shenanigans. Then the
media grab hold of a potential scandal and don’t let go until they’ve found out
what happened.
Nor is this merely sensation-seeking: the death
concerns each journalist, each civic activist. It’s all extremely simple:
access to information turns into meaningless farce if people are killed for
exposing inconvenient truths.
And if they’re killed with impunity, the concept of
rule of law also loses any meaning. In most democracies journalists and civic
activists are protected to a large extent by the inevitability of huge scandal
if those riled by unwelcome exposure resort to unacceptable means.
The depressingly predictable impunity in Ukraine can
and must be stopped but it needs journalists with bulldog grip, and stubborn
refusal to be distracted, or conned into misleading the public.
There would not seem to have been any witnesses to the
attack on Volodymyr Honcharenko and we know what happened only thanks to the phone
call he managed to make to his son-in-law before losing consciousness.
Unfortunately it is not only this that is complicating
investigation of the case. Despite the press conference and other cases where
Honcharenko exposed abuse or criminal behaviour and threats he received, and
although his colleagues, human rights and civic activists throughout Ukraine
are convinced that he was murdered because of his civic activities, the
investigators are stubbornly rejecting that line of investigation. They name as their main versions either
“conflict in connection with a road accident” and “professional” / “commercial”
activity. The latter was virtually non-existent, according to the dead man’s
relatives and colleagues.
All possible motives must be examined and clear
reluctance to consider one is disturbing. It is not the only cause for concern.
If, according to the investigators, the attack was prompted by a road accident,
it would be good to know why the police report that the two cars “collided”
whereas Honcharenko told his son-in-law that the other car had blocked his
path. The police version suggests a road
conflict, Honcharenko’s – an attack.
The above discrepancy makes the shoddy or dishonest
reporting of the First Kryvy Rih TV Channel particularly worrying. The channel
stated that “according to official information” Honcharenko died as the result
of a car accident.”
The same channel also triumphantly reports that they
didn’t find any radioactive contamination in Kryvy Rih. Excellent, of course,
only a total red herring since Honcharenko warned of chemical contamination,
not radiation. You might think that the
channel was simply copying the words of representative of the company most
implicated in the scandal, Ihor Bohush, were it not for one circumstance. Colleagues
and volunteers running information sites on Facebook and vkontakte have left
comments on the channel’s site, politely correcting erroneous information.
These have been deleted.
It is clear why a representative of Ukr-EURO should be
dying to “prove” that there is no excessive amount of radiation although nobody
said that there was in this case. They are firstly trying to undermine trust
towards the slain environmentalist while also deflecting attention from what
really is the issue – chemically contaminated scrap metal.
The motives of the far right political party VO
Svoboda are also questionable. Despite being properly informed, it insisted on
holding a demonstration making demands regarding radiation which in the given
case is not the issue.
In short, instead of clear confirmation or the
contrary of allegations regarding the contaminated heat exchangers, we have a
depressingly familiar scenario, similar to that on political talk shows. One
side says “you did”, the other “no, we didn’t” or “it was you!” and the
“winner” is the one who shouts the loudest.
Instead of journalists helping to get to the truth, we have political
parties concerned primarily about getting good publicity.
A human life is per se worthy of attention while the
dangers of impunity recognize no professional or other boundaries.
Halya Coynash
is a member of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group.
