Ukraine is “sitting on a nuclear powder keg” and the western world must not abandon it to its fate, said peace activist, charity founder and former presidential candidate Adi Roche as she received a major international peace award in London on Saturday.
Ms Roche, the founder of Chernobyl Children International (CCI), which has delivered more than €108 million of aid to Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus since the 1986 nuclear disaster in the region, has been awarded the Ahmadiyya Muslim Peace Prize.
The award is presented each year by the Ahmadiyya community, a south Asian Muslim movement, at a grand ceremony at one of Europe’s biggest mosques, the Baitul Futuh complex in south London.
Previous winners include Hiroshima bomb survivor and anti-nuclear campaigner Setsuko Thurlow and Buddhist nun Cheng Yen, the founder of the Tzu Chi humanitarian organisation in Taiwan.
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Ms Roche was originally selected for the award in 2020 but the ceremony was postponed due to the pandemic.
Speaking to The Irish Times in advance of the peace symposium at the Baitul Futuh mosque, she said the award had “given her heart a little bit of a lift”, after CCI’s operations in Belarus and Ukraine were upended by Russia’s 2022 invasion of its neighbour.
But she also accused Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces of issuing a discreet nuclear threat by invading Ukraine from Belarus on a route directly through the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone in the north of the country – the power plant was captured on the first day of the war.
“It’s a war crime to weaponise a nuclear facility,” she said. “The Hague Convention should be invoked. Russia issued a nuclear threat without having to say it by going through that area. It made them triumphalist and so they went on to Zaporizhzhia [a nuclear plant in southeast Ukraine that has been the scene of fighting and is now controlled by Russia].”
Ms Roche, an anti-nuclear campaigner since the 1970s, said that while she remains hopeful for peace, the risks of a catastrophe in Ukraine worry her.
“Sometimes I can’t sleep at night,” she said.
Before the war, CCI operated mostly in Belarus, working with medical teams to provide care for children in the region whose health was affected by the nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster. Some of the kids were brought to Ireland each year to stay with host families.
Ms Roche said her Cork-headquartered charity has been unable to go into Belarus ever since sanctions were put in place against the regime there of Aleksandr Lukashenko, a close Putin ally.
“It’s most unfortunate. We have no engagement with the politics of Belarus. It’s with the children. It has been deeply challenging but we have found ways and means,” she said.
The CCI operation in Belarus is now run entirely by 60 local staff.
Before the conflict, CCI also operated from the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which was captured by Russia early in the war and subsequently liberated by the Ukrainians. The charity has since had to shift its operations to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv to avoid the fighting.
“In Ukraine we have a different set of problems. We are on the frontline of child cardiac services there,” said Ms Roche.
CCI’s medical volunteers treat children for illnesses such as “Chernobyl heart”, a cardiac condition prevalent in the region and thought to be caused by the fallout.
“With Chernobyl heart, the children can’t live with it, and they’ll die without help. Our surgeons there tried to stay working in Kharkiv after the invasion but they had to pull out two years ago and move to Lviv. The risk was too great – it would have been suicidal to stay. The surgeons were literally chased from east to west by the war,” said Ms Roche.
She said that rather than cutting services in Ukraine, CCI has actually expanded its operations there from its new base in the west.
“Each month we send in supplies to hundreds of villages in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. We send them food, solar lamps, stoves, whatever they need. We also take the kids to Carpathian Mountains for breaks.”
She said the war had brought challenges that she had never anticipated.
“But you dust yourself down and get on with it. The power of our love is very strong.”
Ms Roche, who ran for president in 1997, said she was honoured to receive the peace prize.
“What’s lovely about the Ahmadiyya is they are so focused on peace. Religions can be divisive, but also unifying when it comes to the values of peace and justice,” she said.
“Peace has been forgotten in the world. People feel paralysed and hopeless because of this. Let’s not abandon peace even when it’s weakened and drowned out by war.”
The Ahmadiyya is a Muslim messianic movement founded in India in 1899. Its adherents follow mainstream Islamic tenets but also believe that Jesus Christ survived on the cross and later died in Kashmir. Members of the Ahmadiyya movement are sometimes persecuted by other branches of the Muslim faith.
The movement’s worldwide spiritual leader, or caliph, is Mirza Masroor Ahmad, who as due to give a keynote address at the ceremony in London at which Ms Roche received her peace award.
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