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Trust and Chernobyl: Counting Lives

Trust was an appropriate subject to comment on today. I'd written about it myself last year when faced with the dilemma of trusting a stranger. I'd done it twice, sending money for food aid but the continuining demands made me uncomfortable.

I reflected on trusting a stranger, inviting him to me home and from there engaging in trust with people at a distance who would return evidence of what they were doing for the victims of Beslan.

For the stranger who I invited into my home it had gone a lot further ,from his honorary appointment with Clinton's re-election team.to Russia where he'd invested all he had after becoming homeless in a plan to tackle poverty.

He put his trust in me when returning to fast for economic rights in North Carolina and I became his message bearer. It was about a way of doing business differently where humanity is the bottom line.

Going off on a tangent, it's the 27th anniversary of Cheronobyl today.and I was reminded of Adrian Edmondson's sensitive portrayal of the man who would commit suicide two years after the disaster. He refers to those who placed trust in their leaders, saying:

We've seen so many walking dead and sent so many to their deaths but never with such certainty.

We tell them the truth and they trust us -  Is this task essential? Then there's nothing more to say.

There's a moving scene as two divers facing certain death, enter the highly radioactive water to prevent the deaths of a million others

 

In truth, the workers at Chernobyl had been tragical deceived by a cover up of the faulty reactor design. They'd been told it just couldn't go wrong.

This does have something to do with social business         

Founder Terry Hallman was enlisted in the US Army when assigned to duty at a missile silo. He made a stand, telling his superiors that if he were one of the men instructed to complete the launch sequence, he'd not do it under any circumstances. That got him discharged from the Army.

He'd end up some years later in the city of Tomsk and it's secret neighbour city of Seversk where there were many nuclear physicists and weapons stockpiles. Sending back his recommendations to Clinton's office he commented that there was no manual to deal with the collapse of Russia. It was 1999 and Russia would be one of the first affected by the global economic crisis.

That was how the Tomsk Regonal Intiative began with a "moral collateral" based community bank as a primary component. it was a modified version of what Grameen had introduced in Bangladesh in the 1970s. Each member of a loan circle being required to trust all others, on who the next stage of lending would depend    

Ukraine is the best country to spend my limited life time he said, when interviewed about our work in Ukraine  He relates what the Tomsk experience and subsequent work in Crimea taught him about dealing with corrupt authority.   

The real story of the next 5 years until his death is the leap of faith in taking a stand for the vulnerable and voiceless. His vision being the creation of a loving family home for all children

"Most important is the welfare of each of these children. There are at this time, for example, numerous institutions across Ukraine where children die on a daily basis from little more than lack of knowledge about how to help them. The actual cost of helping them immediately is nothing more than one-day workshops for existing staff, to demonstrate basic, simple medical interventions common in the West. These institutions are generally closed to the outside world, difficult to access due to imposed secrecy, and are mostly in very rural areas where even the closest neighbors have no idea of the reality of these facilities."

He knew that he stood alone with the exception of my financial and logistical support, we'd sought the solidarity of our peers in social enterprise but were beyond their focus..

The words of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' would resonate:

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do”

When he died in 2011 I was able to reveal his correpondence with the US Senate and USAID and something else he'd lent a hand in. A proposal to turn the former weapons research laboratory in Kharkiv, where Russia had developed their H Bomb into an educational centre and the location for a joint production agreement for medical isotopes.

He was pre-deceased by only a few months by Oleg Lavrenteyev the Russian who wrote to Khruschev claiming he could build a fission weapon. A stark contrast with an American who told his president that there was a way capitalism could serve humanity Both men had lived and worked in Kharkiv.

iN 2009, business secretary Lord Mandelson speaking of a social enterprise summit had said that they were helping firms who helped others. He would turn up later in Ukraine to help an oligarch, as did former PM Tony Blair, .  

We trusted in our governments, the two of us, both the UK and the US by introducing our work to them,calling for their support. We'd trust the parnters of Grameen in a social business ideas competition and an EU citizens consultation. This was the intellectual property intended to benefit the most vulnerable.

 

 

The Sunday Times put it plainly 5 years after our article about Torez - 'Death Camps, For Children'

‘The Ukrainian maxim: “I saw nothing, my home is on the other side of the village” has no place in the modern world. If by our deliberate blindness, children are allowed to suffer such depravities then, by our inaction, we are all guilty.’

It would reflect what had been written earlier about our approaches to USAID and UNICEF:

  "This is not a research activity where many, if any, other people dared to participate.  UNICEF was willfully blind to the matter because it was just too dangerous to bother to intercede  Powerful interests remained entrenched with enforcers to make it dangerous.  Jurists were correct, in my view.  It was more a mafia operation than anything else, aimed at misappropriation and laundering of large money.  That was perfectly congruent with how Ukraine operated before the revolution.  USAID wanted nothing to do with it, nor would they fund any organizations or activists who might try.  Some things could be done and some things could not be done.  Helping these children was something that could not be done.  So, I exposed it and made it the central focus and metric of Ukraine's microeconomic development blueprint. " 

When one examines the British Council's description of social enterprise in Ukraine, the dishonesty of those involved is apparent in the definition they use. allegedly that of a British "expert" which one may only read in Ukrainian. It can not conceal replication of the definiton from our 2006 'Marshall Plan' paper and earlier work, We could not be partners in this project because the eligibility criteria include the ability to make a financial contribution. We were not told this, our application was simply disregarded.

The British Council sponsors a hub on the Guardian social enterprise network and since they are largely funded by government, that is something all of us pay for in taxation.      .  

For the Guardian editors who publish the article on trust, my contribution is unacceptable in that it "keeps going over old ground".

Yes, I'm going over the ground where the bodies of those unwanted lie. I'll go over it again and again and keep coming like the ocean waves at those who opine from the comfort of a risk averse salaried position on something of which they have little knowledge and have never commited to personally. 

I'll offer them a tour which may bruise their egos, but they'll end up the better for it with a non surgical spinal insertion 

Taking another persons work with the intention of personal benefit is a crime. Others have been extradited for less, Our founder, empty handed from our efforts, could not fund his own medical treatment and died because he would not give up on those who are voiceless and unremembered. 

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