April is a terrible month for Ukraine. It is precisely in April that all sorts of tragedies occur in Ukraine. In April 1986, the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant occurred; in April 1996, there was an explosion at the "Karl Marx" mine near Voroshilovgrad, as a result of which 64 miners died. In April 2000 — an accident in Kharkiv, at the seemingly innocuously named Rogan Meat Processing Plant, resulting in an ammonia leak of such magnitude that about 200 residents of the neighborhoods adjacent to the plant ended up in hospitals. Among them — about 50 children. 12 of whom died from poisoning. However, while everyone knows about the first two accidents, the strange accident at the Rogan Meat Processing Plant still remains a secret sealed with seven seals. The Ukrainian authorities refuse to acknowledge even the very fact of the tragedy, asserting that on April 4 the emergency evacuation of the plant's workers occurred not because of "some" accident, but according to the plan of exercises of Civil Defense units. And the poisonings of people that followed these strange exercises, the deaths of children in the intensive care unit of the city hospital — this is, as the mayor of Kharkiv cynically stated, and as if completely by chance (oh, the cynicism!), the owner of the meat processing plant Mykhailo Pylypchuk — a random coincidence.... Today, 3 years after the mysterious tragic events that occurred in Kharkiv, we asked former Verkhovna Rada deputy Volodymyr Novikov to tell us about this; at that time he worked in Kharkiv and was an eyewitness to these tragic events.

EX-DEPUTY RECALLS:

-- It was like a film from the "X-Files" series, when there is panic in Kharkiv, the city is cordoned off by troops, and the Ukrainian media do not write a word about the mass poisoning of people in the residential neighborhoods adjacent to this strange plant, which supposedly specialized in the production of meat products, but in fact at this plant, as at many enterprises of the former Soviet Union, under the roof of peaceful sausage production, there operated a secret workshop subordinate to the Ministry of Defense of the USSR. According to my data, in this workshop during Soviet times they were engaged in the production of chemical weapons. What cynicism! Samples of chemical weapons were tested on animals, whose meat was then processed and sold as ham, sausage, i.e., food products. People bought the products of the Rogan Meat Processing Plant for decades without even suspecting that they were eating meat poisoned during chemical weapons tests. No one in Kharkiv studied the reasons why about 20,000 people died of cancer every year... Well, of course, that is a thing of the past. But here is the paradox: after the collapse of the USSR, independent Ukraine did not destroy but continued to use the secret laboratory that existed under the roof of the Rogan Meat Processing Plant. Public attention was drawn to this secret facility after the accident that occurred on April 4, 2000, as a result of which a large-scale ammonia leak occurred, leading to mass poisoning. Well, and to be fully consistent, it must be said that the Kharkiv authorities would have managed to hush up the scandal. However, in their path stood a brave, resolute woman — Svitlana Vorozhkina. Before this accident, she was actively involved in politics and defended human rights. But this accident at the Rogan Meat Processing Plant destroyed her life and undermined her children's health. After the accident, it was she, Svitlana Vorozhkina, who united around herself the residents of the district whose family members suffered from the ammonia leak. Their association was called "CIVIC INITIATIVE." These people did not demand any million-dollar compensation payments, as is customary in the West. They only wanted the authorities to investigate the causes of the accident and punish those guilty of this tragedy. And the guilty party was none other than the mayor of Kharkiv, Mykhailo Pylypchuk, who was at the same time the owner of the Rogan Meat Processing Plant! And above all, he and the people behind him did not need this scandal at all. After all, if information about the "strange accident" and the "strange mass poisoning" had reached the ears of Western European diplomats, the European Union and NATO would have asked President Kuchma what kind of mysterious poisonings were occurring in Ukraine? And after all, Kuchma swore before NATO that there was no chemical weapons in Ukraine and could not be. In general, had an international scandal occurred, the president of Ukraine would not have stood on ceremony with the guilty mayor of Kharkiv, Mykhailo Pylypchuk! As a result, the people behind Pylypchuk would have lost huge amounts of money! So imagine what this very Pylypchuk and his company felt when it seemed the scandal had been hushed up, but a certain unknown Svitlana Vorozhkina unites people and raises a scandal across all of Ukraine. Incidentally, while leading people to picket the checkpoint of the Rogan Meat Processing Plant of the city administration, she did not even suspect whose path she was "crossing," whose "cards she was confusing." As a result, Svitlana Vorozhkina and her family were literally trampled. A criminal case was opened against her under some fabricated articles. She was attacked several times, as usually happens in Ukraine, by "unknown persons." And then probably someone from Pylypchuk's team remembered how in Soviet times they dealt with people undesirable to the authorities. Such people in Soviet times were placed in special psychiatric hospitals, where a normal person within a month was turned into a helpless invalid suffering from schizophrenia. And even if a person, after such "treatment," tried again to say something other than what the authorities wanted, the authorities could always say that this person was a schizophrenic and all his statements were the ravings of a sick person... That is what they did to the leader of the organization "CIVIC INITIATIVE," Svitlana Vorozhkina — they turned her into a schizophrenic. Thereby a lesson was taught to all who disagreed with the authorities, and the question of the accident at the Rogan Meat Processing Plant was buried forever. All talk about some accident, some ammonia leak, after Svitlana Vorozhkina was forcibly subjected to psychiatric treatment, was declared the ravings of schizophrenics... As a result, today the fate of Svitlana Vorozhkina is unknown. The mayor of Kharkiv, Pylypchuk, is on the list of the richest people in Ukraine, and the country itself, in which an honest person is easily turned into a schizophrenic by the authorities and ground to dust, is called in one modern French dictionary "a state with a developing democracy"... Now that, in my opinion, really smells of schizophrenia... Three years have passed. How many more years must pass before in our country honest but undesirable people stop being turned into the mentally ill? So that Ukraine becomes a country of truly developing democracy?!..