CIC Special Briefing - How Great is Kazakhstan's Poisoned Legacy?

The new State of Kazakhstan inherited not one, but two of the world's biggest ecological catastrophes.

In addition to the problems of the rapidly disappearing Aral Sea, there were those resulting from radioactive contamination around the nuclear testing site at the Polygon, which has turned the area into a bleak and dangerous wasteland. Both of these disasters were man-made, the consequences of decisions made in Moscow over which the people of Kazakhstan had no influence and no means of reversing. In addition, Lake Balkash is seriously polluted, and the water in Caspian Sea is rising, covering old well-heads from the Soviet period, and thus contaminating the lake. There are also many thousands of acres of the steppe that have been left barren, or turned literally into desert, as a result of over-intensive cultivation and excessive use of pesticides and fertilisers.

Before water was taken from the rivers that flow into it, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world, approximate in size to Lake Huron. The lake, which lies in western Kazakhstan on the border with Uzbekistan, supported a fishing industry employing more than 60,000 people. But from 1960 it began to dry up as the result of a decision by Soviet economic planners to dig irrigation channels to divert water from the Amu Darya and Syr Dara, the two main rivers feeding the lake, towards vast, new cotton fields in the dry lands of Central Asia. As a result, the Soviet Union became the world's second largest exporter of cotton. But the lake, by 1980, had fallen by 16 metres and its volume by three quarters. The area of the lake shrank by 45 per cent, with the result that fishing villages were now many miles from the water's edge. Salt levels rose three-fold, killing the fish stocks, and the rains stopped. The diverse wild life that had once occupied the river delta perished or fled. The once thriving port of Aralsk became a ghost town, left high and dry like many of the fishing boats that had once worked its waters.

Among the many unfortunate consequences of this man-made disaster, millions of tons of toxic waste deposited on the former seabed are whipped up and carried by the wind to the glaciers in the Tian mountains, the source of drinking water for most of the peoples of Kazakhstan.

These problems, which have severely damaged the health of many of those living in the Aral Sea basin and led to reduced life expectancy there, were acknowledged for more than 20 years – but no decisive action was taken. In the 1970s, the Soviet leadership belatedly ordered scientists and economic planners to find a solution. The result was a dramatic plan to divert some of the water from Siberian rivers by means of a 1,500-mile canal. Lack of resources meant that the plan was never implemented.

Hope of finding a way to prevent the lake from drying up altogether only came with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the possibility of outside assistance. In 1992, the five Central Asian republics set up an Inter-State Council in order to reach agreement about how to share the waters from the Amy Darya and Syry Darya Rivers, taking into account the impact on the Aral Sea. A year later they agreed to create an International Fund in order to prevent its extinction, with each state pledging to contribute one percent of GDP. In 1994, the World Bank pledged US$32 million, and this commitment has been followed by other grants from international sources, including a loan of 64.5 million from the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development in 2001. The main aim of the funding is to increase the flow of river waters into the lake without causing damage to other parts the Central Asian economy. A dozen states have offered technical advice or support.

Kazakhstan's approach to this immense ecological disaster typifies the way in which it has dealt with several of the problems that it has faced since Independence. Many of these are shared with other Central Asian countries and are on a scale that makes purely domestic approaches impractical. By first acknowledging this fact, and by initiating a regional response in which the country then plays a leading role, Kazakhstan has been able to obtain support from the wider international community. Its record in this respect has enhanced its growing reputation as a state which meets international obligations and which respects the terms of the agreements reached with international aid organisations and with others. This in turn has given the reform programme greater credibility at home and made it easier for the peoples of Kazakhstan to accept that reform often entails short-term sacrifices and costs.

Like the harm done to the Aral Sea and the communities that depended on it, the damage caused to the city of Semipalatinsk and the area around it by Soviet nuclear testing between 1949 and 1970, will take decades to repair. Among those watching the first atmospheric test carried out by the Soviet Army in 1949 at the Semipalatinsk site was the young Russian physicist, Andrei Sakharov, then working at a top secret outpost. In his memoirs, he later recalled surveying the scorched landscape, of observing the destruction of the area's wildlife and of hearing accounts of the first deaths from radiation. His experiences were one of the factors that led him to become a leading critic of the Soviet Union's military plans and of the Soviet system itself.

Those living near the test site later reported that, as a consequence of the testing, at noon a second sun would appear in the sky. And when it snowed the flakes were radioactive.

According to the Kazakhstan government, as many as half a million people suffered directly or indirectly from the radiation. The effects continue, more than 30 years after the tests were halted. Even today, children are born with severe deformities.

President Nazarbayev has written in his autobiography: "It is difficult to overestimate the sheer destruction which these tests caused to Kazakhstan. It was nothing less than genocide, the wiping out by the Soviet government of its own people. Over the course of 41 years, there were 752 explosions, 26 in the atmosphere, 78 at ground level and the rest underground. The whole city shook when the nuclear charges went off. At the time, I was working in Karaganda, some 500 kilometres away; even at that distance we still felt the shock wave."

According to Nazarbayev, the Soviet authorities ran a secret hospital at Semipalatinsk in order to observe and monitor the effects of radiation on human beings. Rural settlements of 50 people – each compensated for his or her suffering with a crate of vodka and one hundred roubles - were established close to the site of the explosions in order to pursue the research on radioactive fallout.

In 1989 there were earth tremors, and a huge radioactive cloud formed above Northern Kazakhstan as the result of two nuclear tests. Public outrage led to the creation of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement, the first mass movement in the history of the Soviet Union. Its principal demands were the end of testing and the closure of the test site at Semipalatinsk. The Kazakhstan Communist Party responded by adding to the demands for its closure. No further tests were held there.