Uzbekistán

Historias reales

Drought plagues Uzbekistan as Aral Sea dries up

© UNICEF Uzbekistan/Gordon Weiss

Uzak: "We deceived nature"

Aymuratov Uzak is 22. When he was a small boy, he visited the town of Myinak, the Aral Sea's principal resort and fishing town in the far north of Uzbekistan. He watched as Uzbek men competed in horse races in honour of a wedding. Such races had taken place since their Mongol ancestors rode across the central Asian lands and settled permanently to graze their animals.

Uzak saw the riders dash across the sands, their colourful pennants a splash of colour against the burnished sands and white skies and strange, decaying ships that were strung across the desert. Uzak asked a goatherd what the rusting hulks were doing there, stuck fast in a perpetual list as though they were forever trying to sink through the vast plates of hardened salt. "They were for the sea, but the sea has gone." Uzak: "We deceived nature"

"You see," says Uzak, referring to the drought that is consuming Central Asia. "We deceived nature, and now nature is deceiving us." When Uzak was eleven, his father died of kidney cancer (a disease attributed to a prevalence of salt in the drinking water). Six years later, his brother's 31 year-old wife died in her sleep, and doctors refused to perform an autopsy "because it was a waste of time, they said."

In despair, his brother committed suicide and Uzak was left at 17 to provide for his mother, two sisters, and two small nieces, in the Karl Marx collective farm that lies east of the Aral Sea in the district of Takhtakupir. He cannot attend college, and his youthful dreams seem to have disappeared. He hopes to marry, to be able to support the education of the children, to continue to provide for his mother, and to improve his skills on the dombra, a long-necked string instrument he plucks at while we talk.

© UNICEF Uzbekistan/Gordon Weiss

Children of the Karakalpakstan region

We deceived nature

Most of Uzbekistan is lowland desert with little rainfall. The country relies for water on the snow-fed rivers of the Amu Dar'ya (the ancient Oxus) and the Syr Dar'ya flowing from their mountainous easterly neighbours Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. As late as the 1920's families of nomadic herdsmen roamed its sparsely vegetated lands in search of pasture for their animals.

The drying of the Aral sea began in the 1930's with the large-scale agricultural policies of Stalin's Soviet Union. Huge tracts of unsuitable land in Central Asia were turned over to agriculture, and sustained with massive irrigation schemes, forcible population transfers, and fertilizers and pesticides. Today's drained rivers, dried aquifers, poisoned water-tables, and large populations subsisting on exhausted lands, are the direct results of those policies. As are the mysterious illnesses, low life expectancy, and high infant mortality rates of a number of central Asian populations.

As the unsustainable agricultural policies foundered, planners compensated with large scale chemical intervention and the sluicing of even greater quantities of water from the Aral's 'feed' rivers onto the land. They transformed a balanced pastoral and fishing paradise into an ecological disaster The fishing industry, once one of the world's most abundant, has completely disappeared, and the shore has receded up to 120 kilometers at some points. Communities which once lived just kilometres from its shores know of the Aral Sea only by hearsay (villagers we speak to have heard of, but have never seen the sea because it is "too far.").

As the sea receded, it exposed 27,000 square kilometres of dry seabed. The river basins began snaring up to 25 million tonnes of salt each year from their upper reaches that would once have been carried into the saline-balanced sea. Huge dust storms of salt and pesticide are now driven by prevailing winds hundreds of kilometres across the fields of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, further eroding the limited capacities of the soil, destroying forests, and poisoning the population.

The Aral Sea shores are home to 3.5 million people. In Uzbekistan's region of Karakalpakia there are high rates of child mortality, illness amongst women of child-bearing age, maternal mortality, anaemia, typhoid, respiratory and intestinal infections, cancer, hepatitis, DDT poisoning (especially notable in breast milk), and diminished life-expectancy. All drinking water is chemically contaminated to dangerous levels, and most bacteriologically, to levels characterized as "catastrophic." Malnutrition is commonplace

© UNICEF Uzbekistan/Gordon Weiss

Old woman of the Karakalpakstan region

As the U.S.S.R. crumbled and constituent republics opted for independence, the social services in the cotton and wheat fields of the southern republics were withdrawn overnight. And this year, for the first time, the mighty Amu Dar'ya river withered a record 150 kilometers back from the Aral Sea, denied what water that escapes diversion by the failure of rain and snow in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

On the Karl Marx farm the people are in despair. On 13 June, their irrigation channels finally ran dry. They could only watch as their rice crop wilted, then shrivelled up completely. They have been confused by theories of unfriendly neighbouring countries denying them water, and terrorists destroying reservoirs and pumping facilities. The government has given them no explanations, no compensation, and no solutions, although they have been excused from paying their rice tax.

Uzak, who manages the government-owned store and can gauge the hunger and sense of urgency says: "there are many illnesses, headaches, as though something is always pressing on you. My skin always feels tight, and dry." Uzak has no alternative but to imbibe the same waters that probably killed his father. "When I travel to town and drink the water there, and return, I cannot drink our water for its salt." Life is hard, but it is set to get harder. "80 per cent of the people have used their reserves of food, and nobody has any money. There will be hunger this winter," he says. It is a chilling fact that life consumes the young quickly in this part of the world. Even quicker when there is no water.