High and dry

A silver-coloured statue of a fisherman proudly holding a sturgeon bears testament to Muynak’s past. Its fish factory used to produce caviar for the Soviet government. Those were the days when Muynak was a lively fishing town on the southern coast of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. But the water is long gone – as far as the eye can see is sandy desert and green scrub. Younger generations of people have never even seen the sea.

A man-made disaster

The Aral Sea, remote and now inaccessible, is fed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, but depends on all five central Asian countries to continually replenish its water supply: Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which surround the sea, Turkmenistan, which shares the Amu Darya river with Uzbekistan for irrigation, and Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, home to the mountains where the rivers that feed the sea have their source.

During Soviet rule, these rivers were bled dry by massive irrigation networks, mainly needed for cotton production. At the same time, fertilizers and pesticides, used to force up crops from increasingly saline soil, fed into the rivers of the Aral Sea heavily polluting the drinking water of downstream towns.

It was a deliberate action. With their focus on producing enough cotton to feed a growing textile industry, Soviet planners knew their strategy would ultimately dry up the sea. Today, the Aral Sea is a harsh lesson in what happens when you interfere with Mother Nature. The summers are now hotter, the winters colder. Plants and trees have disappeared. Fish can no longer survive in what is left of the sea because it has become too saline. Salty dust storms whipped up from the sea-bed blow for hundreds of kilometres.

“It’s only the beginning of the catastrophe,” says Kabulov Saparbey, head of plants and ecology at the Academy of Science in Nukus, Uzbekistan. “The sea could disappear completely in the next 10 to 12 years because of evaporation if we do not increase the water flow. This would create a new desert and bring a climate with greater extremes of temperature.”

The human consequences

“The suffering of the people in the region is widespread but complex. Complex because the ill health,
deformities in newborn children, high rates of cancer and a bewildering array of health problems caused by toxic water bearing almost every known form of pollution, is so extensive,” explains Federation head of regional delegation Bob McKerrow. “In addition chest, eye, ear and skin infections are caused by the huge salt and dust clouds.”

The human toll is most pronounced among pregnant women and newborn babies. High levels of anaemia among women cause miscarriages and sick babies, born underweight or with deformities. In the maternity ward of Kazalins Hospital in the Kazakh Aral Sea zone, Aygul Akpanova, 23, has just given birth to a daughter whose feet bend inwards. “I felt tired and dizzy throughout my pregnancy,” she says. A high level of poverty and malnutrition in the region exacerbates the health problems. Many people are surviving on bread, vegetables and tea. Anaemia is caused by a poor diet. Tuberculosis – a disease that thrives in poor social conditions – is higher in the Aral Sea zone than elsewhere in the region. At the tuberculosis centre in Kungrad, south of Muynak, several adults admitted this year weighed less than 30 kg.

In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, the government runs a programme for sick children from the Aral Sea zone. Children come to Almaty children’s hospital for one month of medical treatment, clean water and nutritious food. Almost all of them suffer from gastro-intestinal and respiratory diseases. The Kazak Red Crescent and Red Cross (KRCRC) supplies the hospital with donations of blankets, bedlinen, hygiene kits and medical equipment.

Those born after the 1970s have never known clean drinking water, dependent on the now salty and polluted waters of the Aral Sea rivers. In Aralsk, a former port on the Kazak coast, now more than 50 km from the sea, clean drinking water is trucked in, but not regularly, and the transport has to be paid for by the villagers.

But the sea alone is not to blame for many of the problems facing the inhabitants of the Aral Sea region. The economic and financial lifeline of all five central Asian countries was severed when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving inhabitants with inadequate industry, unemployment and unpaid salaries. Even those who have a job today are not all being paid.

“We live like dogs,” says Seretbai Tulegenov of Muynak.
“I haven’t been paid for seven months. I have seven children, only one of my sons has found a job. There’s no work here,” he says.