Reuters
October 8

The Soviet Union is gone, the glaciers are getting smaller, and in parched oil-rich Central Asia, the battle is on for water.

Most of it pours down during the hot summer months from the glaciers of the towering Pamir and Tien Shan mountain ranges, on territory claimed by Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Downstream, and thirstier by the year, lie their former Soviet "brothers," Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.

"I would not say all is too bad at the moment," said Asylbek Aidaraliyev, Kyrgyz presidential aide, at an international water conference in the Tajik capital Dushanbe last month. "But glaciers in the north Tien Shan have shrunk by 30 percent since 1957 and will be half-gone by 2025. The population will grow, rivers will dry up, sown areas will decrease: Here is the reason for water conflicts."

Before the Soviet Union started falling apart a decade ago, water in the five "stans" was managed centrally — and with clockwork precision — to supply the region's 50 million people.

Soviet engineers built giant power stations in the Kyrgyz and Tajik mountains, the source of the two main regional rivers, Syr Darya and Amu Darya. Tajikistan's Nurek hydropower station, with the second-largest dam in the world, alone controls some 40 percent of the flow of the Amu Darya.

Each summer, Moscow would order upstream Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to release water to neighbors below, irrigating wide stretches of orchards, cotton, and rice. In winter, the two kept water in their mountain reservoirs and produced cheap electricity from coal, oil, and gas sent by their neighbors in return for precious summer water deliveries.

After the Soviet Union unraveled in 1991, Moscow stopped issuing the orders, the energy system fell apart, and farmland turned into salt-laden desert.

Water Is Wasted

"Israel and Jordan, populated by some 11 million, use 3 billion cubic meters (bcm) of water," said an angry Kyrgyz Deputy Prime Minister Bazarbai Mambetov. "The Amu Darya and Syr Darya supply 110 bcm a year, and it's not enough! It's nonsense!"

An estimated 50 percent of the arid region's water is wasted, and the potential for conflicts over water is high in volatile Central Asia.

Uzbekistan used to cut off neighboring Kyrgyzstan from natural gas supplies in cold winter months if payments were late. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, their poverty-stricken economies unable to afford fuel to generate their own electricity in winter, nowadays switch on their hydropower systems — often flooding furious neighbors downstream in the process.

"You have flooded our pastures, villages, and destroyed roads," Khalilulla Shirimbetov, head of Uzbekistan's Nature Protection Committee, told the conference, directing his accusations at the Kyrgyz delegation.

Uzbekistan is also worried that a more economically buoyant Afghanistan will use more water from the Amu Darya river on their border.

And Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov wants to create a lake in the Karakum desert to immortalize his rule. Turkmenistan says the "Golden Century Lake" will be fed by drainage water. Uzbekistan suspects it will take more water from the Amu Drya.

The lack of water has been compounded by the sad fate of the Aral Sea. Lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, it was once the world's fourth-largest inland sea. It is now half its original size and getting smaller, the result of people sucking water from the main rivers that supplied it during Soviet days to help meet grandiose cotton harvest targets in a region ill-suited to the thirsty crop.

It has become one of the world's most polluted regions, and the fishing villages along its shores have become arid ghost towns stuck on dry lake beds. Experts estimate 75 million tons of the toxic mixture of sea salt and fertilizers are blown off the dry Aral Sea bed each year.

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