Apparently unchastened by the wave of protests that accompanied recent failed attempts to force through land reforms, Kazakhstan is now mulling renting large areas of land to Russia to accommodate falling rocket debris.
The plan has already drawn criticism.
Deputy Investment and Development Minister Albert Rau told Nash Kostanai newspaper on July 3 that the government plans to lease 630 square kilometers for $460,000 per year.
When rockets are launched from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan, stages of the rocket containing engines and propellant are jettisoned in the first few minutes of flight, typically over empty and barren steppe.
Rau said parliament is working on ratifying an agreement with Russia on the lease agreement.
Under the proposed arrangement, sections of launched rockets will now fall in areas to the northwest of the city of Zhezkazgan, which is situated almost bang in the middle of the country.
Money raised through the rent will go straight into the state budget and be used for “social needs” in the Kostanay and Aktobe regions, where the land is located, Rau said.
"I wrote to the governors of both regions and they confirmed to me that the allocated funds would not just sit idle, but they would go toward the districts where the rocket debris is falling,” Rau said. “I took a look at the map and there aren’t a lot of residential areas there, so people living in those areas will truly be able to receive funds for their social needs.”
This explanation has been met with some indignation, particularly considering that many believe crashing rockets might be provoking illnesses among the human and animal population in the area.
Aizhan Khamit, a blogger and journalist who writes about the history and traditions of Kazakhstan, vented her rage on her Facebook account.
“The money received will go to the social needs of the population. What good is this money when we have such high rates of cancer? What good is this money when last year around 134,000 saiga antelopes died? You poison us and with this money you build roads. I don’t know where else you would find a country like Kazakhstan. I don’t know,” Khamit wrote.
Indeed, the death of around 60 percent of Kazakhstan native saiga antelope population still remains a mystery, although some scientists have linked the mass die-off to a lung disease sweeping across the steppe.
Some commenters under the Nash Kostanai news article expressed indignation at the size of the rent and at what even Rau seems to concede is pretty threadbare research about the potentially affected communities.
“Take $460,000 and divide it by 12 months and you get kopecks. Any hotel complex or restaurant would bring in a substantial profit. The deputy minister’s comments about how there aren’t many residential areas there are deeply humiliating and insulting to Kazakhs — as if to say you can sacrifice those people there since there aren’t that many of them. But the population of the entire republic isn’t that big,” one commenter wrote. “Stop bargaining with the health of our nation. With deputy ministers like these, our children will have no future.”
The general mood has been well captured in a piece titled “The Auction of the Motherland Continues” on news website Exclusive.kz, which called its readers to action. The author of the article suggests the unhappy either refraining from complaining altogether or creating solidarity groups and signing petitions to show their discontent.
Still, it is worth pointing out that crashing rocket stages is nothing new for Kazakhstan's steppes and has been occurring regularly since the first launches started from Baikonur in the 1950s. Environmental activists have fought a thankless battle to raise awareness of what they say are the health and ecological risks posed by the activities of Baikonur. Renting out land for the rocket stages to crash is only a new development in that Kazakhstan will now at least make some money out of it.
Aigerim Toleukhanova is a journalist and researcher from Kazakhstan.
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