At the fifth annual Pan-European Ministerial Conference in Ukraine from May 21 to 23, the five Central Asian nations formally invited international agencies and lenders to craft and enforce policies for protecting water sources.
Ismail Jurabekov, counselor to Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov, told Uzbek and Russian experts in mid-2002 that diverting Siberian waters to Central Asia would be "a mutually beneficial project." The idea of diverting Siberian rivers was first proposed in the 1970s, when a project to build a 2,000-kilometer canal from Siberia was discussed.
Ismail Jurabekov, counselor to Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov, told Uzbek and Russian experts in mid-2002 that diverting Siberian waters to Central Asia would be "a mutually beneficial project." The idea of diverting Siberian rivers was first proposed in the 1970s, when a project to build a 2,000-kilometer canal from Siberia was discussed.
The Prime Minister's comments, quoted in the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, are the latest in a string of setbacks for Kazatomprom's proposal. In November 2002, Tasmagambetov stated only that the issue was complex and required further study. In late December, a group of parliamentary deputies visited a potential burial site in western Kazakhstan.
Observers and participants hailed it as a success for drawing attention to the special problems facing the world's mountainous regions, which cover around a quarter of the planet's surface.
UN Environmental Programme specialists estimate the Aral's surface area is now just 25 percent of that which existed before Soviet central planners began diverting the rivers that feed the sea for ill-conceived agricultural irrigation schemes.
The most recent incident at the Kumtor mine involved the July 8 collapse of a wall, burying a worker identified by the company as 25-year-old Almaz Jakishev. This incident follows a series of toxic spills at the open-pit mine, believed to be the world's eighth largest gold field.
The diversion of waters from the Ob and Irtysh rivers in not a new idea. In the 1980s, about 150 scientific and research institutes in the former Soviet Union collaborated on developing a water diversion blueprint, which would supposedly enlarge the amount of arable land in Central Asia, Ural and Siberia by 4.5 million hectares.
Recent landslides in southern Kyrgyzstan threaten to flood nearby areas, including radioactive storage sites containing Soviet-era uranium waste, UN and government officials said.
