35stand astride the Vakhsh River, a tributary of the Amu-Darya, at 335 metres high,
making it the tallest dam in the world. According to Salini Impregilo, the Italian
engineering company now tasked with execution of the project, Rogun’s six 600
megawatt turbines will generate the same amount of power as three nuclear power
plants.
If Rogun has inspired excited visions of a bright future in Tajikistan, it has his-
torically elicited mostly ominous predictions of trouble in Uzbekistan. Karimov,
the late Uzbek leader, put it in stark terms during a joint briefing with his Kazakh
counterpart, in September 2012. “Since almost 1992, these issues have been dis-
cussed in great detail at all levels. As many strategists and experts say, water re-
sources could become a problem in future that causes tensions in relations, and
not just in our region”, Karimov said. “It may all get so bad that it could lead not
just to confrontation, but even to war.”
Karimov was also alluding in his remarks to Kyrgyzstan’s hydropower develop-
ment designs, which include construction of the Kambar-Ata plant on the Naryn
River, a tributary of the Syr-Darya. That dam could generate up to 4.4 billion kilowatt
hours of power annually. Uzbekistan’s anxiety stems from the belief that Rogun,
and similar projects elsewhere, would reduce the amount of irrigation water avail-
able to its farmers during the summer. Even if Tajikistan were to undertake every
measure to ensure its neighbour was not adversely affected, hawkish officials in
Tashkent are ill at ease with the notion that the strategic balance of power would,
through this project, be so radically tilted against their country.
That these positions are more heavily predicated on politics than science are
broadly confirmed by the findings of specialists who have studied the issue in depth.
A 2015 paper published in the journal Water International by Maksud Bekchanov,
Claudia Ringler, Anik Bhaduri and Marc Jeuland, titled “How would the Rogun
Dam affect water and energy scarcity in Central Asia?” finds that the construction
of Rogun Ddam would not have an excessively damaging impact on irrigation sites.
“Optimal management of the dam leads to only minor impacts on downstream
irrigation across different levels of water availability. Since most of the river flow
in the system can already be controlled using current dams, the benefits of the
newly constructed dams for irrigation water availability are inconsequential,” the
paper concludes.
Benefits of co-operationPerhaps in view of such considerations, which broadly reflect the views of the
international community, Uzbekistan, under Mirziyoyev, has adopted a different
Central Asia and water, Peter Leonard Opinion & Analysis