New Eastern Europe - November-December 2017

34

Others quickly followed suit in a confounding tangle of diplomatic blackmail

schemes. Uzbekistan cut off a section of river flowing into Kazakhstan in a demand

for unsettled debts to be paid. In return, Kazakhstan disconnected part of the

Soviet-period telephone grid used by Uzbekistan. So Kazakhstan then appealed

to Tajikistan to release greater amounts of its own water into the Amu-Darya,

so that Uzbekistan might be compelled to allow more to enter Kazakhstan. The

pattern repeated in different permutations over the years, as each country used

whatever commodity it had in relative abundance – gas for Uzbekistan, coal and

gas for Kazakhstan, water for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – as bargaining chips in

their disputes.

As implementation of the 1998 Syr-Darya agreement clearly became unfeasi-

ble, the document was allowed to lapse after its initial five-year cycle, forcing all

the parties into ad hoc arrangements. With time, self-sufficiency at all costs has

become a priority in all areas. Kyrgyzstan has borrowed heavily from China to

build high-voltage power lines within the nation’s borders. Uzbekistan has bored

through mountains to link its Ferghana Valley with the rest of the country, thereby

obviating the need for circling around mountains through Tajikistan. Tajikistan

has learnt to live without Uzbekistan’s gas supplies.

But some things – like the ambitions of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to build gi-

ant hydroelectric dams that they dream will one day generate billions in income

from exports of electricity to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – may be harder to

work around.

Tajikistan’s marvel

In Tajikistan, the Rogun Dam project is an all-consuming national obsession.

Work on it started as far back as 1967, but the progress was halting. By the time

the Soviet Union had collapsed, workers had managed to erect a 40-meter high

dam and build 20 kilometres of service tunnels. The

outbreak of the civil war in Tajikistan led to a mass ex-

odus of technicians and then work was suspended in

1993 due to a lack of funding. One year later, the com-

pleted section of the dam was washed away in a flood

and the tunnels filled with water.

Building restarted in 2004 under the aegis of Rus-

sian aluminium titan RusAl, which pledged to spend

two billion US dollars on the project, but that arrangement fell through in 2007,

forcing Tajikistan to go it alone. If and when it is ever completed, Rogun Dam will

In Tajikistan,

the Rogun Dam

project is an

all-consuming

national obsession.

Opinion & Analysis Central Asia and water, Peter Leonard