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Environmental disaster in the
making
By Sergei Blagov
MOSCOW - Security issues, not environmental
concerns, are drawing the focus - yet again - in the
wake of the Dec 27 suicide bomb blasts at Chechnya's
pro-Kremlin government headquarters in Grozny.
While Russia's ministry of natural resources
concedes that Chechnya is an "area of environmental
disaster" and the government has approved a blueprint of
a clean-up program, a sum of only 15 million roubles
(US$500,000) has been allocated.
The program
aims at cleaning soil and water polluted by oil spills
as well as building anti-flood dikes in Chechnya, deputy
minister for natural resources, Maksim Yakovenko,
announced.
But considering the gigantic scale of
the problem, experts consider the amount earmarked for
the purpose as "far from adequate". One-third of
Chechnya's agricultural land is soaked with oil waste,
according to official government estimates. Many Chechen
rivers, including the main waterways Terek, Sunzha and
Argun, are polluted with concentrations of oil products.
The damage extends to neighboring Dagestan.
According to Yakovenko, satellite photos indicated grave
oil pollution of the Caspian Sea, which originated from
Chechnya. Though the situation has worsened in the past
10 years, oil pollution around Grozny was already
evident in Soviet times. In 1992, official government
figures revealed that 2 million tons of oil had leaked
into the ground during the Soviet era, largely because
of the sloppiness of Soviet industrial methods.
Following years of war and continued armed
hostilities, the Chechen population became largely
dependent on illegal oil extraction to survive. Many
Chechens risk their lives to extract oil which they then
refine into primitive low-quality gasoline, while all
by-products are dumped into nearby rivers.
As a
result, one-third of the territory of the breakaway
republic became a "zone of ecological disaster", says
the environmental safety service of the Russian Armed
Forces. Another 40 percent is classified as a zone of
extreme environmental distress.
Russian
officials say that the recent oil spills in Chechnya are
mainly a consequence of what they call the "Chechen
bandit economy". After 1991, when the Chechens declared
independence, local warlords started splitting up the
oil business in the region among themselves to make
quick profits on illegal extraction.
Subsequently, Russian troops systematically blew
up oil wells, reservoirs and pumps so as to cut the
rebels off from their fuel and financial sources. The
oil and gas sector traditionally dominated Chechnya's
economy. But oil production fell steadily from 21.5
million tons in 1971 to less than 2 million tons in
1993, or less than 1 percent of Russia's total
production. In addition, much of the Chechen oil
sector's infrastructure was badly damaged in the
subsequent war.
Many oil fields are still poorly
guarded, hence posing constant environmental threat. In
addition, there are some 150 free-flowing wells in
Chechnya with a combined output 30,000 tons per month.
According to various estimates, at least tens of
thousand or probably more than one million tons of crude
oil and oil products has leaked from the refineries
since the war started.
It is not just the menace
of oil spills, though. Chechnya also faces a problem of
radioactive material that had disappeared from waste
disposal sites in Chechnya. During the war, storage
facilities holding radioactive waste were damaged. Used
medical and research equipment containing radioactive
cesium were dumped there.
At the start of the
hostilities in November 1994, some 900 cubic meters of
nuclear material had been stored at the Radon factory
and nuclear waste disposal site near the village of
Tolstoy-yurt, north of Grozny. When a truce was agreed
in May 1996, half of the material was missing.
The Rodon site was set up in 1965 and used to
contain substances such as plutonium, beryllium,
radium-226, caesium-137, thorium, thulium-170,
iridium-192, americium-241 and Iodine-131. During the
war, as many as 67 different sources of radiation were
bombed around Grozny. A commission appointed by the
Russian government found at least 21 sites in Chechnya
where radioactive material was unguarded.
In
many cities sewage system stopped working long ago.
Massive oil spills, ruined fields and contaminated water
have made parts of the republic barely habitable. It is
not surprising, therefore, that the Chechen refugees,
officially considered internally displaced people, or
IDPs, have been reluctant to return.
However,
Russian officials insist that Chechen IDPs are returning
and steadily repopulating the region: This, they say, is
evidence that the war is over. The government minister
on Chechen affairs, Stanislav Ilyasov, announced
December 6 that some 300,000 people had returned to
Chechnya within the past 30 months. According to
Ilyasov, only 69,000 Chechen refugees live in
neighboring Ingushetia. In early December, Russian
authorities announced that they planned to close down
the remaining camps in Ingushetia in the coming weeks.
The United Nations and human rights
organizations have accused Russian authorities of
forcing Chechens to leave refugee camps in neighboring
Ingushetia. Human rights groups have claimed that
Russian officials had threatened to switch off
electricity and gas supplies unless the refugees went
home.
This view also appears to be shared by UN
Resident Coordinator in Moscow, Frederick Lyons, who is
also the UN humanitarian coordinator in Russia. He
insists that people have been coerced into returning. In
response, on December 10, President Vladimir Putin
pledged that Chechen refugees would not be forced to
return to Chechnya against their will.
(Inter
Press Service)
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