TASHKENT - Although Tajikistan's
Rogun dam and hydro-power project has not yet been
cleared by the World Bank-sponsored technical and
environmental assessments, Tajikistan, seemingly
with the bank's tacit approval, is continuing to
spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year
for its construction and is also trying to link
the construction of this gigantic and
controversial dam to the international efforts to
stabilize Afghanistan.
The Tajikistan
government has agreed in the past to halt all
construction works at the controversial Rogun dam
except for
what officials mysteriously
call "repair works" until the assessments are
completed in return for possible World Bank
financial assistance in the event the assessment
clears the project in terms of technical and
environmental security.
However,
Tajikistan's down-stream neighbor Uzbekistan,
which has been locked in a bitter dispute with
Tajikistan over the dam, claims that Tajikistan is
not honoring its pledge made to the World Bank by
continuing to allocate funds for the so-called
"repair works".
Tajikistan allocates more
than US$200 million annually for the dam,
apparently far exceeding the simple maintenance
costs of undertaking "repair work". Uzbekistan
further maintains that the World Bank has not put
in place stringent oversight mechanisms that would
ensure the Tajik government's full and verifiable
compliance to its pledge made to the bank.
Meanwhile, Tajikistan's tireless attempts
to promote the CASA1000 trans-regional electricity
transmission line project to export Tajik
electricity to Pakistan via Afghanistan, which the
Tajik government links to the Rogun dam, has
further increased Uzbekistan's suspicion that all
along Tajikistan has not been genuinely committed
to the World Bank's technical and environmental
assessments and only agreed to the bank's proposal
on a calculated gamble that these might eventually
come up with surprise positive findings for the
dam while it can easily dismiss any negative
outcome.
This observation does indeed seem
to be the case given that Tajik officials starting
from President Emomali Rahmon down to Tajik
members of parliament and rank and file civil
servants are regularly put on record vowing to
complete the Rogun dam at any cost and regardless
of what may come to pass.
Recently, while
attending two international conferences dedicated
to normalizing Afghanistan, which took place in
Istanbul and Bonn in early November and December
in an effort to win the international community's
support for his government's controversial plan to
construct what would be the world's tallest dam,
Tajikistan's Foreign Minister Hamrokhon Zarifi
claimed that the CASA1000 project would help to
"fundamentally reverse" the existing situation in
Afghanistan.
According to Zarifi, CASA1000
would help Afghanistan to wean its farmers from
cultivating opium to cultivating what he called
"peaceful" crops by supplying water to Afghanistan
and helping it to recover its irrigation system.
Though the foreign minister did not openly
mention Rogun dam in his address to the Bonn II
Conference participants, it was clear to many
Central Asia observers that CASA1000 for
Tajikistan means Rogun dam, as it has been the
only game in town in Dushanbe for the past decade
or so - and more importantly, though the World
Bank prefers not to mention it, the CASA1000
project would not be economically viable without
the dam's construction.
Any tourist
visiting this mountainous Central Asian country's
capital and other large cities will hardly fail to
notice that Rogun has already become an idee
fixe for the Tajik government and its
leadership. Billboards with Rahmon at the Rogun
construction site with patriotic slogans such as
"Rogun - a matter of life and death" or "Rogun -
the light at the end of the dark tunnel" decorate
all main streets in Tajikistan.
In order
to prove its resolve and to demonstrate to
Uzbekistan that it will not swerve from its chosen
path, the Tajik government has already taken the
decisive step of forcefully selling "golden Rogun
shares" to its population in order to raise US$1.2
billion, which is necessary to complete the first
section of the dam.
If the World
Bank/International Monetary Fund had not
interfered, the government would have continued
selling Rogun shares to its impoverished
population to the extent that most of its people
would have to choose between buying Rogun shares
and buying basic food items to survive.
Uzbekistan is not letting up in its
opposition to the Rogun dam. Basically, the Uzbek
government and its scientists argue against the
project by claiming:
It is a relic of the former Soviet Union,
whose water-related policies in Central Asia have
already led to the near complete disappearance of
the Aral Sea - once one of the world's biggest
fresh-water inland lakes. Construction of the dam
might further endanger the already fragile
environmental balance in the region;
The dam will limit the flow of water in the
Amudarya River as it will be diverted to the Rogun
dam reservoir. According to most conservative
estimates, Tajikistan will have to divert
substantial amounts of river water for at least
eight to 10 years in order to fill the reservoir.
They say that, contrary to Tajik claims, dams to
be built in Tajikistan are not really meant to
supply water to neighbors but to divert and hoard
water to generate electricity;
The Uzbek government is also afraid that, if
completed, the Rogun dam will make it possible for
the Tajik government to use the water issue for
powerful negotiating leverage in any future
dispute with Uzbekistan;
That a completed dam would be a disaster in
waiting of "Biblical proportions". The Rogun dam,
designed to be at least a record 336 meters tall,
is modelled on the Soviet-era Sajano-Shushenskaya
dam in Siberia, which collapsed in 2009. If
anything similar goes wrong for this "feat of
Tajik-Soviet engineering", or if a strong
earthquake hits Tajikistan (the whole Central
Asian region is on a permanently active seismic
zone) then a "monster tsunami" could be unleashed
on adjacent territories including heavily
populated territories of Uzbekistan, Afghanistan
and Turkmenistan;
Climatic changes attributed to global warming
are already being acutely felt in Central Asia,
with unusually extreme hot summers and shortages
of water during harvesting seasons taking their
toll on agriculture in downstream countries such
as Uzbekistan and also in Tajikistan this year.
Thousands of hectares of wheat and other crops
were allowed to perish because of a shortage of
water for irrigation. Agriculture is a crucial
sector for all Central Asian countries, whether
involving cotton or vegetables, fruits and meat in
demand by growing populations.
Uzbek and
international experts say Tajikistan should build
small- and medium-sized hydroelectric power
stations (provided they meet technical and
environmental safety safeguards) to harness the
energy potential of the rivers that cross its
territory.
That would benefit it
economically, helping it fully meet its energy
needs throughout the year while still allowing it
to become a net exporter of electricity to the
likes of Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan - for which last there is even no need
to construct costly transmission lines similar to
CASA1000 since energy grids linking Uzbekistan to
Tajikistan and its other Central Asian neighbors
are already in place.
The growth in
population and demand for food items suggest
Uzbekistan's claims are more than self-serving
fear-mongering. Its population will reach 35
million people by 2020 from the present 29 million
- a trend seen in all other Central Asian
countries, whose combined population barely equals
that of Uzbekistan.
None of the Central
Asian countries can boast complete or
near-complete self-sufficiency in food, while
Tajikistan is the region's biggest importer per
capita of food items as its government pays far
less attention to its heavily indebted farmers
than to its epic struggle to complete the Rogun
dam.
The government uses administrative
measures such as artificial and largely
ineffective price caps on various food items
rather than stimulating and creating favorable
conditions for its farmers to improve their
output.
Tajik forecasts of the potential
miraculous benefits of the country's dams on
Afghanistan are not accepted by George Gavrilis,
among others, who in a recent Foreign Affairs
analysis of regional solutions to the war in
Afghanistan said: "Tajikistan's ability to collect
lucrative international development aid is greatly
owed to its proximity to dysfunctional
Afghanistan. Tajik officials regularly present
international donors with long list of 'win-win'
cross-border development projects that, they
insist, must be built on their side of the border.
This means that Afghanistan accrues no benefit
until much later, if at all."
Linking
CASA1000 to international efforts to bring peace
and stability to Afghanistan will imperil rather
than facilitate efforts to normalize the country
by complicating regional disputes and Kabul into
them.
With the Tajik government's present
interpretation of CASA1000 project linked to
Rogun, any support by Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Russia or the US for the transmission line project
will by default also be extended to Rogun, only
fueling the already bitter dispute over the dam -
it is no coincidence that Uzbekistan declined to
send a high-level delegation to attend the latest
Istanbul and Bonn II conferences on Afghanistan
and did not subscribe to the joint statements of
these two conferences.
Normalization of
life in Afghanistan, including persuading Afghan
farmers to switch to "peaceful" crops, requires
the resolution of far more complex issues and
processes than the construction of Rogun or any
other dam in Tajikistan.
That raises the
question why the World Bank continues to pretend
not to notice the Tajik government's shenanigans
over so-called "repair works" while pledging $1
billion for the erection of electricity
transmission lines as part of the CASA1000 project
with the full knowledge that it would not be
economically viable without the Rogun hydro-power
project.
Last month, the World Bank
announced plans to provide around $1 billion to
fund the CASA1000 power lines project, which will
also carry elecricity from Kyrgyzstan to
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander Kremer, who
heads the World Bank office in the Kyrgyz capital
Bishkek, told reporters $200 million would be
invested in Kyrgyzstan and $250 million in
neighboring Tajikistan, while Afghanistan would
need around $350 million in loans and Pakistan
another $200 million, the Kyrgyzstan Newswire
reported on December 19.
Discrepancies in
World Bank pronouncements and actions over the
projects will not only undermine the credibility
of the technical and environmental assessments on
the Rogun dam but also erode the bank's standing
as a self-appointed but well-meaning "neutral
mediator" between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Fozil Mashrab is a pseudonym used
by an independent analyst based in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan.
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