If Siberian River Water isn’t Diverted to Central Asia, 100 Million Refugees from There will Flood into Russia, Tashkent Scholar Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 8 – Ever increasing water shortages in Central Asia mean that unless plans to divert Siberian river water to the region, as many as 100 million refugees from the five countries there will soon flood into the Russian Federation, according to Ravshan Nazarov, an instructor at the Tashkent branch of the Moscow University of Economics.

            Saying that he often feels like “a voice crying in the wilderness,” Nazarov says that the need for Siberian river diversion is now and some at some distant point in the future. And he warns that several factors are bringing the day closer when millions of Central Asians will be forced to flee their homelands (asia24.media/news/esli-voda-iz-sibiri-ne-pridyet-v-tsentralnuyu-aziyu-to-100-mln-bezhentsev-priedut-v-sibir/).

            Growing populations, declining domestic flows, and a dam in Afghanistan that will soon block even more water to the region are all making this issue something Moscow must take up and agree to even if it doesn’t want to because of cost or other reasons, the Central Asian researcher says.

            In the course of his general argument, Nazarov calls attention to three things that have not received the attention that he believes they should:

·       First, Turkmenistan, not Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, is the largest consumer of water, some 53 cubic kilometers a year – an amount that is twice as much as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan taken together consumer.

·       Second, Kyrgyzstan, long identified as a water surplus republic because of its glaciers, now is experiencing a water shortage that is an even greater political threat than Islamist radicalism.

·       And third, the dam being constructed in Afghanistan may well leave both Turkmenistan and the western portions of Uzbekistan without the necessary amount of water by next year or shortly thereafter.

Few want to believe that Central Asia is running out of water; but then few wanted to believe that the Aral Sea would disappear, Nazarov says.  And the only place for Central Asians to look is the Russian Federation which now consumes 30,000 cubic meters of water per person annually compared to the only 1500 cubic meters of water per person each year in Central Asia.

The time has come to act to start diverting some Siberian river water to Central Asia, he concludes. Failure to do so will mean that Russia may keep its water but it will gain as many as 100,000 million thirsty Central Asians as residents of its territory.