Water Shortages Spark Rare Protests
Tuesday, 4 August, 2009
Water Shortages Spark Rare Protests
Tuesday, 4 August, 2009
On July 17, about 100 people staged a protest near the Central Post Office after staff there refused to send a telegram to Turkmen president Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov informing him of problems with the mains water supply.
When the request was made, a group of people planning to send the telegram were driven out of the post office, which was then closed. Outside, “the crowd made a noise and banged on the post office doors, but to no avail”, said one eyewitness.
On July 22, a group of women picketed the city mayor’s office demanding that something be done about the drinking water supply.
“Mayor Oraz Ataev ran inside the building, while a police unit dispersed the women who were enraged by the lack of water,” said another eyewitness.
Turkmenbashi – formerly known as Krasnovodsk – and other parts of western Turkmenistan are suffering acute shortages of water.
The region is supplied from the Karakum canal, which leads from the Amu Darya river far away in the east of the country, but the waterway has silted up and its water-management systems are decrepit.
As daytime temperatures hit 40 degrees Celsius in the shade, residents found life increasingly unbearable as the taps ran dry.
“On average, the water comes on only once every ten or 12 days, and then only for one or two hours,” said an observer in the Balkan region, where Turkmenbashi is located. “There is no bottled water, and the situation at
kindergartens and hospitals is catastrophic.”
Water is occasionally distributed by tanker trucks, but it is never enough.
An energy experts said the city needed a supply of 80,000 cubic metres an hour for domestic and industrial use, but in reality was receiving between 15,000 and 20,000 cu m an hour, and nothing at all on some days.
It is not as if Turkmenbashi is some neglected out-of-the-way place – it is the location of the government’s favourite prestige project, the Avaza business and tourism resort which officials say has received substantial investment.
That is no comfort to local residents, whose tempers are fraying.
“The situation may get worse if the authorities fail to act energetically,” said”, says Vyacheslav Mamedov, who heads the Netherlands-based Civil Democratic Union of Turkmenistan, and hails from Turkmenbashi himself. “A lack of water during hot weather can be compared to a humanitarian disaster.”
(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service has resumed, covering Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.)
