Translation of TajikVoice’s post (RUS)

Last month, the Tajik capital pompously hosted a conference on water.

The full, pompous title of the conference was “High Level International Conference on the Mid-term Comprehensive Review of the Implementation of the International Decade for Action, “Water for Life,” 2005-2015”

Its goal was to publicize what Tajikistan’s government has managed to accomplish in recent years to provide the population with potable water.

Since Tajikistan had promised to complete this task by 2015, the gathering of 70 UN member states was expecting some progress to have been made. Or, from the government’s point-of-view, they had to come up with some excuses.

Everywhere around the world, people are suffering from the financial crisis; everywhere except in the Tajik government.

The President of Tajikistan greatly profits from all sorts of crises, mudslides, floods, cargo delays in neighboring countries, etc. Otherwise, who is to blame for failures in projects that have already been allocated millions of dollars? The money is stolen and then – BAM! – there’s a crisis. Perfect scapegoat.

Most interesting is the fact that international organizations and embassies, spearheaded by the UN, welcome and approve all the lies that pour out of Emomali Rahmon’s mouth.

The President began his address at the conference like an experienced manipulator, by shifting the audience’s attention to problems in other countries:

“Today, it is still early to talk about substantial achievements in implementing the internationally agreed goals on water. There are many problems and challenges that require immediate solutions: nearly 1 billion people worldwide lack access to the safe drinking water and 2.6 billion people are deprived of basic sanitation, more than 80 countries are experiencing water shortage, 42,000 people die every week from diseases due to poor quality of drinking water and unsanitary conditions, over 90 percent of cases apply to children under the age of five, drought and desertification threaten the livelihoods of more than 1.2 billion people around the globe.”

Once conference members were under the influence of statistics, Rahmon directed their attention toward the “cause” of all these troubles:

“The past five years were difficult due to the global financial crisis and problems related to the change of climate. In many countries, these global processes have a negative impact on the implementation of goals, objectives and projects for water supply and overall water sources.”

The crisis in Tajikistan has been going on for at least the last 15 years.

“Despite an abundance of water resources, more than 40% of our population has no access to safe drinking water and in some rural areas providing drinking water remains an acute problem. Alongside with this, over the past decade Tajikistan is also facing increasing power shortages, lack of financing in the water sector and other factors, such as natural disasters which, despite the government’s untiring efforts to prevent them, continue having a tremendous negative impact on the development of our country.”

Here, we’ll take a pause before going into more detail. To be continued…