Articles tagged with: Roghun
Photograph by Flickr user guixacuitora (CC-usage).
Editor’s note: The embassy of Uzbekistan in Tajikistan has released a statement defending the ongoing stoppage of Tajikistan-destined freight trains as an innocent side-effect of repairs being made to the railroad, but neweurasia’s Dushanbe isn’t convinced. He picks through the statement with his analytical scalpel. “It seems Ragnarok Roghun-style is threatening to expand beyond just Tajikistan and Uzbekistan…”
If you can read between the lines of the latest statement from the Uzbekistan embassy to the government of Tajikistan, good luck. The embassy criticized the Tajik mass media for its reports about the captive railway carriages in Uzbekistan as “lies and baseless allegations.” They went on to say,
“The passage of the transit goods destined for Dushanbe and the Soghd province railroad stations of Tajikistan through the border stations of Kudukli and Bekabad in Uzbekistan have been continuing without delays and obstacles.”
This would be true if we were not distinguishing between freight and passengers. The route is only open for passengers. Additionally, only a small number of freight cars go from Uzbekistan to Dushanbe and Soghd in general, especially in comparison with the Khatlon stations in the south of Tajikistan, where the Roghun and Sangtuda power plants and the highways and bridges to Afghanistan are slated for construction. Meanwhile, many companies in Dushanbe and Soghd province continue to suffer. They complain that they are losing millions of dollars because they can’t get hold of their cargo.
So, officials in Tajikistan are saying that the Roghun dam will force thousands of people to abandon their homes. That’s 6,500 people from Roghun district, a little over 100 km from Dushanbe. Understably, there’s a lot of outcry about this, but moving people to safer locations actually doesn’t hurt society’s wellbeing in my opinion.
What does hurt it is compelling these poor people to begin with, from students to retired pensioners, to give money for a totally nontransparent business and construction plan. It hurts our government’s credibility. It also hurts us economically, as my fellow blogger for Tajikistan, Dushanbe, points out.
Despite kicking them off their land, I doubt this government will lift a finger to provide the dislocated people the compensation equal to their property’s worth. You can say all you want how Tajikistan needs this project and that we all have to make sacrifices, but those sacrifices should be honestly and sincerely voluntary.
Increasingly, the Roghun project seems to be following a Chinese model: make decisions for the people, then say it was in their own best interest and that they wanted it anyway.
Image from the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for public use.
Editor’s note: WikiLeaks may end up becoming Central Asia’s best hope for bringing to light their leaders’ many dark secrets, say neweurasia’s bloggers from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Yet, there are many problems, not least of which is trust, all of which WikiLeaks or other whistle-blower websites will have to overcome, writes neweurasia’s Schwartz.
The whistle-blower website WikiLeaks has made international headlines for its leaks of sensitive information related to the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet a little-known aspect of the organization is its work in the former communist world, including Central Asia.
According to AsiaMedia, WikiLeaks has specifically professed interest in the former Soviet Union alongside other regions:
“Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their own governments and corporations.”
In a 9 June 2007 e-mail to WikiLeaks volunteers that has been leaked on the website Cryptome, another website specializing in revealing sensitive and secret information, an anonymous author speaking for the operation explains its strategy in the West as ultimately serving the purpose of its strategy in regions like Central Asia:
“Apart from the beneficial effect on Western democracies, we believe this will provide a strong, consistent base where we can operate efficiently and freely, permitting us to concentrate our efforts on the most repressive regimes.”
And more than a year later, an anonymous editorial to WikiLeaks volunteers, also leaked on Cryptome, evinces a sophisticated understanding of the peaks and pitfalls of journalism in the former Communist nations:
“In transitional states, journalistic freedom and journalistic persecution appear to stem from the same root cause: the inability of power groups to defend themselves from journalists by using means more sophisticated than arrest or murder. Because [arrest or murder] comes at some cost to the persecutor, [such tactics] are rarely employed.
“In other words, all but a few ‘off limit’ subjects can be reported freely and these limits are not yet well understood, which is why some journalists are murdered.”
Unfortunately, many here at neweurasia can relate to these remarks, as we’ve all had friends and colleagues who have suffered as a result of these often enigmatic limits.
Image by neweurasia's Schwartz (CC-usage).
Editor’s note: neweurasia’s Dushanbe offers his brother an interesting birthday gift, only to find himself thrust in the middle of the Roghun dam controversy. It seems that the government’s enormous fundraising campaign has worked too well, and may not only be monetarily crippling Tajikistan, but even slowly undermining its very raison d’être, as well.
It’s always hard to find a good birthday gift, but it’s all the more difficult for my spoiled brother. After two days of searching, I was about to exclaim, “OMG!”, when suddenly I saw a Roghun t-shirt in one of the city boutiques. The seller informed me that the newly designed shirt had arrived on the market just the previous day.
My brother happens to be a fan of the Roghun hydropower project; he even bought 3,500 somoni worth of shares. I thought this would be the perfect gift for him — so I was very surprised when he responded in a very subdued way. It turned out that he had dug into the family budget to make his donation to the Roghun project, and his wife was bitter about it because she’d rather save money for her children’s education. Suddenly the political and macroeconomic had become very personal and microeconomic.
Are Tajikistan and Uzbekistan slowly spiralling toward serious conflict over the Roghun project? Image by Flickr user vitroid (CC-usage).
Editor’s note: Tajik and Uzbek officials traded barbs during this weekend’s security conference in Dushanbe. The argument concerned freight train shipments for Tajikistan that have been stalled on Uzbek territory, but as neweurasia’s Dushanbe explains, the real reason is the Roghun dam project. Are the two countries steaming toward conflict? Their disagreement is now involving major players, including the United States, which may raise the stakes, but also point the way toward peaceful resolution.
This past Saturday during a regional security conference in Dushanbe, Uzbekistan’s ambassador to Tajikistan, Shahqasim Shahislomov, confirmed that about 1000 railway carriages transporting goods to Tajikistan have been halted in the Uzbek territory. He explained that the problem was caused by logistical issues related to shipments of supplies destined for U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan:
There are goods destined for Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and other destinations; no one specifically chosen the Tajik carriages to stop.
The chairman of Tajikistan’s National Security Council, Amirqul Azimov, disagreed. He told the same conference that each of the railway carriages has its own documentation and specifically all of the Tajik freight traffic are being blocked at the Uzbek-Tajik border, far from the Uzbek-Afghan border.
We perfectly know where and how many carriages were detained, but when you say you do not know if the carriages belongs to Russians, Americans or Kazakhs, and that the problem is purely technical, we say every carriage has own papers.
Furthermore, Azimov said that some of the carriages have been detained in Uzbek territory since early February. Several Tajik newspapers are saying that the blocked carriages contain machinery and cement important to the controversial Roghun project, the construction of which has increased tensions between the countries.
Is corruption or survival the elephant in the room in Tajikistan? Image by Flickr user David Blackwell (CC-usage).
Editor’s note: neweurasia readers will already be well-acquainted with the ongoing Roghun project and the controversy surrounding it, as well as the news, announced first by our network, of a massive lawsuit by a trio of judges against a trio of independent newspapers. neweurasia’s Averroes sees a potentially serious ethical conflict between the government and press in Tajikistan and wants to know your opinion: whose side is right?
Imagine if you were the government of one of the world’s most economically vulnerable countries. Every winter millions of your citizens go cold as nearly limitless hydro-electrical potential goes untapped. Developing this potential would require an engineering feat.
Photograph of construction at Roghun from Asia-Plus.
Editor’s note: neweurasia’s Dushanbe describes how a possible Ragnarok is building up between the leaderships of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan over the Roghun dam project. Check out neweurasia’s ongoing coverage of the dam here.
Tajikistan has rejected the Uzbek proposal to suspend building the Roghun power plant until independent expertise determines its possible impact on environment and water distribution in the region.
In a reply letter to the Uzbek authorities, the Tajik Prime Minister Oqil Oqilov says his country will not change its plan to build the plant. He adds that they believe the new reservoir will help both countries to save and use regional water resources more effectively.
Image by neweurasia's Schwartz (CC-usage).
Are the Roghun project and the lawsuit against three independent newspapers connected? Alpharabius, neweurasia‘s blogger covering the lawsuit, believes that the trial is at minimum peripherally connected to the dam controversy, not to mention the upcoming parliamentary elections. His sentiment is apparently echoed by much of the Tajik journalistic and human rights community.
Photograph of Roghun construction by Asia Plus (CC-usage).
Editor’s note: Continuing our coverage of the Roghun dam project, here’s an editorial by neweurasia’s Botur. Check out his earlier post here, as well as Tajik Voice’s posts here and here.
As previously reported, the Tajik Government started selling shares of Roghun hydro power plant in January aiming to raise $1.4 billion from population. They initiated this project in order speed up the construction of the giant plant, but did not care to provide the public with a detailed business plan showing credible proof as to how, who, when and what for specifically collected funds will be spent on. It is remarkably rare in the history of free market economy that such an immense project with so little preparation and much countrywide propaganda is offered for investment of citizens.
Rahmon and Karimov, with Nazarbaev in the center. Photo credit: Radio Azattyq.
Here’s a fun story, perhaps more a rumor, related to the ongoing Roghuan saga. Before his recent announcement, Emomali Rahmon’s four-hour speech in December in front of some fifty Tajik journalists on 8 December had been his boldest, and from Tashkent’s predictable point-of-view, his most audacious, too. Having sympathized with the country’s current energy security situation and general instability, the Tajik president proceeded to “come down” to the people, cited by Vremia novostei columnist Arkadii Dubnov:
Every winter, when the country experiences an energy crisis, I suffer with the people. It hurt me greatly when, as head of state, the energy shortages in 2008 caused the deaths of newborn children.
Following an established tradition, Emomali-aka did not fail to remind those present about the importance of building the Rogunskaia hydroelectric dam, which, the Tajik leader believes, is “a question of life and death for the country.” After denying that he has ordered forcible purchase of stocks (RUS, ENG), he reiterated:
Donations for the Rogun and the purchase of stocks are purely voluntary. We aren’t forcing anyone to do it… you’re not building the dam for me, you’re building it for the state!
Perhaps, he wanted to stare down opposition not only in his country. For his peers among Central Asia’s leadership, it seems, talk is very cheap, because the people are footing the bill: every Tajik is expected to contribute at least 3000 somoni ($690).
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