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WATER POLITICS

Courtesy of Central Asia Economy Newswire, a report on central Asia water tension:

Uzbek President Islam Karimov brought worldwide attention to Central Asia’s water disputes on Friday during a state visit to his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev, warning that tensions may spill over and cause bloodshed if issues remained unresolved.

The one small detail he forgot to mention is that he’s not helping matters either.

“Water resources could become a problem in the future that could escalate tensions not only in our region, but on every continent,” Kazakh state media reported Karimov as saying Friday in the Kazakh capital Astana.

“I won’t name specific countries, but all of this could deteriorate to the point where not just serious confrontation, but even wars could be the result.”

Karimov’s comments come after a highly contentious year with Uzbekistan’s neighbor Tajikistan, in which the Uzbek government held up trains carrying construction materials destined for the Rogun dam – Tajikistan’s long-running state project which it hopes will solve all of its recurring electricity woes once and for all.

The problem is, the trains also contained necessary food staples for the already-impoverished Central Asian state, prompting the Tajik government to call for humanitarian aid to ensure its southern provinces received enough food supplies.

Tajikistan isn’t blameless in this scenario, in that it blindly insists on continuing with the dam project which has been under construction on and off since the mid-1980s. Tajikistan’s political establishment has steadfastly refused to compromise, on either scaling back the dam project or meeting in good faith with Uzbek representatives, instead preferring to complain loudly at international conferences and demand mediation.

Part of the cause of Central Asia’s water woes rests in the scarcity of the resource throughout the region, dotted with deserts as it is. The other problem is that too many states – and here Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan are the worst offenders – rely far too much on cultivating cotton, a water-guzzling crop, to propel their economies.

Real discussion in averting a water war needs to start with talks on how to better diversify Central Asian economies, and not with empty threats of impending violence by a regional leader who has a very clear desire to further debilitate its already-weak neighbor.