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Kazakhstan’s bitter harvest

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Two out of ten babies are stillborn in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan due to the appalling effects of nuclear pollution, according to a respected anti-nuclear group.

Kazakhstan, which was for years the main nuclear testing and dumping ground of the former USSR, is today facing a pollution catastrophe which the government is only just beginning to acknowledge. ‘It is like Chernobyl every day there,’ comments Elizabeth Nordgren, a Finnish journalist who has recently returned from a visit to the country.

The Nevada Semipalatinsk anti-nuclear group estimates 10 million of Kazakhstan’s 16 million population are affected by the pollution. Many children are born physically deformed with no arms or legs or with their mouths on their cheeks, some suffer neurological illnesses resulting in brain damage and others are born with leukaemia.

Kazakhstan, in the depths of economic crisis, cannot afford the medical care necessary to treat these people effectively. At present, hospitals can only hope to offer a degree of pain relief to selected patients.

’They have hardly any sophisticated medicine and, on the whole, cannot perform complicated operations. Only some people get treatment and the doctors have to choose who gets help. If a person is in the terminal stages of leukaemia, they have to leave them to die,’ said Elizabeth Nordgren.

The Nevada Semipalatinsk group, named after two main nuclear weapons plants in Kazakhstan, says nuclear arms are buried every 50 kilometres in Kazakhstan, which is around the size of Western Europe. In the 1950s and 1960s Kazakhstan was chosen by the former USSR as a site for testing nuclear weapons because a large part of the country is desert and it is sparsely populated, although a percentage of the population is nomadic.

In the 1970s, overground explosions stopped and tests were made underground. But the Nevada Semipalatinsk group says there has been leakage, although the government has not admitted it.

In 1991, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, announced that nuclear experiments had stopped. But, despite President Boris Yeltsin’s pleas to Kazakhstan to give up its nuclear weapons to Russia, Kazakhstan clung to the arms, using them as a bargaining chip to secure badly needed aid from the US. In May, the government announced that it would take part in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty programme and seemed confident that Kazakhstan would be able to get rid of all its nuclear weapons within two years. Previously the government had been saying this would take around 15 years.

The US is keen to bring Kazakhstan into the fold of friendly CIS states in its bid to secure a Western power base in the Central Asian region to counteract the rise of the Islamic parties.

But despite the pledges to reduce nuclear arms in Kazakhstan, the problem of nuclear waste from the country’s power plants and reactors remains. This is still being buried underground.

It is only since the collapse of the Soviet Union that statistics have begun to be compiled on nuclear pollution in the former Soviet states. Before 1989, no one in Kazakhstan knew about the incidence of leukaemia among children. Doctors at a cancer clinic in the capital, Alma Ata, say the KGB would visit the clinic regularly to control the release of public information about cancer cases. The clinic now has 450 leukaemia cases on its books covering the period 1989-91.

Many people in Kazakhstan remain ignorant of leukaemia and so do not seek treatment until it is too late. The lack of public health information is a major problem. The Nevada Semipalatinsk group, set up five years ago, has been trying to spread information to rural areas, but the real problem seems to be the government’s refusal to recognise the scale of the public health disaster.

’Kazakhstan has been playing at power politics while the country is sitting on a time bomb,’ says Elizabeth Nordgren.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War has just sent a fact-finding delegation to Ukraine, Byelorussia, Russia and Kazakhstan. Their report is due out soon.