Squabbling between central Asian neighbours is leading to power shortages and exasperation in neighbouring China, writes Mark Godfrey in Bishkek
TO THE residents of the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, misery is hearing the week’s scheduled power cuts on the evening news. It is an all-too frequent occurrence in this post-Soviet state which rations electricity because it can’t generate enough. A mild winter has, however, eased the discomfort for locals, who suffered a brutally cold season this time last year.
The five million souls of this moderately Muslim state are being promised that blackouts will soon be consigned to memory. The long-delayed Kambarata-1 hydropower project is expected to get under way after Russia lent the $2 billion needed to complete the 1,200 megawatt (MW) station on the Naryn River. The deal sealer is seen as Bishkek’s eviction of the US military from its base outside the capital, a presence that never sat easily with Moscow, the perennial power arbiter in these parts.
But will the hydropower plant ever get built, particularly given the recent reversal in Russia’s own oil-driven fortunes? If the money is paid over, the power station could “reconfigure” the whole regional energy map, and solve Kyrgyzstan’s power needs, says Bishkek-based Paul Quinn-Judge, director of the central Asia project at the Open Society.
Grand hydropower projects have become the Holy Grail of cash-strapped governments here and in neighbouring Tajikistan. Russia’s knowledge of the region’s politics may count as much as money in getting this project built. China has sought to build hydropower stations here and in other parts of central Asia but found itself mired in incessant regional rows over water resources.
Well-practised Chinese state-owned hydropower firms like Sinohydro and Gezhouba have been keen to replicate their success at home in building hydro-power stations in mountainous central Asia.
One such power plant is already under construction on the Zarofshon river in Tajikistan, built by Sinohydro on $200 million soft loan financing from Beijing. A similarly financed $300 million deal on the Hingob river in eastern Tajikistan was announced by Sinohydro last August.
Such deals ought to become commonplace as economically vibrant China exchanged aid for markets under the aegis of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, an umbrella body under which China meets its former Soviet neighbours. Yet disputes between SCO members Tajikistan and neighbouring Uzbekistan may curtail Chinese projects in the region.
Resource-rich Uzbekistan, an ally of China, has complained that dams in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan will cut off waters irrigating its thirsty cotton and grain crops. Sinohydro has already had to delay construction of the Zarofshon dam to wait for a study proving to Uzbekistan that its irrigation interests wouldn’t be harmed.
Millions of Uzbeks in the fertile Fergana valley depend on leaky Soviet-era irrigation canals tapping the Amu Darya (previously known as the Oxus) river that rises in Tajikistan, and the Syr Darya river which originates in the Tian Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan.
An unusually severe winter in 2007-2008 sparked an interregional crisis after the freezing Tajiks and Kyrgyzis released water from dams on the two rivers and their tributaries to generate electricity, depleting the summer supply to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
Freezing and unable to pay for gas or oil supplies, the Kyrgyz and Tajik governments have resolved to build more hydropower stations, says Erkin Orolbaev, a consultant to an OECD project helping Kyrgyzstan to manage its water resources. Beijing-based Sinohydro has dispatched engineers, veterans of the 22,500 megawatt Three Gorges and numerous smaller Chinese dams, to Kyrgyzstan to assess potential dam projects there.
Chinese dam builders and makers of power turbines and generators like Dongfang Electrical Power Co have picked up contracts in southeast Asia and Africa with a sure-footed recipe for success that offers low price, on-time projects to beneficiary states which are also lured by an availability of low-interest loans from the China Export Import Bank, also government-run.
The Chinese companies involved declined to talk, but Chinese academic Li Lifan, a central Asian specialist at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, expresses exasperation at the deep mutual distrust and suspicion which has long hindered political and economic progress in central Asia.
In Soviet times Moscow-appointed local leaders followed Kremlin orders to share water: the smaller states, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, generated electricity which their larger neighbours Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were compelled to purchase.
The proceeds bought the oil and gas to heat Kyrgyz and Tajik homes in the winter cold.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the newly independent states were unprepared to share and have been relying ever since on an ad-hoc mess of ineffectual bilateral and semi-official agreements.
Problems are most acute between Uzbekistan, a gas producer, and its two smaller neighbours, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, whom it accuses of hoarding water. Both claim Uzbekistan overcharges for the gas it supplies, and underpays for electricity generated in their hydro-power stations.
“Tashkent is really blocking on this issue,” says Sebastien Peyrouse, a scholar at the Stockholm-based central Asia-Caucus Institute.
Like most experts studying the region, Peyrouse believes the solutions to regional energy shortages lie in states jointly regulating dams and river flow. Agreement looks distant, however, and relations icy.
Paul Quinn-Judge remains pessimistic, pointing to decades of bad blood between Uzbekistan and its neighbours.
The country’s authoritarian president, Islom Karimov, in power for over two decades, is distrusted for his arbitrary shutdowns of gas supplies and border crossings. There’s little hope of an enlightened sharing of water resources, says Judge, until a new generation of central Asian leaders comes along to replace the ageing elite which has run the region – apart from Kyrgyzstan – since before the collapse of the USSR.
Orolbaev is more hopeful, pointing to the OSCE-guided deal between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan which came into force in 2006, according to which Kazakhstan pays for construction and upkeep of dams on the Chu and Talas rivers connecting the two countries. He sees hope for the region in similar foreign-brokered deals, and more foreign investment in hydropower stations. Work on the Kambarata-1 power station meanwhile has yet to commence.
Getting the lights on in Bishkek will take a while longer then.