The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth biggest inland sea, now it has dried up to reveal a secret biological weapons facility
Report Chris Aslan
We left the last cotton fields behind hours ago, but as for their toxic legacy, the worst still lies ahead of us. We bounce along a rutted road with nothing around us but desert. There’s a little scrub – just enough grazing for the occasional languid camel. Every half an hour or so, we pass an old Soviet concrete bus shelter that hasn’t seen a bus in decades. There’s a scattering of yurts, but most of the traditionally nomadic Karakalpaks were forcibly settled during Soviet times under Stalin and live in simple mudbrick, whitewashed houses with corrugated roofs. Although it’s only May, it’s already blazing hot and there’s a tired listlessness about the land. We feel it too. At odds with the heat is the frosting that covers the sand – saltpetre that rises to the surface during spring rains.
We’re in Karakalpakstan, a large semi-autonomous region in the northwest of Uzbekistan. A century ago, the desert through which we’re driving was known as the Reed Kingdom – a marshy delta area where the Amu Darya widened as it approached the Aral Sea. Bird life and wild boars abounded, and there were enough Aral Sea tigers that, according to Russian records, between 1886 and 1891 about 200 people were eaten by them.
Since then, the river has been bled by Soviet-built irrigation channels and canals, often unlined, in an attempt to turn huge swathes of desert into cotton fields. The fact that cotton – a member of the mallow family – prefers wet, swampy conditions and requires ten times more water than wheat, seems not to have troubled the Soviet authorities, determined that the Soviet Union, unable to afford expensive imports, would be entirely self-sufficient when it came to cotton.
HIGH AND DRY
After hours of desert and scrub, we spot a large concrete sign ahead of us. It’s an inverted triangle welcoming us to the once-prosperous port town of Moynaq. The top side of the triangle depicts waves with a fish leaping out of the water in the centre. It feels like a cruel joke.
There’s also a sign to the airport, but that’s now just a cracked and derelict concrete strip. It was built in a happier time when Soviet apparatchiks would fly straight to Moynaq with their families to enjoy seaside holidays. Back then, there was also a large cannery that employed thousands of people, producing tinned fish that was exported all over the Soviet Union. The fishing business, including the cannery, has completely collapsed now due to one fairly significant absence: the sea itself is gone.
You can see this absence everywhere. The town curves along the seashore, but beyond it there’s now nothing but cracked and salty sandflats. We stop to ask for directions to the boat graveyard. A Karakalpak woman with Mongol features and a white headscarf, nods wearily and points us in the right direction. After all, it’s where all the foreigners go. I hear from a friend later that locals joke that if every tourist, journalist and scientist that visits brought a bucket of water with them, the Aral Sea would be replenished by now.
We see the rusting hulks below us in what was once a harbour but is now just sand dunes and hummocks of seagrass. A fleet of obsolete fishing vessels sits beached and rusting, paint flaking. A few cows and a camel ruminate in the shade of one of the boats, chewing meditatively. There are deep, dry channels that were dug in a desperate attempt to keep the fishing industry alive back when the sea first started to retreat. Back then there were still some fish to be had, despite the fact that the remaining water was getting steadily saltier.
The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, roughly the size of Sri Lanka or Georgia, and yet within just a few decades, it has all but disappeared. Water from the two great rivers that fed it (known by the Ancient Greeks as the Oxus and Jaxartes) was syphoned off to reclaim desert land for cotton growing. According to one World Bank report, around 60 per cent of this irrigation water didn’t even reach the fields due to unlined and poorly maintained canals.
We trudge over to the rusting hulks, which are hot to the touch in the midday sun and covered in graffiti. I clamber onto a boat that lists almost on its side. It’s disorientating to lurch through rusting metal bulkheads at unfamiliar angles. I stand on the listing bridge in the place where the wheel would have been. The dials and other machinery have rusted away, and the place was long ago picked clean of trophies and souvenirs.
Then the schoolboys arrive. They look to be around ten or 11, but are probably older. The ecological devastation associated with the sea’s death has severely stunted growth, particularly among boys. They’re in high spirits and clearly treat the graveyard as their personal playground. Keen to impress me, one of them clambers up to the prow and stands with his arms wide. ‘Look at me!’ he shouts in Karakalpak, ‘I’m Jack! I’m the king of the world,’ mimicking the famous scene from Titanic, one of the few Hollywood hits in Central Asia. ‘You’re not Jack,’ jeers his mate. ‘You’re Rosa!’
They want me to take their photo, so we all pose on the rusting bow. When I jump down onto the sand dunes, my feet crunch. I hunt and find small shells just as you would along any seashore. I collect a few and pocket them, knowing that I’ll value them more than anything else I’ve ever beachcombed.
TOXIC COTTON
This fishing fleet, and others in Aralsk, a former Aral Sea port in Kazakhstan, provided the Soviet Union with up to ten per cent of its fish. During Stalin’s man-made famine in the early 1930s, fishing helped save the lives of many Kazakhs who would otherwise have starved to death. If you visit Aralsk today, it still has a jetty that juts out from the port, but it ends abruptly in scrubby desert surrounded by similarly beached and rusting fishing vessels.
It was obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of the water cycle that when the imperial Russians, and later the Soviets, began to divert huge quantities of water from the Amu and Syr rivers to irrigate reclaimed desert for cotton and wheat there would be consequences. However, when imperial Russian scientists, water engineers and agronomists were summoned to advise the newly formed Soviet government on increasing cotton yields in the 1920s, those who expressed concerns about the unintended consequences of reclaiming the desert were promptly imprisoned or sent to gulags.
At first, the sea level didn’t drop noticeably, but by the 1950s, cotton production had ramped up and the Karakum Canal opened. This diverted huge quantities of water for the burgeoning Turkmen capital of Ashgabat and other desert-bound cities and cotton fields.
That was when people really began to notice the sinking sea levels. At first, there were few adverse effects. Moynaq was still canning around 26,000 tonnes of fish annually, but by the 1960s, there were discussions about the Aral Sea issue and what was to be done about it. In the end, the economic benefits of cotton were considered too great for anything more than talk.
The sea then shrank rapidly – much more quickly than anyone had predicted. The channels dug to enable the fishing fleet to reach the retreating sea were futile as the remaining water was soon too saline to support fish. In a breathtaking example of how a command economy can work, fish were then transported all the way from the Pacific Ocean to be canned in Moynaq so that the townspeople would still have jobs.
In its wake, the retreating sea left behind a toxic chemical cocktail of sea salt and dust, blended with the residue from pesticides, herbicides, cotton defoliants and huge quantities of DDT that had been sprayed for decades all over Uzbekistan and had washed into its rivers, eventually ending up in the sea.
Cotton is particularly vulnerable to blight and pests, and given how much of a monoculture it had become in Central Asia, everything depended on a good harvest. There was no stinting on the amount of DDT used, even after it had been banned in the rest of the Soviet Union due to its adverse effect on human and animal health. In just one decade, Uzbekistan was doused with 60,000 tonnes of DDT, which eventually found its way into the Aral.
Even today, around a quarter of the world’s pesticides are used on cotton alone. In India, cotton takes up only five per cent of agricultural land and yet it accounts for half of the pesticides used. Not only does cotton demand more pesticides than other crops, it also depletes the soil so rapidly that it’s known as a frontier crop. Whenever it’s grown continually in the same soil, ever greater quantities of fertiliser and pesticide are needed to maintain good yields.
This toxic Aral dust gets whipped up into the air, causing respiratory diseases, contaminating drinking sources and travelling throughout our atmosphere. Deposits have been found in countries on the other side of the world, as well as on glaciers, where it exacerbates melting. Once they’re ingested by animals, persistent organic pollutants such as DDT can’t be excreted using the usual kidney/liver function and get passed up the food chain, showing up in human blood and breast milk. Today, around five per cent of Karakalpak children are born with abnormalities and their DNA mutation rate is 3.5 times higher than in most other countries.
HEALTH IMPACTS
I’m keen to meet up with my friend Oktyabr. He’s back visiting Moynaq, where he grew up, and has the lean physique and slanting eyes of a nomad. He tells us how people in his town are 27 times more likely to get throat cancer than the global average. Lung cancer is also rife, and tuberculosis is an issue all over Karakalpakstan, along with severe anaemia. Lots of people have eye problems from the dust. Infant- and child-mortality rates are both alarmingly high and the number of birth defects is rising. The sea used to regulate the temperature, but now summers are hotter and winters are colder and longer.
‘It wasn’t always like this,’ Oktyabr tells us. ‘If you could have seen this town as I knew it when I was a child…’ He looks up, resolute. ‘Come, I want to show you something.’
We drive out of the town and up to a ridge where a dusty Second World War memorial stands. There’s one in every Soviet town and every bride and groom will come here to lay flowers on their wedding day. Oktyabr ignores the monument and beckons me to stand with him. We perch on the edge of a cliff. Ahead of us is the new expanse of land known as the Aral Desert.
‘People say we have to learn to live with the situation,’ Oktyabr says. ‘The Uzbek government wants to just relocate us and take us far from our land and the place of our ancestors. But look down there.’ He points at rocks below us. ‘When I was a boy, I swam down there with my school friends. It’s where we spent our summers. The waves would crash against these rocks.’ His eyes blaze with fury and heartbreak as he holds my gaze. I don’t look away. That would be too easy.
He’s not my only friend who has lived in Moynaq. Desiree is one of the only foreigners to have lived in the town. A can-do American Christian, she had spent years working in China with Nike and now wanted to give something back, using her business acumen to help small-scale business start-ups. I caught up with her to find out what life was like as the only foreigner in town back in the early 2000s.
‘I had one colleague and she was local but from a more urban environment and we shared a house together,’ she says. ‘All the women we worked with were really anaemic, but that wasn’t just in Moynaq, it was in most of the country. They drink a lot of black tea with their meals and that inhibits your body from absorbing iron from your food. They also weren’t able to afford much meat, and what meat there was tended to be eaten by the men. Many women had really brittle fingernails that snapped easily. I paid for blood transfusions for one or two women who kept blacking out. It wasn’t a solution, just a stop-gap measure, but I had to do something. They also had far more urinary and kidney infections than normal due to the high salinity of our drinking water.
‘Wounds got really badly infected in a way I’d never seen before,’ she continues. ‘A simple cut could lead to a strep infection and even amputation. The whole town still got sprayed by crop-dusting planes with some kind of chemicals, apparently to get rid of fleas, which were a problem. We spent most of our time working as there wasn’t a lot else to do. We used to hike into the Aral Desert, across the old seabed, feeling like Moses walking through the Red Sea, and we took visitors to the ship graveyards. One of the boats got painted by a film crew who wanted to shoot a music video there. We couldn’t understand why they’d want to paint it up to make it look nice.’ Desiree talked with the middle-aged townspeople who had seen the sea vanish. ‘They said that it happened gradually but then very suddenly,’ she says. ‘Within the space of just a few days, the water level dropped by several metres. That seemed really strange and like something else was going on, and not just evaporation.’
I asked Oktyabr about this, and his theory is that the Soviet nuclear weapons testing that took place in the desert between the Aral and Caspian seas opened up fissures in the earth. The Caspian Sea is 68 metres lower than the Aral and there are reports that its level increased at the same time as the sudden drop in Aral water levels, suggesting that water found its way through the fissures and drained from one sea into the other.
I ask Desiree what the biggest challenges had been, living in a place like Moynaq. ‘Even more than the isolation and the environmental damage was the suspicion towards me,’ she says. ‘I mean, I was used to people’s curiosity about me being an American and having to justify why I was unmarried in my 30s – that already happened to me in Nukus, the regional capital. What I hadn’t expected was to have the KGB show up regularly and unannounced, hoping to catch me in the act of espionage or terrorism, or something. The only internet connection in the whole town was dial-up from the post office, so I used to turn up there with my laptop and plug in. The locals would hear all the weird sounds dial-up makes and think it was some kind of witchcraft. One time, the main KGB guy showed up, narrowed his eyes and told me that he knew exactly what I was doing, and that I was connecting to this thing called the internet. I mean, yeah? He seemed surprised when I didn’t deny it, or see anything wrong with that.
‘Then they showed up at our office and spotted the map on our wall,’ she continues. ‘We’d got hold of an old Soviet map of Moynaq so we could mark out the locations of the different businesses and enterprises we were helping to finance through our project. They took one look at this map and wanted to confiscate it. When I asked why, that same KGB guy jabbed his finger at the airport, which was still showing on the map, and thought I was giving away military secrets. I mean the airport was just a disused wasteland, like the canning factory. He seemed to think this was proof that I was a spy, and that I was going to bomb this derelict airport that was no use to anyone. It was insane!’
Desiree once met an American army official who was part of a biological-hazard clean-up operation. It was then that she learnt of the Aral Sea’s other dirty secret, which helped explain some of the paranoia towards her she’d experienced. It might seem that this destructive tale of a plant that killed a sea, leaving poisoned land behind, couldn’t get any worse – but it’s about to.
BIOLOGICAL WARFARE PLANT
The word Aral means ‘island’, and the island of Kantubek in the middle of the sea drew interest from Red Army generals as early as the 1920s. Its remote location and sparse surrounding population made it the perfect place for a biological weapons research facility. If something went wrong – as it would – at least it was far away from Moscow.
Over the years, a bio-weapons facility, known as Aralsk 7, was built, complete with outdoor pens for animal test subjects and indoor cages rumoured to sometimes contain humans. Around the facility grew the town of Kantubek, comprising houses and apartment blocks for around 1,500 inhabitants, schools, shops, a sports stadium, an airfield and a park. The Russians referred to the island as Vozrozhdeniya, meaning ‘rebirth’, although it never appeared on Soviet maps. Gamers might be familiar with its location as the backdrop for Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Diseases were modified and enhanced to make them more virulent and resistant to medication. These included weaponised anthrax, with spores made smaller so they couldn’t be so easily caught and filtered by nasal hairs. They also fused these anthrax spores with genes from Bacillus cereus, which rots human tissue. If breathed in and lodged in the lungs, the spores would multiply, leading to a slow and horrible end. They also weaponised smallpox, along with botulinum, tularaemia and equine encephalitis. The first tests were carried out in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that the town was built.
Inevitably, there were accidents. In 1971, there was an explosion of weaponised smallpox, releasing a murky yellow cloud that rolled out over the sea. A scientific research vessel crossed its path and one of the scientists on deck was infected, despite being vaccinated. When she got back to the port town of Aralsk, she unwittingly infected nine others. While she survived, three didn’t; one of the fatalities was her younger brother. Then there were fishermen found dead on bobbing boats with no signs of bodily trauma. In 1976, huge shoals of fish died suddenly for no apparent reason and were discovered floating belly up. Entire flocks of sheep lost their wool, and in 1988, half a million saiga antelope – a third of the world’s population – dropped dead within an hour.
The island’s soil was contaminated due to open-air testing in some parts, so the Soviets decided to make it a dumping ground for all of their stockpiles of weaponised anthrax. By then, the Cold War was on the wane and there had been an accident at a bio-weapons facility in Perm, Russia, that had caused the deaths of more than 100 people. The anthrax spores were mixed with bleach to kill them and hundreds of tonnes of the anthrax and bleach slurry were taken to the island, dumped into pits and covered. However, spores can remain alive but inactive for hundreds of years and are resistant to extremes of heat and cold, and even to disinfectants. Also, spores often clump together, so while some might have been killed by contact with bleach, others could still be alive.
All this time, the island’s landmass was growing steadily in size as the waters receded, until it joined up with the mainland of Karakalpakstan. Now, animals could unwittingly wander over to the island. There are rumours of camels discovered in the desert haemorrhaging or foaming at the mouth.
The whole town of Kantubek and its weapons facility were finally closed down in 1992 in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, the hastily dumped slurry of bleached anthrax was considered enough of a potential bio-terrorism risk that after the World Trade Centre attacks in New York in 2001, and subsequent letters filled with anthrax spores, the US intelligence community began to research the whereabouts of global anthrax stockpiles. A Soviet scientist who had defected revealed the existence of the island. The Americans worked with the Uzbek government on a six-month operation that employed hundreds of local people, digging up the anthrax remains and disposing of them properly.
I interviewed Nick Middleton, a University of Oxford professor, explorer and travel writer, who managed to visit the island by boat in 2005. At the time, there was still a body of water between the port town of Aralsk and the island itself. Nick went with Kazakh smugglers whose reasons for visiting the island weren’t entirely clear, but ostensibly involved scavenging for scrap metal. Also accompanying him was Dave Butler from the British military, who was an expert in biological weaponry. He insisted that they wear gas masks and hazmat suits despite the sizzling summer temperatures.
They were shocked to discover just how much of the weapons-testing facility was still intact. It looked as if there had been a very hasty departure as they walked gingerly among the detritus of rusting cages, broken glass vials and petri dishes that had once contained all manner of horrors. They didn’t stay long, and stripped and scrubbed outside after their return to Aralsk, doing everything they could to ensure that not a single stray anthrax spore had hitched a ride. I asked Nick what – all these years later – he remembered most.
‘Just the spookiness of it,’ he replied. ‘The complete absence of birdsong or of any animal noises, and the fact that it hadn’t been cleaned up properly – just abandoned. My natural instinct was to touch things that I found fascinating but, of course, we couldn’t touch anything, not even with gloves on. You can’t see, taste or feel anthrax spores but we knew they could still be floating around. There was a sense that one wrong step and things could turn really ugly, maybe even fatal.’
I asked him what he thought the future was for the Aral Sea region. He shrugged. ‘Well, the Kazakhs have dammed the top part and that’s refilling, but the rest is just going to be desert. The human demand for irrigation water to keep the cotton growing is just too great. The Uzbek government’s main strategy seems to be relocating Karakalpaks to other parts of the country, but that might also be a strategy to reduce separatist components. Apparently, the World Bank is funding programmes to plant saxaul saplings on the seabed, which might help anchor the soil.’
The World Bank also funded the 13-kilometre-long Kazakh dam, known as the Kok-Aral, or Blue Island Dam. Now, instead of receding, the water level in the Little Aral is gradually rising again, fed by the Syr River. The salinity has reduced and fish have been reintroduced. The hope is that one day, the wooden jetty in Aralsk might end at the sea again. For Moynaq, though, the sea is gone forever.
WORSE THAN CHERNOBYL
The global textile industry is the world’s second most polluting industry after the fossil fuel industry and consumes vast quantities of water. To manufacture just one pair of jeans requires 11,000 litres of water. The ecological fallout from all this isn’t always as stark as the fate of Moynaq, but is still causing all manner of environmental devastation, particularly as clothing prices in Western countries remain low and clothes have become almost disposable.
Are there any glimmers of hope in Moynaq? Well, not many. Disaster tourism helps provide a supplementary income for those who run cafes or hotels. There’s also a new museum, popular with tourists, that shows heartbreaking footage of the good old days before the sea disappeared. There are jerky black and white images of fishermen hauling in their catches, lifting up prize specimens, including a breed of sturgeon popular for Russian caviar. Happy workers in the canning factory glance up briefly from their work and then get back to sorting the catch. Uzbekistan is one of the world’s largest exporters of cotton and still relies heavily on the crop. It shows no signs of stopping cotton production and no-one speaks of the sea returning.
‘I read about the situation in Chernobyl with the nature,’ says Oktyabr, referring to that other great Soviet environmental catastrophe. ‘The deer are coming back and the forests are regrowing. It’s still not safe for humans to return, but that’s given nature a chance. But here, the situation is worse than Chernobyl. Imagine anyone saying that. Our homeland is now worse than Chernobyl.’
Chris Aslan’s latest book, Unravelling the Silk Road, explores the three tangled textile roads that make their way across Central Asia, transforming the region in the process. His research is heavily embroidered by his own experiences of living and working in the region for 15 years. Click here to get your copy via Amazon
