TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, Dec 14 (Asia Water Wire) – “The Aral Sea is quietly disappearing. The sea is becoming shallow… A hot wind will blow tomorrow. The sea elements are sighing, exposing the bottom of the cliff pebble by pebble, centimetre by centimetre.” -- Uzbek poet and journalist Raim Farhadi wrote these lines nearly 40 years ago, when he noticed that the sea had drawn back from the Aral’s former shore by a few metres.

   People ignored that warning, carried away as they were by triumphant reports of record cotton harvests at that time. When the poem saw print in the Moscow-based ‘Yunost’ magazine in the early 1970s, Farhadi was criticised at a Guild of the Uzbekistani Writers session for the (alleged) “defectiveness of his poetry".

   Troubled by the rising levels of pollution in the rivers and lakes of his homeland, Farhadi tried to reach out to the public about the seriousness of his country’s water problem through poetry.

   Born in Samarkand – the Uzbek city that once sourced its water from springs flowing down neighbouring  mountains – the 64-year-old Farhadi saw first-hand how these same springs had become choked with garbage as the years passed. 

   The poet was sore about it and wrote the poem ‘A Scream’: “A bulldozer has covered a spring. Its scream from under stones is not heard. But it screams. What a pain! You still don’t feel this pain.”

   “Unfortunately, modern people have no reverence for water that is the circulatory system of any living substance,” he told Asia Water Wire in an interview.

   Farhadi knows fully well the worth of water. He said that water from the springs naturally flowed into agricultural fields in Samarkand, located 280 kilometres to the south-west of the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. Then 5 or 6 six years old, Farhadi would help secure these water ‘paths’ with a hoe for his family’s fruit garden. Older boys would often try to block such paths and fights over ‘water rights’ would commence among them.

   Yusufjan Shadimetov, president of the International Organisation of Ecology and Health (ECOSAN), an international environmental group based in Tashkent, thinks highly of Farhadi.

   “Poetry influences the psychology of people, their activities. With the help of Raim Farhadi’s works, we can stir children and the youth into (the importance of) environmental preservation, (and a) healthy lifestyle,” he said.

   Farhadi represents an emerging  group of environmental crusaders who aim to teach children the value of nature, especially water, through painting, poetry and drama. About 80 budding artists and environmentalists aged two to 12 are taught these ‘gentle’ art forms at the Young Artist Studio attached to the City Centre for Pupils’ Art in Tashkent.

   Central Asia, as a whole, faces an acute shortage of fresh water. According to an assessment by the UN Economic Commission for Europe regional working group in 1998, only 700 cubic metres of fresh water were available to people in Central Asia – against the 5,000 cubic metres said to be needed by an individual annually.

   The Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers poured about 58 billion cubic metres of water into the Aral Sea every year until the 1960s. But the flow declined drastically in the mid-‘80s after the expansion of irrigation systems.

   “(The Amu Darya) has scattered itself over aryks – canals, distributed itself to beloved and went to unwanted strangers. Bridges, spits, dams and speeches,” Farhadi wrote in the poem ‘The Life of the River’.

   As a result, the Aral had fragmented into two giant lakes and its water volume had dropped by 90 percent, or 115 billion cubic metres. Its surface area had also shrunk by 73 percent – to 17,600 square kilometres. The Aral was once the world’s fourth-largest inland lake, after the Caspian Sea that straddles Europe and Asia, Lake Superior in North America and Lake Victoria in Africa.

   The poet says, “The problem of the Aral results from other ecological problems. Tashkent, for instance, is a huge bucket full of holes, with a great deal of pipes continuously pouring water.”

   The waters of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya are highly polluted. Almost 20 percent of water in the reservoirs in Uzbekistan comprised of sewerage drained into them, according to a 2000 regional report jointly released by the World Bank, the Norwegian Trade Council, the International Fund on the Aral Sea and some agencies representing Central Asian states.

   “To write about water is to write about human health, about the future of human beings because what we consume mainly consists of water and a human being mostly consists of it,” Uzbek poet Rakhmatjon Kuldashev told AWW. “If there is no water in a region or the water in it is dirty, there is an ecological disaster there.”

   Kuldashev notes, “In the 1930s, Uzbek poets wrote about the beauties of nature, the purity of water because they were able to watch those things. But now they do not write about them – instead, they use such words as ‘dirty water,’ ‘swamps,’ ‘the smoke of vehicles.’”

   Farhadi writes in Russian but his poems have been translated into many languages. Some of his poems are included in textbooks for schoolchildren in Uzbekistan.

   The poet also writes about nature and people’s feelings – their love, hatred, excitement and sadness. He is married and has two daughters who now live in Britain and Spain.

   Farhadi worked for the Central Committee of the Uzbekistan Communist Union of Youth under the former Soviet Union. When the republic gained independence in 1991, he worked at the Uzbek ‘Narodnoe Slovo’ newspaper as culture, literature and environment editor. He was later asked to work for the culture and literature division in the office of Uzbek President Islam Karimov. (END/AWW/MK/LC/JS;/141206)