Вечерный Бишкек, Понедельник, 27 февраля 2006 года. №36 (8960) II съезд Ассоциации горнопромышленников и геологов республики прошел незаметно для широкой общественности. Ну и действительно — ни скандалов, ни мордобития, осадных юрт не ставили, самосожжением не угрожали. Какой может быть интерес? На самом деле это было в высшей степени показательное событие. Собралась элита горняков, геологов, профессионалов самой высшей марки (таких у нас, конечно, намного меньше, чем рево-люционеров, но все–таки еще есть). И разбирались в том, что творится в самой важной отрасли республики — горнодобывающей. (далее…)
JALAL-ABAD (IRIN) — Many cotton growers in southern Kyrgyzstan are joining an organic farming drive in the area, with numbers up almost six times since the initiative kicked off in 2003.
Suerkul Orunbaev from the Shaidan village of the southern Kyrgyz province of Jalal-Abad, one of the main cotton producing areas in the country, remembers his initial doubts about organic agriculture three years ago.
«The risk of failure was high. In the first year, the cotton yield dropped significantly and it [hit us] financially. But in the second year the yield rate improved and I got a comparatively better income. I hope it will improve even further,» Orunbaev said. (далее…)
ARAVAN, 20 Feb 2006 (IRIN) — A landslide on Sunday ripped through a road linking the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh with the Aravan district, blocking traffic and destroying electricity and telephone services to the area, with no casualties reported.
“The traffic is very intense on this road but luckily no one was there when the landslide hit. I saw from a distance how a large landmass slid down and blocked the road,” Usar Khalikov, a local taxi driver who witnessed the landslide, said in Osh.
OSH, 21 Feb 2006 (IRIN) — Almost half a dozen patients have been hospitalised in southern Kyrgyzstan with typhoid in a town near radioactive dump sites.“Eight local residents have been hospitalised over the past week in the Mailuu-Suu town in the southern province of Jalal-Abad and we have five confirmed cases, the rest are ordinary diarrhoea instances,” officials at a local sanitary and epidemiological surveillance centre said from Jalal-Abad on Monday. “All of them are residents of the upper area of Mailuu-Suu known as Koktash settlement,” they added.
With a population of some 25,000, Mailuu-Suu, 100 km northwest of the provincial capital Jalal-Abad, is known for its radioactive uranium dumps, a legacy of the Soviet Union’s uranium mining programme in the area.
In a middle school in Burghandy village in the south of Kyrgyzstan, pupils come to school with their own bottle of boiled water or tea, labelled clearly with their names.
This is no ordinary school regulation but one that is crucial to public health as part of attempts to prevent children from falling ill from belly typhus, which is the most common infectious disease due to dirty water in the south of this Central Asian country.
The name Tentek-say—which translates as ‘playful’ or ‘mad’ river—says it all: It is unpredictable and a management nightmare. Complicating its management is a political boundary which criss-crosses two countries. The boundary separating Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan runs through the village of Chek—two-thirds of the settlement lies in the Nooken district of Kyrgyzstan and the remaining one-third is in Pahta-Abad district of Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan has reinforced the right bank in its part of the border but the entire village of 4,500 people is prone to floods because the river does not have embankments in upstream Kyrgyz territory. The floods last year and early this year washed away the Kyrgyz part of the river bank submerging about 100 hectares of land downstream. Another 10 hectares were washed out in spring this year. In an effort to bypass bureaucratic red-tape, local Kyrgyz and Uzbek authorities and the community are now trying to manage the border-rivers by supporting local water user groups. And there are early signs that the idea works.
In January of this year, Kyrgyz government has issued a decree to find new investors for Jerooy gold deposit exploitation. The decree signed by the Prime Minister Felix Kulov on the New Year’s eve said the joint enterprise Talas Gold Mining Company had not fulfilled the license agreement conditions on the deposit exploitation and had ruined the plan realization.
According to the decree quoted by Gazeta.Kg website, Talas Gold Mining Company (67 percent of UK’s Oxus Gold, 33 percent of Kyrgyz state corporation) had delayed the project realization for many years. The company’s foreign member reportedly continued to work on the deposit even after its license had been annulled, referring to its correspondence with former Kyrgyz PM, Nikolai Tanayev. (далее…)
