Transcriber: Heba Albassar Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Imagine eating meat laced with radioisotopes.
Imagine your kids drinking contaminated milk.
Imagine the walls in your house
getting cracks from the earth shaking underneath it -
you are so fed up, you don't fix them anymore.
More than a million people in Kazakhstan do not have to imagine.
They had lived through this for 40 years
while Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union.
This talk today is my love letter
to the courage of ordinary people.
People who are not afraid to tell the truth,
even when not convenient.
People who are not afraid to challenge power,
to challenge oppressive regimes.
My stories today are the stories of my people,
people of Kazakhstan,
and their fight to stop nuclear tests on their land.
These stories have inspired me,
and I hope they will inspire you.
I hope they will serve as a reminder to all of us
that we, the people, can challenge power,
and we can make a difference to the course of history.
This is all very personal to me.
Kazakhstan's nuclear story defined who I am.
The family of my father lived in the city of Semipalatinsk,
just seventy miles away from the nuclear test site.
When the Soviet Union collapsed,
and Kazakhstan found itself
with a nuclear inheritance it did not seek,
more than a thousand Soviet nuclear weapons,
my father,
at the time, the head of the country’s first analytical institution,
helped the Kazakh government to make nuclear policy decisions.
My father died young.
Eager to follow his footsteps
and keenly aware how nuclear politics shaped my country,
I entered the field of nuclear policy 18 years ago.
I'm thrilled to be part of the community
that works toward ridding our planet of nuclear weapons.
And just like my father, but many years later,
I had the honor to serve
as an advisor on disarmament to the UN Secretary-General.
Soviet leaders rushed to develop nuclear weapons,
eager to catch up with the United States.
To test their weapons, they chose the land of my ancestors,
the region that holds sacred place in the Kazakh consciousness.
Our most famous writers, poets, intellectuals were born here.
It is on this land that a nuclear test site,
the size of Israel, was built.
From ancient times,
endless steppe and limitless blue skies signified freedom to Kazakh nomads.
Depending on the season,
steppe changes color from vibrant green to golden under scorching sun in summer.
At the horizon, steppe meets the skies,
dividing what you see in two blocks of color,
with nothing to obstruct the view,
just like a Rothko painting.
Before the Soviet military arrived,
Kazakh shepherds roamed the generous land that provided food for their cattle.
Soon, the region that prided itself
on supplying the entire country with the best quality meat, fresh milk -
raising livestock became contaminated,
Nuclear bombs were dropped from the skies, just like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nuclear mushrooms became a regular feature of the steppe horizon.
Nuclear bombs also exploded
underneath the earth in specially built tunnels.
People started to get sick.
Here is just one testimony from a woman who lived in a rural settlement nearby,
“Nobody told us
about the harmfulness of nuclear explosions.
Everything was secret.
Now I'm ill myself, my son hanged himself,
and only the test site is to blame for all my ills.
Every single inhabitant in our village
suffers the consequences of nuclear explosions.”
The rise in suicides and mental illness
was the darkest side of the human tragedy unfolded in the Kazakh steppe.
Suicide was previously such an alien concept to Kazakhs,
they didn’t even have a word for it.
The military, of course,
denied that the tests were doing any harm to local people.
They blamed the deteriorating health of locals
on living conditions and poor diet.
The Soviet government fully controlled the narrative.
Nuclear scientists were not allowed to talk about their work;
doctors were not allowed to diagnose any radiation-related illnesses.
In this atmosphere of full control from Moscow,
scientists from Kazakhstan launched a medical expedition
to examine the health of people who lived near the test site.
Those scientists worked for the Institute of Regional Pathology,
part of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences.
For three years,
in the late 1950s,
they painstakingly examined thousands of people,
going from one village to another.
Those were courageous men and women.
They truthfully recorded what they saw.
And their account is a very clinical record.
It's full of medical jargon,
but let me tell you,
if you read the dry text
and picture the innocent people behind the abstract data points,
it will break your heart.
Blood did not circulate properly in people’s brains.
Those who were exposed long-term to high amounts of radioactivity
lost their sense of smell and taste.
The neurological pathologies made people tired,
caused dizziness and headaches.
Many locals were losing their swallowing reflex,
the body's important defense mechanism against choking on food.
Those scientists were summoned to Moscow,
where the representatives of the military medical establishment
argued with them, dismissing their findings.
Under pressure from the military,
further efforts of the Kazakh scientists were suspended.
The Soviet government classified their data,
and for decades that data was unavailable to public.
That was the time of information suppression -
nobody was supposed to know the truth.
Decades later,
I found myself in the library
of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences in Almaty,
and I was holding in my hands
the original documents from that medical expedition.
Chill ran down my spine,
and my entire body was covered in goosebumps,
not only from the profound sadness I felt for my people
that they had to suffer through these ailments
through no fault of their own,
but from the realization
that any of these authors could have been accused of state treason.
They were recording
how the country’s most important national security project
was ruining the health of their countrymen.
I will never forget the emotions I felt that day,
and I will never forget the courage of those scientists.
What this story represents to me is the search for truth,
even when confronted by a repressive regime.
For decades, people in the Semipalatinsk region
continued to live
under the dark cloud of nuclear tests.
They tried to make politicians hear them,
to no avail.
Their anger, fueled by pain, reached its peak,
and finally, a window of opportunity to act opened up for them.
It was late 1980s -
nobody yet could have predicted the Soviet Union would collapse.
I was too young
and only have very vague recollections of that particular moment in history,
but I remember the wind of change we felt
when a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power.
He allowed more political freedom,
but that freedom also uncovered the depth of the Soviet Union’s decay.
The Soviet republics
and their frustration of the Soviet republics
with the Moscow rule
could not be contained any longer.
In Kazakhstan, that frustration manifested itself
in massive protests against nuclear tests.
So it was February of 1989
when yet another underground nuclear test rocked the Kazakh land.
As the result of the test,
radioactive gas escaped from underneath the earth -
nothing unusual,
it happened so many times before -
but this time,
because the Soviet government
could no longer fully control the information flow,
this news became public.
A charismatic Kazakh poet, Olzhas Suleimenov,
went on national TV and appealed to the people of Kazakhstan
to rally against nuclear tests.
Three days later, 5,000 people showed up at the Writers House,
a gathering place for literary professionals in Almaty.
The hall couldn't even hold everyone,
and thousands stood outside in the winter chill.
The energy that day in that hall was galvanizing,
and the world's most massive public movement
against nuclear tests was born.
They called it Nevada-Semipalatinsk.
Kazakhs added Nevada
because they wanted to feel connected with the downwinders in the United States
who were fighting to stop nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site.
Millions of people of Kazakhstan joined the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement.
On the ground in the Semipalatinsk region,
a courageous local leader, Keshrim Boztaeyv,
appealed to Gorbachev,
asking him to stop nuclear tests in his region.
From Almaty, the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev,
appealed to Moscow,
asking to spare his nation from continued tests.
One expects action from leaders; it is their duty.
What moves me most in this story
is the courage and determination of regular people -
people who marched for months,
showed up in thousands to rallies -
uniting for one common goal:
to stop nuclear tests.
People were reclaiming their land.
They were standing up for their lives.
Kazakh steppe was alive again.
The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement
became truly global.
In 1990, about 80 Americans came to Kazakhaztan,
as well as Russians and Japanese.
Among Americans, there were members of the Shoshone tribe of Nevada,
downwinders from Utah.
And they all came to support Kazakhs in the International Peace March,
and so, more than 200 of them
traveled through Kazakhstan by planes, buses, and on foot,
stopping in villages and cities.
In places where there were not enough buildings to house everyone,
this international crowd put up the tents and slept under the open sky.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was collapsing under its own weight.
Military leaders in Moscow
had to reduce the number of tests in Kazakhstan
because of this public protest,
but they were not planning to stop,
at least not well into the '90s,
and they were putting pressure on the Kazakh government to accept that.
Entire Kazakhstan
including the political establishments,
but, more importantly,
people did not succumb.
People continued to march,
people continued to protest,
and finally, the tireless fight of millions of people of Kazakhstan
culminated in their victory.
On August 29th of 1991,
Kazakhstan shut down the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site forever.
A few -
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
A few months later, the Soviet Union collapsed,
and Kazakhstan found itself
with more than a thousand Soviet nuclear weapons.
If you look at other countries that are dying to have nuclear weapons,
you would assume they would want to keep them,
but no, Kazakhstan chose to get rid of those nuclear weapons,
to a large extent
because of its experience with the nuclear tests.
So I want to leave you with this:
If you have a choice to tell the truth,
please tell it!
Like those scientists in Kazakhstan did.
If you have an opportunity to act on your civic duties,
please act on it.
Like millions of people of Kazakhstan did
when they fought against nuclear tests.
We can make a difference to the course of history.
We are the makers of our own destiny.
Thank you.
(Applause)