(1 Aug 1995) Russian/Nat
The former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan is counting the cost of playing host to a massive chemical industry under the old communist regime.
50 years after the factories were first built in Sumgait, they're lying idle.
The people are suffering the consequences of half a century of chemical waste, which pours untreated into the Caspian Sea.
Sumgait was once the model of Soviet industrial efficiency. Its population swelled to half a million as workers gathered from all over Azerbaijan for high paid work at the chemical plants.
Here, smoke stacks and chimneys of the town's 12 factories dominate the skyline. They belch thick black smoke into the air.
Waste from the factories pours - untreated - into the nearby Caspian Sea.
Under the Soviets there was no Ministry of the Environment in Azerbaijan.
SOUNDBITE: (Russian)
"All of our major factories in Sumgait were subjugated to the Soviet Union. To some extent our republic had no control over them. Therefore all decisions were made from there. It was very difficult, even impossible, to go against them."
SUPER CAPTION: Asif Islamzad, environmental advisor to the mayor of Sumgait
In 1964, the government built several cleaning stations to cope with the huge amounts of waste, but the last repairs were carried out in 1974.
One of the main offenders - this huge aluminium plant on the outskirts of town - now stands idle. The conveyor belt may have stopped, due to a lack of demand, but the environmental damage is done.
Pollution is taking its toll. Every fourth child in Sumgait is born with defects; the child mortality rate is 25 percent higher than that in the rest of the republic; and one in ten inhabitants has difficulties breathing.
High unemployment has led local authorities to consider building new factories to replace the obsolete plants.
Many local people strongly oppose the plans.
SOUNDBITE: (Russian)
"Every day you can smell the gas in the air, you can't breathe, you see your children suffocating. We can't let that happen all over again."
SUPER CAPTION: Asif Islamzad, environmental advisor to the mayor of Sumgait
As a plume of acrid smoke billows from the chimneys and over the town cemetery, it is impossible not the notice the unusually high number of children buried there.
Their gravestones remain a powerful reminder of the Soviet era in which industrialization was pursued at any cost.
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