"I have seen the dead forest with my own eyes, it's a very eerie sensation,” Andrei Ozharovsky, a nuclear physicist and antinuclear campaigner, told The Moscow Times. “The explosion happened in the 1970s but in one direction, for about two or three kilometers, there are still dead trees standing.
At Kyrgyzstan s Kumtor Mine, Not All That Glitters Is Gold
21 May 2021, 04:15 GMT+10
Mining the Kumtor gold deposits in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan was supposed to bring economic salvation to the former Soviet republic in Central Asia.
For a country lacking large reserves of oil or natural gas, the government s joint mining project with a foreign firm was seen as a way to generate revenue from natural resources just as most of Kyrgyzstan s resource-rich neighbors do.
But Bishkek s partnerships with Canadian firms at the Kumtor gold mine have been contentious since operations began there in 1997.
In recent weeks, the relationship with its current partner Centerra Gold has deteriorated into a showdown.
There’s gold in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. But neither the Canadian mining firm now operating there nor the Kyrgyz government have found their partnership to be an El Dorado.