The Voice of Mirza Xazar

The orphans of Sumqayit
By Nigel Green
BBC News, Azerbaijan

With some of the biggest oil reserves in the world, Azerbaijan is fast becoming an energy giant.

But although foreign investors have pumped billions into the economy in the 15 years since the country gained independence, some grim aspects of the Soviet legacy remain.

Sumqayit may be a seaside town but it is not somewhere you would want to spend your holiday.
Not unless you like a place that looks like the backdrop for a science fiction movie.

Sumqayit is just an hour's drive from Baku, the oil-rich capital of Azerbaijan.

But here, rather than the gleaming office blocks and the marble squares, green parks and fountains, all we could see were derelict factories, twisted, rusting metal pipes and tankers abandoned on broken railway lines.

There were few people to be seen - and the only animals we came across were wild dogs.

My guide for the day was Akif Askerov, a likeable young man who once played football for his country and now has a well-paid job as a health and safety officer employed by a western oil company.

As we got out of the car, Akif pointed out we were walking on crushed sheets of asbestos. The smell of chemicals, aggravated by dust churned up by our car, hit our throats.

Birth defects

Just 20 years ago, Sumqayit was the biggest petro-chemical centre in the Soviet Union.

Under Stalin's orders, this town had been built in the 1930s to feed off the huge oil reserves nearby.

After World War Two, Sumqayit's population grew to a third of a million. The workers were mostly young and relatively well-rewarded.

The list of substances they used to manufacture at Sumqayit is long, but it included huge quantities of lindane, a pesticide that has been compared to Agent Orange, the chemical so widely used during the Vietnam War.

And, like Agent Orange, lindane has been blamed for causing birth defects.

In Soviet days, the workers were given extra cheese and milk in the misguided belief that this would strengthen their bodies' defences. It did not.

Exact figures are hard to find but numerous reports link the town with high levels of deformities in new-born children. The number of girls and boys here with Downs syndrome, cerebral palsy and spina bifida is way above average.

The new, independent government of Azerbaijan declared Sumqayit an ecological disaster zone and closed most of its factories. But they seem to have left an appalling legacy.

'Twisted limbs'

Akif wanted to show me the work that he and his British oil worker friends have done renovating an orphanage not far from Sumqayit.