He left his fishing boat to rot on a sandbank in 1982 as the Aral Sea receded, sucked dry by a vast Soviet irrigation system built to water the cotton fields of Uzbekistan.

For the past 22 years, he and the other residents of this once-thriving fishing port, now 100 miles from the sea’s edge, have eked out a living on the salty, toxin-laced residue of one of the world’s worst ecological disasters.

But now their survival is threatened by another monumental water project, in Turkmenistan, which experts say could create an environmental catastrophe on a similar scale to the Aral Sea.

President Niyazov, the Turkmen leader, is building a vast reservoir, dubbed “Lake Turkmen of the Golden Age”, in the middle of the Karakum desert that skirts Uzbekistan’s southern border.

The Turkmen Government says that the $4.5 billion (£2.6 billion) reservoir, at 75 miles long, 40 miles wide and 80 metres deep, will collect only waste water that now disappears into the sand.

But many environmental experts fear that it will divert fresh water from the Amu Darya, one of the two main rivers of Central Asia, and cause a devastating man-made drought downstream, especially in the autonomous Uzbek region of Karakalpakstan.

Some predict that up to three million people will leave the area once the lake is completed in 2020. Others talk of a regional “water war”.

“This is ecological fascism,” said Oral Ataniyazova, an obstetrician, local deputy and winner of the 2000 Goldman environmental award for raising awareness about the Aral Sea. “You don’t need guns to destroy a people. You can just turn their water off.”

The controversy highlights a growing struggle in former Soviet Central Asia for the water flowing from the Pamir mountains, through the Amu and Syr rivers, towards the Aral Sea.

It also exposes the weakness in their political systems and the potential for instability in a strategically important region, still ruled by autocratic leaders from the Soviet era. President Niyazov, otherwise known as Turkmenbashi the Great, or Father of All Turkmen, has promised his five million people that his lake will increase crop yields, ease the climate, and safeguard water supplies for the future.

“Lake Turkmen, currently being constructed in the Karakum Desert, will be a giant artificial lake, never before seen in the history of humanity and designed to change the destiny of the Turkmen people for generations to come,” he said in a speech this year.

But critics dismiss it as the latest vanity project designed to fuel a North Korean-style personality cult. Declared President for life, Mr Niyazov has already changed the names of months of the year, littered his capital with statues of his mother, and made a quasi-religious text that he penned into compulsory school reading.

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