Statement

The Coalition to ban biological weapons after the deployment of a new military biological laboratory in Kazakhstan and an international repository of dangerous pathogens


The Coalition is concerned about the announcement that a new American military biological laboratory BSL-4 and an underground storage facility for the collection of dangerous and especially dangerous strains of diseases from around the world will appear in Kazakhstan. This was announced in an explanatory note by the Minister of Industry of the Republic Beibut Atamkulov addressed to the Prime Minister, who has already prepared a bill on the construction of these facilities, starting from 2022.

According to the Government of Kazakhstan, the construction of a BSL-4 Laboratory and an underground storage facility for a collection of dangerous and especially dangerous strains is planned in order to study in more depth highly contagious pathogens that cause severe and fatal diseases against which there are no available vaccines and treatments.

In fact, these facilities will be erected at the expense of the Military Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under the US Department of Defense in order to develop a network of American biological laboratories and their infrastructure on the territory of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

There are already five facilities and research institutes in Kazakhstan, which are commissioned by the US military department and supervised by officers attached to the US Embassy in the republic. The most significant facility – the Central Reference Laboratory (CRL) of the third degree of protection was built in Almaty with Washington's financial resources in 2016, despite the negative attitude of local residents.

New facilities will appear in the Zhambyl region in the south of the republic in the same village where the Biological Safety Research Institute under the Ministry of Science and Education of Kazakhstan, which has been working for many years as part of the Pentagon's research programs, is already located. This laboratory will house various strains of the most dangerous African diseases, such as the Ebola virus, as well as the Marburg virus, smallpox and many others. The very name of the BSL-4 facility (Biosafety Level 4) stands for laboratory of the fourth highest level of biological hazard.

This collection of the most dangerous pathogens can cause serious illness in humans or animals and easily spread from sick to healthy. At the same time, there are simply no real medical methods of countering these pathogens. We are confident that DTRA employees will place all these pathogens not so much for storage, but for studying and upgrading strains and conducting tests already on humans and local fauna in order to produce biological weapons.

Any leak or man-made disaster in an earthquake-prone area will cause a catastrophe of unprecedented scale, capable of killing hundreds of millions of people in Eurasia and dealing a colossal blow to all countries of the region. Various diversions with the purposeful use of laboratory-upgraded strains directed against Russia and China bordering Kazakhstan are also not excluded.

We regard such facilities as US military bases equipped with offensive biological weapons. Accordingly, they pose a huge threat to all CSTO, EAEU, and SCO countries and are capable of creating a hotbed of instability and mass infection in Central Asia. At the same time, after the appearance of such facilities, the Pentagon places its "training centers" allegedly to train specialists in their protection, which has already been demonstrated by the example of the Low-Enriched Uranium Center in East Kazakhstan.

The Coalition for the Prohibition of Biological Weapons appeals to the public of Kazakhstan to launch a protest campaign against such plans for the placement of such facilities and demands the immediate elimination of the CRL in Almaty and the conduct of research at the Research Institute of the republic under the programs of the Pentagon.

In addition, the Coalition appeals to all communist and workers' parties, leftist forces and trade unions to respond to this threat and make statements to the authorities of Kazakhstan, as well as to voice these facts to the deputies of their parliaments.

The Coalition will also conduct a constant information and political campaign against these intentions and explain the essence of such projects implemented for imperialist and aggressive purposes of waging war by other means.

No to American military biological laboratories in Kazakhstan and Central Asia!

United Communist Party of Georgia

Socialist Movement of Kazakhstan

Socialist Party of Latvia

Communist Party of Pakistan