Adiya Akhmer

Adiya Akhmer is a Reclaim Community Fellow and  founding member of Steppe Organization for Peace (STOP), an independent youth-led initiative aimed at addressing the legacy of nuclear testing in Qazaqstan. Adiya shares why she is passionate about nuclear justice.

“I learnt my family’s history of experiencing nuclear tests through stories. Reminiscing about her childhood, my grandaunt would tell me how families were asked to leave their houses, while children played outside with a fire mushroom in the background. She’d tell me how all the neighbors gathered in their small house, and how her father was injured by broken glass after the shakes.

If she hadn’t shared these moments with me, I would never have known the legacy my family carried through all these years. When I think about it now, as a grown-up myself, starting my own family, I see how important it is to share, to listen, to empathize, and to trust.

Trust used to bother me.

Nuclear-affected communities have experienced too many breaches of trust from those who never saw them as equals. Colonial practices that made nuclear weapons programs possible in the first place continue to this day in how survivors are treated and viewed, how much access they have to information and decision-making, and how their stories are told. After three years in the nuclear abolition and disarmament movement, I started to question how much of my own story I wanted the world to know.

Today, trust inspires me, too.

It takes courage to share your story, ask questions, pursue new knowledge, learn from others, and look for allies.

Over the past half a year, I’ve witnessed and experienced all of this through the Nuclear Truth Project's, Reclaim Community Fellowship. I’ve seen how trust can be created, nourished, and practiced from session to session. Most importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to engage in the shared work of creating safe, long-standing, and compact spaces for people (now friends!) who all carry their families’ and communities’ nuclear legacies into the work they do.

In the run-up to the TPNW RevCon, I think about what I’ll bring there.

My formal engagement with the global anti-nuclear movement started in 2023, at the 2nd MSP to the TPNW in New York. It was an unforgettable and overwhelming first-time experience that I had to process for a long time before I could understand what it meant to me, my family and my community.

Now, I feel much more grounded in my expertise, the messages I translate, and the environment I want to sustain. I want to learn about both civil society’s and States Parties’ reflections on the progress the Treaty has made since the adoption of the Vienna Action Plan: what has worked, what challenges remain, and how to address them.

I’d like to share the outcomes of Steppe Organization for Peace (STOP) research in Qazaqstan’s affected regions with nuclear frontline communities, academics, and States Parties. I aim to show support and empathy to Reclaim Fellows and allies, and to do my part to make UN spaces as safe and comfortable as I can. I’m eager to learn from different epistemic communities and build lasting relationships.

Though I expect the pace of this UN week to be even more hectic and overwhelming than before, I believe that our civil society, nuclear frontline communities and allies will make it feel warm and close to heart.”