VIEW: Central Asia’s identity crisis —Dr Azmat Hayat Khan

Russia views Central Asia as its backyard, but it has no interest in cleaning up this particular bit of it. Moscow is not enthused that the provisional government in Kyrgyzstan, for all its many failings, talks of building a multiparty democracy

Until the Soviet period, Central Asia had never been possessed by Czarist Russia. The various states and entities of the region had long consisted of loose and shifting alliances of tribal groupings. The names attached to them did not represent nations but rather were drawn from several key tribal designations like Uzbek, Kirghiz, etc. Only a rough effort was made to include a major part of each tribal grouping within the boundaries of each new republic. In fact, they were created primarily as a mechanism of divide and rule. The boundaries were not clearly fixed and all of Central Asia was divisible into two primary culture types, namely a nomadic culture, which comprises particularly the Turkoman, Kazakhs and Kirghiz, and the urban culture, based on twin pillars of Turkic governmental administrative and military institutions and the Persian literary and artistic culture.

Today, with the collapse of the empire, the question of identity ranks high on the list of critical questions the Central Asian Republics (CARs) are facing. The vast majority of CARs is, of course, Muslim and the Muslim identity has been paramount for well over a millennium. Ethnically, they are Turks, i.e. members of a broader ethnic group that stretches from Yugoslavia to Mongolia, dominated today by the dynamic state of Turkey.

Thus, most Central Asians have a reason to be confused by the overlapping aspects that one’s identity may take, many of which have become politically permissible only in the past few years. These problems do not leave leaders much time to think about the longer-range course of Central Asian development. Thus, the process seems to be developing organically rather than by any blueprint drawn up at leisure by visionary statesmen and thinkers.

Today, the power elites of these republics have much to lose from any willing cession of national sovereignty to other republics. Over time, further grievances, both economic and ethnic, have developed among them, stemming in part from the arbitrary borders that split ethnic groups among these republics. While minority-majority frictions within any single republic further aggravate the tension, rivalry exists for leadership among the republics, particularly between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. And the smaller republics fear the influence of the ethnically and culturally powerful Uzbeks as well as the economic power of the Kazakhs.

It was because of these very underlying reasons that large-scale riots broke out in the small Central Asian state Kyrgyzstan, in which tens of thousand of opposition supporters took to the streets storming big government buildings and eventually taking the presidential building and parliament in April this year. In southern Kyrgyzstan, two well-armed communities, Kyrgyz and Uzbek, live in close proximity, angry and scared. The crisis took the shape of riots and consequently the interim government was put under pressure mainly by the supporters of the ex-president, causing a lot of Uzbeks to flee to Uzbekistan.

A few days prior to the crisis in Kyrgyzstan, Turkey hosted the summit of a regional organisation dedicated to increase security in Asia, including representatives from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, which was overshadowed by the flotilla crisis. The recent crisis in Kyrgyzstan is testimony to the absence of Turkey in this critical geography. However, Turkish experts who monitor the region closely knew that a bigger crisis was coming in that ex-Soviet republic. Perhaps people feel that a power vacuum in a country that few people could find on the map is no big deal, but they were proved wrong.

Observing that the situation in Kyrgyzstan is tense, especially along the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border, the US is in touch with several countries in the region including Russia and sees it as an emerging humanitarian crisis in this Central Asian republic.

Washington is obsessed with Afghanistan, and though the Americans have a major base in Kyrgyzstan at Manas, they seem disinclined to do very much. They may have given up hope for the base, but they are clearly not interested in getting involved with Kyrgyzstan’s police and military, which they seem to regard as feckless at best.

Russia views Central Asia as its backyard, but it has no interest in cleaning up this particular bit of it. Moscow is not enthused that the provisional government, for all its many failings, talks of building a multiparty democracy. Kyrgyzstan does not have the abundance of natural resources that make its neighbours so attractive or ‘strategic’ to the outside world.

Kyrgyzstan is a major stop on the drug road from Afghanistan. Much of Afghanistan’s opiates are trucked and flown in to the south of Kyrgyzstan. The chances are, in fact, that drug dealers have been active in the violence. Much of the drugs move straight to Russia, which already has an enormous problem both with drugs and intravenously transmitted HIV/AIDS, and to China, which is developing the same problem.

Southern Kyrgyzstan is also a transit route for another commodity the West fears most — the Islamist fighters. They move to and from Afghanistan, on their way to Uzbekistan just across the border, but also to Western Europe. It is already a comfortable stop along their long march. A country without a government will make for an even friendlier environment.

The water problem in the CARs is also quite severe. These states inherited the water resources of the Aral Basin, which is an arid and semi-arid area, with low rainfall, especially limited in downstream countries. The region suffers tensions over water use between the upstream countries of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and their downstream neighbours Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Afghanistan is also an upstream country for the region. The region’s stress is likely to worsen, if Afghanistan’s internal political and military conflict diminishes and the country begins to develop.

The CARs are currently undergoing a period of extraordinarily rapid and profound change. In many republics there is a more open press, several political parties have formed and all are embarked on a gradual transition from a command administrative economy to a free market. The CARs are also undergoing a special identity crisis. These republics are, therefore, likely to experience even more profound change and dislocation than most other regions of the old Soviet Union.

Independence came entirely unexpectedly for these republics, leaving them unprepared to cope with the new problems created by independence and the need for new policies in nearly every area of life.

The writer is vice chancellor, University of Peshawar, and former director of Area Study Centre, University of Peshawar