Central Asia: quiet retreat along the road to nowhere?

By PHK

If you haven’t thought about what’s happening in Russia or Central Asia lately, maybe its time. I realize the mess the Bush administration has gotten us into in Iraq takes center stage – and it will - until the troops come home at least, but there are a number of disquieting things occurring in what is still called the former Soviet Union here in the US and referred to as the Near Abroad in the Russian Federation.

Years ago when I was educational exchanges officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, I got to know a number of our American researchers, professors and students who were in the country to conduct research or teach on the official US-Soviet exchange program. Nancy Lubin was one of those graduate students. She spent nearly ten months in Tashkent researching her dissertation on labor and politics in Uzbekistan which Princeton University Press and Macmillan (London) later published as a book. It was difficult living but she was fluent in Russian and had a passable knowledge of Uzbek. She was also as smart, savvy and able to con anyone into anything then – well almost anything – as she is now. And she knew how the Soviet system worked during the waning Brezhnev years, just as she knows how post-Soviet Central Asia operates today.

For several years after the book came out, she told me, the Soviets refused her visa applications to return to the country. She discovered that her name had been put on a list of “bourgeois falsifiers” because of the book’s contents which, of course, meant that in reality she had accurately described what was happening in the country’s soft underbelly.

My husband and I were some of the very few people assigned to the Embassy the year Nancy lived in Tashkent who actually ventured that far away from Moscow. The trip took six hours or so by plane from the confines of one of the capital’s several airports and the Soviet imposed noose of Moscow’s Outer Ring Road. Tashkent was one of the strangest places I ever visited during my 27 year plus Foreign Service career. An earthquake in the 1960s had destroyed much of the city’s historic center. In its place, the Soviets had erected one of their monstrously ugly, God-awful gray concrete space platform style office complexes.

And I don’t think Nancy will ever let me forget the large can of army ration chili I brought for her birthday party. It really was pretty awful, but in a society where food was in short supply, it saved the day, and the party was fun. Anyway, Tashkent may even rank right up there at the top of my “chalk that one down to experience” list along with flying Air Burma from Rangoon to Pagan and points north a few years earlier.

Nancy became a long time friend and we have subsequently kept in touch. So when she was recently here in New Mexico and spoke on Central Asia, I made sure not to miss her presentation. We also had an opportunity to talk privately.

I won’t go into many specifics, but I’d like to highlight just a few of the thoughtful points she made earlier this week about the current situation in this unsettled and dangerous part of the world.

• Now 14 years after the break up of the Soviet Union, none of the five Central Asian countries or the “stans” have turned out as the US had hoped. Instead of becoming friendly democracies like the three small northern European Baltic countries that are clearly on the road to somewhere, all Central Asian countries have grown increasingly autocratic albeit to varying degrees despite the $6-8 billion in aid that the US, the World Bank and other western institutions have poured into them over the years.

• For the most part, except in oil and gas rich Kazakhstan, the poor - particularly in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan - have become even poorer than they were under the Soviets, as the gap between rich and poor has become massive. Their bad health care systems and access to education have become even worse, and non-existent in the case of Turkmenistan. Organized and systematized corruption reigns and has become the biggest obstacle to any hope for reform – but for details, you’ll need to wait for her new book to come out.

• Islam was and is a force in Central Asia. The Soviets had co-opted Islam which they controlled from Moscow thereby diffusing the potential of Islam as a political movement. In 1993, a survey Nancy conducted of more than 2000 Central Asians showed lots of support for Islam, but it also demonstrated that few Central Asian Muslims knew what it meant to be Muslim or to live in an Islamic state. Today, Islam is becoming a more significant political force than before.

• Today, Central Asian relations with the US are at an all-time low. Part of the reason began a couple of years ago with the success of the “colored revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia that drew large popular support from peoples ready for change. The Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan that followed was not as well planned or supported. The Central Asian autocrats – as did Russia’s Vladimir Putin - saw these revolutions-from-within supported by western powers-from-without as, not surprisingly, threatening to their own futures. US assistance programs to local NGOs for democracy-building became viewed as sinister plots. Whereas earlier public opinion data had shown that the Central Asian populations were open to change, the anti-western attitudes of the elites have now trickled down to the people.

The turning point in Uzbekistan which had offered US basing rights in 2001 came with the Andijan riots last year when President Karimov ordered the Uzbek military to fire on the protesters. It would have been impossible for the US to turn a blind eye and when it didn’t, the Russians and Chinese came in and announced that everything was fine. The result: the US troops had to leave, the Russians signed a deal for a permanent military base and lots of investment and assistance, the Chinese offered the Uzbeks a $600 million deal, and all western NGOs have been closed or kicked out. The future does not look good.

• Meanwhile, perhaps because the U.S. never took the time to figure out how these societies and their politics operated, too much of our aid effort operated at cross-purposes. The results were counter-productive, lacked oversight and the US came across as arrogant and “very bright, but doesn’t play well with others.”

Map: Central Asia 2003, CIA - Perry Castenada Map Collection; Photo: William J. Kushlis, downtown Tashkent, April 1979.