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The New Great Game? Russia, China and Central Asia

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Throughout the Gorbachev years and before, the Soviet Union’s five Central Asian Republics (otherwise known as the -stans) were the strongest supporters of the Soviet Union.  When the collapse came, they were also the least prepared for independence politically or economically.  Prior to their forced assimilation into the Russian Empire in the 19th century, they had been Turkic or Persian speaking Muslim khanates with all that they entailed.

As part of the Soviet Union, a kind of modernization was brought to the region.  Women were freed of the veil – sometimes forcibly - and required to go to school.   They still, however, often produced large families – and when the Soviets sought “hero” mothers with 14 or so children to deify, the authorities turned to the Central Asians because few, if any Russians, Slavs, Balts or Moldovans, met the numeric requirements.

Meanwhile, Moscow used Central Asians as wartime cannon fodder and conscript brigades were sent to repair Moscow’s streets, water and sewer systems. Stalin divided the khanates into republics fractionalizing the ethnicities according to the best divide and rule policies of the time – an historic fact of life that continues to prove an irritant to amicable relations among and within the republics thereby causing friction and instability domestically and providing a convenient way for Russians and others to manipulate the five largely authoritarian countries to their advantage.   

What is perhaps less generally known is that by the 1970s the Soviets regularly transferred wealth from the European parts of the Union to Central Asia to keep the Central Asians materially satisfied so that the Russians and other Slavs could continue to rule the vast region and its resources unchallenged.  They also controlled the republics through a "second in command" system (namely by placing a Central Asian to the top position and a ethnic Russian as deputy.)

Furthermore, for the most part, the Soviets kept the Central Asians isolated.  Strict travel and emigration restrictions meant that they had little contact with the West, could not establish residency in the prestige cities of Moscow and Leningrad and their only bases for comparison – if they had them at all – were India, Pakistan and Afghanistan – countries most directly to their south.

Of the Central Asian republics, only Kazakhstan has produced substantial petroleum.  So it’s no surprise that today this republic remains the richest of the five. And by 1991, it’s quite likely that a majority of the republic’s population was Slavic – if not Russian – despite what the then census claimed.

The other Central Asian republics had basically been caravan stops on the ubiquitous Silk Road with multiple branches that ran from eastern China to Istanbul from the Middle Ages onward although Uzbekistan's cotton crop was prized within the Soviet Union itself.    

"Voting Against Freedom"

In Joshua Kucera’s article, “Voting Against Freedom,” in the Winter 2013 Wilson Quarterly, the author seeks to answer the question as to why democracy has failed in the former Soviet Union – with the exception of the Baltic Republics and Moldova – and criticizes the Clinton State Department and Obama Administration for pretending that democracy building there remains a realistic goal for US foreign policy. 

SYRIA: WHY RUSSIA AND CHINA ARE APPLYING THE BRAKES

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

From any normal human point of view, the disinclination of Russia and China to enthusiastically join efforts to restrain Bashar Assad from his slaughter fest is incomprehensible.  So far as I can tell, not even the most horrified foreign leaders are eager to put boots on the ground or even to provide the degree of assistance that Libyan rebels received, but China and Russia are not ready for serious jaw-boning, either. Nor have they joined the chorus suggesting that Assad and his family might seek a cozy retirement site. If recently leaked emails are authentic, the Assads would settle for nothing less than world class luxury aka life among the global 1%.  Bribing the unjust with chateaux leaves a very bad taste in the mouth, but it’s a time honored way to dislodge tyrants with minimal loss of life.

Meanwhile, what a bonus for the enablers!  While supporting a brutal dictatorship, China and Russia  masquerade as global  good citizens upholding long understood principles of international law.

Yes, a state is allowed to protect itself from most civil unrest and to defend itself from external threat. But only up to a point, in each case. 

The Assad regime claims to be restoring peace and stability by neutralizing “armed gangs” beholden to outside forces. When restoring order requires the scale of destruction we’ve seen in Homs, including day-after-day blanket shelling of residential areas followed by the systematic house-to-house slaughter of survivors, it’s probably safe to say the regime  has lost its legitimacy.  At this point what’s labeled unrest more closely resembles revolution, To date, in Syria, nearly 10,000 people have been killed, and yet unarmed civilians continue to take to the streets in their thousands at the risk of being picked off by snipers stationed on roof tops. Individual soldiers and even whole units of the army have joined the rebels.  So have some high ranking officers and even a minister in the Assad government.  It seems a shame that many more people will have to die before Bashar finally admits that his day at the top is over.

Yes, external meddling in the internal affairs of a country is normally to be deplored and resisted.  The sovereignty argument has always made considerable sense because international neighbors, if bigger and stronger, tend to be greedy and aggressive. So it might be argued that China and Russia are taking the high road in respecting Syria’s sovereignty.  However, the genocides and other brutalities of the twentieth century have given rise to an important sovereignty-trumping principle. It is known as the “responsibility to protect,” which means that rulers do not have carte blanche in terrorizing their own citizens. When external interference prevents internal massacre, it is not judged to be a classic invasion of sovereignty. The Assad regime, it would seem, has set itself up for some meddling, to put it mildly.

Unfortunately for the rebels, Syria is not Libya.  Syria is a heavily populated country.  It is well institutionalized and the regime controls all subordinate centers of power, including a very large army officered  by members of the minority Alowite sect to which the Assads belong.  

This brings us to the problem of minorities in Syria, most of whom, it's argued, continue to support the secular-minded  Assad regime.  Syrian Christians have no doubt noted that the Coptics in Egypt fared better under Mubarak than they seem to be doing now.  Alowites may fear the sort of retalitory maltreatment that Sunnis are presently suffering in Iraq.  The Asad regime may be brutal, but it is an equal opportunity oppressor, which is a grudging way of recognizing its relative tolerance for minorities.  The U.S. Constitution's  Bill of Rights protects minorities from the tyrrany of the majority.  As the aftermath of the Arab spring indicates, tolerance doesn't always come automatically with democracy.

Minorities' not unfounded fear of repression gives some altruistic cover to the Chinese and Russian tenderness toward the Assad regime, but other motives for their behavior are no doubt more persuasive.  Neither country is governed by figures who find it convenient to respect the will of the people.  Russia’s Vladimir Putin maintains his hold on power by manipulating elections, curbing the media, jailing opponents and breaking up demonstrations before they get too large and enthusiastic.  China tolerates absolutely no debate or street activity at all.  What’s more, both regimes rigorously suppress the political and cultural demands of their ethnic and religious minorities, especially those who happen to form majorities in ancestral territories with historic claims to independence.  Like Homs, Chechnya was ravaged to keep it Russian; brutality keeps it Russian.  Suppression of protest over cultural genocide in Tibet is so complete that an increasing number of monks have resorted to setting themslves aflame, although Tibetan Buddhism does not encourage such acts.  Meanwhile, Beijing floods Tibet with Han Chinese in order to reduce Tibetans to a minority in what was once their own country.  (The Soviets did the same in the Baltic states, which has led to many complications for the post-Communist governments in those countries.) 

Freedom of speech?  Freedom of assembly?  Freedom to chose one’s leadership in free and fair elections? Syrians want these freedoms.  If China and Russia acknowledge the validity of Syrians’ desires, how can they continue to deny them to the people within their own national boundaries?

Afghanistan, the U.S. and Attila the Hun

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Goths.  Vandals.  Huns.  I bet you  experienced a twinge of distaste as your eyes passed over those names.  That’s not surprising.  They were enemies of Rome, and our sources for the history of the period are Roman.  I’d be willing to bet that the same nose-wrinkling occurs when you encounter a reference to the Taliban. 

Back in the fifth century A.D.  Rome was an over-extended status quo power (divided into Eastern and Western wings) on the defense against the resurgent and/or newly arrived peoples on its periphery.  The crux: too many challenges, not enough divisions.  The Vandals had seized half of North Africa, including Carthage.  The Goths were in control of much of what’s now Spain and more.  The Huns, or at least a formidable branch of them, had settled into the Hungarian steppe.  Settled is the operative word.  They were no longer nomadic.  They were trading with their more powerful neighbors and, up to a point,  they were often happy to accept tribute in gold instead of wiping out populations.  Not that they wouldn’t go on a rampage if crossed.     

Christopher Kelly, author of The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome, calls the Huns’ emphasis on tribute a “protection racket.” Think of it as a money-making scheme not so different from the extortions of many post-ideological  insurgent groups today.  Threatened entities pay up to ward off death and destruction, thus strengthening and emboldening the very forces they fear. (The Huns' racket is also reminiscent of the process by which U.S.-hired contractors and sub-contractors pay Taliban units for safe passage.  The supplies reach our troops, but the enemy gets the funds to buy countervailing armaments.)

At any rate, Rome had serious problems.  Bad enough they had in the Huns a formidable enemy.  Worse, the Roman leadership clung to a cliched, mythologized  image of the enemy.  Kelly shows how the Hun descriptors used by an influential late 4th century A.D.  Roman historian derive from the fanciful evocations of the Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BCE.) and, for that matter, Homer’s Odyssey (9th-8th century BCE).  To simplify: barbarians are beasts or monsters.  Huns are barbariens.  Ergo....

Unfortunately, there are no written records in the Hunnic language, which, even as a spoken tongue, is extinct.  But one Priscus was sent from Constantinople on an embassy to Attila’s court in 449 A.D.  Based on his experiences, Priscus wrote A History of Attila in eight volumes. ( It was published too late to do any good strategically.)  Thanks to mindlessly brutal pruning in the tenth century, only 35 fragments of the old manuscript survive to our times, but what’s left, according to Kelly, allows us a glimpse of Attila’s capital and court at the time of the end game, not long before the so-called barbarian invasions reduced the Western Roman empire to a peninsular affair with borders not so different from modern Italy’s.

As I read Kelly’s conscientious revisionist portrait of Attila, trying to keep all the wars, battles and personalities straight, I found my view of Attila transformed.  I also found myself thinking of the amorphous war in Afghanistan and the fact that it’s only one of the wars the U.S. is waging, overtly or covertly, against militant Islam. Like Rome’s, America's efforts lack strategic coherence and sustainability .  The U.S. doesn't have enough armies or fractions of armies to operate, simultaneously, in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, to say nothing of the mess involving Israel and the war that is likely to erupt in southern Sudan when the referendum on independence for the South is tallied.  Like Rome, we rely on more or less unsavory proxies and more or less unwilling allies to deal with a protean enemy, and still we must extract troops from one shakily controlled locale to reinforce another. 

The U.S. isn’t poor.  It’s still the richest country in the world.  Ditto Rome back then.  But as Rome was acquiring and consolidating its empire, the world was changing.  Long before Attila became leader of the Huns on the Hungarian steppe,  Rome was on the defense in every quarter.  Rome's armies had become border police. Tribes that had been pushovers in earlier times had acquired new technologies, more sophisticate tactics, more worldly leaders, more ambitious goals, etc., and they had begun a pushback  Inch by inch, mile by mile, river by river, Rome’s subjugated peoples were reclaiming their lands and freedom.  Attila, the alert and wily leader of a lately rooted, originally nomadic people, was one such leader.  The arrows in his quiver included imaginative diplomacy as well as brutal applications of the age-old scorched earth policy.  Sometimes he was Rome’s ally.  Sometimes he was Rome’s antagonist.  He was a master of surprise, ambiguity and unpredictability, according to Kelly. His intelligence was always very very good.  Need I say that Taliban leadership isn't so bad either?

Naturally, since I was already reading about Rome when the now infamous Rolling Stone article about the runaway general hit the internet, I couldn’t help thinking how poorly President Barak Obama had handled the necessary dismissal of his own insubordinate general in Afghanistan. 

Obama,  foolishly, underplayed the constitutionally-important subordination issue by accusing McChrystal of “divisiveness” vis-à-vis administration policy.  On a pragmatic level, whatever the pretext, the dismissal served his purpose: he got rid of a general who wasn’t sympatico.  This is every president’s prerogative. Yet, in the very next breath, and then repeatedly, Obama explicitly and very unwisely re-committed himself to a failed—or at least badly applied—policy.  I can understand the politics here.  Attempting to appear steadfast in order to neutralize  enemies  who persist in portraying him as a backboneless wimp, Obama embraced a foolishly short-sighted rigidity instead, welding himself to a policy he will have to modify in the not too distant future.   What’s more, by avoiding the trap set by one bunch of  Republicans, he fell afoul of another Republican critique: being too transparent to the enemy.  He'd already set a date certain for initiating withdrawal.  Now he's made a public proclamation of strategy, which could put him into a strait jacket domestically.  Worse, as  Attila could have admonished him, he's told the enemy exactly what he plans to do.   McChrystal made this mistake, too.  The Taliban have had months and months to prepare for the promised American campaign in Kandahar. 

According to Kelly, the Romans were abysmally ignorant of their opponents.  Americans, meanwhile, scratch their heads and wonder what on earth those Afghans want.  As if Afghans were beasts and monsters with minds inaccessible to noble creatures like us! 

Let me help a little.  I think Priscus would approve.  Using a combination of ordinary fellow feeling, gleanings from journalists’ interviews with Afghans and an awareness of Muslim texts about governance, I reach the conclusion that  Afghans want three things. Security.  Justice and the rule of law.  Honest administration and policing.  Any government that delivers these three desiderata will be supported.  In fact, because of their reputation for honesty and keeping order, the Taliban were welcomed when they first marched into Kabul.  As we know, they muffed that golden opportunity.     Hamid Karzai, unfortunately, does not meet any of those three criteria, which is why Afghans do not rally to the government.  They are truly between a rock and a hard place.

Oh, yes.   Afghans want something else: they want a purely Afghan government.  American troops can learn Pashtu or Dari.  They can say “pretty please” as they demand to search a house.  But the Americans and their allies are a foreign occupation.  Romans were also renowned for their engineering skills and administrative abilities.  They kept the peace. Coopted elites prospered.  But, as Kelly shows,  the Goths, the Vandals and the Huns along with many smaller tribes kicked them out as soon as they could. 

 

Turkey and Armenia: Settling Differences not Scores

By Patricia H. Kushlis

When all is said and done, it took less than six weeks of tough quiet negotiations under the watchful eyes and steady hands of experienced Swiss mediators for the Turkish and Armenian governments to sit down and hammer out certain differences that had been festering for years between the two contentious neighbors.  Some would argue the antagonisms had been poisoning Black Sea waters for nearly a century.

Will it be smooth sailing from here on in?  No.  Certainly not. This is already evident.   But the agreement between the two protagonists signed on October 10, 2009 in Zurich is an important first step.

 Sometime last year each government must have decided that it was in its own self-interest to try to settle outstanding differences with the other rather than continue the feud ad infinitum ala Hatfields and McCoys to their mutual disadvantage. 

 The accord which the two parties signed at the University of Zurich establishes diplomatic relations between the two countries for the first time in nearly 100 years - with the hope of reopening the border that the Turks closed in 1993 and ending a century of acrimony over a bloody past.

In concrete terms, the agreement confirms the border established in 1921 between Turkey and Russia as the border between today’s Turkey and Armenia and sets up regular political consultations between the foreign ministries of Turkey and Armenia.

The agreement also has the support of the major international parties interested in seeing that a rapprochement works.

In fact, the way the signing ceremony transpired, the event itself seemed almost like a shot-gun wedding with the outside “guarantor” powers present to ensure the ceremony actually took place. Foreign Ministers from the US, Russia, France and the EU were all in attendance.  For the agreement to become legal, however, it still needs the approval of both Turkish and Armenian parliaments.

And despite the noise on the streets from the ultra-nationalists on both sides intent upon derailing it, this minimalist framework is expected – fingers crossed - to obtain the necessary parliamentary approvals.  This is mandatory for it to become legal.

Tit-for-tat diplomacy

Yes, there’s lots more that needs to happen.  At the top of the list are the thorny issues of Armenian troops still stationed in neighboring Azerbaijan near Nagorno-Karabakh – an Armenian enclave in the middle of this Turkic speaking, oil-rich, Muslim Caucasian neighbor and the opening of the border between Turkey and Armenia which the Turks closed in retaliation for the Armenian invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh in 1993.  The resolution of these two contentious issues – the Turks say – is inseparable.  This is known as tit-for-tat diplomacy.

Keeping Georgia On Our Mind

By Asbed Kotchikian, Guest Contributor

Asbed Kotchikian is a lecturer at the Global Studies Department at Bentley University specializing in the politics of identity, foreign policy as well as political processes in the Middle East and the South Caucasus. He frequently travels to both regions (most recently in July 2009).

Two weeks ago, Tbilisi announced its withdrawal from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) over a year after the war between Russia and Republic of Georgia. The CIS was created on December 8, 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union to “ease” the separation of the 13 republics (the Baltic countries refused to join) and provide Russia with a new vehicle to keep its cultural, economic political and military oversight over its former “colonies.”  In other words, the formation of the CIS retained 12 non-Russian republics in Russia’s sphere of influence.

Not so Recent Background

Georgia’s enrollment in the CIS was not a decision made under “normal” circumstances. Thus in 1994 (the year Georgia’s then President Eduard Shevardnadze signed the agreement with Russia that brought Georgia into the CIS), the followers of the ousted Georgian president Zviad Gamsakhurdia were gaining ground in a civil war that had threatened to throw Georgia into an abyss of failed statehood. Not long after the signing of the CIS treaty, the Georgian army began to gain ground against the Zviadist rebels. Soon thereafter, Russian “peacekeepers” landed in western Georgia to help quell the rebellion and consolidate Shevardnadze’s authority.

Georgia’s entry into the CIS came with tremendous hesitation and mistrust. From the Georgian perspective, the CIS was nothing more than a new version of the Russian attempt to colonize the “near abroad” (the term that many Russians used to designate the former Soviet and now independent republics). However, in the face of imminent collapse of the country into a disorganized and dysfunctional entity, accepting Russian protection became the only way out for the continuation of Georgia as a viable state. This “alliance” – which from the Georgian standpoint - was not based on free choice, was an important reason for the subsequent tension between the two countries, since it provided Russia with a mechanism and the tools to limit Georgia’s attempts to conduct a foreign policy distinct from that of Moscow.

Russia also retained a heavy military presence in Georgia (under the guise of CIS peace-keeping forces) acting as a buffer between Georgia forces on the one hand and separatist Abkhaz and South Ossetians on the other. In 1994, then Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev stated that “the Russian military presence in Georgia was vital to ensure a stabilization of the situation, to protect the rights of Russian speakers, and to help Georgia establish its own armed forces.”

Behind the “August war”

On August 7, 2008, Tbilisi embarked on a large scale military operation to retake the breakaway and unrecognized republic of South Ossetia.

Turkey and the Armenian Question: That was then, this is now

By Patricia H. Kushlis

On Friday afternoon April 24, traffic was slower than normal on Washington's Massachusetts Avenue in front of the Turkish Embassy. Across the street, some 25-50 demonstrators waved Armenian flags, shouted angry slogans and held up home-made placards demanding that the Turkish Government recognize as genocide the massacre of Armenians that began in 1915. It was as if those tragic historic events had happened just yesterday. I saw two Greek – not Cypriot - flags in the smallish crowd but no reasons stated for Greek participation.

The Armenian opposite numbers stood on the sidewalk in front of the Turkish Embassy waving Turkish flags and carrying signs proclaiming that what had happened to the Armenians was part of a larger civil war occurring in the then crumbling Ottoman Empire and not a deliberate campaign by the Ottoman rulers or the Turks, the Empire’s successors, to eradicate all Armenians.

Last year the US Congress came within inches of championing the Armenian view on this still firestorm of an issue.

That was last year