A few days ago, in his address to the nation, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev remarked that “the international community is going through troubled times today”. He did not go into the reasons, noting only, with some bitterness, that “many countries are making absurd, invented accusations against each other, and the behind-the-scenes confrontation between them is growing”.
Tokayev’s reproaches, one assumes, were aimed at the wider world beyond Central Asia, a world where wars rage and conflicts break open, in the Middle East, in Europe, in Africa… The Kazakh president has no intention of healing the whole world. He proposes to concentrate on his own country’s problems: to start, as the saying goes, by repairing and cleaning the stairwell of one’s own building. He has launched a “People’s Construction” drive in Kazakhstan and is ready to build new infrastructure, to lay roads and to build airports, power stations, hospitals…
Much the same network schedule for renewal, if you like, is taking shape across Central Asia as a whole.
Now, 35 years after the collapse of the USSR, I would be careful about calling the region post-Soviet. The five states that became independent are asserting their sovereignty. Most of their elites were not ready for independence and for separation from the Russian metropole. I remember how Muratbek Imanaliev, Kyrgyzstan’s former foreign minister, by then retired, once recalled: “You in Russia threw us out in 1991 like fish onto the rocks: survive as best you can!” And yet they survived…
But the losses were many.
I will never forget those times. Practically all of these 35 years, most of my adult life, have been bound up with Central Asia. That said, I had been travelling to Tashkent on business trips to the Sredazelektroapparat plant since 1979. In the autumn of 1992, as part of Boris Yeltsin’s press pool, I flew with him to one of the first CIS summits, in Bishkek. In neighbouring Tajikistan a ferocious civil war was flaring up. There was a real threat that it would spread to neighbouring Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan… Askar Akayev, then president of Kyrgyzstan, proposed that his country be given a peacekeeping mandate. The decision was Yeltsin’s, since Russia’s 201st division was stationed in Tajikistan. He waved his hand: go ahead, try… Vice-President Felix Kulov was given the task of assessing the situation next door. I talked my way into going with him. After that trip I understood why the painter Vereshchagin, who took part in the tsarist army’s campaigns in Central Asia in the 19th century, called his famous painting of a mountain of human skulls “The Apotheosis of War”…
Later I ended up in Afghanistan, looking for the camps of Tajik refugees. The sight of endless cemeteries, with poles stuck in the ground and triangular flags fluttering on them in the wind, is etched in my memory for ever. A couple of years later civil war broke out in Afghanistan itself, and the world learned about the Taliban. I had to go there even more often than to Central Asia… Then, in 1999–2000, came the incursion of Islamist fighters from Afghanistan through Tajikistan into Kyrgyzstan (the Batken events).
And then came 11 September 2001, the worst terrorist attacks in modern history: the strikes on the Twin Towers in New York, behind which stood Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda, whom the Taliban had sheltered in Afghanistan.
As early as 7 October 2001 (the world would have reason to remember that date again 22 years later), the US and its allies launched a counter-terrorism operation in Afghanistan, Enduring Freedom, which lasted 20 years.
Once again Central Asia found itself at the centre of the world’s attention, having in effect become the rear base of the American operation.
There were armed border clashes within the region too, and a short war between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in 2022. The region was in turmoil for almost the entire first quarter of this century, and for a third of the last one, when Central Asia was part of the Soviet empire. Over these years the ruling elites have changed everywhere except Tajikistan, and the personal feuds between the leaders of neighbouring countries, a legacy of their shared life under the Kremlin’s patronage, have died down.
Central Asia, to use the words of Prince Gorchakov (Russia’s foreign minister under Alexander II), spoken a few years after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1854, is beginning to collect itself. Its understanding of its place in world history, as a single geopolitical space, is taking shape at first as consultative meetings of the leaders of the five states, joined this year by Azerbaijan. What makes it hard to define a Central Asian identity is the need to balance the interest that world powers and blocs take in the region: the US, China, Russia, the European Union, NATO… Individual Central Asian countries belong to groupings and alliances that compete with each other for influence in the region and for its resources. The list alone is impressive: the CIS, the CSTO, the EAEU, the SCO, the OTS, the OIC… I would also point to formats for the region’s dealings with the outside world such as C5+ (the US, Russia, the EU, Japan…)
The countries of the region that were once part of the USSR now have to search carefully for ways of distancing themselves from any involvement in the military conflict Russia started with Ukraine, a country that has its own relations with Central Asia.
A telling sign of this distinct view, for example of their own part in the CSTO, came a few days ago from Marat Syzdykov, Kazakhstan’s permanent representative to the organisation: “membership of the CSTO does not mean that states are obliged to take identical foreign-policy positions on every international crisis”.
New and difficult circumstances, in which the Central Asian countries, together and individually, have to defend their identity, are also arising from the well-known growth of Iranian and Turkish influence in the region.
In these conditions, the arrival of a separate media outlet that will, I hope, honestly focus on what is happening in Central Asia and analyse the region’s problems looks like a real intellectual and professional challenge. Winning the attention of a broad public, spoiled by clip-style news and a black-and-white picture of reality, will take considerable patience and serious resources, as well as political independence.
Good luck, Mezon!