The five countries shown in the maps below are all newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union. Geographically, they form what is loosely used to describe Central Asia. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and centrifugal force drove those countries on the periphery to demand and get their political independence from Russia. The entire area has a population of about 44 million people, with Uzbekistan the largest with 21 million, and Kazakhstan second, with 17.3 million They are also new members of The North Atlantic Cooperation Council. The Secretary General of NATO, Dr. Javier Solana visited these countries in March, 1997, presumably to discussed their new status as members of The North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NAAC). With the exception of Tajikistan, the people of these countries all speak a Turkic language, but they have difficulty understanding each other. Tajik, the language spoken is a dialect of Persian similar to Farsi and Dari. The people of Turkmenistan, for example, speak Turkmen, while the people of Kyrgyzstan speak Kirghiz. have their own variation. However, the official language is Russian. About 56 percent of the 17 million people in Kazakhstan speak Kazakh, but the language of inter-ethnic communication is Russian.

Tajikistan & Kyrgystan

 

Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan & Kazakhstan

Approximately the same linguistic mix exists in Uzbekistan. Before the collapse of the old Soviet Union, the Soviets ethnic tensions in Central Asia had their origins in Moscow. Large groups of Turkmen, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz were forced by the Soviets to move from one Central Asian republic to another. Uzbekistan, with its population of twenty-one million people suggests it may have the greatest potential of the five Central Asian republics to fill the role of political anchor in the region. President Islam Karimov has announced that October, 1997, was the 2500th anniversary of Khiva in Uzbekistan. Karimov was its president until a five-year term expired whereupon he authorized a referendum extending his term. Reports of the election were mixed. However, there has been no one publicly disagreeing with the administration's figures of a 99.6 percent vote approving the outcome. Karimov insisted he was committed to economic reform and democratic institutions. However, Karimov's plans for opening the country to democracy and foreign investment clashed with the Communist's fear of losing control of power. There is no independent press, protest meetings are forbidden, and opposition political parties were banned before the referendum vote. Efforts to diversify the cotton-based economy depended largely on foreign investment, but corruption and broken promises drove some foreign investors and deeply offended those entrepreneurs that chose to remain. The population has been secular in its orientation, and security police kept it that way by intimidating the mullahs and Islamic fundamentalists. Alcohol was freely available in the major cities of Tashkent, in the Uzbek capitol, Bukhara, and Khiva. Bukhara was different in at least one important area. It was a city regarded as holy by Nakshbandi Moslems. They represented the view that the Koran did not require others to adopt any particular religion. Its mullahs derive their faith from the Koran, but must preach tolerance and a peace. This order named after its 14th century founder, preaches an all-embracing form of Islam that abhors sectarianism and orthodoxy. It claims 40 million adherents in dozens of countries. When early Moslem armies invaded a city and began to kill women and children, Mohammad, the Nakshbandi order believes, stopped them. They are infidels, the soldiers said. However, Mohammad replied by saying the soldiers were once infidels themselves.

Music from nearby Tajikistan offers persuasive evidence of its culture. It was probably composed long before the ugly civil war within its borders in 1997. Music by Yulduz Usmanova sung in Uzbekistan offers another aspect of Central Asia's culture. The New York Times ran a story on Uzbek culture on December 8, 1997. Datelined Bukhara, its author offered a tantalizing glimpse of a culture that had all but disappeared. "The Silk Road, one of history's greatest trading routes, once traversed Central Asia and the caravans that passed through Bukhara and other cities, including Samarkand and Tashkent, left a rich cultural heritage. People here became expert in a wide variety of crafts. Men wore richly embroidered caftans, women covered themselves with jewelry, and girls collected handmade objects of beauty for their dowries."...An exhibition of 19th century Uzbek textiles was at San Francisco's deYoung Museum until March, 1998 when it opened in Washington.

During the 13th and 14th centuries, the Mongols, a nomadic and warlike people, ruled much of China and Central Asia. Genghis Khan, for example, captured entire cities sparing only the artists, artisans, and craftsmen. He killed the rest of the population, but the artists were sent to various areas and spent their lives creating silk pieces, tapestries, and even clothes. Museum experts have been doing detective work to locate the origins of this evidence of Central Asian culture.

13th Century Mongolian Tapestries

Anne Wardwell and James Watt were the researchers who unearthed at least one piece now on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is entitled "When Silk was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese textiles. In 1989, Mrs Wardwell acquired a 13th-century tapestry of gold and silk. It had images of winged lions with long tails looped around rosettes. A year later, another tapestry from the same period arrived at the museum. It was emblazoned with eagles, dragons and panthers which also had tails looped around rosettes. Mrs Wardwell knew she had solved the puzzle when they were seen together. One was woven by artists sent east, and the other by artists in the Iranian world. This finding supports the idea of migration by artists. Other pieces in the exhibition include some from Uzbekistan, a few from Tibet and some by Uighur artists from what is now Sinnliang. In his travels, Marco Polo carried pieces from these areas back to Venice, but his routes were known as the Silk Routes in the 13th century.

Kazakhstan is in no position to be the political anchor, even with its oil fields. There has been too much ethnic hostility that recently surfaced with the end of monolithic Communist control. The six million Russians in the republic, formerly the favored class, now face the hostility of a society dominated by Muslims.. Furthermore, Kazakhstan has serious pollution problems, obsolete technology, and not much experience in foreign markets. However, Kazakhstan has the oil, and in huge amounts. As a result, major western oil companies and Lukhoil of Russia and China's petroleum ministry were all pressing Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev to sign production agreements for oil. However, Russia lost this round. In October, 1997, Nazarbayev told Russian Prime Muinister, Victor Chernomyrdin that Kazakhstan would sign production sharing agreements with France's Total SA, Royal Dutch/Shell, a British Petroleum-Statoil alliance, Italy's AGIP SpA, and Mobil Corporation of the United States to develop some of its very valuable offshore oil fields. Russia has taken the position that the Caspian Sea is an inland lake, not a sea. Consequently, one of its littoral states cannot exploit resources that belong to all its littoral states. International law does not support this position. This so far unresolved dispute has already sent tremors through an $8 billion international oil consortium to the south, but on the Caspian Sea.

Since 1991 and the independence of some former Soviet republics, Russia has remained something of a big brother to most of these republics, such as Kazakhstan. As a result, Russia retains a strong presence in Central Asian states like Kazakhstan. It is obligated to Russia for access to Soviet-built pipelines to export their oil and gas. Russia lost some of this big brother status when, in 1997, it deployed Cossack troops along its border with Kazakhstan. It was an ugly reminder of Cossack colonization of the Kazakh steppes, attempting to move the borders of the old Tsarist empire to the detriment of the once-nomadic Kazakhs.

Tajikistan features civil war between two different Islamic groups and old-style Communism. Democracy seems unlikely in mountainous Tajikistan, and the civil war, every bit as savage as the war in Bosnia, seems without end. As recently as August 1997, there was no one capable of brokering a peace agreement. Originally, the fighting forced tens of thousands of Islam-led Tajiks to flee to Afghanistan. The winners carved Tajikistan into fiefs run by local war lords who allowed Emomali Rakhmonov to operate as the nominal leader of these war lords. He has no power of his own. Russian jets have intervened occasionally in this vicious civil war with no end in sight. Furthermore, every time there is an earthquake in the region, ordinary activities stop. In 1911, an earthquake in the Pamir Mountains occurred, and several cubic kilometers of the Mizkol Range slid down, burying the village of Osoi and damming the Murgob River Valley. Sarez Lake, created by this dam, is some sixty kilometers long. The disintegration of this dam would release a wall of water that would destroy everything on its way to Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Periodic plans to lower the water level or channel it in a benign direction have run out of money. A major earthquake would probably breach the dam and lead to destruction on a vast scale.

Both the Russian Tsars and the Soviet Union after 1921 confirmed Uzbekistan's position in Central Asia. The Russians elevated Tashkent to their military and administrative center soon after conquering it in 1865. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Stalin simply incorporated Uzbekistan into a Soviet republic. It was still the seat of Russia's military presence in Central Asia when the USSR collapsed in 1991. However, before 1991 Soviet rule had developed Uzbekistan's economy siting major plants for the production of aircraft, buses, and tractors, as well as refineries for oil from neighboring Turkmenistan. However, the real economic importance of these five republics is a solid base of natural resources of which oil and natural gas seem the most promising. Kazakhstan, for example, will soon be producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day developed by Chevron and other international oil companies in the Tenghiz field alone. In Turkmenistan, there are still enormous reserves of natural gas; some say in excess of 45 trillion cubic meters. Other natural resources of great importance to industry, such as gold, tungsten, and manganese are abundant in Uzbekistan. Agriculture is favored by weather suitable for cotton, and Uzbekistan has become one of the world's largest producers of this export commodity.

Saparmurad Niyazov is the Communist president of Turkmenistan and recently announced the construction of a natural gas pipeline into Iran. He won the presidency in 1992 unopposed . Niyazov has the unnerving habit of firing his trade ministers. Once an exporter of natural gas to Russia, Turkmenistan has been boxed in by that country. Russia closed down Turkmenistan's only pipeline to Eastern Europe, forcing Niyazov to sell gas to neighboring countries controlled by Russia. These countries, however, could not pay their bills in any convertible currency. Turkmenistan was left with over $1 billion in unpaid bills. The new pipeline to Iran won't help Turkmenistan for almost a year; money paid by Iran for gas must first be applied to the cost of the pipeline. Niyazov has never explained the details of the Iran pipeline; he relies instead on his own image machine to bolster his standing.

Chinese officials have claimed for years that the Tarim Basin in Sinkiang had vast oil reserves. They have now given up looking and worked out a deal with Kazakhstan. On August 1, 1997 Kazakhstan announced it had granted the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) the exclusive right to negotiate a contract to develop the Uzen oilfield. China is also talking about investing over $1 billion to build a 1,300mile pipeline to carry Kazakh oil to China. More controversially, it wants to send some of the oil across the Caspian Sea by tanker to Iran for onward delivery to Europe. China will have local problems with ethnic Uighurs in Sinkiang through which the pipeline would be built. Uighurs are a distinct ethnic group without a country. In this respect, they resemble the Kurds, and they are just as troublesome. Furthermore, Chinese attempts to put down rebellion may draw angry reactions from Uighur emigres. If Kazakhstan's government ignores Uighur feelings it might find itself the focus of Turkic wrath. Nursultan Nazarbaev, Kazakhstan's president, seems determined to move its capital city from Almaty to Akmola, Hardly anyone has shown much enthusiasm for this move to a climate in winter that's well below zero.

Almost in anticipation of China's agreement with Kazakhstan to develop the Uzen oilfield, the Clinton Administration announced it would drop its opposition to oil and natural gas pipelines. They ran through about 740 miles of Iran to Turkey, probably its port city of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. The date of this announcement was July 25, 1997 just days before the inauguration of Iran's new president, Mohammed Khatami, described by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as a "moderate." The Clinton Administration also said that shipping natural gas or oil through a part of Iran would not violate provisions of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act signed by Clinton in 1996. This seems a rather narrow interpretation of a law enacted to prevent Iran from benefiting Iran financially. The natural gas would come from Turkmenistan, and the oil would flow from wells in the Caspian Sea Basin.

Uzbekistan's rivers originate in the mountains of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, but the water is largely lost to irrigation and evaporation. The diversion of the waters of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for irrigation has caused the Aral Sea to shrink by almost half. The Aral Sea has become increasingly saline, and its waters have been polluted by chemical fertilizers and insecticides carried into it by feeder rivers.

Water and soil pollution in Uzbekistan were legacies of the Soviet occupation from 1924 to the present time.. Eventually, this spreading pollution caused serious environmental damage affecting the health of the Uzbek populace. In June, 1990, Uzbekistan declared that its own laws displaced those enacted by the Soviet Union and applied uniformly throughout it within all other Soviet republics. After 1991, opposition parties were allowed to organize but were later suppressed, and Islam Karimov was elected president in 1994 as chairman of the People's Democratic Party once controlled by Communists. In 1989, Karimov was First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party Central Committee. In 1995, the Secretary of Defense in Washington, William Perry visited Tashkent. He praised Uzbekistan as "an island of stability" in Central Asia. Its officials responded in kind by being the only Central Asian to back the American embargo against the sale of Russian nuclear reactors to Iran. Up to this point, the United States had treated Central Asia as an afterthought in terms of European security.

In 1997, the view from Washington has changed; five Central Asian countries are members of the second tier of states belonging to NATO. via the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic became associate members of NATO. Article 10 of the treaty establishing NATO permitted the addition of only European countries to NATO; Asian countries required a different status. They could be added as second tier states without amending the NATO treaty and asking the Senate to ratify the treaty as amended.

The Caspian Sea blocks pipelines from Turkmenistan to the west except via Iran. However, Russia takes the position that the Caspian Sea is not a sea at all, but a lake. As such, it must be jointly exploited by the individual countries along its shores. This position prevents Turkmenistan from excluding Iran or Russia from negotiations contemplating the sale of natural gas to Europe or Pakistan and India or at least through Russia to Europe. With consent from Moscow, Turkmenistan may tunnel under the Caspian Sea to ship gas to Turkey and eventually to the Mediterranean Sea, but only at a cost considered prohibitively high by Western oil companies that would be building the pipeline.

In February, 1997 Russia's Foreign Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, offered a compromise. He proposed dividing the Caspian Sea into zones. Azerbaijan, however, has refused to accept this proposal and maintained its position that the Caspian is a sea, not a lake. The United States supported this position. Presumably, Clinton brought this up when he met with Russia's Boris Yeltsin in March, 1997. Until the status of the Caspian Sea has been settled, oil and gas delivery by Turkmenistan to Europe is on hold. Kazakhstan has the same problem. It is one of the four countries with borders on the Caspian Sea. Iran and Russia are the other two. In June, 1997 a major American oil company announced it wanted to build a $2.3 billion pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The key to this deal was Afghanistan. It had to be at peace with those countries around it and peace had to exist within Afghanistan. For a few hours in June, these conditions existed. However, the Taliban extremists were again fighting each other. The opposition to the Taliban is made up of Uzbeks and another faction led by a leader of the Hazara people. Russia is not far from being the principal opposition to the pipeline from Turkmenistan. Moscow blocked natural gas exports from Turkmenistan to Europe, and not religious warfare within Afghanistan has blocked another route that would earn hard currency for Turkmenistan. Old warriors of the Soviet Union might have told the warring factions in Afghanistan how hopeless peace might be; the Soviet Union had forces in that country from 1980 to 1989 and retreated in defeat.

Tajikistan has had a civil war in the last three years. It has also experienced three changes of government during the same period (1994). The current president Emonmali Rakhmonov was elected to the presidency in November, 1994, yet he has been in power since 1992. Underlying the civil war are deeply rooted regional and clan-based animosities that pit one group primarily from a particular region against a secular and Islam-led opposition in another region. There seems to be no end in sight. Government and opposition representatives have held periodic rounds of United Nations-mediated peace talks. In September, 1994, government and opposition leaders agreed to a ceasefire. Russian-led peacekeeping forces are deployed throughout the country, and Russian border guards are stationed along the Tajik-Afghanistan border. In its westernmost region, Sinkiang an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China is keeping a wary eye on this civil war. It might spill over and stir up unwanted nationalism amongst those Uighurs living in China. It was noted earlier herein that Dr. Solana of NATO visited all of the five states listed in the title of this chapter, except for Tajikistan. NATO regarded that country as so involved in a civil war with Russian troops patrolling Tajikistan and its borders with Afghanistan that it could not be considered for membership in the North Atlantic Cooperation Council.

The forty states participating in the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) and other member countries of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) able and willing to contribute, were invited to join the NATO member states of the Partnership for Peace. Some twenty-six accepted and in most cases Individual Partnership Programs have been agreed and are being implemented. The extension of NATO programs into Asia occurred only because the former Soviet Union, now the Confederation of States (CIS) shed some newly independent states, and some states declared their independence from Russia but remained members of the confederation. Five of the forty new members were spun off from Russia in one way or another during or after 1991. They are: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Other former Russian states now members of NACC include Armenia, Belaurus, Georgia, Moldova, and Azerbaijan. This indirect expansion of NATO was severely criticized in Moscow as a move designed to further weaken Russia. President Yeltsin reluctantly agreed to this indirect expansion; he may have had no choice because of the weakness of Russian forces. Most of them had not been paid for months, and some of the soldiers wanted to be relieved of any obligation, i.e., conscription, to serve in the military. Active duty Russian troops were already serving in Tajikistan and Georgia as peacekeepers. Moscow did not have the funds to pay the others, except during intermittent periods when Moscow was driven to pay the armed forces.

The United Nations has followed an indirect route to peace in Georgia. It has an Observer Mission in Georgia with the tongue-twisting acronym of UNOMIG. This mission was originally established to verify the ceasefire agreement of July 27, 1993 between the Government of Georgia and the Abkhaz authorities After fighting broke out in September, 1993, the Mission was given an Interim Mandate by the Security Council. Finally, there was a new ceasefire in May, 1994. The peacekeeping Mission had new responsibilities. It was responsible for monitoring the separation of forces -- CIS and Abkhaz forces, verify that troops from either side to remain in the security zone, and to control the position of heavy military equipment. As of December 31, 1996 the Mission had personnel from twenty-two nations including the United States acting essentially as observers. They were also charged with the responsibility of maintaining the "territorial integrity of Georgia." The United Nations has elected to treat the fighting in Georgia as a civil war limited in scope. Georgia is a member of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. The NACC, however, has temporarily deferred to the United Nations mandate which is moving in the same direction as NACC, toward stability or peace.

Nuclear weapons made in the former Soviet Union are the source of widespread concern Many of these weapons of mass destruction were originally in Kazakhstan, and they remained there after this republic acquired its independence. By the end of 1993, Kazakhstan had been officially accepted as a member by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria. Article III of the Agency's Statute authorized the IAEA "to establish and administer safeguards designed to ensure that special fissionable and other material, services, equipment, facilities and information... are not used in such a way as to further any military purpose." The objective of most Western countries has been to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons. They have moved forward on this issue with Start I and Start II in 1993, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ratified in 1967. Start II was signed by Russia and the United States calling on both to slash their nuclear arsenals of long-range weapons from 7,500 to 3,500 each. Both agreed to eliminate their huge land-based missiles that carry up to ten warheads each.

The Senate ratified this treaty in 1996. The Duma, Russia's parliament has yet to take it up. The headlong rush of President Clinton to expand NATO has left President Boris Yeltsin with a club over Clinton's head. If Clinton tells Republican hard-liners in the Senate that the NATO expansion gives Russia no vetoes and that NATO expansion will push right up against Russia's present borders, Yeltsin will tell the Duma the motives behind the NATO expansion are unclear. Once the Duma sees NATO's expansion as unclear, Start II will never be ratified there. In a related move, Russia and Ukraine signed a friendship treaty on May 30, 1997 treaty affirmed the 1954 transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine. At the time it collapsed in 1991, the Soviet Black Sea Fleet was based in Sebastopol, and the treaty affirmed Russian ownership of the fleet. This means only that Russian forces necessary to operate the fleet may transit Ukraine for that purpose. While Ukraine did not oppose the NATO expansion, it had no interest in joining NATO.

Listen to some classical Kyrgyzstani folk music. It's an instrumental piece.

Listen to some classical Tajikistani folk music. It's a piece called Oi dilo dil.

Listen to some Tajikistani dombra music. It's a piece called Shymyr.

All contents © 1998 William M. Brinton