 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
CENTRAL ASIA AFTER THE OPERATION IN AFGHANISTANNikolai KUZMIN
Nikolai Kuzmin, Director, Foreign Policy and Analysis Center (Almaty, Kazakhstan)
There is one trap into which all Western political scientists and even experts in Central Asia fall: they tend to look at the five states as one single whole. More often than not they ignore not only the local specifics (such as the cultural differences between the land tilling and nomad peoples) but also facts and figures. They apply blanket descriptions such as “oil- and gas-rich countries” to all of them while in fact neither Kyrgyzstan nor Tajikistan can boast of oil and gas reserves. They speak about all of them as “countries with the rapidly growing populations” while since 1991 the population of Kazakhstan has been dropping; they describe their economies as stagnating while in 2001 the GDP of Kazakhstan increased by over 13 percent; they say that all of them are headed by former communist party apparatchiks while President of Kyrgyzstan Askar Akaev has never been one; they say that there are radical Islamic parties and groups in all of them while there are none in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
Descriptions of the region are peppered with such terms as “five stans” or even the “pipelineistan.” This prepares the reader for information that American military aircraft landed on an airfield at Bishkek in Tajikistan. Indeed, does it matter which of the “stans” is called what—the main thing is: how many kilometers separate a newly acquired American base from the Chinese border. These scientists do not regard the Central Asian republics as entities of international relations per se but rather as an arena of a new Big Game.
Even the authors of “The OSCE in Central Asia: A New Strategy” report compiled by the International Crisis Group published in September 2002, who undertook to provide specific recommendations for each of……………..
Please fill subscription form to obtain full text of this jounal
 |