11.12.2005
UNDER THE SIGN OF ANDIJAN
Central Asia Divided by the Russians, the Chinese, and the Arabs
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Ulugbek Djuraev, AIA Central Asian section
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Previous part 
Withdrawal of the West from Uzbekistan has created favorable conditions for the final partition of political and economic influence over Central Asia between China and Russia. Simultaneously, the rivalry for the spirit of this region has gained in strength. The Arabs have the best chance for victory, but in that case they won't avoid a collision with the Chinese…
The Anti-Western Front
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| The Shanghai Five |
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In 2005, the US position in Central Asia suffered an unprecedented great loss as a result of the March revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and the May events in East Uzbekistan. All the regional contenders and opponents of America: China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran have benefited from this to different extents. All of them except for the Saudi Kingdom, for the last few years became part of a certain "united front" against the Western presence in Central Asia. Russia undertook the role of a connecting link between the various flanks of this union. Moscow has established interaction in the regional questions with every participant of this front on a bilateral or wider basis.
Russian-Chinese cooperation
In this context Russia supports the closest contact with China. Since the second half of the 1990s, they actively coordinate with each other in partitioning of the spheres of influence, and since 2001, they also have joined efforts in a struggle against the Western presence in the region. To secure their own status of the Central Asian powers, and for legitimization of division of zones of interest, Russia and China involved the states of the region in this cooperation. In 1996-97, on the basis of arrangements on the frontier and military issues, a new regional forum was created, named "The Shanghai Five". It included China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In the summer of 2001, Uzbekistan joined them, and the forum was transformed into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
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| Vladimir Putin with the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Hassan Rouhani |
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Russian-Iranian cooperation
Russia has closely cooperated with Iran in the affairs of Central Asia since the middle of the 1990s. This cooperation is based mainly on the interests of both states in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The ability of Moscow and Tehran to cooperate effectively for the sake of common goals in this direction was shown by the signing in 1997 of the peace agreement between the government and the opposition in Tajikistan. In 1997-98, military bodies and secret services of Russia and Iran started to coordinate rendering of assistance to the Northern Alliance against the Talibs (Moscow and Tehran were staking on the Tajiks).
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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with Russian President Vladimir Putin |
Russian-Turkish cooperation
As opposed to China and Iran, during the 1990s, Turkey was considered a strategic partner of the USA, and the opponent of Russia in Central Asia. However, retargeting of Ankara towards Brussels, as well as worsening of its relations with Washington in 2002-2003 (mainly, because of the Iraqi issue), favored the shift in Turkey's regional policy. At the end of 2004, a historic visit of the Russian President to Turkey took place. This event served as a jumpstart for a strategic partnership between these two countries, including that on the Central Asian track.
Saudi Arabia's autonomy
Saudi Arabia is obviously standing out against this background. Riyadh realizes very well that it is not capable of competing with the Russian-Chinese alliance in Central Asia. Therefore, the Saudis are not even seeking economic or political leadership in the region. Their activity is directed, first of all, toward the maintenance of the Kingdom's spiritual monopoly over the local Sunni population. By virtue of the specificity of purposes and traditions of Saudi foreign policy, Riyadh avoids contacts on regional questions with the other big players. The representatives of the Kingdom prefer not to operate directly, but to use their channels of influence in the third countries, or the organizations, which are not connected to them officially. Moreover, in the wider prospect Saudi Arabia considers the other large participants of the modern Great Game to be its competitors. In fact, while the Chinese and the Russians mainly hasten to divide the natural riches and influence over the governors of the Central Asian peoples, the Arabian Arabs aspire to take possession of their spirit.
The Clash of Civilizations
Five civilizations compete in the struggle for the spirit of the Central Asians:
The Russian-Soviet (Russophone) culture: Its world center is Moscow, and the regional one is the former Kazakh capital of Alma-Ati. The influence of this culture in Central Asia became noticeable starting from the end of the XIX – the beginning of the XX century. Its centers were then and still are the large cities, where the bureaucracy, intelligentsia, and representatives of non-native peoples (mainly the Slavs) are concentrated. The main carriers of this culture are the representatives of non-native peoples, and also the senior generation of the urbanized aboriginal population. At the same time, the Russian language and key elements of Russian-Soviet culture still remain distinctive signs of the ruling elite. Moscow uses the language and the culture as one of its main tools in its struggle for influence in Central Asia.
Turkic culture: It is one of the traditional ones for Central Asia. In the opinion of the majority of historians, it began spreading over this region in the first millennium B.C. Four out of five of the modern titular nations of Central Asia are carriers of the Turkic language, and of the local variations of Turkic folklore. More full-scale Turkic cultural influence is spreading over the region from Turkey. Its capital – Ankara, serves as the political, ideological, and cultural center of world Turkic civilization. The capital of the Uzbek statehood, Tashkent, may conditionally be considered as the Turkic center of Central Asia. The Uzbeks constitute the majority among the Central Asian Turki. Besides, among the Turkic states of the region, Uzbekistan is leading from the point of view of the practice of national language, and on the pace of the revival of Turkic culture.
During the Russian-Soviet colonization, the popular Turkic culture and language were preserved mainly in the countryside. Starting from the second half of the 1990s, national languages began to revive intensively among the younger generation of the aboriginal population in the urban areas.
The communion of Turkic culture serves as Ankara's main tool in the modern Great Game.
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Ancient city of Samarkand |
Persian-language subculture: This is the most ancient one in Central Asia. Its influence is limited by the settling of the Tajiks in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and in the Northwestern China. Central Asian Persian-speaking civilization includes small ethnic groups, such as the Hazara, Kurds, Persians, some part of the local Arabs and Gypsies (Pashtun and Baloch, being a part of the Iranian group, are mostly drawn to the Hindustani civilization, as well as the Bukhara Jews, who speak a dialect of the Tajik language, but belong to the Judaic civilization)
The Central Asian Persian-language subculture differs considerably from the Persian culture, because of religious differences (on the principle of the Shia-Sunni distinction), and also because of the long centuries-old political isolation, and geographical remoteness from the basic centers of Persian civilization. All this promoted formation of Persian-language subcultures of the Central Asian region. Its distinctive features are: spiritual prevalence of Sunni Islam, and also Turkic linguistic and cultural influence.
The Persian-language subculture of Central Asia is subdivided into northeastern and southwestern branches. The first (Tajikistan, Central Uzbekistan, Northern Afghanistan, Northwestern China) is more subject to the influence of Turkic and/or Russian-Soviet civilizations. Samarkand and Bukhara are considered its traditional centers. The southwestern branch (Central and Western Afghanistan) is more subject to Iranian influence. From the religious point of view it includes not only the Sunni, but also the Shia components. The city of Herat in Western Afghanistan, near the border with Iran, is considered to be its center.
By virtue of the abovementioned reasons, the spiritual and cultural center of Persian civilization in the Iranian city of Qom does not render any influence on the northeastern branch of the Central Asian Persian-language subculture, and has only a partial influence on its southwestern branch.
The Iranians use the commonness of the language, and of part of the historical past with the Tajiks as
the basic pretext for their involvement in Central Asian politics. In the Afghani direction, it is also the aspiration of Tehran to patronize the oppressed Shia-Hazara.
The Arab culture: It was rooted in Central Asia as a result of the Islamisation of the major part of the settled population in the VII-IX centuries. The nomadic people of the region experienced this process until the XVI century. However, even after that they did not show a very tight connection to the religion. The nomads were drawn to the simplified Turkic interpretation of the Sufism – the esoteric stream of Islam. Unlike them, the inhabitants of the cities appeared to be much more susceptible to the Arab cultural influence.
In addition to the Islamisation, the Arab influence was spreading by means of the Arab alphabet, sciences, and jurisprudence practices. As a result of the political, trading, and cultural contacts of the townspeople with the nomads, the latter gradually took on some elements of Arab culture, as, for example, the alphabet.
As the majority of the cities of Central Asia at that time were within the borders of modern Uzbekistan, it turned into the regional center of Arab influence. This was further promoted by the appearance there of a large Arab colony in the VIII-IX centuries. The overall number of its population was so significant that up until now in Uzbekistan there lives the most numerous Arab Diaspora of all the former Soviet republics of the region (according to the official census of 1989 it totaled almost three thousand persons; and according to the Arab national cultural center of Uzbekistan, over 100 thousand ethnic Arabs live in the republic today).
Becoming the center of the Arab presence in Central Asia, Uzbekistan, since the times of the Califate, has turned into a stronghold of the Sunni Orthodoxy in the region. It kept this status up to the beginning of the Soviet period. It was naturally reflected in the further history of the republic. Not incidentally in Uzbekistan there has been a continuous struggle against the Bolshevik intervention proceeding up to 1935, i.e. much longer than anywhere in the territory of the former Russian Empire. After WWII, in the 1970s, the first Islamic underground in the USSR was formed in Eastern Uzbekistan. It turned out to be the basis for formation of the modern Islamist movement in Central
Asia, and promoted the revival of Islam in the east of the Northern Caucasus.
Considering the survivability of the Islamic tradition, and the degree of politicization of the religion in the Uzbek environment, the Saudi establishment at the end of the 1980s – beginning of the 1990s staked on restoration of Arab influence among the Uzbeks. The representatives of the Uzbek Diaspora of Saudi Arabia, some spiritual leaders, high-ranking intelligence officers of Pakistan, and also a number of leaders of the Afghani Mujaheddins played an important role in making this decision, and in its realization. In the first half of the 1990s, Arab influence was spreading in Uzbekistan through the new mosques, religious schools, and Islamic charitable organizations. Foreign preachers took an active part in this process. Special attention was given to the preparation of young Uzbeks in the Middle East for the future to enable them to spread Arab influence. In the second half of the 1990s, these expansive efforts started to have more and more of an underground character. Then a concept of the stage-by-stage "re-religiosity” of the Uzbek population of Central Asia appeared, based on the scheme "from the periphery to the center". As a consequence, the work in this direction in the Uzbek communities of Southern Kazakhstan and Western Kyrgyzstan (that share border with Uzbekistan) became considerably more vigorous.
Since the end of the 1970s, the Ferghana Valley is an epicenter of Arab influence in Central Asia. Uzbek youth is the population, which is most subjected to this influence. The ideological and socio-economic attractiveness of the Arabian Islam serves as the main, and actually the unique, tool of the Saudi regional policy.
The Globalist, Western, (Anglophone) culture: Since the 1990s, it was spreading in Central Asia, but in a very limited manner. The Western influence on the local population was occurring mainly as a result of the studies in the EU and the USA, and also under the influence of the Internet. As a rule, in both cases only individuals of the younger generation (and seldom the older ones), belonging to a narrow layer of social and political elite, became susceptible to this influence.
The mental, religious, and cultural peculiarities, and also a rather low level of social-economic and technological progress of the peoples of Central Asia by Western measure, hamper the spread of Western cultural influence here. Furthermore, since the USSR collapse, neither the USA, nor the EU could work out a precise time-line and strategy for the introduction and dissemination of Western culture in Central Asia, taking into consideration the local realities. Moreover, Washington and Brussels never considered the civilization factor as a tool of geopolitical competition for influence in this region. Absence of ideologic content of the Western policy in Central Asia was one of the determinative reasons for its bankruptcy.
Arabian Spirit Versus Turkic Tradition
Today in Central Asia the influence of Western culture is strictly limited.
The spread of Persian-language subculture is bounded by the narrow limits of the Tajik range (not including Afghanistan, the Tajiks comprise less than 10% of the total population of the region). Accordingly, only three civilizations: the Russian-Soviet, Turkic, and Arab are competing for the souls of the local population.
The first one - the Russian-Soviet, has held a privileged position in spiritual and cultural spheres since the second half of the XIX Century. It was violently enrooted by the authorities of the Russian and Soviet Empires. However, since the second half of the 1990s, owing to the revival of national culture and the religious Renaissance, the Russian-Soviet civilization's influence began to decline. Strengthening of the political and economic influence of Moscow in Central Asia is able to slow down this process, but not to stop it. Reduction in the number of carriers of Russian-Soviet culture is especially felt among the young natives of this region, primarily in the countryside. This process develops more intensively in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
We must expect a noticeable weakening of the position of the Russian culture in Central Asia, within several decades. By then, its influence probably will remain only in Northern Kyrgyzstan, Northern and Southeastern Kazakhstan. The growing niche will be occupied by the Turkic and Arab civilizations.
Turkic vulnerability
At first sight, the Turkic culture has more favorable conditions. It is traditional in Central Asia, and the representatives of Turkic ethnicity make up the majority of the region's population. However, a number of factors level down these advantages considerably.
Disturbance of cultural progress: Natural development of the national culture of the Turkic people of Central Asia had been slowed by Russian colonization, and almost totally disturbed during the Soviet period. As a consequence, the whole branches of the national culture of Turkic ethnicity in this region seriously lag behind the level of their political and technological development. Besides, some spheres of culture, by right of succession from the pre-Soviet period, are indissolubly connected with the Arab influence.
Absence of the national idea: From the moment of gaining independence, the ruling elites of the titular Turkic peoples of Central Asia have failed to present a precise and universal concept of national ideology. They have nothing to shield themselves from external spiritual and cultural expansion.
Decreasing Turkish influence: First of, it is a result of the obvious prevalence of the European direction in Ankara's foreign policy. Although, at the beginning of the 1990s, Turkey had applied for the role of patroness of the Turkic people of the former USSR, now most of its efforts are directed toward integration into the European bodies. The victory gained by the Justice and Development Party in the parliamentary elections of 2002 played no smaller a role in the decreasing of Turkish influence. Up to that time, the secular model of Turkish statehood was an example for the Turkic republics of the former USSR. However, moderate Islamists’ coming to power in Ankara deprived this model of any appeal for the present and future secular elite of the Turkic countries of Central Asia.
Owing to both processes, Central Asian Turks have lost not only a valuable guide in the development of their own statehood, but also a noticeable external counterbalance to the Arab influence.
The Arab power
Weaknesses of the Central Asian Turkic civilization increase its vulnerability to the ideological expansion of Arabia. The spreading of Arab influence is also promoted by:
Historical heritage: A significant portion of the Turkic people's national culture, especially the religious tradition, has been impregnated by the Arab influence of previous epochs.
Ideological universality: The Arab influence is based on the export of Islamic fundamentalism. Middle-Eastern adherents consider it a universal model for solving of all social and political problems. They are convinced that it is a unique alternative to the morally bankrupt Middle-Eastern secular regimes. Accordingly, the Arab influence in Central Asia bears in itself not only spiritual and cultural content, but also a political ideology aimed at changing the ruling authority. There is nothing that can oppose it in the region, especially due to the fact that Turkic peoples still have no national ideal.
System of expansion: From the moment of Islam's appearance, the Arab civilization considered political, spiritual, and cultural expansion as its predestination. From the middle of the XX Century, this has been carried out by the spreading of the Islamic fundamentalism. Today it serves as the tool of Arab spiritual and cultural influence.
With the rise of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement in the 1920s, the predestination of the Arab civilization was rethought in view of the modern political and technological realities. Since the 1940s and 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood and the organizations, which have broken away from them, developed a system of spreading Islamic fundamentalism. It was based on various methods of propaganda (using the institutions and attributes of traditional Islam), as well as on numerous forms of social and humanitarian activity. During the second half of the XX Century, this system was tested in majority of the countries in the world. Prior to the beginning of its application in Central Asia, this system proved its efficiency in a number of countries having much in common with Central Asia, in particular, in Afghanistan (ethnic similarity).
Foreign support: The activity of Islamic organizations in the spreading of the Arab influence to Central Asia is actively supported (and in some cases even directed) by the influential circles of the Persian Gulf monarchies. This support is rendered, in particular, by members of the ruling dynasties, who occupy key positions in the state Ministries, secret services, and oil companies.
Looking into the future
The weak spots of Central Asian Turkic civilization and the clear advantages of the Arab influence, in the long-term prospective create a real chance for spiritual monopoly by Saudi Arabia in the region. The only thing that can stop this is the appearance of a strong Turkic power, capable of achieving conclusive political, economic, spiritual, and cultural leadership in Central Asia (such power can emerge merely on the basis of the Uzbek majority among the Turkic population of the region). It is natural that all the participants of the Great Game are extremely reluctant to appearing of such a power. If, owing to the common efforts of the players, no cardinal changes occur within the region, and the Saudis reach their goal, they will not avoid collision with the Chinese...
Read in the next part: The Iranians and the Turks Won at the Beginning of Great Game's New Round
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