Shaun Walker
There are four “breakaway states” in the former Soviet space: entities that were autonomous within their parent Soviet republics, and that when the Union collapsed in the early 1990s demanded their independence.
Some of them—like tiny South Ossetia, which demands independence from Georgia—are inconceivable as “real countries.” But Abkhazia, a strip of beautiful subtropical coastline on the Black sea, which was also part of Georgia during Soviet times, would probably be viable as an independent state.
Abkhazia’s population is around 170,000. About 90,000 of these are ethnic Abkhaz, who speak a throaty language with 64 letters. There is also a sizable Armenian population, and during the 1980s, almost half of the population were ethnic Georgians. But when the Abkhaz demanded independence as the Soviet Union disintegrated, Tbilisi sent the tanks in and war broke out. After the Abkhaz came out on top, most of the Georgians fled.
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Aatish Taseer
Sons of the Conquerors by Hugh Pope
(Duckworth, £20)
Turkey is not Europe. Since my arrival here a month ago, I have been collecting reasons big and small for why this is. But just as it is not Europe, neither is it the middle east. Some will argue that this is why many Europeans want Turkey in the EU, a country so well positioned geo-culturally between Christian Europe and the Islamic middle east that if there hadn’t been a clash of civilisations, it might have invented one just to profit from its ability to bridge it. Yet however much we would like to think of Turkey as a secure walkway between east and west, it might come as a surprise to learn that Turkey’s deepest cultural affinities lie not between al Qaeda and George W Bush, but with a corridor of Turkic peoples stretching to western China.
This is the central idea of Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World, a highly readable account of travels in the Turkic world by Hugh Pope, the Wall Street Journal’s correspondent in Turkey and a long-time Istanbul resident. If we feel a pang of shame at not knowing exactly what is covered by the word “Turkic,” Pope lets on that he himself had only heard it for the first time several years after moving to the middle east. Pope becomes acquainted with the word in 1989 after a demonstration in the streets of Urumqi, capital of the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang. The demonstrators are an ethnic group called Uighurs and their exiled leader (who died in 1995 in Turkey) is Isa Alptekin. In tracking down Alptekin, Pope becomes acquainted with an entire world that had been submerged by the Soviet Union. The book is an account of a decade of travel in the Turkic-speaking countries, stretching from Turkey and Azerbaijan to all those with the suffix “stan”—excluding the older stans of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Persian-speaking Tajikistan—right up to the Uighurs in western China. The Turkic world. Pope’s greatest achievement is that he succeeds in giving cohesion to this region. Through the course of his travels Pope discovers compelling connections from religion and food to ethnic traits and customs that link Turkey and the steppe. But the most compelling thread through Pope’s book is that with the Turkish he has learnt in Turkey he can get by all the way to western China. In turn, the reader finds that without too much effort he has become acquainted with the major events of the past decade in this region, the political lives of individual countries and, yes, where they are and what their capitals are. It prepares the ground for the main thrust of the book.
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Anthony Robinson
Lenin justified ruthlessness by quoting a Russian folk saying—”When you live with wolves you must learn to howl like a wolf.” Last month, Islam Karimov, the ageing Uzbek president, did what his Soviet apparatchik training told him to and howled “shoot.” When the shooting stopped, hundreds of people lay dead in the streets of Andijan, a city in the fertile, ethnically complex Ferghana valley, east of the capital Tashkent.
A regime which competes in nastiness with Turkmenistan for the mantle of worst in central Asia blamed “Islamic extremists” linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir for provoking the trouble. Hizb, which is banned, is a declaredly non-violent movement which aims to set up an Islamic caliphate across the former Soviet republics of central Asia. Much of its support comes from the heavily populated Ferghana valley.
But in Andijan, as in nearby Korasuv and most other Uzbek towns and villages, the under-25s make up more than 60 per cent of the population—and most of them are unemployed. Economic frustration, coupled with political repression and widespread corruption, is at least as responsible as religious exaltation for the tensions. For millions of young Uzbeks, the only escape from poverty is to seek work on the building sites or farms of Russia or neighbouring Kazakhstan. Their meagre remittances keep many a family from starvation—and underpin the faltering domestic economy.
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Edward Lucas
Book: The Shackled Continent
Author: Robert Guest
Price: (Macmillan, ?20)
It was a couple of years ago in Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet republics, that I realised that comparisons between Africa and the former Soviet Union were not completely silly. My hosts, a family of eight, lived in a two-room concrete hut with a dirt floor and leaky roof. Water and electricity were available for just a few hours each week. There were no public services of any kind in their village. Life was supported by subsistence farming and migrant work.
I had met my host, Rustam, on a plane from Moscow, where he had worked for three years as a labourer. A teacher in Soviet times, he had come home to find his sons, aged eight, nine and eleven, illiterate. They spent all day working in the fields. After dark there was no light to read by. Though painfully upset by this, there was little Rustam could do: he was returning to Russia in a month.
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James Fergusson
The story so far
In the August/September 2001 issue of Prospect, James Fergusson described how, in 1998, he had helped his friend Mir (then given the alternative pseudonym Wahidallah) to escape Afghanistan and claim asylum in Britain. Mir had worked as a translator for Fergusson in Afghanistan but, as the civil war intensified, found his life under threat in Mazar-i-Sharif and was forced to flee to Islamabad. Fergusson met him there a year later, and agreed to help him get to London and claim asylum on the condition that, once the bureaucratic hurdles had been cleared, Mir would neither expect nor ask for any further help. Once in London, Mir, to Fergusson’s surprise, kept his word. Granted asylum, he contacted distant family friends, found himself a flat in the east end and slipped into the Afghan immigrant groove – signing on, taking a series of badly paid jobs, sending the bulk of his wages back to Pakistan to help support his exiled family. Troubled by the prevalence of sexual imagery and alcohol, and longing for his family, Mir had deeply ambivalent feelings about his life in London. Then, four years ago, two of his brothers and a cousin smuggled themselves into England. Fergusson began to record the story of what looked set to be a family reunion of Afghans in London. In reality, however, it was the beginning of a disaster.
Gulabuddin was always the likeliest of the three arrivals from Afghanistan to make a mess of his life in London, although none of us could have predicted how spectacularly. His depression should have been lifted by the success of his recent asylum appeal. Perhaps it had been – perhaps his subsequent behaviour was a last spontaneous act of joie de vivre before the arrival of his wife and children. Yet what he did was so illogical, so stupidly risky, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that he was still not quite right in the head.
I didn’t know him well. I was only connected to him via his cousin, Mir, my interpreter and fixer from the days when I worked as a freelance journalist in Afghanistan. I had helped Mir gain asylum in Britain three years earlier. His work for me and other western journalists, notably Lionel David of the BBC, had put his life in danger. I thought that we westerners collectively owed him at least that much. He was clever, resourceful and spoke good English – a fine example of a well born and well educated Pashtun. So it wasn’t too long before he established himself and settled down in a smart east London council flat. The complication was his family.
In the summer of 2000, a year before the problems began, two of Mir’s brothers and his cousin Gulabuddin had without my knowledge smuggled themselves into England in the standard way, arriving at Dover in the back of a truck. Mir was thrilled. As with most Afghans, family was sacred to him; he lived through it and for it. The thought of seeing his relatives again had sustained him through many lonely nights in this alien city, and if he could not return to them, then they would have to come to him. I felt ambiguous about the arrival of the newcomers. On the one hand I understood that eventual family reunion was the likeliest, and perhaps only, means by which Mir would ever be happy again. On the other, I inwardly groaned at the memory of the home office paperwork and court appearances I had undertaken on Mir’s behalf. The thought of repeating this dreary cycle in triplicate did not appeal.
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Anthony Robinson
The struggle for control of the 21st century’s oil resources underlies, in part, both the bloody Russian war against Chechen separatism and the possible war with Saddam Hussein. It also underlies a struggle less violent but, in its own way, just as significant in Kazakhstan, the biggest new oil province since Alaska opened up 30 years ago.
The main players of the Kazakh drama are Nursultan Nazarbayev, the autocratic president, and Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, a former supporter who is now the imprisoned leader of the most serious opposition movement in post-Soviet central Asia. Zhakiyanov used to be the governor of Pavlodar, a grimy industrial province on Kazakhstan’s northern border with Russia. Today he sits in a former Soviet gulag on the bleak Kazakh steppe, surrounded by common criminals, many suffering from TB, HIV and other contagious diseases. He has been in jail since August when he was sentenced to seven years in what diplomats describe as a typical Soviet-era show trial.
His real crime was to have been the co-founder, with businessman and former energy minister Mukhtar Ablyazov, of a new opposition group called Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK) and to have openly denounced the corruption of Nazarbayev’s regime. (Ablyazov was also jailed for six years.) An earlier opposition movement got similar short shrift when its leader was forced into exile and denied the chance to stand against Nazarbayev in rigged elections three years ago.
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Anthony Robinson
Coverage of the Mittal affair may have raised important issues of political patronage and party funding, but it has completely misread the significance of Lakshmi Mittal himself. It has left the impression that he is a sleazy Indian carpetbagger who has become one of the richest men in the world through asset-stripping, bribing politicians and playing both ends against the middle.
It is true that the US-EU steel war could be embarrassingly advantageous for Mittal. The Sidex plant in Romania, which he bought with Tony Blair’s help, is not subject to a US import ban. And his US company, Ispat Inland, donated $600,000 to Stand up for Steel, the US steel lobby whose pleas for protection from imports has fallen on George W Bush’s receptive ears. But Mittal had no choice in supporting Stand up for Steel. Membership is one of the conditions enshrined in the labour contracts which all employers have to sign with the Steelworkers Union-including foreign companies such as Ispat and Arcelor, Europe’s largest steelmaker, based in Luxembourg. Ironically, Arcelor is also the leading light in Eurofer, the European steelmakers lobby which is mainly dedicated to opposing US protectionism.
But the bigger picture is that Mittal has become a central figure in the restructuring of the global steel industry-and is instrumental in shifting capacity from rich, highly regulated places like the US and the EU to lower cost zones such as Romania. That is as it should be. He has saved thousands of steel-related jobs, and entire working- class communities in Romania, Kazakhstan, Mexico and other faraway places about which the British press apparently knows little.
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Chris Stephen
The caretaker of the Bulgarian embassy in Kabul is a big, bearded Tajik called Amruddin. One summer’s day in 1992 a rocket slammed into the embassy, wounding the ambassador in the arm. He left that same day, handing Amruddin the embassy keys and promising to be back soon. That was nine years ago.
Since then Amruddin has been stuck in the building, never leaving for more than an hour lest bandits ransack the place. “The last thing the ambassador told me,” says Amruddin, “was to 99 percent look after yourself and one percent look after the embassy. He said if they come with guns do not stop them. But do not give them the keys. If they want to come in they must break the doors.”
Amruddin was also left in charge of the embassy cars, including the ambassador’s Mercedes and a red sports car in a metal container which had been bought duty-free and was awaiting shipment to Bulgaria. As rockets rained down on the city, Amruddin was often tempted to quit his job. But that would have been the end of the embassy and, worse, he would then be out of a job. His absent ambassador proved to be a fairy godmother, ensuring that Amruddin was paid a salary each month with money smuggled into Kabul. So he stayed at the embassy, bringing his family of six into the compound.
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Paul Sampson
The world’s industrial countries are facing the possibility of a new oil crisis in the next century, as the Asian economies expand and instability in the middle east persists. For this reason attention has shifted to the giant oil and gas reserves in central Asia and the Transcaucasus.
The three fledgling states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have some of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, dotted in and around the Caspian Sea. But they all share a problem: the existing pipelines which deliver their oil and gas to international markets pass through Russia, which can thus threaten the economic independence of the southern flank of its lost empire.
The US and Turkey have tried to nudge the southern republics away from Russia by promoting new pipelines which take the oil westwards. The US’s arch enemy, Iran, has also embarked on its own pipeline strategy, making use of its growing commercial links with Islamic central Asia. But, so far, Moscow has managed to hold its ground.
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