#4
Izvestia
December 5, 2002
SHARING CENTRAL ASIA WITH AMERICA
Russia maintains its presence in Central Asia
Author: Valery Volkov, Nikolai Khorunzhii
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]

RUSSIA IS CURRENTLY BEING OFFERED THE ROLE OF "JUNIOR PARTNER" IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER (AND APPEARS READY TO ACCEPT); BUT IN CENTRAL ASIA, THE UNITED STATES ITSELF IS PREPARED TO PLAY THAT ROLE. RUSSIA'S CULTURAL INFLUENCE COULD BE VITAL IN HALTING THE SPREAD OF ISLAMIC EXTREMISM.

President Putin is due to visit Bishkek today. His itinerary will include watching demonstration flights by Su-27 fighters, whose range covers not only the Central Asian member nations of the CIS Collective Security Treaty, but also the adjacent territories of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China. Putin's visit may be interpreted as Russia's acknowledgement of the following: Central Asia remains within the zone of interests of the CIS, and primarily of Russia itself. And Bishkek is essentially becoming the outpost of Russia's presence in the region.

GROWING STRENGTH

The CIS Collective Security Treaty includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan). On November 20, at a Moscow meeting of defense ministers from all the Collective Security Treaty nations, a decision was made to increase troop numbers in the Central Asian region. Ten days later, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that a base for the Russian Armed Forces was being set up near Bishkek. At the CIS summit in Chishinau, Moldova, in October the heads of state of the Collective Security Treaty nations approved the charter and legal status agreement for the treaty organization. These documents were then sent to the cabinets of member nations, to be forwarded to each nation's parliament for ratification. By the next meeting - in May 2003 - it should be possible to speak of a new international regional security organization coming into existence. Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, says the rise in the status of the CIS Collective Security Treaty will transform it into a military-political bloc, the role of which is hard to overestimate, especially given that a substantial proportion of current global threats are concentrated in Central Asia and the Middle East.

There is also another point of view. Andrei Grozin, an analyst with the CIS Nations Institute, considers that the significance of regional alliances - the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Collective Security Treaty, the Euro-Asian Economic Community - is not comparable to the influence of the United States. Political scientist Dmitry Simes (United States) adds that the combined military efforts of the CIS in the region are insufficient to ensure stability there.

There is indeed a power vacuum in the region. Specialists at the International Politics Analysis Institute (United States) consider that Russia does not have enough resources to restore its hegemony in Central Asia, while the US and Europe have shown a lack of interest in establishing dominance there.

According to Nikolai Zlobin, director of Russian and Asian programs at the Defense Information Center (Washington), in US policy on this region the security factor still outweighs the factor of having an interest in diversifying supply lines for energy resources. In other words, the interests of oil and gas corporations do not prevail over Washington's decisions, as yet. And Russia itself still has no clear policy on Caspian Sea oil.

How is the United States assisting Central Asian nations?

First: by improving the mobility of their armed forces and providing communications infrastructure, which primarily involves supplying helicopters. Russia is of little help here; everyone knows the problems it's having with its own aging helicopter fleet.

Second: by strengthening borders with a view to non-proliferation of weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, and halting drug trafficking. Here too, Russia has huge problems along its own borders with other CIS nations.

In addition to defense aid, the US is also allocating substantial sums for humanitarian programs. Last year, Central Asian nations received $230 million, and this year they got almost $600 million.

MOSQUES FOR OSAMA BIN LADEN

While the great powers are providing defense aid to the region, the Arab nations are strengthening the position of Islam. The number of mosques in Kyrgyzstan has risen substantially. In Uzbekistan, five thousand mosques have been built over the past decade of independence. According to President Emomali Rakhmonov of Tajikistan, extremist propaganda is being disseminated via these mosques, the number of which has increased in recent years. As an example, he cites the Isfarinsk district - one of Tajikistan's largest districts, located at the junction of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Some mullahs in mosques there are members of the Tajikistan Islamic Renaissance Party (the only officially-registered Islamic party in any Central Asian nation), even though it's against the law for clergy to be members of political parties. At present, there is a slight decline in the number of mosques and Islamic schools in the Central Asian nations - their governments are wary of any active promotion of Islam, since they are aiming to live up to their role as participants in the anti- terrorism coalition.

In speaking of a religious revival among Muslims in former Soviet states, Imam-Khatyb Marat Murtazin, rector of the Moscow Islamic University, has noted that in the early 1990s there was a shortage of imam preachers, teachers, theologians, scholars of Shariah law and other Islamic studies. According to Murtazin, it was thought back then that pure ideas, without any political overtones, would come in from the Arab world. Murtazin admits: "The process of religious revival by importing religious ideas turned out to be very painful for us."

Nevertheless, many experts consider that the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by Arabs on setting up Islamic schools in Central Asia will show a much higher strategic return than the American millions invested in armed forces. After all, the American weapons will be wielded by people whose minds have been filled with the ideals of the Arab world.

Tariq bin Laden, brother of Osama, was well aware of this when he visited Russia in the early 1990s. Following his visits to Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan and other Caucasus republics, mosques, Islamic schools and cultural centers sprang up like mushrooms. They were usually headed by bin Laden's people.

This is precisely why Russia could play a key role in Central Asia: Russia remains the sole influential cultural force in the region. There are hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians living there. Many of the region's intelligentsia were educated in Russia and speak Russian. If Russia should withdraw from this cultural territory, it would quickly be replaced by imported varieties of Islam, including radical varieties. And the governments of the region would find it difficult to neutralize these trends, even with American money available.

Hence, there is another essential task for Central Asian nations: organizing training for "their own" imams and teachers. The Muslims of Central Asia are being offered assistance in this by Russian Muslims. For example, there are students from Central Asia at the Kazan Islamic University. Unfortunately, there are few of them.

Ravil Gainutdin, head of the Russian Council of Muftis, says the main reason why radical brands of Islam are appearing in Central Asia and Russia is the "ill-informed and clumsy actions of foreign missionaries, which have done harm to the revival of Islam" on former Soviet territory. Such preachers and teachers "have been raised and educated in a mono-religious environment, and the things they taught did not prepare young Muslims in the former USSR for life in a poly- religious society".

Ravil Gainutdin: "What is happening in Chechnya is more than separatism alone. Wahhabism is an ideology whose adherents are certain of victory. We must also provide guarantees for our own ideology. But we are disastrously short of resources for doing so."

For a few months, there were indeed discussions in senior political circles in Washington about whether to include the Central Asian states in the US sphere of responsibility. The outcome of the debate: the United States acknowledged that Russia has priority for influence in Central Asia, wisely understanding that links which go back decades can play a greater role than low-interest loans for re- equipping armed forces. Russia is currently being offered the role of "junior partner" in the new world order (and appears ready to accept); but in Central Asia, the United States itself is prepared to play that role. Both Washington and Moscow have realized that if the leaders of Central Asian nations associate with pro-European states (including the US and Russia), this will mean that radical forms of Islam will not penetrate the Central Asian nations. And Central Asia itself will become a kind of civilizational barrier between the radicalizing world of instability and the European brotherhood of developed nations.

(Translated by P. Pikhnovsky)

BACK TO THE TOP    #234 CONTENTS    NEXT ARTICLE