Central Asia Continues Ascent as a Geopolitical Priority
Last week we wrote that the EU was working on a comprehensive policy to bolster its relations with Central Asia.
Germany has drawn up a new plan to boost EU dialogue with Central Asia. On the face of it, the EU seems determined to establish a firm footprint in a region that is heavily blessed with natural gas and equally challenged with political instability. Specifically, Germany’s policy paper calls for the EU and Central Asia to engage in a dialogue over such things as human rights and battling corruption. It also outlines efforts to bolster civil society and a permanent EU presence in the region.
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Will the U.S. join the party?
There has been a significant cooling period since 9/11 between the United States and Central AsiaIn the wake of simmering tensions between Central Asia and the United States over the fallout from prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as some festering divisions over foreign policy and democratic development.
However, as the race for Western engagement in Central Asia continues to climb in competition with the likes of Russia and China, key regional strategists believe the U.S. needs to join the EU in bolstering its commitment to Central Asia.
In an interview with RFE/RL Bruce Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, comments on this tenuous US-Central Asian relationship and some of the factors that may be key to future progress.
RFE/RL: Democracy in Central Asia appears stalled at first base. How do you assess prospects for improvement?
Bruce Jackson: Clearly we’ve stumbled in Central Asia in the last several years; perhaps [the United States] got off on the wrong foot, emphasizing military bases rather than basic standards of democracy and interaction. There have been [other] missteps, small bureaucratic slips, like [when the U.S. State Department] transferred Central Asia to the South Asia [desk], and away from Europe, while our intent should be the opposite. So I think we are in a period of regrouping, and hopefully we will see reengagement begin.
Wait, there’s more…
RFE/RL: The European Union is now developing a comprehensive strategy toward Central Asia. Should a U.S. policy complement the EU’s or are their interests different?
Jackson: This is not only a deficit in our policy to Central Asia but also to the entire Black Sea region and countries like Ukraine and Moldova. What was called the…cooperation between the EU and the United States in the Balkans over the past decade, has not yet been found in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This kind of [U.S.-EU] cooperation is absolutely essential. The EU has begun to work on a neighborhood policy, free trade, feasibility studies, all these are the beginning of a cooperative approach, but the dialogue seems to be in the early stages; our organization was delighted to see that these topics are beginning to be raised at venues like the upcoming summit between the EU troika [leadership] and the president of the United States.
What about the notion of the West selling out genuine democratic and human rights concerns?
RFE/RL: There are some fears among rights activists that the EU will downplay human rights violations in favor of engagement with Central Asian governments. How should Washington handle this balance?
Jackson: I don’t think the criticism can be restricted only to the European Union. I think there were some elements of U.S. policy which seemed to suggest we would look the other way on human rights. This was a flawed beginning, [because] a sacrifice of human rights and political values as a basis for a policy is unsustainable and, to a certain extent, both the U.S. and Europe were perceived as cynical and perhaps unreliable, and that’s not the reputation we want to have in Central Asia, so I would expect a renewed emphasis and clarity about our values as a precondition to the engagement.
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Suppression of human rights and free press
The observance of human rights and support of a free press continue to be demands by rights groups over any realignment of Western priorities in Central Asia.
As we posted last week, Human Rights Watch called on any EU cooperation deal to have a strong human rights dimension.
Ensuring respect for human rights is of critical importance to the goals of the Central Asia strategy articulated by the German presidency and of the EU’s January 2007 Joint Discussion Paper on the Strategy for Central Asia (“the EU draft strategy”).
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Media in Central Asia: not so free…
These concerns over human rights and democratic freedoms continue to grow, particularly as they relate to freedom of the press and journalists. Late last month we posted on the disappearance of a Kazakh investigative journalist.
A Kazakh investigative journalist, Oralgaisha Omarshanova, disappeared on March 30th following a local story about the killings of several people in a small village in Southern Kazakhstan. A writer for independent weekly Law and Justice (Zakon i Pravosudiye), Omarshanova’s disappearance has caught the eye of fellow journalists, human rights groups and local authorities. She had previously received threats as a result of her reporting.
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Christopher Walker of Freedom House spoke with RFE/RL about his findings on the decline of press freedom in Central Asia.
In Central Asia, the key to the media is the television media and in every case you have either direct state control or effective state control through, for example, the media holdings of associates or family members of the presidents in these countries. This means in a very basic way, information of political consequence does not reach the vast majority of people in these countries.
We’ve seen an intensification of the efforts to control mass media. At the same time there’ve been indications in a number of countries that the regimes and the authorities are looking to assert even greater control over other media. So, there’ve been efforts to put greater pressure on newspapers, which tend to have smaller audiences but nevertheless have been important sources of independent information in a number of countries in the region. One possible explanation for this renewed attention to newspapers may be that the authorities are recognizing the ability of information from newsprint today to make its way onto the Internet and to be available to far larger audiences through the web.
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Will any EU strategy bring about cause for effective reform in Central Asia?
On Caucaz.com, Kazakh journalist Marat Yermukanov posts a bleak picture for the possibility for any real reform on the human rights and democratization fronts eminating from the proposed EU strategy, particularly in Kazakhstan.
The wall of alienation between society and the government and plummeting public confidence in the authorities’ integrity are potential sources of trouble in Kazakhstan that may undermine the EU’s strategy in the region. As long as press freedom is curtailed at the local and regional level and European monitors see nothing beyond Astana and Almaty, nothing will change for the better.
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NGOs feel the pressure
Just yesterday, a translator in Human Rights Watch’s Tashkent office was sentenced to jail time .
The sentencing of Umida Niazova, an Uzbek human rights defender, should compel the European Union to make the release of rights defenders a necessary precondition for any further easing of sanctions against Uzbekistan, Human Rights Watch said today. Niazova is the translator for Human Rights Watch’s Tashkent office. Niazova was sentenced on May 1 to seven years of imprisonment on politically-motivated charges by the Sergeli District Court in Tashkent.
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Meanwhile, strategic energy interests in Central Asia remain top priority
China’s vigorous pursuit of Central Asian energy
As it scrapes for any available deposit to fuel its economic expansion, China has been strengthening its footprint in Central Asia’s energy market.
Uzbekistan plans to build a gas pipeline to China with a capacity of 30 billion cubic metres a year, equivalent to half the Central Asian state’s gas production, the Uzbek government said in a statement.
The statement said Ma Kai, the head of China’s top state planning body, and Uzbek Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Azimov signed an agreement in Tashkent on Monday about the principles of building and running a pipeline along the route.
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Moves like this one are often viewed as Chnia’s effort to hedge other major energy influences in Central Asia, particularly Russia.
Although there are also huge physical obstacles mountains and deserts a pipeline could diversify China’s energy supplies while allowing Uzbekistan to break free of Gazprom’s control and play China and Russia off against each other.
Gazprom is already moving fast to enter the Asian market, building pipelines with a capacity of 60-80 bcm to China.
It has also just bought 50 per cent of the huge Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas project, previously controlled by Shell, which will mainly supply South Korea and Japan.
Its export monopoly also means it holds sway over several other big potential China supply projects, including the Kovykta gas field operated by BP’s joint venture TNK-BP.
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The Next “Great Game”: A Proxy Global Energy War in Central Asia
From CSM over the weekend . . .
Here at Dushanbe airport, French Air Force planes sit on the tarmac, their blue, white, and red roundels looking a bit incongruous against the backdrop of the soaring, snowy Pamir Mountains.
A dozen miles away, Indian engineers are quietly reconstructing a former Soviet airfield. In central Tajikistan, Russia maintains a motorized infantry division of 10,000 men at a sprawling outpost, while the US is reportedly training Tajik forces in counterterrorism techniques.
They’re all piling into a modern replay of the 19th-century “Great Game,” in which the contending Russian and British Empires vied for land and influence amid these same Central Asian desert wastes and towering mountain peaks.
In this round, the main prize is control over pipelines that will deliver an estimated 5 percent of the world’s dwindling energy reserves to market. And the players are far more diverse: In addition to the US, China, France, and India, the region’s five post-Soviet states are getting into the game, giving the local hazards that stalk them – including faltering authoritarian governments, rising Islamic militancy, and a wave of drug trafficking that originates in the poppy fields of Afghanistan – a new international dimension.
“The game in Central Asia is very much about competition between the powers,” says Dmitri Suslov, an expert with the independent Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow. “But this time the countries of the region are players themselves, using the contradictions between Russia, the US, the European Union, and China for their own benefit. It’s becoming very complicated.”
It’s not only Tajikistan where world powers have taken to flying their flags, especially since the 9/11 attacks focused attention on the dangers of state failure in this volatile region.
In neighboring Kyrgyzstan, gleaming rows of US Air Force KC-135 midair refueling tankers line the airstrip at Manas International Airport; Russia flies Sukhoi-27 fighters from its base at nearby Kant. China is said to be eyeing its own Kyrgyz military presence. And Germany stations 300 troops with helicopters at Termez, in next-door Uzbekistan.
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Russia is fighting diplomatic, energy and security battles on multiple fronts
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin assume the reins of power in Moscow, Russia has been working hard to reclaim its energy and political dominance throughout the former Soviet Union. A much tougher battler will need to be fought in Central Asia.
One of the major battefields has been the Caspian Basin, which is rich in energy reserves.
This is where Russia continues to fight a veritable diplomatic and energy war with the West. A big headache for Moscow, it is trying to firm up its control over energy resources in the Basin, while working closely with some Central Asian governments to curb U.S. efforts to stake its own Caspain Basin energy deals. A meeting in Moscow last month between Russian President Putin and Turkmenistan’s new leader, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, did not yield the kind of guaranteed total energy domination Russia would prefer for the Caspian Basin.
EurasiaNet wrote a detailed account of this exchange.
Acknowledging that energy issues topped the bilateral agenda, Putin pressed Berdymukhammedov to commit to a Russian scheme that aims to frustrate a US-backed plan to build a trans-Caspian pipeline linking Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. Construction of such a route would enable Turkmenistan, along with Kazakhstan, to avoid using Russian pipelines to export natural gas to Western markets. A commentary published by the Kommersant business daily characterized the trans-Caspian project as a “big headache for Moscow.”
Putin played up an alternative, Russian-controlled route that skirts the Caspian Sea, instead of going under it. “At your request, we quite recently launched another branch of the gas transportation system along the Caspian Sea, and today we pump over 5 million cubic meters of gas every day [along this Russian route],” Putin told Berdymukhammedov, according to a report distributed by the Itar-Tass news agency. “There exists the possibility of expanding its activities.”
Berdymukhammedov appeared to listen politely to Putin’s various pitches, but did not make any firm commitments. “We’ll give this option to experts to judge,” he said, referring to Russia’s alternative Caspian route. “They’ll work on it, and then we may return to it,” the Itar-Tass news agency quoted Berdymukhammedov as saying.
In addition, the new Turkmen leader declined to publicly endorse a pledge made in September 2006 by his deceased predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, to refrain from joining any project to construct an undersea Caspian pipeline. Berdymukhammedov likewise resisted Putin’s overture about forging stronger security ties.
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(For more on the growing Caspian Basin energy conflict between Russia and the U.S., check out this article in the Journal of Turkish Weekly.)
This kind of diplomatic energy warfare on the part of the Kremlin with Western nations, particularly the United States, is growing more intense as players like the EU and China up their resources to compete for influence.
EU’s Central Asia strategy seen as pivotal to its larger energy security
Former Ukraine PM Yuliya Tymoshenko recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that the EU would need to break Gazprom’s pipeline monopoly in order to sure up and diversify its own energy security policy. For the EU, Central Asia is certainly one of the more logical regions to start.
Any worthwhile energy security policy for Europe would also seek to loosen Gazprom’s monopolistic grip on the pipelines. . . . Beyond tackling Gazprom’s monopolistic power, a realistic energy policy for Europe would also seek to share the risks of any possible energy blockade equally among all Europeans, rather than allowing separate deals that leave others vulnerable to energy blackmail. Such a policy would need to incorporate a consensus that no country could reach a deal with Gazprom that undercuts EU plans to help construct pipelines from Central Asia that bypass Russia.
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