Central Asia: Five New Nations Ask WHO ARE WE?

On a rugged, snow-mantled mountainside above Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Joloi Beishenov tends his flock on horseback, as his ancestors did centuries ago. During the cold season he shelters his 70 sheep in two traditional canvas yurts and lives alone in a spartan wooden shack until the warm weather brings his family up from the lowlands. This spring there is another new season, the opening out of the former Soviet Union; Beishenov has heard about new economic reforms, and hopes to rent from a neighboring state farm the strip of stony pasture he uses for grazing. But he is unmoved by larger questions of politics and religion. He is the kind of Muslim, he says, “who prays to himself.” He just wants a piece of land he can call his * own.

Beishenov may soon get his wish. Since the Soviet Union collapsed five months ago, more dramatic changes have been taking place in Central Asia than the sheepherder could ever imagine. Freed from control by Moscow, a vast stretch of the Eurasian continent populated by more than 50 million predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking peoples has unfolded to the outside world. The former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan never agitated for the breakup of the union and even served as a passive but powerful prop for the communist regime. Once centralized Soviet control began to split apart, however, they had little choice but to join the exodus toward independence.

The economically underdeveloped states of the south were not ready to deal with such newfangled concepts as political pluralism or free-market economics. The vast majority of the population lives a rural life, cut off from urban political developments. Robbed of their natural resources and even their cultural identity by the Kremlin, the Central Asians were forced to take charge of their destiny overnight. Their struggle to define the future is even more basic than in the old Soviet European republics.

Nevertheless, the outside world is already vying to shape it for them. Presidents and diplomats, businessmen and clergy shuttle in and out of the republics like traders from the caravans that once crisscrossed the great Silk Road to China. After U.S. Secretary of State James Baker made a whirlwind December visit, Washington became the first foreign nation to establish formal diplomatic ties with Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Neighboring Turkey and Iran have been the main competitors for influence, inviting the Central Asians to take part in their rival Black Sea and Caspian Sea cooperation zones. China has cautiously proposed joint-venture projects, and even the South Koreans have offered a taste of free enterprise with a fast-food restaurant in the Kazakhstan capital of Alma-Ata. If an Islamic regime emerges in Afghanistan, the Asian republics can expect strong overtures to bring about fraternal ties.

With so many suitors, the newly independent states have been wary of making geopolitical commitments. Askar Akayev, President of Kyrgyzstan, wants his country to be “politically like Switzerland, but in the heart of Asia.” Foreign Minister Abdu Kuliyev believes Turkmenistan should be “neither Islamic nor Soviet but a secular, democratic state.” President Nursultan * Nazarbayev thinks Kazakhstan, which stretches from the Volga region of Russia to the western borders of China, should be a bridge between Europe and Asia. Says he: “We want to enter the democratic world like any other state.”

Much of the diplomatic activity has been prompted by growing fears in the West that if democratic values and free-market economies fail to take root, the whole southern rim of the old Soviet empire will slide inexorably into the embrace of Islamic fundamentalism. Central Asia has been an arena for clashing values, an ancient land swept successively by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Tatars, Russians and finally communist bureaucrats. During 70 years of heavy-handed rule, Soviet administrations made every effort to standardize life and co-opt Islamic culture. The abrupt end of Moscow’s power has left a yawning political and spiritual vacuum. Since most of the region’s Muslims have predominantly Turkic ethnic roots, the tug is between two versions of the Islamic state: the secular, Westernized Turkey and the radical, anti-Western Iran.

When strict confessional differences are considered, the pull of Iranian- style fundamentalism appears to be greatly exaggerated. The overwhelming majority of Central Asian Muslims, including the ethnically Persian peoples of Tajikistan, follow the Sunni Islam observed in Saudi Arabia and most of the Muslim world. A true religious revival in Central Asia would probably produce an Islamic state more like Pakistan than Iran, which holds to the more extreme fundamentalist Shi’ite dogma.

Such theological distinctions are lost, however, on a younger generation of radicals, who accuse the official Islamic establishment of having collaborated with a godless Soviet regime. “It doesn’t matter that they are Shi’ite over there and we are Sunni,” argues a militant in the Uzbek city of Namangan. “The Ayatullah made Iran strong and glorious, while in Sunni Turkey they have weakened Islam.”

Muslim political aspirations have found a focus in the Islamic Renaissance Party, which held its founding congress in 1990 in the Russian city of Astrakhan, once the historic capital of a Muslim Tatar fiefdom. “Our party’s goals are similar to those of the Iranian revolution,” explains Moscow-based spokesman Vali-Akhmet Sadur. “We stand for tradition.” Before the union broke apart, the party could operate openly only in Russia, but it now has chapters in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan that have emerged from the underground.

$ The movement has especially strong grass-roots support in Uzbekistan’s Fergana Valley, a hotbed of Muslim resistance to communist rule. Angered by the new regime’s failure to deal with corruption and a growing crime rate, local militants in the city of Namangan have organized local Islamic guard patrols, who punish offenders with religious indoctrination and the public pillory. Communist propaganda posters still decorate the streets, but the cry of “God is great!” echoing from the mosques has a more stirring effect on the local population. During afternoon prayers, the Islamic guards keep order among the steady stream of the faithful crowding through the ornate portals of a city mosque.

Officials in the capital of Tashkent turned a blind eye to the growing power of the Islamic revivalists in Namangan, until they openly challenged the authority of President Islam Karimov. Last month police sealed off the city and whisked at least 80 activists away to prisons outside the region, deeply offending city residents. An enraged party member in Moscow warned, “A revolution is imminent. We have learned something from the Algerian experience.”

The conflict in some of the republics may be resolved only when stable, popularly supported governments take shape. So far, the political scorecard is mixed. Kyrgyzstan’s Akayev and Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev have won praise in the West for their eagerness to open up to the outside world. They have tried to forge a policy of “public consensus” in their ethnically diverse states, presiding over what can best be described as “nonparty” systems made up of shifting groups of democrats, nationalists, environmentalists and Old Guard communists. Akayev says his major aim is to create “a strong and powerful middle class that will guarantee future stability.” It is a commendable goal, but until such social forces develop, the future of reforms in both states may depend wholly on the political fate of their Presidents.

The region’s two potential flash points are Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where postcommunist leaders seem unable to find common ground with either democratic or Islamic movements. President Rakhman Nabiyev of Tajikistan has been under a virtual state of siege since last month, when supporters of the opposition began to gather in the tens of thousands outside the parliament building to urge dismissal of the republic’s legislature of holdover party officials. Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov received a warning signal of his own in | January, when students protesting the liberalization of prices clashed with police, resulting in two deaths. Muslim extremists view Karimov as the major obstacle to setting up an Islamic republic, while democrats see him as a sly defender of the old regime who, they claim, “gives with one hand while squeezing with the other.” Uzbek moderates are worried that if Karimov should fall from power now, the fundamentalists rather than the democrats would pick up the pieces.

However heated the current debate may be over Eastern and Western values, the region’s most serious problems are economic. Uzbek writer Sabit Madaliyev contends that the political choice Central Asians ultimately make will be determined by the conditions of daily life, not by religious fanaticism. “They will think first about how to feed their children, and that means introducing a market economy,” he says. “But democracy and a free-market system cannot be introduced in a day here. Our people could not endure such speed.” Jabar Abduvakhid, deputy director of Tashkent’s Institute of Oriental Studies, puts the dilemma more bluntly: “The growth of the Islamic movement will be in direct proportion to the decline in the region’s economic and social conditions.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union has only deepened the economic crisis by disrupting traditional trade ties with Russia and the European republics. Central Asian republics used to receive almost all of their manufactured goods and cheap fuel in exchange for raw materials. Now they are without reliable suppliers and must fend for themselves. That has not proved easy. The fuel shortage in Kyrgyzstan grew so severe in February that only one flight a day could leave Bishkek’s airport for Moscow; energy supplies at power stations dwindled to a 10-day reserve.

Nonetheless, Kyrgyzstan’s Akayev contends that the pain of separation from Moscow will pay off if his republic can manage to rebuild its economy on a more stable foundation, open “to all four corners of the world.” Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev makes a forceful case for greater Western economic involvement in the region. His republic, he argues, could become the Kuwait of the 21st century if Western know-how were harnessed to tap its rich energy sources. Even technical assistance in setting up and running food-processing plants would be invaluable in getting the new republics to stand on their own. Nazarbayev sums up the region’s hopes and the expectations of the West in a single question, What are they waiting for?

Washington’s answer is, Democracy and free markets. The U.S. has opened embassies in all the Central Asian republics. But the $24 billion Western aid package President Bush announced three weeks ago is aimed at Russia almost exclusively, which Baker justifies on the grounds that Moscow’s economic reforms are the most advanced.

In the end, the West cannot afford to ignore the Central Asian call for cooperation, given its turbulent dealings with other Muslim states like Iran and Iraq. Says Uzbek political analyst Abduvakhid: “If the West waits until tomorrow or the day after to get involved, it may be too late.” Perhaps it is time for the Marco Polos of this age to set out on a new voyage of discovery to this long-neglected corner of the fabled East.