Danish journalist Michael Andersen argues yes. His new documentary, available via youtube, here: Documentary

His interview can be found on ferghana.ru’s website, http://enews.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=…

Radio Liberty comments here on official Islam.

Overall, I agree with Andersen. He can be reached at  michaelandersencentralasia at yahoo.com

Overview:
Kyrgyzstan played the US and Russia for a whole lot of money (Suez Crisis all over again?). There were scuffles between border guards over the Ferghana Valley borders. Nabucco is still on paper while a pipeline between China and Kazakhstan opened. Kazakhstan heads the OSCE while Kyrgyzstan kills or harasses those it considers enemies of the state. Turkmenistan continues to slowly move away from Niyazov’s rule. Uzbekistan makes life more difficult for its own citizens while denying electricity, in summer and winter, to neighboring countries.

Person of the Year:
The person of the year should be Kyrgyz President Bakiyev, who came to power in a colored revolution, under the banner of Westernization, and has spent the year consolidating his own power. His son was appointed to an influential post while human rights workers and journalists were killed. Good job, Bakiyev.

Most Unexpected Event:
The pipeline between Russia and Turkmenistan blowing up in April. Russia probably blew it up so it did not have to pay for expensive gas during an economic crisis. I’m curious, however, what do my readers think was most unexpected in Central Asia this year?

What to Watch for in 2010:
Watch the political ramifications from the Kazakhstan-China pipeline, which finally frees Central Asian gas/oil from Russian transport.

Russia will open a new base in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, later this year. Osh once hosted a Soviet airbase and is strategically located in the Ferghana Valley, extremely close to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The agreement will last for 49 years, to be renewed thereafter. All soldiers there will have diplomatic immunity, a courtesy not extended to the Americans. Also unlike the Americans, Russia is acting as security guarantor for the region, rather than a stop-over point.

And this is what Uzbekistan, and more distantly Belarus, is objecting to. According to a statementpublished by the Uzbek Foreign Ministry’s Jahon news agency, a second base in Kyrgyzstan could aggravate ethnic tensions (Osh has a significant Uzbek population) and provoke terrorism. Uzbekistan has long been trying to assert its own regional influence, and a significant increase in Russian military presence will be another obstacle to Uzbek influence over its neighbors.

On April 28, the five Central Asian states met to discuss water issues in a summit in Almaty. To no one’s surprise, no agreements of substance were signed. Instead, the leaders bickered and stalled, and in the end, signed an agreement that did not address regional water management.

Continuing to provoke its neighbors, on April 30, Uzbekistan erected a signpost on a disputed Kyrgyz border town. Apparently, the Kyrgyz authorities have not contested the claim, while Uzbek security and provincial authorities have moved in.

Russia, China, and all the Central Asian states except Uzbekistan took part in war exercises south of Dushanbe. About 1,000 soldiers took part in a staged factory take-over with hostages.

The only truly remarkable fact about this event is this quote from Radio Liberty:

During the exercises, Tajik soldiers demonstrated their ability to tear apart a live rabbit with their teeth and hands. Another soldier bit off the head of a small snake and ate it.

Is this a necessary part of rescuing hostages?

The people of Central Asia are celebrating the Persian New Year, Narouz, marked on the vernal equinox each year. The holiday is celebrated from India to China to parts of Europe, among the Turkic, Iranian and Kurdish peoples, along with a few others. Under the Soviet Union, the holiday was officially banned as it was deemed Islamic. Now the regional governments are promoting it, for example, the Kazakh government is extending its celebration from one day to three, though typical celebrations elsewhere last 13 days. There are some lovely clips of Narouz celebrations here and here. Also, BBC has a nice slideshow of celebrations around the world here.

The most interesting development is President Obama’s Narouz message to the Iranian people. It reaches out to the Iranian people by showing that the US respects the Persian New Year and Persian culture and can overcome political differences through mutual respect. I appreciated the tone of the message and see it as a first step in fixing America’s image. I’m an optimist.

As this blog has been reporting, some countries have a lot of water and other countries do not have enough. In a more perfect world, normal forces of supply and demand would render the former a producer and the latter a consumer. But as arguably the most valuable resource in the world, water is an emotional topic. People feel that the water in their country is theirs and fear making it more scarce. Radio Liberty has posted an article explaining the various canals that could be built, such as from the Ob River in Siberia to the Aral Sea, which is shared between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

There are two major obstacles for selling water to countries that need it. The first is the massive cost of building the canals or otherwise transporting it. But the second is trust. Those who live in water-producing countries worry that their ecosystem and water security could be compromised, resulting in a lack of political will. Apparently, a successful water-sharing agreement is in place between Lesotho and South Africa, but although I am quite unaware as to the history of their relationship, I will bet that it is less contentious than relations between the Central Asian states. Extending trust is required over the long term in order to establish programs that exchange water for produce, programs which could raise the living standards of the region’s people. As of yet, however, that isn’t possible.

Registan’s critique of scholarship on Islam in Central Asia got me thinking. The writer, Nathan, focuses on Soviet scholarship, but I am more familiar with Central Asia under tsarist rule. Either way, Nathan critiques the scholarship Islam in Central Asia because it typically starts from the postulate that Muslims are inherently violent fanatics. He is right for the most part, but misses some major and popular recent works that have enhanced our understanding of the historical meaning of Islam in the region. 

First of all, there is Adeeb Khalid’s The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, which aside from being written exceptionally well, as far as academic books go, links together debates in the Muslim world in the late 19th century with discourse elsewhere. He shows how modernity fundamentally shaped Muslims under Russian rule, and in all the other places Muslims lived. He locates Muslim discourse in the possibilities opened up by modern forms of sociability and transportation and communication networks.

In addition, Bruce Privratsky’s anthropological work Turkestan is a sophisticated analysis of Islam among the Kazakhs and gets away from standard portrayals of Kazakhs being either weakly Islamicized or only recently so. Nathan mentions DeWeese’s work, but Privratsky is much more readable and discusses the contemporary as well as historical role of Islam among the steppe nomads.

Another work that deserves credit is Robert Crews’ book, For Prophet or Tsar, especially the chapter on the Kazakhs. While it has serious methodological problems, it also examines Islam in a non-hateful or dialectical manner. Muslims in Central Asia were cast as less than perfectly Islamic for specific historical reasons and Crews outlines how that came about. I recommend these books for a nuanced view of the history of Islam in Central Asia.

As this blog has been insisting, regional ties are the answer to many of Central Asia’s problems, rather than the West or even Russia. This Radio Liberty article describes how the State Department groups the post-Soviet Central Asian states together with the South Asian states in a long-term effort to promote ties between US-friendly states like India and Kazakhstan in opposition to a Russia orientated space. This is interesting and ambitious, though I am not sure Russia’s importance can ever be truly superseded for its neighboring states. 

Still, plans for Kazakhstan providing uranium for India’s nuclear power plants and progress on a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline are exciting. Any de-leveraging of Russian power in the region is a good sign for the countries. As the article concludes, Kazakhstan will chair the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) in 2010 and India continues to search for energy sources, so the State Department’s vision may indeed be anticipating the links between Central and South Asia. However, the article fails to see that it is precisely the political vacuum in Pakistan and Afghanistan that makes Russia the stronger geopolitical partner for a long time to come.

EurasiaNet published an informative piece on the complicated relationships between state media outlets and regional cooperation. The recent summit between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan on water seemed like it yielded tangible results, but while in Tashkent, Turkmenistan’s president, Gurbangly Berdymukhamedov, stated that any water projects should be subject to international feasibility studies. Tajik media interpreted this as a rejection of any deals, while Uzbek media worried that the comment was dangerously cautious.  Turkmen media, for its part, was vague.

Either way, it is clear that the opinions of state controlled media outlets should be closely watched, in addition to actual events and statements by leaders.