Central Asia

Until writing these posts, I visualized desertification as an encroaching edge.  Climate research shows, though, that desertification works on a pocket approach: a little desert here, and a little desert there, like brush fires, gradually grow into one very large swathe of hostile landmass.  This pocket-to-pocket desertification is occurring in the Gobi Deserts of Mongolia and Tibet and Xinjiang—and it is occurring in the Aral Sea Basin.  It increases poverty, as when Mongolian or Uzbekistani herdsmen can no longer support themselves through livestock cultivation. 

In the Aral Sea region, with so many contaminants on the dry lakebed, desertification has increased the severity of poverty-related disease, and brought new illnesses to an already weakened populace. And just as noted by those who study human security, those who are least able to confront climate change are now living under the worst-case scenarios noted by climate change advocates.

The regions most affected by Aral Sea dessication include the Dashoguz region of Turkmenistan, the Kyzyl-Orda region of Kazakhstan, and most of all, the Karakalpakstan region of Uzbekistan.  But dust storms can blow these poisonous salts up to 700 miles away.

Karakalpakstan–the Downstream Oblast
Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan Autonomous District is a sparsely-populated, isolated pocket of an isolationist state.  It has always been the most downstream oblast; Karakalpakstan’s autonomous status means its political clout is little; poverty contributes to their political voicelessness. 

As described in part one of this series, Aral Sea degradation has decimated commerce and killed livestock and fish-stocks.  Wetlands-based industries, such as cane-gathering or muskrat breeding, are no longer possible.  Feedstock growth is lessened; land can sustain less livestock.  Nutritionally, this means that nearby communities can no longer access sources of protein.   

Medical research differentiates between poverty disease and environmental disease, and so does the UNEP/GRID-Arendal report:

The primary victims of the crises were the most vulnerable layers of population, namely children, women, ill-paid inhabitants of cities and rural areas. The region has the highest child mortality rate in the former USSR (75 children per 1000 newly born), high level of maternity death: about 120 women per 10,000 births. Diseases such as TB, infections and parasites, typhus, hepatit[is, and] paratyphoid always accompany poverty.

The aerosolized pesticide and fertilizer that blows in the wind (fancifully called Aeolian dust by Medical Researchers) is breathed by inhabitants.  It also settles in wells and waterways, meaning that these poisons are ingested with drinking water and cooked into food. 

In the epicentre of ecological disaster, anemia, thyroid gland dysfunction, kidney and liver diseases are widespread. Blood, oncological diseases, asthma and heart diseases are progressing. Medical research proves that the incidence and growth of these diseases are directly dependent on ecological disaster.

In reality, though, the differences between poverty-based disease and environmental disease in the Aral Sea basin are academic, or based upon funding categories and politics.  The basin’s inhabitants are poor because of environmental degradation; one cannot separate the Aeolian salts from the dirt in the wind, nor the close relationship of tubercular disease from throat cancer in this region, nor the added vulnerability that chemically-induced anaemia adds to rates of maternal death.

Some Karapalkstan stats
97% of Karakalpakstan’s women are anemic—five times more than in 1987.  Manganese and zinc from pesticide ingestion affects human iron uptake.  (FAO, 1997).  The decrease in women’s health affects infant mortality and maternal death rates.  Aral Sea basin infant mortality increases are 70-100 per 1000 live births, but in Karakalpakstan they are over 100 per 1,000 live births; three to four times higher thanthat of the rest of the former Soviet Union.  Low birth weight, growth retardation, delayed puberty, and mental retardation are substantially present.  –  (Whish-Wilson, 2002)

The DNA of Karakalpakstani residents is 3.5 times higher in genetic damage than that of people in the United States. This leads to cancer, a lack of general healing from injury, and birth defects.  As in all genetic material, damage can also be passed on to succeeding generations.  (Blua, 2004; BBC, 2004).  Liver cancer rates increased 200% between 1981 and 1987.  Throat cancer rates rose 25%.  — (FAO, 1997).

Tuberculosis rates have risen 70% in the last decade; 30% of these cases are multi-drug resistant strains of TB. (IRIN, 2006).

The exhaustion of Karakalpakstan is somehow mirrored by the world at large when it comes to the Aral Sea Crisis:

There is a tendency in informal parlance to describe the disaster in the past tense, yet the process that has dessicated the sea continues taking its toll on the health of the region.  While many places in the world have shown a positive increase in the quality of life, in the Aral Sea Region it continues to fall.  [emphases added].

But it’s not over.  The Aral Sea Crisis continues to sicken and kill in Karakalpakstan, with ramifications for all Central Asia, for Asia as a whole—and it shows us all the human costs of climate change.

The Aral Sea’s degradation will continue to pull down the economy and social services of Central Asian states if not addressed.  Tomorrow: (last post in the series) addresses the Post-Soviet Aral Sea.  There are some solutions that can make the Aral  Sea something more than the shame of the past or the harbinger of the future.  Instead, the Aral Sea can become a symbol of human ability  to remedy previous environmental destruction.

References:
Again, Phillip Micklin (2000)–72 pages of absolute expertise, on Worth Reading page–Central Asia General
All indented quotes from UNEP-GRIDA-Arendal Aral Sea page
Bill Hewitt on world economic loss due to climate change

Photos: NASA, Akamai.net, International Red Crescent/Red Cross
Map:  University of Michigan

100-plus years of accelerating irrigation, destruction

Though the Environmental Justice Project blames the Aral Sea disaster upon Karimov’s regime, this is not strictly correct (or even useful).  The Aral Sea disaster is a mostly ignored but challenging legacy to Central Asia’s leadership as a whole.  Uzbekistan is the prime violator of sustainable water regimes, but Karimov is not the only historical or current leader who bears responsibility for Aral Sea degradation.  Central Asia’s states have only continued an agricultural system that has been in place for decades.

Pre-Soviet Era
The Amu Darya and Syr Darya were used for irrigation before the Tsars, under customary and traditional family practice and small landholdings.  Irrigation development under the Tsars was accomplished after 1900, and mainly extended irrigation in areas where irrigation was already in practice, such as the Ferghana Valley.

The Soviet invasions of Central Asia under the 1920’s destroyed or made dormant many irrigation systems.  These, however, were repaired by the late 1920’s, and further advances in agriculture began.

Agricultural Collectivization
The beginning of collective farms was the true beginning of the Aral Sea disaster, because it increased the scale of irrigation waterways.  It’s possible that any large-scale farming that ignored micro-climates, Soviet-planned or not, would have caused these problems.  Nevertheless, the command structure of the Soviet economy played a distressing part, because the plan was more important than the realities on the ground.  Alongside its often brutal implementation, a disdain for local knowledge was betrayed by collectivization policy.

Under Stalin, larger collective farms (kolkhoz; sovkhoz) were established; the irrigation for these larger tracts of land proved vastly less efficient in terms of water flow.  These longer, wider, uncovered irrigation canals increased the evaporation rate of the diverted water, meaning that more water was required to moisten the same amounts of land.  Increasing irrigation influx caused swamping and soil erosion.  Between increased erosion and increased evaporation, irrigation water became so greatly saline in content as to be agriculturally useless.  This salinized water was returned to the rivers and traveled, inevitably, to the Aral Sea.

Virgin Lands Program
During the mid 1950’s under Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands program, increased land cultivation required increasing irrigation capacity.  In 1954, the Soviet Union needed grain urgently, and hesitated to purchase it on the world market.  Given these isolationist constraints, Soviet policymakers considered developing the steppes of Kazakhstan and Siberia more cost-effective than enriching fields already cultivated.  The plan itself was centrally formulated, grandiose in design, and its pace unsustainably high.

Interestingly, most of the criticism of the program came from inside the Soviet Union.  Discreet articles which blamed no one in particular noted the conservation hazards of wheat monoculture in northern Kazakhstan and the increasing incidence of dust storms there.  In the U.S., analysts held mixed views of Soviet agricultural success—industrialization, one must remember, was and still is considered a positive sign of development. 

One notable article I found (mostly divorced from Cold War politics or even a conventional economics of the time) studied Central Asian water from the point of view of resource geography.  Neil Field (1954) compares of the water capacity of the Amu Darya against three canal and irrigation projects slated to draw from it.  He concluded at the onset of the Virgin Lands Programme that the Amu Darya projects were not feasible. 

One of those projects, the Kara-Kum Canal in Turkmenistan, was completed.  A second canal project for Turkmenistan, from Nukus to points south and nearly as long as the Kara-Kum, was scrapped completely.  The third project, to irrigate parts of South Central Uzbekistan, appears to have been built in a modified form.  As Field would have predicted, the two surviving projects, their extensions, and their inefficiency, took most of the Amu Darya’s water capacity, which has caused Aral Sea shrinkage.

The cycle of desperation–By the Numbers
The failure of agricultural reform toppled Khrushchev, but it did not end any of these projects.  Luxenburg (1971) cites UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) statistics showing that Soviet agricultural productivity slumped in the post-Khrushchev years, reaching 1962 levels of productivity again in 1968.  Moreover, production could not keep up with population growth. 

One figure, however, that did keep pace over the decades, was Soviet use of chemical fertilizers.  Fertilizer use increased 282% between 1960 and 1968, on approximately 2.1 million less hectares of land.  Not all of this fertilizer use could be called mis-application, nor was all of the fertilizer used in Central Asia.  But we can reasonably infer that increased fertilizer use also increased the salinization of irrigation water, and thus, the water of the Aral Sea.  To indiscriminate use of fertilizer, one must also add indiscriminate use of pesticide; and for cotton harvests, the indiscriminate use of chemical defoliants.

As the Soviet Union slid into bureaucratic stasis, and then outright failure, the problems for the Aral Sea worsened.  The canal/irrigation systems, already flawed in design, fell into increasing disrepair.  Showing sincere commitment to agricultural production meant utilizing fertilizer and pesticide in increasing amounts, but this failed to boost production.  By 1987, the Aral Sea had divided in two – already a local disaster.

References:
Still using Beach, et al, Field, and Micklin, as noted in Part 1.
Add Luxenburg (1971), and four articles drawing on Martin McCauley’s Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture: [Ellison (1977), Kozlowski (1978), Miller (1977), and Stuart (1978)]–see Worth Reading: Central Asia General.

Poster: Tate Gallery, London
Photos: NASA, Katardat.org
NASA Photos of the Aral Sea, including the 2000-2001 drought
Check out the FPA blog on Climate Change in blogroll at right

Part 3 on public health concerns in the Aral Sea region will run tomorrow.

Three ways to measure degradation:
Micklin (2000) writes that the Aral Sea is a surface-fed rather than groundwater-fed lake: it relies upon water contributions from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya.  Since it is located between Central Asia’s Kara-Kum, Kyzyl-Kum, and Baetpakdala deserts, its evaporation rate is relatively high. Lake evaporation contributes, however, to the atmospheric and ambient temperature of the surrounding area– a “climate cooling” function, so to speak, that is increasingly unavailable in the Aral Sea Basin.

The change in Aral Sea depth over the centuries, therefore, has largely been a function of river inflows, less the outgo from evaporation.  According to Field (1954), previous to 1880, glacier advance in the mountains led to reduced riverine influx to the Aral Sea; however, world temperatures were lower then, which also affected the evaporation rate.  That level remained remarkably stable, with lake level variations of plus or minus one meter. 

Between 1960 and 1987, the Sea divided into two lakes, North and South.  The South lake has also divided.  One small lake lies to the west and another, larger lake to the east, although at times there has been a channel between the North and South. 

1. Depth
Between 1960 and 1998, the level of the smaller lake fell by 13 meters; the level of the larger lake fell by 18 meters.

2. Surface area
In 1960, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest inland body of water, covering 67,000 square kilometers between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.  According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, over the last fifty years, its size has shrunk by 40,000 square kilometers.  The above photo is one of many that captures the loss of depth and the salty, silty soil quality of the former Aral Sea bed. 

3. Salinity
The Aral Sea was a brackish lake, with salinity about one-third of the world’s oceans.  In 1960, already compromised, its salinity measured 9.9 grams of salt per liter.  In 1998, the large sea measured approximately 45 grams of salt per liter (455% increase); the small sea, approximately 30 g/l salinity (303% increase). 

The increased salinity, loss of water depth and lake area for this groundwater-fed lake should not surprise us.  In some months, river contribution to the Aral Sea is –nothing.  Furthermore, when river water does come into the Aral Sea, its quality has been greatly compromised by agricultural and human use.  Many of these salts are pesticide and fertilizer residue.  The aridity of the region means that these salts are carried by the wind and breathed in by humans.

Three ways to measure economic loss
The loss of Aral Sea depth has ruined lake commerce.  Trawlers that once plied the sea for fish (according to BBC, about 44,000 tons annually) are now stranded on the sandy lakebed.  The maritime trade route between these two rural areas of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan has literally dried up.

The degradation of the Aral Sea area has also reduced habitat and species diversity in Central Asia.  UNEP/GRIDA-Arendal has a great overview:

In 1960, the Aral Sea region was the home of:

70 species of mammals—now, 32 species of mammals
310 species of birds–at present, 160 species of birds
5-7 kinds of livestock fodder no longer grow in region
Disease and death of cattle and sheep showed marked increase.

The increase in Aral Sea salinity has also changed the species that can live within the water itself.  Again, according to UNEP/GRIDA:

24 species of fish are at risk: two species now extinct.

The reason for the dearth of riverine input and poor water quality: unsustainable, inefficient, and failing irrigation systems.  Check back on Tuesday for Part 2: Agriculture versus the Aral Sea.

The cost of Aral Sea degradation on human health has been horrific: Check back Wednesday for Part 3: The Aral Sea and Public Health.

References:
I am especially indebted to Beach, et al, for terminology—see Worth Reading Page, General;
Phillip Micklin’s great book on Central Asian water and Neil Field’s 1954 article on resource geography of the Amu Darya—see Worth Reading, Central Asia General.
UNEP/GRIDA-Arendal Home Page—Capacity Building and Environmental Knowledge for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia: their Aral Sea Page is cited above.
The FPA Climate Change blog gives a world overview of what the Aral Sea represents specifically-see Bill Hewitt’s article on the latest reports

Map: Unimaps.com: Aral, the Dying Sea page has other great maps
Photo: (U.S.) National Geographic Society

Now here’s something to talk about when you are out at dinner tonight:
The Foreign Policy Association (yes, This Foreign Policy Association) recently cited some unhappy statistics.  Ninety percent of the schoolchildren in the United States cannot identify Afghanistan on a map, despite the fact that our troops and reconstruction teams have been there since just after the September 11, 2001 massacre at New York’s Twin Towers.  Our troops and reconstruction teams have been in Iraq for four years, and they make news headlines every day, but only 25% of U.S. schoolchildren can find Iraq on a map.  As far as I can tell, the U.S. populace in general has this problem–not just the schoolchildren. 

Of course, reaching out on geographical literacy in an international relations blog is like preaching to the choir.  Each reader presumably holds an already-active interest in world affairs.  But here are some talking points and suggestions you can use to get others interested in geography.  I’d like to point out that promoting geographic literacy is going to create informed voting, analysis, and activism on a wide variety of issues.  Because, as in all kinds of illiteracy, what people don’t know can take them unaware.  But promoting geographic knowledge doesn’t have to include a soapbox lecture: there are many ways to influence others and get them interested. 

Building geographical literacy one-on-one and family style
Encourage others to:

Use an atlas or the internet to look up the places in the news and take note of the surrounding countries, the terrain, and nearby cities.

Obtain an atlas they can actually use.  My personal favorite is 6” by 9 ½”,  portable, has beautiful maps, and costs under $20.00.  (See Worth Reading-General).  It would also make a great graduation gift.

Play geography games with their family:  Play “World Capitals”, where family members have to match the state capital to the nation and vice versa.  Play “Lakes and Continents” or “Mountain Ranges and Continents”.  You can play this game in the car when you take a family trip or have three questions per day at the dinner table.  Leave the atlas on the kitchen counter or tuck it under the car seat so you can check each other’s accuracy.  (BTW–Thanks, Dad!).

Encourage others to look up the same issue or event on the internet from one home-grown and foreign source.  Allow them to compare for themselves what their favorite news source considers important and what the international source finds relevant.

Portal page for geography education materials from Spartacus Schoolnet
Play Geosense, an online geography game
BBC has games for schoolchildren ages 4-11
Check out the Foreign Policy Association home page in blogroll at right; (FPA is also raising funds for Geography Literacy; Full Disclosure: no one asked/ordered me to make this post)
University of Texas Perry-Castaneda Library has great maps
CIA Factbook has all the stats by state, and many ranked pages on issues

Photo: Stupidco.com–yeah, buddy–

In order to understand the issues of climate change in Central Asia, one has to understand the nature of water distribution in the region.  First of all, Asia is a large continent, with less shoreline per land mass than other continents.  This has profound effects on its ability to obtain water, particularly in the Central regions.  The map below shows relative water scarcity across Eurasia and Africa:

The pale area shows regions of relative water scarcity; the Northeastern portion of this pale area covers the Central Asian region, from the east side of the Caspian into Mongolia and China’s Xinjiang province.   This relatively arid terrain has both mountains and deserts.  The mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan hold glaciers, which feed the two river systems of Central Asia, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya (Darya=river), both of which feed the Aral Sea.   The Amu and Syr Darya watersheds are called exotic watersheds, because they descend from a water-rich upstream to a water-poor downstream.  The 680-mile long (1100 km) Kara-Kum canal through Turkmenistan, though not a river, diverts sufficient water from the Amu Darya to be included as part of the water resources of Central Asia. 

 A slightly larger picture of Central Asian water systems uses the Aral Sea Basin as a system.  The Aral Sea, between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, is also fed by water from Iran and Afghanistan.  Watershed initiatives between Central Asian states have thus far tended to exclude these minor contributors.  As water becomes scarce, this may no longer be possible.

 A third way of looking at watersheds in Central Asia includes mountain precipitation, geology, and geography.  At the western limit of the mountain ranges, precipitation averages 1500 mm per year (60 inches) ; at the east, 150 mm per year (6 inches).  The Pamir and Tien Shan mountain ranges hold approximately 20,000 glaciers.  These mountain ranges are seismically active, and earthquakes such as the one this week are not uncommon.  (See previous post).  In 1911, an earthquake in the Pamirs created a naturally-formed dam and new lake in Tajikistan, the 61-km long Lake Sarez, pictured here.   But just as earthquakes can make dams, they can destroy them, leaving Central Asia liable to flooding, mudslides, and redefinition of watercourses.  Likewise, global warming presents the prospect of increased seismic activity.  It also suggests that glaciers will melt at a faster rate, meaning that water runoff from glaciers is liable to create floods at first, and then severely curtail these water sources for Central Asia’s people in the future. 

At the same time, rainfall patterns are expected to change: boreal Asia (e.g., Siberia) is expected to gain waterfall, while arid sections of Asia are expected to have less rainfall.

Looking at climate change with respect to Central Asia underscores many of the statements made on the news.  First and foremost, regions that will be most affected by global warming are regions already in some water distress.  Second, Central Asian states do not have sufficient development in water infrastructure already.  The politics of water distribution in exotic watersheds such as Central Asia do not lend themselves to easy political or economic answers for development.  Furthermore, a system that is patched together for today may well not answer in the floods, earthquakes, and human distress of tomorrow.

Upcoming:

Central Asian water issues are fundamental to understanding the political and economic challenges in this region–check back for more on Central Asian Hydropolitics. 
Also, the Aral Sea, one of the world’s largest environmental disasters, represents a worst-case future for Central Asia as a whole.  Check back for an Aral Sea update next week.

Biodiversity Hotspots.org Central Asia page for rainfall and mountain information;
Aral Sea Basin information from Oregon State University’s Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database .
UNEP/GRID-Arendal climate change group-its 2001 report,
the Central Asia pages
Great book on Central Asian water issues: Phillip Micklin’s Managing Water in Central Asia (see Worth Reading page-Central Asia).
My colleague Bill Hewitt, who has a lot of experience in climate change issue advocacy, is writing for FPA Climate Change blog; he has links to other blogs and newsources on this vital issue.

Maps: United Nations University; University of Indiana, Bloomington
Photo: NASA Earth Observatory

One strength of the English language has been its incredible ability to assimilate any noun from any language–and then, through mispronunciation, claim it for itself.  This characteristic is undisputably useful, but can also institutionalize translation errors.  The yurt is not a yurt.  Yurt means “homeland”.  Wikipedia says:

In Kazakh (and Uyghur) the term for the structure is kiyiz üy (киіз үй—lit. “felt home”). In Kyrgyz the term is “boz üi”, literally “grey house”, because of the colour of the felt. In Mongolian it is called a ger (гэр). Afghans and Pakistanis call them “Kherga”/”Jirga” or “ooee”. In Pakistan “گہر”.

Central Asian nomads have built felt homes in order to move with the herding season since approximately the fifth century B.C.  A wood frame composed of long pieces and collapsible trellis provide the skeleton, which is covered in felt and then roped down with a functional, attractive interweaving.  According to Jacqueline Ruyak, (see Worth Reading: Kyrgyzstan), grey yurts are for everyday; white ones for ceremonial purposes such as weddings.  Wood is the scarce material on the steppes, but the felt-making must be the most labor-intensive part of basic construction.

In 1997, the Mingei International (Folk Arts & Design) Museum of San Diego exhibited a prize-winning Kyrgyz ceremonial felt home that the Osmonaliyev family took five and a half years to complete.  The latticework was bound by red wool woven onto the lattice; so too were the room dividers decorated by interwoven red yarn.  The felt was embroidered.  There were no pictures of this museum-quality dwelling, so I have found these others that might convey a little of the beauty and functionality of this kind of building.  And just watch this [fabulous!] video by Rebecca Schultz, with lovely music (so turn up your sound).  I think Ms. Schultz also conveyed some of the strength of the family depicted, as they erected this ceremonial boz üi. 

Photos: RogerWendell.com; Chebucto.org
Ulantaaj has a history page for further reading

Eighty years ago, Stalinists attempted to eradicate specific Central Asian religious and cultural practices: one such undesired practice, again relevant, concerned the customary headcoverings for Islamic women (hijab).  According to articles by Douglas Northrop in 2000 and 2001 (see Worth Reading: Uzbekistan), Bolsheviks in Uzbekistan began korenizatsaiia (nativization) in the early 1920’s.  By 1926, they had identified traditional Islamic women’s dress as a barrier to nativization (a curious doublespeak, since they meant, really, homogenization), and had decided to bring women into public life, unveiled and completely revolutionized in nature.  They hoped to complete this project by October of 1927—one year to complete this task—in time for the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. 

In Uzbekistan, the party apparatus, without much in the way of funding for a more widespread campaign, decided to begin with those with whom they had the most access.  Therefore, they attempted to change the mores and folkways of those already within the Uzbekistani Communist Party.  In a combination of exhortation and shaming, they presented unveiling as a duty of leadership by example to the ignorant.  This approach put those Uzbekis most accepting of Communism in an untenable position: between Party affiliation and local/religious custom.  Local response, according to Northrop’s research, was:

Praise be to Allah that we are not Communists!

Under this formulation, gender relations became class relations, with women identified as the proletariat that needed to be liberated.  Northrop (2000) writes that “by treating a woman’s status, veiled or unveiled, as transparently revelatory of [their male relatives’ or spouse’s] political views”, this approach to unveiling within the party effaced women’s ability to choose how to live their own lives.”

Needless to say, the Bolsheviks were unable to create a bare-headed tenth anniversary of the Revolution.  They therefore redoubled their efforts.  By 1928, this failure of the unveiling led to a more sinister Proverka (audit) of Uzbekistan’s Communists.  Party members could expect inspections and evaluations of family conduct and mores, with private life invaded in order to measure revolutionary sincerity.  This practice politicized private life and made it publicly accountable.  “Gender misconduct”, which encompassed not just hijab, but also underage marriage, limited public life for women, and bride-price commerce, not-so-gradually coalesced into one issue: the presence or absence of hijab on female family members.  Thus the use of the hijab became the One indicator of an entire political outlook. 

The identification of gender politics as primary to the Stalinist agenda was specific to Central Asia, but formed a precedent for other mergers of public and private in Stalinist purges elsewhere.  Bolshevik paranoia had concentrated a host of issues into one visually-identifiable practice, and then treated this practice as the entirety of progress toward national assimilation. 

And if Stalin can’t manage it . . .

Mongolia Web reports that New York’s Lincoln Center Fest will present the Secret History of the Mongols July 22-29, 2007.  Nine musicians and storytellers will perform the work at the Clark Studio Theater.

This passage is from The Secret History of the Mongols:

In time Dobun passed away
and after he was gone Alan the Fair, without a husband,
gave birth to three more sons.
They were named Bughu Khatagi, Bughutu Salji, and Bodonchar the Fool.

The first two sons, Belgunutei and Bugunutei,
talked to each other about this:
“Even though our mother has no brothers or kin here
and now has no husband at all
she’s given birth to three sons.
The only man in her tent is the servant,
. . .
These three must be his children.”

Even though they were careful to say all this out of her sight,
their mother, Alan, could hear them talking about her.
Then one day in the spring,
while boiling soup from dried mutton,
Alan the Fair assembled her five sons together.

She seated them all in a row,
gave them each a shaft of an arrow,
and said to them: “Break it!”

A single arrow shaft,
it took no great strength to break it,
so each of them broke it and tossed it away.

Then she bound together five shafts in a bundle,
and giving the bundle to each in his turn,
said to each of them: “Break it!”

Each of the brothers held the five bound together
and no one could break them.

. . .

Then Alan the Fair spoke to her five sons and gave them this advice:
“You five were all born from one womb.
If, like the five single arrows that you held
you separate yourselves, each going alone,
then each of you can be broken by anyone.
If you are drawn together by a singular purpose
bound like the five shafts in a bundle
how can anyone break you?”

Hello, Central Asia Watchers, and welcome!  This quotation comes from the Say It In Kazakh Web page of the Kazakhstan Embassy to the United States and Canada.

Click here for a table of Central Asia Flash Facts; go to the “Worth Reading” Page of this blog for a kind of running bibliography of non-Internet source material.

The first week or so on the Central Asia Web log (“blog”) for the Foreign Policy Association will be devoted to new Central Asian developments paired with significant Background Information, for those of you that might be newly interested in this important and fascinating region.  One intermittent series of posts, starting this week, will look at Kazakhstan’s very active First Family.

The Foreign Policy Association has dedicated certain months to each issue area covered in the Great Decisions series for 2007.  Therefore I will also be posting with emphasis on children’s issues, migration, and other of these issues, and may draw your attention to great entries in other FPA Web logs that relate to Central Asia and its many, interesting concerns.

Also, for those of you who unfailingly count down the minutes to the weekend, I’ll be including an intermittent “Casual Friday”—because not everything that is important about Central Asia is included in international relations theory or economics . . . . some of the most important aspects of Central Asia are cultural—cuisine, dress, manners, jokes, literature, fine and applied arts, and architecture—that which makes us happy, elevates us, and sustains friendships in an otherwise empty world.