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1994-05-02
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<text>
<title>
Central Asia's Emergence
</title>
<article>
<hdr>
Current History, October 1992
Central Asia's Emergence
</hdr>
<body>
<p>By George I. Mirsky
</p>
<p>George I. Mirsky is a scholar at the Institute of World Economy
and International Relations in Moscow. He is the recent
recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant to study ethnic issues
in the former Central Asian republics.
</p>
<p>The redrawing of the map of the Soviet Union has focused
attention on the five former Soviet republics that make up
Central Asia. A region once considered the esoteric domain of
Soviet ethnic specialists, it has become one of the most closely
watched areas in the world because of its Muslim population and
its strategic proximity to the Middle East and South Asia.
</p>
<p> Central Asia, one of the world's oldest inhabited areas and
home to an ancient and highly developed civilization, was until
last year viewed by most as a faraway, godforsaken place of no
serious interest to anyone. (The five sovereign states that have
emerged in Central Asia are: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Kazakhstan, strictly speaking,
does not belong to Central Asia; it claims to be a Eurasian
state that is a bridge between East and West.) The end of the
Soviet Union last year has changed that. The region has been
neither the quietest nor the most restive of the former Soviet
territories. What about tomorrow?
</p>
<p>A Neglected Area
</p>
<p> Some years ago this writer had the opportunity to visit
Central Asia as a member of a team headed by Yegor Gaidar,
currently Russia's economic czar. The picture we were presented
with was truly appalling. The region's chief gynecologist, for
instance, told us that the vast majority of pregnant women had
already borne one or more children and were aware that there
were health risks if they had another child. However, they had
become pregnant because contraception was either unavailable or
was rejected as contrary to custom and religion. (Most women in
the region had never even visited a gynecologist.)
</p>
<p> In the tobacco-growing valleys of Tajikistan, nicotine could
be found in infants' blood. In the area near the Aral Sea,
doctors counseled would-be mothers not to nurse their infants,
since their breast milk could be contaminated. The Aral Sea
itself is a scene of immense ecological damage. The two main
rivers that feed this inland sea are primary irrigation sources
for the large cotton plantations that dominate Central Asia's
economy. Because of the intensive irrigation required to
cultivate cotton in the region, the Aral has lost 65 percent of
its volume in the last 30 years. Irrigation has led to the
salinization of huge tracts of arable land, and the area has
been severely polluted by the huge quantities of chemical and
mineral fertilizers used to grow cotton.
</p>
<p> On cotton plantations, mainly women and children could be
seen working, this kind of labor being deemed unfit for men. At
the same time, in the mahallas--communal neighborhoods--large crowds of young men and teen-age boys idly stood around.
(We were told that urban unemployment was assuming extremely
dangerous proportions.)
</p>
<p> Comparisons to the developing world are unavoidable. And this
is just what Central Asia has been--the Soviet third world,
backward and exploited, lagging behind the industrial center in
economic and social development. Traditional patterns of belief,
life-styles, behavior, and attitudes toward work successfully
resisted Soviet-style modernization. In fact, it is totally
incorrect to consider Central Asian societies as Sovietized by
Communist rule and the Central Asian peoples no more than
"Soviet" people speaking Oriental languages. Another kind of
society managed to preserve its identity, although not quite
intact.
</p>
<p> Resistance was only one side of this unique relationship, the
other side being coexistence. Communist rule was superimposed
on traditional social structures that were sometimes called
feudal (though there never has been true feudalism in Central
Asia). Communism and traditional society proved to be quite
compatible, since both have an authoritarian base. Central Asian
scholar Boris Rumer maintains that clan and tribal consciousness
"not only survived but [became] even stronger in the Soviet
era.... A majority of the national cadres remain[ed] loyal to
their clan and tribe." (Boris Z. Rumer, Soviet Central Asia: A
Tragic Experiment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 148.)
</p>
<p> Central Asia's client-patron relationships maintained from
generation to generation and its clan and communal group
mentality fit easily into a Soviet system built on the absolute
rule of omnipotent party first secretaries. In every locality
there was only one official worth talking to, one man who
decided everything--the party first secretary. In Central
Asia the first secretary also symbolized and took the place of
the traditional clan and ethnic leader; he was the local
chieftain and all-powerful patron, a Godfather figure lording
it over an entrenched network that often resembled the
corporative structures of the Mafia. Loyalty to him was
paramount, and hardly related to Communist ideology.
</p>
<p> The native nomenklatura played a dual role: first, party and
state officials were Communist apparatchiks just like their
colleagues in Moscow, Leningrad, or Kiev; and second, they were
traditional local bosses and patrons. Thus their system of rule
was vertical, and they always had the valuable feedback from the
grass roots, allowing them to gauge the mood of the populace.
This is why they, unlike their counterparts in Russia, have
retained their positions after the collapse of the Soviet
system.
</p>
<p> These elites held sway over a society that was (except in
Kazakhstan) predominantly Muslim. Of course, within atheistic
Soviet ideology, Islam was, if not banned, at least not
encouraged. But people knew they were Muslims, and observed
religious practices such as those concerning circumcision,
marriage, and funeral rituals. They had a rudimentary knowledge
of the basic tenets of Islam, and had heard about the Prophet
Mohammed, Mecca, and pilgrimage; some performed their prayers
and respected the region's few mosques and mullahs.
</p>
<p> With independence came an inevitable religious revival.
Overnight, Islam became a common denominator, a powerful vehicle
(alongside ethnicity) for asserting identity. People
instinctively felt it was Islam--which is not just a set of
religious beliefs but a way of life and a civilization--that
made them different from the Russians, whose rule they had never
accepted as legitimate. Now openly proclaiming themselves
Muslims (whether from the predominant Sunni sect or from
smaller ones, like the Ismailite sect in Tajikistan) and
asserting their Islamic identity, they have found at last what
makes them a community distinct from all the others. For the
Central Asians, Islam now embodies the ideas of nationalism and
sovereignty; it is a banner of liberation.
</p>
<p> The revival of Islam in Central Asia is probably
unprecedented. Five years ago there were only about 260 mosques
across the region; now there are more than 5,000. Ten new
mosques open each day. But the Islamic revival has, if not to
compete with, then to coexist and somehow come to terms with
another powerful trend accompanying the process of liberation
and the assertion of identity: the rise of ethnicism.
</p>
<p>Ethnos and Nation
</p>
<p> Before the October Revolution, ethnicity was not a reference
point for Central Asian communities, which historically were
divided not along ethnolinguistic lines but by whether they were
sedentary or pastoralist. Bukhara in Uzbekistan and Khojent in
Tajikistan, two of the most populous and wealthy cities in
Central Asian history, both have mixed ethnic populations. Those
living in present-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan
(especially urban dwellers), were largely bilingual, speaking
local va