Essay on Central Asia

As Central Asia is hurtled into the “new” post-Soviet era, it lurches towards a pro­foundly different world. The monolithic political structure of the Soviet rule is col­lapsed and all the five republics are now independent, sovereign nations. Among the possible scenarios, the most likely one to emerge is the movement towards the in­troduction of a western-style democracy and market economy.

Since the medieval times, Central Asia Isolated, and economically backward, it has been away from the world’s main cur­rents of political and economic history during the last several decades. Though relatively rich in mineral and agricultural resources, the economic development of the region was essentially geared to the needs of the Soviet Union.

Politically, the boundaries of the five present-day republics created during the Soviet regime do not reflect the historic ethnic and cultural patterns of the people, and all the republics contain substantial minority populations, a situation which is fraught with the prospect of future con­flicts.

Culturally, the peoples of Central Asia managed to retain their traditional ethnic heritage under difficult circum­stances. They are now attempting to use the recently-acquired democratic freedoms to assert their identity. This heretofore suppressed nationalistic movement of the various minority groups during the Soviet rule is beginning to emerge.

The central administrations of these new republics are likely to experience difficulties in holding the ethnic groups together as their nation­alistic pressures show signs of increasing the risk of political instability and even fragmentation.

An emerging factor of increasing im­portance is the growing strength of the Islamic religious tradition that was sup­pressed during the Soviet rule, which is now likely to affect the future political configuration of the region. The religious aspirations that lay dormant over long pe­riods of authoritarian Soviet rule are now beginning to assert themselves and these nations are now attempting to forge new regional connections with neighboring Is­lamic countries such as Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia (without renouncing their basic secular political structures).

The vast lands of Kazakhstan had pro­vided the Soviets with testing sites, and installation of nuclear armaments in the area east of the Aral Sea and the full extent of the environmental pollution resulting from such testing was kept a guarded se­cret. As the region emerges from the shadows of secrecy, Central Asia faces the challenge of cleaning up the mess that the Soviet testing over the last three decades had created.

The enormous costs of envi­ronmental cleanup added to those of rebuilding of the backward economies, as well as these nations’ own efforts to be­come economically competitive in world markets would require substantial finan­cial assistance from the international community including the United States and Russia.

In perspective, whatever course the Central Asian nations adopt—the continu­ation of keeping economic links with Russia and other former Soviet republics, as the formation of some kind of common market or the formation of a united Turkestan—the future destinies of these republics will be of more than regional sig­nificance.