The Uzbek Timeswww.uztimes.com March-April 2013 Issue 1

Claude Salhani p. 7

How real is the Islamic Militant Threat to Central Asia?

daniel Graeber p. 10

Uzbek needsextend beyond oil and natural gas

JohnC.K. daly p. 14

Central Asian water woes – international convention best way forward

Centralasian

waterwOes

– internatiOnalCOnventiOn best

way fOrward

$4.9

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Welcome to the premier edition of The Uzbek Times, a bimonthly journal in-tended to bring to a global readership articles about the exotic, yet still largely unknown, region of the five former Central Asian Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, as well as other neglected Central Asian na-tions, including Afghanistan and Mongolia.

For 74 years, Central Asia was immured behind perhaps the thickest section of the Iron curtain until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In the past 22 years, the “Stans” had had to cope with myriad problems. These included the rampant hyper-inflation that ravaged the post-Soviet space, the collapse of traditional inter-republic trading patterns, the legacy of the centrally planned Soviet economic directives intended to turn Central Asia towards supporting Moscow’s directives, from designating Uzbekistan the USSR’s “cotton plantation” to the ill-advised efforts of the 1953-1960 “Virgin Lands” program begun under Khrushchev to turn millions of hectares of Kazakh steppe into the USSR’s wheat producing zone.

In 1992, the region’s most pressing problems were overcoming inflation, establishing new national policies and stabilizing new currencies disconnected from the Soviet ruble, along with coping with the consequences of a major loss of specialists as many ethnic Russians departed.

Longer term, the Stans’ biggest problem was restructuring their economies from a So-viet centrally planned model to nationalist, free market ones evolving towards integration to the needs of the global market.

There have been many successes along the way, but substantial problems remain. What is not in doubt are the resources of the region. Kazakhstan is now a rising oil ex-porter and the world’s leading uranium producer. There are numerous other examples of the region’s economic potential. To give but one example, a single site in Uzbekistan, the Muruntau gold field, contains an estimated 4-6,000 tons of recoverable gold. With current gold prices hovering at roughly $1,600 per ounce, Muruntau contains $20-30 billion of recoverable gold.

Quite aside from mineral riches and traditional luxury items such as silk, perhaps Central Asia’s greatest asset is its population. One of the Soviet legacies that has con-tinued is the region’s emphasis on education – according to the authoritative CIA World Factbook, Uzbekistan has a higher adult literacy rate (99.3 percent) than the U.S. (99 percent).

To be sure, larger regional problems beyond Central Asia’s borders remain, with the most serious external concern being terrorism, an ongoing issue with the instability in Afghanistan. Political development in the Stans has also been uneven, but in this context it is important to remember that until 1991 the region suffered under a Communist dic-tatorship, and democracy and free market economies took decades to develop in the West.

What is clear is the dynamism of the region – The Uzbek Times is intended to provide a window into the region’s development, and we hope that you will join us on a journey along the new Silk Road.

From the Editor

Table of conTenTs March-april1Uzbekistan open

for business

azerbaijan in central asia - future and perspectives

How real is the Islamic Militant Threatto central asia?

Kyrgyzstan seeks to improve its investment climate after years of instability

Uzbek needs extend beyondoil and natural gas

“We turn the deserts into gardens:” Turk-menistan’s “Golden age” lake’s viability

central asian water woes – international convention best way forward

Jihadi internet literature and its potential impact on central asia

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18

26

14

22

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Publisher:Farhod Sulton

Editor-in-Chief:John C.K. Daly

Deputy Editor:Celia Pesce

Executive Director:Shokhrukh Kenjaev

Contributors:Claude SalhaniDaniel GraeberStephen Ulph

Zhulduz BaizakovaRoman Muzalevsky

Anar Valiyev

Editorial and Executive office:

2667 Coney Island Ave.Brooklyn. NY. 11223

Phone: (212) 372-3050

All materials in this magazine have been copyrighted and

are the exclusive property of The Uzbek Times, Inc and

cannot be reproduced without the due consent of the pub-lisher. The views and opinions expressed by our columnists do not necessarily reflect the

editors’ point of view.© 2013 The Uzbek Times

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Uzbekistanopen forbusiness by John C.K. Daly

he sudden and peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991 caught most of its citizens by surprise, not to mention western intelligence agencies.

Hidden behind the Iron Curtain for 74 years, Eurasia’s vast resources and markets were suddenly open to foreign direct investment (FDI), with sig-nificant caveats, as fifteen new nations attempted to cope with their sudden independence, attempting to convert their republics’ central planned economies, heavily oriented towards the defense sector, into market economies capable of integrating with the global marketplace.

Now, one of the most conservative post-Soviet states, Uzbekistan, is cautiously seeking foreign di-rect investment, though FDI will be on Tashkent’s terms, not the “wild East” terms that marked for-eign investment in the wild and wooly years when Western free market advocates flooded the debris field of the former USSR with wildly unfair offers. The contract available at the time included terms that promulgated Western “shock therapy,” but that were nevertheless embraced by post-Soviet states

desperate for capital, including the Russian Feder-ation.

The subsequent “sticker shock” became evident when, on 17 August 1998 the “Ruble crisis” or the “Russian Flu” hit Russia, the year before President Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister, resulting in the Russian government devaluing the ruble and de-faulting on its debt.

Uzbekistan, which had retained tight central fis-cal control, was largely unaffected.

Twenty years later, the financial recession, which began in August 2008, triggered a global fiscal slowdown, which again, Uzbekistan’s fiscal policies largely avoided.

But, to understand the disparate fiscal policies of the 15 nations that emerged from the peaceful De-cember 1991 collapse of the USSR, one must turn to history, as virtually all the post-Soviet leadership lived through the Soviet Communist experiment, providing an insight into current policies.

Actually, during the Soviet era a number of West-ern companies penetrated the USSR market, includ-ing American, German and British firms.

T

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Following the Bolshevik vic-tory in the Russian civil war, So-viet authorities quickly set out to reestablish trading links and the initial Soviet priority, even before the New Economic Policy was established in 1921, was re-furbishing the railways. Substan-tial orders were placed in Britain with Armstrong-Whitworths for locomotive repairs and orders for new locomotives were placed in Germany and Sweden. The prob-lem was how to pay for them. As the economy was exhausted, the USSR it was forced to use gold, which saw Soviet Russia exhaust more than half of its gold reserves by 1922, with railway equipment accounting for much of it.

From 1926 the Soviet regime was committed to rapid industri-alization, as Soviet economic pri-orities shifted from recovery from the ravages of World War One and the subsequent Russian civ-il war to new investments, many of which were to be in the form of imported capital equipment. American exports to the USSR as a result grew 300 percent between 1924 and 1929, at a time when there were still no diplomatic rela-tions between the USSR and US.

American companies like Mc-Cormicks led the way in mech-anized reapers and Internation-al Harvester and Ford became involved in tractor production, though their ventures were barely profitable.

Textile machinery had gone to Germany’s Deutsche Werke, while German businesses were import-ant in chemicals, with I.G. Far-ben being described at the time as having a virtual monopoly after 1926.

By 1928 oil and oil product ex-ports exceeded pre-war levels in both volume and value, a market in which the British predominat-

ed. The British firm Vickers was a major supplier of equipment for drilling, cracking and refining oil. British companies tended to be prominent in extractive industries such as mining and forestry, while German, American and Swedish companies dominated the USSR’s nascent manufacturing sector.

The agreement was signed in 1925 and applied not only to the goldfield on the river Lena but a number of other non-ferrous metal mines in the Urals and Far East as well as an ironworks in the Urals. This company and an-other British mining concession, Tetyukhe, were responsible for producing significant quantities not only of gold but also copper, lead, zinc and other non-ferrous metals which in turn played a vi-tal role in export earnings. The Lena concession produced 33 per cent of Soviet gold in 1925/26, 37 per cent in the following year and 28 per cent in calendar year 1928. By the end of 1930, however, the company was in arbitration with the Soviet government over se-questrated property and its refus-al to allow profits to be exported.

The activities of the United States suggest that there was no necessary contradiction between strong diplomacy and good com-merce. Indeed during the world-wide slump after 1929 the Soviet Union was one of the few growing markets, virtually essential for the survival of German and U.S. machine exports.

Accordingly, the 1920s set the general parameters as to how the Soviet Union would interact with western concerns until 1991. Con-tracts in which the USSR held a

controlling share, allowing West-ern firms modest but not extor-tionate profits, with all the at-tendant problems of corruption, difficulty of repatriating profits and an uncertain investment cli-mate where the government could unilaterally change contract terms.

So, why did foreign firms stay?Simple – to enter the

closed Soviet market could establish something nearly impossible in the West, a de

facto monopoly, bereft of compe-tition.

The 1991 implosion of the USSR changed everything, but elements of the previous system remained throughout the post-So-viet space.

For the newly independent na-tions, the new governments’ first priority was to tackle the hyperin-flation that raged throughout the post-Soviet space.

For the newly independent Central Asian nations of Kazakh-stan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, an added burden was how to cope with the sudden loss of subsidies from Moscow.

Further hobbling the newly in-dependent states’ economic recov-ery was the fact that the USSR functioned as a centralized econo-my entity, rather than for the ben-efit of each republic, a situation that the collapse of the USSR tore apart. Two give but two ex-amples – all of the Soviet Union’s electric meters were manufac-tured in Lithuania, while Russia’s textiles mills were totally depen-dent on imports of Uzbek cotton. The economic chaos would take years to resolve.

Such problems were particu-larly acute in Central Asia, which had been heavily isolated behind the Iron Curtain. Each of the five

The largest concession in termsof investment was, however,a British concern – the LenaGoldfields Co. Ltd.

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neighboring “Stans” attempted to grow beyond their Soviet legacy in different ways, and the quintet gradually adopted differing ap-proaches to economic issues.

For Kazakhstan, the way for-ward was deemed to be to devel-op the country’s vast hydrocar-bon reserves by enticing in FDI through the offer of joint ventures and progressive tax structures.

In cash wracked Kyrgyzstan, similar offers were made to foreign investors, with the crown jewel of Western investment becoming the Kumtor gold mining concession.

Unfortunately for Tajikistan, following independence in 1992 the nation descended into a brutal civil war dominated by diehard Communists and Islamic mili-tants. When it ended five years later with a UN-brokered agree-ment, more than 50,000 Tajiks had been killed in a nation of only 7.5 million, and more than one-tenth of the population had fled the country.

Following independence Turk-menistan quickly evolved into a closed state led by “Turkmen-bashi” (“father of the Turkmen”) Saparmurat Niyazov, who until his unexpected death in Decem-

ber 2006 fostered a “cult of per-sonality” that Stalin would have envied. Since then, foreign ener-gy companies have been tripping over the corporate jets in Ashga-bat to cut deals to participate in the development of what the U.S. government’s Energy Informa-tion Administration has described as “some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world.”

Which leaves Uzbekistan, whose government has proceeded cautiously with economic reform.

With a population of 27 mil-lion, Uzbekistan is Central Asia’s most populous and dominant power. A conservative fiscal policy since 1991, including inconvert-ibility of the national currency, the soum, has shielded its citizens from the hyperinflation that rav-aged other former Soviet repub-lics, but the policy has stymied massive potential foreign invest-ment up to now.

Since the global recession that began in late 2008, however, Uz-bekistan’s fiscal conservatism, previously dismissed by the for-eign investment community, has looked more and more like a pragmatic policy that isolated the country from the worst aspects of

the recession in stark contrast to other post-Soviet states that fer-vently embraced free market capi-talism like Lithuania, whose econ-omy contracted 18.1 percent this year. The authoritative CIA World Factbook noted, “Uzbekistan has seen few effects from the global economic downturn, primarily due to its relative isolation from the global financial markets.”

In contrast, according to statis-tics quoted by the CIA for Febru-ary 2012, “Uzbekistan has posted GDP growth of over 8 percent for the past several years, driven primarily by rising world prices for its main export commodities - natural gas, cotton and gold - and some industrial growth.”

But this fiscal caution has re-sulted in less FDI than Tashkent would like. Accordingly, Elyor Ghaniev, Uzbek Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Economic Relations, Investment and Trade at the 17th session of the Uzbek-British Trade and In-dustry Council in London on 10 December 2010 told his audience that Uzbekistan plans to attract over $50 billion of foreign invest-ment in next five years in over 500 projects.

And the rewards for companies negotiating the Uzbek bureau-cracy can be immense – U.S. firm General Motors made a stunning 94 percent of all new cars sold in Uzbekistan in 2011.

In a move certain to be wel-comed by the foreign investor community, Uzbekistan is slowly moving towards making its cur-rency convertible but whenever it happens, for the present the country offers a fiscal stability unmatched by many of its more free-market neighbors.

Time for savvy foreign firms with an appetite for risk to inves-tigate the possibilities there.

ne moment they were there, the next they were gone. A handful of Arab dictators were brought down by the unexpected events of the Arab Spring, events that caught the Middle East with the full force of a desert tsunami. The events of the Arab Spring were so sudden

and unexpected that they even surprised the region’s most ruthless secret police forces whose job was to keep their respective regimes in power. There must be a lesson here for others to heed.

In truth these events may have caught the special police forces unaware but anyone who had deeper understanding of the region could have predicted what was to come. In fact this author did exactly that in 2009. “One day there will be an awakening in the region. The Middle East cannot continue to stagnate as it is doing today while the world overtakes it in every aspect, from education to the sciences and from the arts to women’s rights and where individual freedom continues to be ignored.

How real is theIslamic Militant Threat

to Central Asia? by Claude Salhani

Claude Salhani is a journalist, author and political analyst based in the Middle East and Washington, DC, specializing in Middle East politics, politicized Islam and terrorism. Salhani is the former editor of the Middle East Times and a former International Editor with United Press International, who ran UPI’s Terrorism & Security Desks. Salhani has provided polit-ical commentary for CNN, French radio and TV, Canadian radio and TV, al-Hurra and other Middle East media. Salhani’s journal-ism has been published worldwide in jour-nals including The Times (London), The New York Times, The Foreign Service Journal, The Middle East Policy Journal and Salon.com, Salhani’s latest book, Islam without a veil, on Islam in Kazakhstan, was published in 2011.

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A country whose people have no say in its governance cannot suc-ceed.”(Claude Salhani, Islam With-out a Veil: Kazakhstan’s Path of Moderation, Potomac Books, Inc., Dulles, VA: 2011, 228 pages.)

The causes behind the intelligence failures were numerous but one pre-dominant reason was that the lead-ership became so far removed from the people they governed that they failed to see the reality through the web of lies they had weaved. As John Porter, a notable New England settler stated more than 400 years ago: “A leader’s job is to help people have vision of their potential.” In many Arab countries it was the op-posite philosophy that applied; the leadership believed their job was to use the people to increase their own potential. Sic semper tyrannis.

The Arab Spring shook the Arab world in a similar manner that the fall of the Berlin Wall had on the former Soviet space. Just as the downfall of communism changed the lifestyle of millions of people in the former Soviet Union, so too did the Arab Spring forever change the face of the parts of the Middle East it touched, albeit at a far slower pace. But the ripple effect from the Arab Spring will – without a doubt – be felt far beyond the borders of the Arab world. Especially vulnera-ble will be the countries of the for-mer Soviet republics of Central Asia due to the common bound they have with the Arab countries of the Mid-dle East and North Africa: Islam.

And this is where potential for-eign investors eager to do business in the rapidly expanding markets of Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyr-gyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – will require some assurance before they invest in that neighborhood, a region that is expanding economically as rap-idly today as the Arab Gulf states did in the early 1970s. At the same time they are also seeing an expan-sion of militant Islam attempting to implement itself in the region. For-eign investors will want guarantees

– to the extent that is possible today - that their investments will not be compromised by Islamist move-ments, more active in some countries in the region than in others.

Islam in Central Asia is however somewhat of a paradox. The religion has survived 60-plus years of Soviet dominance and Marxist-Leninist at-tempts at eradicating it, along with other religions. Of course, as we know, the communists failed in that attempt and both Christianity and Islam not only survived, but grew stronger during the Soviet era. And again paradoxically, it was an unho-ly alliance between the West and Is-lam that contributed to the downfall of Soviet Communism.

Islam resurfaced in Central Asia in a sort of a two-pronged “attack.” From one side came those who had survived the Soviet clampdown on religion, for the most part regular people who just wanted to practice their religion. Then on the other side was the incursion by the neo-Isla-mists, those spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the salafist and takfiri. Those included imams who were on Saudi Arabia’s payroll who traveled throughout the country-side offering $100 per month to any woman willing to don the hijab, or to any man who would grow a beard. That may not sound like much but to those earning $100 a month, it doubled their intake. And while these may appear as relatively be-nign signs they are nevertheless the beginning of Islamist infringement on relatively open societies in efforts to Islamize them. This is a long and slow process that will take decades if not centuries to implement.

Long term for al-Qaida and their associates holds a very different meaning than long term for US plan-ners who are incapable of planning

anything beyond the four years of their current presidential adminis-tration.

Countries such as Kazakhstan however are well aware of the perils of politicized Islam and have taken concrete steps towards reconciling religion with the peaceful aspect it was intended to have. Again here one can refer to a two-pronged plan. On the one hand is the public face of the campaign. A number of multi-reli-gious forums and initiatives pushed through by the Kazakh government aims to bridge the cultural divides between Islam and the West.

On the other hand is the more stealth aspect of the campaign, the one being fought in the shadows and of which not much filters out for public consumption. So far both ini-tiatives appear to work.

But the drive from the Islamists is relentless and will not stop unless the issues are addressed at the core. Again, Kazakhstan seems to have understood that threat and is push-ing for the only plausible solution: addressing education. This of course is something that will require time and financial resources. The coun-tries of Central Asia have time and resources; oil and natural gas, for ex-ample, which are abundant in the re-gion. The West meanwhile will have to learn how to accept to look at time through a different prism and to ac-cept that some of the financial gains must be reinvested in the region.

Meanwhile, the other Central Asian republics have been less for-tunate than Kazakhstan in terms of curbing Islamist activity. Perhaps the fact that Turkmenistan, Uzbeki-stan and Tajikistan all share a bor-der with Afghanistan, and they all know that they need to remain extra vigilant because of the fluid fron-tiers where Islamists can easily slip across borders that remain difficult to police. Furthermore, the fact that that the economies of the other Cen-tral Asian countries are less robust than that of Kazakhstan makes them more fertile potential breeding grounds for the Islamists.

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It is important to under-stand that time is not an issue

for the Islamists who planforward some 300 years.

Kyrgyzstan has seen its fair share of troubles, with not one, but two revolution since the end of Soviet rule. They have had to face corrupt leadership and continuous ethnic unrest in the southern part of the country. Tens of thousands of eth-nic Uzbeks were forced to flee their homes in the city of Osh a few years ago and hundreds of people lost their lives in the violence.

In Tajikistan there have also been clashes between government troops and Islamist fighters loyal to a local warlord close to the Afghan border, that left about 30-40 killed on either side last July. The authorities called it the worst violence in recent years. Tajikistan also remains one of the most dangerous countries for jour-nalists with anywhere between 50-80 journalists killed between 1990 and 2001. International agencies place the number of civilians killed in a civil war that raged from 1992-1997 anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000. The effect on the economy was equally devastating.

In Turkmenistan Islam was prac-tically wiped out during the Soviet years, but after independence reli-

gion has tried to resurface, pushed by the Islamists who have not been very successful.

Unlike much of Central Asia where the broad process of re-Islam-ization that occurred in the post-So-viet era of the early 1990s and that was accompanied by the emergence of political movements espousing greater adherence to Islamic tenets, in Turkmenistan, however, there has been no movement to introduce el-ements of Islamic sharia law or to establish parties based on Islamic principles. The vast majority of the population appears to prefer to dis-associate religion from politics, and would be unlikely to support any attempt to replace secular with re-ligious rule, especially if it were to involve a political struggle.

More active among the Islamists has been the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, formed in 1988 with the intent of replacing the government of President Islam Karimov with an Islamic state. In February 1999 a string of six car bombs exploded in Tashkent as the IMU tried to kill Karimov.

Ashgabat, Tashkent and Dushan-

be are also looking over their shoul-ders into Afghanistan and at the Tal-iban. Turkmenistan shares a border with Herat Province, a hotbed of Taliban activity. The question being asked in the three neighboring cap-ital cities is, what would be the re-percussions of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan on the Central Asian re-publics? And how equipped are they to deal with it. Further complicating the situation for Ashgabat, Tash-kent and Dushanbe is the fact that they all participated in one form or another in helping the US military campaign in Afghanistan. Memories live long in this part of the world and the Taliban for one are not about to forget that.

In the final analysis the threat of militant Islam remains real in Cen-tral Asia, as it does in other parts of the world. But in the end, in a free market economy and democratic societies there will be no place for extremists, be they Islamic or com-munists. Just as communism was defeated by the ideas of open societ-ies, so too will militant Islam follow in the footsteps of what was once a global threat.

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undreds of ex-hibitors from the regional oil and natural gas sector, along with more

than 400 international dele-gates, are expected to descend on the Uzbek capital Tashkent in May for an annual oil and natural gas summit. Last year, Deputy Prime Minister Gulom-jonIbragimov, who serves as board chairman of state-energy company Uzbekneftegaz, said modernization was vital for an energy sector struggling with a lack of foreign investments and aging infrastructure.

Recently, Uzbek leaders said a series of government reforms have made it possible for the country to showcase its commer-cial opportunities to foreign in-vestors. Modernization last year was supported by the opening of hundreds of new oil and natural gas fields. With reforms in hand, and isolation from the Europe-an debt crisis, the World Bank expects the Uzbek economy to grow by as much as 8 percent. With few options to get reserves out of the country, and a policy of energy self-sufficiency, all but the usual suspects may stay on the sidelines come May, however.

The country’s oil sector re-mains isolated from much of the international communi-ty because of a general lack of pipeline infrastructure. Ac-cording to the BP World Ener-gy Outlook for 2012, Uzbek oil production has been on a steady decline for most of the last de-cade. The country has proven oil reserves of around 600 million barrels, though production has declined steadily from around 171,000 barrels per day in 2001 to just 87,000 bpd for 2010. The assessment is even lower for the U.S. Energy Department’s En-ergy Information Administra-

Uzbek needsextend beyondoil and natural gas

by Daniel Graeber

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tion, which states Uzbekistan’s production was around 59,000 bpd in 2010, a 60 percent decline from 2000 levels.

Apart from ageing infra-structure, the U.S. government’s report states the lack of foreign investment is in part responsi-ble for declining oil production in Uzbekistan. EIA expects oil production there to continue its decline through 2013.

Uzbek oil reserves are on par with its neighbors and the gov-ernment has said it aims to re-duce its dependence on imports as it works toward becoming a net exporter. The government,

meanwhile, said it hopes to at-tract as much as $850 million in foreign and domestic invest-ments to support shale oil explo-ration campaigns.

New technological develop-ments for shale have redefined market dynamics, placing the United States and Canada in leadership positions in terms of oil production. The shale oil boom in the United States, growing largely from the Bak-ken play in the Northern Plains states, is such that companies are turning to rail because pro-duction has surpassed regional pipeline capacity. The Associa-

tion of American Railroads re-ports that, for the last week of January, rail deliveries of petro-leum products were up 60.9 per-cent compared to the same time last year.

Uzbekistan, through joint ventures with Asian companies, namely Japan Oil, Gas & Metals National Corp., is seeking to tap into as much as 47 billion tons of its own oil shale deposits. With the government looking to become a mid-tiered industrial-ized economy by 2050, oil shale developments may be at the top of the agenda at this year’s oil and natural gas conference.

Daniel Graeber is a Michi-gan-based analyst assess-ing geopolitical aspects of the global energy sector. His works on issues rang-ing from U.S. shale developments to Iraqi disputes over hydrocarbon laws have been featured in publications ranging from NASDAQ’s news portal to the United Press International wire service, as well as the Huffington Post. He currently teaches me-dia literacy courses at Michigan Grand Valley State University. Graeber is also a senior analyst for Oilprice.com.

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A drilling technology subsidi-ary of China National Petroleum Corp. in 2006 signed a contract with state-owned Uzbekneftegaz to supply it with roughly two dozen rigs and supplementary equipment. CNPC entered the Uzbek market in 2006, where it’s been providing oilfield services ever since.

In 2008, CNCPC joined the state-owned company at the country’s onshore Mingbulak oil field along the northern rim of the Fergana Basin. That marks a recovery for the field after mil-lions of barrels of oil spilled when a blowout occurred there in 1992. Developers closed the field because of the oil spill, the worst of its kind in Asian history, but it could wind up yielding the equivalent of 219 million barrels of oil for Uzbekistan. In 2009, CNPC said it started looking at ultra-deep onshore reserves at the same time that it began to look offshore in the Aral Sea.

Meanwhile, companies like Russia’s public oil company Lukoil, second only to U.S. su-per-major Exxon Mobil in terms of oil and natural gas reserves, aim to take advantage of Uzbeki-stan’s conventional oil reserves. By its own admission, however, Lukoil’s focus in Uzbekistan has been largely geared toward natu-ral gas.

Natural gas production in Uzbekistan has held steady or increased marginally since 2001, according the BP’s annual re-port. Production peaked in 2008 at 2.2 trillion cubic feet and has since hovered at around 2.1 tril-lion cubic feet, the British ener-gy company stated. The figures are somewhat different from the U.S. Energy Department’s EIA, which finds the 2008 production

level peaked at 2.4 trillion cubic feet per year.

Nevertheless, at 65 trillion cu-bic feet of natural gas, Uzbeki-stan is ranked fourth regionally in terms of reserves and 13th in the world in terms of production. In its latest assessment, BP esti-mates that Uzbekistan consumed 1.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, however, meaning the coun-try’s electricity and heating sec-tors consume most of the natural gas produced.

Deputy Prime Minister Ibragi-mov said one of the focal points for this year’s energy summit was foreign investments. The country manages its energy sector through various production sharing agree-ments or joint ventures with the likes of Lukoil, energy monopoly Gazprom or CNPC.

Focusing predominately on natural gas, Lukoil said it aims to increase its investments in Uzbekistan from $1.5 billion in 2010 to $5 billion by 2017. Loans secured by foreign energy com-panies working in the country may help finance the develop-ment of the Kandym group of fields. Those fields could provide as much as 390 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year for Uz-bekistan this year. Lukoil aims to get around 47 million barrels of oil equivalent per year from the region by 2018.

Uzbekneftegaz, for its part, said it was financing some of the developments planned for depos-its in the Gazli region, which is expected to cost around $1 bil-lion. While a substantial invest-ment, that project could yield another 176 billion cubic feet of natural gas for the country.

Still, as with oil, the country’s aging infrastructure may be a limiting factor to development

when compared with its gas-rich Caspian neighbors. Pipeline de-velopments there have the sup-port of a European government eager to break the Russian grip on the energy sector. Turkmenistan, meanwhile, expects to get its gas riches to Asian markets by way of a pipeline that could stretch to India with financial support from the Asian Development Bank. Uzbekistan enjoys few of those benefits.

The Uzbek economy is ex-pected to grow by around 7 per-cent through at least next year on an export market driven by non-petroleum commodities like cotton, copper and gold. The World Bank said it expects to see modest growth there in part because of favorable trade terms and because Uzbekistan’s econ-omy is isolated somewhat from the global economic crisis. Tight regulations, however have limited some of the foreign investments needed to invigorate what could be a more vibrant energy sector.

Lukoil, a gold sponsor for this year’s oil and gas conference, has plans to increase natural gas production in Uzbekistan, with a goal of getting some of those reserves into an expanding Cen-tral Asia-China pipeline. As is the case with Turkmenistan’s pipeline ambitions, however, the security situation in neighboring Afghan-istan could present near-term challenges as international forces head for the exit doors next year.

While the Afghan north is rel-atively stable, trans-boundary issues over water resources and general regional tensions could add to Uzbekistan’s landlocked limitations. With few of the op-tions available to Azerbaijan or other littoral states, isolation, while shielding the overall econo-

my, may prevent Uzbekistan from getting its resources to growing Asian economies. With aging oil fields and a domestic economy hungry for gas, Uzbekistan may find itself in a rough neighbor-hood for economic growth given growing domestic energy woes.

Modernization may be the cen-tral theme for this year’s oil and natural gas conference. While rich in reserves, the country may have a long way to go before it’s able to break its dual landlocked situation and tap deeper into for-eign economies with transnation-al pipelines. Meanwhile, if mod-ernization is indeed central to Tashkent’s long-term agenda, it may need to attract more foreign investors to help develop a renew-able energy sector.

The regional wind regime, ac-cording to the World Wind En-ergy Association, is considered modest. The World Bank, how-ever, states the country has no installed wind power. According to the WWEA, members of the Commonwealth of Independent States have only about 178 mega-watts of installed wind capacity but a “huge” wind potential.

While Tashkent can tout a rel-atively stable economy and show-case reforms meant to attract more investments, it appears only the usual suspects have signed up for this year’s energy summit.

With Western and Chinese economies taking steps toward a low-carbon future, Uzbekistan could not only address local ener-gy concerns, but free up some of its reserve potential by directing much-needed foreign investments into building a renewable energy sector.

he unexpected and largely peaceful sudden collapse of the USSR in 1991 left fifteen nations in the place of a single

unitary state. The Russian Federa-tion’s current President, Vladimir Putin, has made no secret of how he felt about the issue, remarking, “First and foremost it is worth ac-knowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the centu-ry.”

Be that as it may, the collapse of the USSR severely disrupted the economies of all fifteen former So-viet republics, destroying tradition-

al patterns of trade and leaving the new nations scrambling, both the stabilize their economies and modi-fy their Soviet inheritance to benefit their nations.

As the USSR had a centrally planned economy directed from Moscow, the result was to develop industries directed towards bene-fiting the Union as a whole, rath-er than its constituent republics. This is nowhere more evident than in Central Asia after authorities in Moscow decided to turn the region

into the USSR’s cotton plantation, in order to feed the textile indus-try that began to spring up around Moscow. The dolorous effects of this decision continue to reverber-ate to this day, more than two de-cades after the fall of the USSR, as the five “Stans” – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan Turkmeni-stan and Uzbekistan spar over the region’s most precious yet increas-ingly rare resource – water. While regional coordination efforts to de-velop equitable water policies began soon after the fragmentation of the USSR, issues about water usage continue to impact relational rela-tions, often for the worse.

Central Asian water woes – international convention best way forward by Dr. John C.K. Daly

Dr. John C.K. Daly, The Uzbek Times editor in chief, is an international correspondent for United Press International and a non-resident scholar at the Central Asia Institute of the Paul H. Nitze School of International Studies, Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC., as well as chief an-alyst for oilrpice.com. Daly’s book, Russian Sea Power and the Eastern Question, dealt extensively with Russian-Turkish relations. In 1999, while at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute of Johns Hop-kins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Daly founded The Cyber-Caravan, which continues today as, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst. Daly’s writings have appeared in Jamestown’s Spotlight on Terror, Eurasia Daily Monitor, China Brief and Terrorism Monitor, along with Jane’s Defense Group’s Intel-ligence Watch Report, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Terrorism Watch Report, Jane’s Terrorism & Security Monitor and Islamic Affairs Analyst, Caspian Crossroads, ISN and the Christian Science Monitor. Daly received his Ph.D. in Russian and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London.

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The major bones of con-tention are two rivers, the 1,500-mile-long Amu Darya and the 1,380-mile-long Syr Darya, whose combined flow before massive Soviet agricultural proj-ects were implemented equaled the Nile. The Amu Darya, Cen-tral Asia’s longest river, rises in Tajikistan’s Pamir mountain range along its border with Af-ghanistan, while the Syr Darya originates in Kyrgyzstan’s por-tion of the Tien Shan mountain range and eastern Uzbekistan. The Syr Darya flows south and westward across Tajikistan, Uz-bekistan and Kazakhstan before draining into the Aral Sea, while the Amu Darya flows on a more southerly route through Turk-menistan and Uzbekistan before entering the Aral.

The rivers together contain more than 90 percent of Central Asia’s available water resourc-es. Their headwaters are ini-tially controlled by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the two poorest ’Stans, even as Uzbekistan’s ex-tensive cotton and agricultur-al irrigation alone account for more than half of the region’s water consumption. Water issues accordingly stretch from Turk-menistan bordering the Caspian in the west to the mountainous alpine glaciers and rivers of Ta-jikistan and Kyrgyzstan, whose waters are now initially used to power hydroelectric stations in the two energy-poor nations be-fore being released to agrarian nations downstream.

As Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan seek to increase their hydroelec-tric potential by constructing yet more dams, the issue is not one of the Stans’ making. While Soviet efforts to divert Central Asian water toward agriculture

began in 1918 to grow cotton trade, the building of a mas-sive network of irrigation proj-ects began in the 1940s, which launched a sustained agricul-tural development program that was to last to the end of the So-viet era and beyond.

Shortly after independence, the five countries agreed to maintain the Soviet-era wa-ter quota system, but compet-ing national needs rendered the agreement unworkable. Further aggravating problems surround-ing the headwaters of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, in the wake of the 1992–97 Tajik civil war and the decline of Kyrgyz-stan’s economy, the two coun-tries’ aquatic facilities fell into disrepair. In 1993 Central Asian leaders recognized the problem of developing a new, post-Sovi-et regional water policy and the Kazakh, Kyr-gyz, Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek presidents es-tablished the Interstate Commission for Water Coordination to harmo-nize their water policies. But while the ICWC has since held more than 50 meetings, lit-tle has been accomplished. In the ensuring vacuum, each na-tion has increasingly developed nationalist policies, often to the detriment of its neighbors.

The failure to develop a coor-dinated approach while remain-ing wedded to fraying Soviet-era water policies is most dramati-cally illustrated in the shrinkage of the Aral Sea. The Aral was once the world’s fourth-largest inland sea with an area of 28,000 square miles. Its slow demise began in the early 1960s, when new, massive Soviet Central Asian canal projects siphoned

off increasing amounts of the Amu Darya’s and Syr Darya’s waters into inefficiently irrigat-ed fields, as increasing demands for diverted water for cotton pro-duction occurred in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The rising diversion of the rivers’ waters eventual-ly shrank the Aral Sea to ap-proximately 8,920 square miles, separating it into the northern “Small Sea” in Kazakhstan and the southern “Large Sea” in Uz-bekistan, while the toxic saline and fertilizer-laced wastelands uncovered by the sea’s retreat blew throughout Eurasia. The amount of water taken from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya doubled between 1960 and 2000, allowing cotton production to nearly double in the same period, paralleling the Aral’s decline.

Not that the newly indepen-dent Stans were oblivious of the Aral’s ecological problems; far from it. In the same year the ICWC was founded, the Stans also created the Interstate Coun-cil for the Aral Sea, which in turn produced the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea to seek funding for restoration ac-tivities under the rubric of the Aral Sea Basin Program 1. While ASBP 1 initially attracted some foreign investment, the scale of the problem subsequently com-bined with charges of poor man-agement, resulting in a drying up of foreign funding. The program is now essentially moribund,

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The rising diversion of the rivers’ waters eventually shrank the Aral Sea to approximately

8,920 square miles.

leaving it with a track record as inefficient as the ICWC’s.

While the Aral Sea’s ecolog-ical trauma is the region’s best-known aquatic disaster, other problems are increasing. Uzbeki-stan’s Syrdarya state biological inspection chief Ablyakim Abi-rov told a regional news agency that in 2008 the Syr Darya’s wa-ter flow was a mere 10 percent of its 2007 level, endangering aquat-ic biodiversity because shoals of river fish could not swim to their spawning grounds. The senti-ment was echoed by Tajikistan’s Soghd environmental committee member Gafurdzhon Karimov, who estimates that nearly half of the Syr Darya’s fish popula-tion was unable to reproduce be-cause of lowered water levels.

Unfortunately for Central Asia, Western governmental in-terest in the region has primarily focused on its energy and mil-itary resources (especially the U.S., traumatized by the 9-11 terrorist attacks), leaving devel-opmental issues such as water largely in the hands of interna-tional organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. International organizations such as the Inter-national Water Association are valuable forums for discussing Central Asian needs, but unfor-tunately they must compete for funding with other worsening situations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Regional tensions have been rising as water-rich but ener-gy-poor Kyrgyzstan and Ta-jikistan, the weakest of the re-gional economies, attempt to barter their aquatic resources for energy imports, a dilemma de-scribed in an article in the Kyr-gyz Vechernyi Bishkek newspa-

per as “a box with valuables on a powder keg.” As Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan seek payment for their water assets or energy barter arrangements with their downstream neighbors, energy shortfalls force them to use more water for power generation in the winter months, causing releases which produce flooding down-stream and leave less water to be released during the vital spring and summer growing seasons.

Nor are the problems of trans-boundary rivers limited to Central Asia. Difficulties exist on every continent, as the streams shared by neighboring countries provide an estimated 60 percent of the world’s freshwater. World-wide there are 260 international river basins, covering nearly half of the Earth’s surface, along which 40 percent of the world’s population lives. With water de-mand rising in every nation, so are tensions over the limited re-source.

So, how to resolve the dilem-ma? Two things are needed – an international framework to which all five parties can agree, and more international funding.

As for the former, interna-tional legislation exists - the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of Inter-national Watercourses, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1997 after 27 years of negoti-ation. Tashkent has been urging the other four Stans to consider using the Convention as the ba-sis for new regional negotiations, but is meeting resistance from both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both of which are seeking to con-struct massive hydroelectric bar-rages first proposed in the Soviet era, which would provide a des-perately needed source of foreign

funds via electricity exports. According to CIA World Fact-

book, in 2011 a third of Kyrgyz-stan’s population lived below the poverty line. Kyrgyzstan, which for years unsuccessfully sought funding on the international market to complete the 900 foot tall, 1,940 megawatt Kambara-ta-1 hydroelectric cascade, has now received Russian soft loans to complete the project, with Russian firm RusHydro as build-er.

Tajikistan has significant hydropower potential ranking eighth in the world after China, Russia, the U.S., Brazil, Congo, India and Canada. Its proposed Sangtuda-1 HPP is the largest investment project and the first hydropower facility in joint use and operation to have been im-plemented by the Russian Fed-eration in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

It is the 3,600 megawatt Ro-gun hydroelectric facility, cur-rently under construction, which most concerns Uzbekistan, which argues that the dam is lo-cated in a seismically active area. If finished, Rogun would be the world’s tallest dam with a height of 1,099 feet.

The prospective trade in elec-tricity envisioned by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan targets primarily South Asian countries. In 2006 the Central Asia/South Asia Regional Electricity Market program was launched with as-sistance from the Asian Develop-ment Bank to develop the sub-re-gional electricity market. The CASA-1000 (Central Asia/South Asia) project was launched in the framework of the program, pro-viding for the export to South Asia of electricity produced in the summer by Tajikistan’s and

16 THE UZBEK TIMES

Kyrgyzstan’s active hydropow-er plants. CASA-1000 creates a system to transmit electricity from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Afghanistan and Pakistan, which will make it possible to export up to 1,000 megawatts during the first phase with sub-sequent increase in supplies.

But, as Uzbekistan rightly points out, the massive upgrad-ing of upstream hydroelectric facilities has potentially enor-mous consequences for down-stream nations’ agriculture and the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses rep-resents the best international legislation to resolve outstanding

water issues between the Stans. International funders should in-sist that the Convention be ful-ly implemented before agreeing to any funding for hydroelectric projects affecting transnational Central Asian rivers, so all con-cerns can be equitably addressed. What is certain at this stage is that the ramshackle rivers’ basin structure is already stretched to breaking point, no further water is available, and if Afghanistan becomes peaceful, yet another regional actor will be vying for a scarce resource. International lending institutions and govern-ments should view the region’s water issues as an organic enti-ty and allocate aid accordingly,

extending its scope to include conservation, agricultural im-provements and assisting Cen-tral Asian nations to diversify their agricultural output beyond cotton to include lower water use crops, while carefully evaluating all concerns surrounding poten-tial power projects before pro-viding funding.

According to an Aral proverb, “In every drop of water there is a grain of gold.” Too many drops have already been lost, and the international community should assist Central Asia in conserving the region’s most precious re-source, its liquid “gold.”

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ince the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Central Asian countries have not been a high priority for Azerbaijan, as the newly independent nation looked westwards towards the United States or European Union rather than towards the eastern shores of the Caspian. Following indepen-dence, Central Asia was a low priority for Baku, both politically and economically, a situation that

lasted for some time, for better or worse. The following article analyzes the reasons for such policies as well as future possibilities for upgraded relations.

Azerbaijan in Central Asia -future and perspectivesDr. Anar Valiyev

Dr. Anar Valiyev is the Dean of the School of In-ternational Affairs at ADA. He received his Bach-elor’s degree in history from Baku State Univer-sity in 1999 and his Master’s degree in history two years later from BSU. In 2001-2003 Valiyev studied public policy at School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he re-ceived his second Masters degree. In 2007 Valiyev successful-ly defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Lou-isville’s School of Urban and Public Affairs. In 2007-2008 Dr. Anar Valiyev worked as an assistant professor at Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.

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S

PoliTicSIt would be wrong to analyze

the relations of Azerbaijan with Central Asian countries from pure-ly geographical perspectives, as Azeri relations with each country are unique and not affected mere-ly by geographical factors. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia, which erupted in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and regional eco-nomic cooperation, was the major factors defining Azerbaijan’s pri-orities in the region in the immedi-ate post-independence period.

Despite the breakup of the USSR, Azerbaijan, along with all five former Soviet Central Asia republics, are all members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Within the framework of the CIS, member states signed numerous multilateral documents and treaties, and many issues of political cooperation were fre-quently solved at annual meetings of the CIS heads of states. Be-yond the CIS, many former Soviet Caucasian and Central Asian re-publics are now members of other organizations, such as the Orga-nization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Three Central Asian coun-tries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan - are also members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), along with Russia, Belorussia and Arme-nia. Uzbekistan, which originally joined CSTO in 1994, suspended its membership in 2012.

The CSTO charter obligated its members to assist each other mil-itarily in case of aggression by a third party. Despite the fact that Azerbaijan did not intend to tres-pass upon Armenian territory, Ye-revan nevertheless sought to use

CSTO as a tool to counterbalance Azerbaijan’s growing military might. In its conflict with Armenia Azerbaijan eventually concluded that Kazakhstan’s, Kyrgyzstan’s and Tajikistan’s membership in CSTO would be of little assistance in redressing its claims, deciding that, whatever the potential rel-ative merits of its case, none of the Central Asian countries, in the case of the reemergence of an Azerbaijani-Armenian war, would intervene in such a conflict.

Of all five Central Asian post-Soviet countries, Azerbai-jan has always regarded Uzbeki-stan as its most stable partner. In comparison with the region’s oth-er post-Soviet nations, Tashkent openly supported Azerbaijan’s po-sition in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute and recognized Armenia as the aggressor. Further politi-cal cooperation between the two countries did not go beyond the declarations however, as Uzbeki-stan did not want to bind itself via treaties or a strategic partner-ship to a country in conflict with a Caucasian nation largely regarded as a Russian client state. For its part, Azerbaijan did not initially actively seek a further deepening of political relations with Uzbeki-stan. While the pair were mem-bers of the post-Soviet GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, founded in 2001, Uzbekistan, having found no benefits in the organization, withdrew in 2005, but maintained warm relations with other mem-ber states, including Azerbaijan, which became another vehicle for stabilizing Azeri-Uzbek relations.

Azerbaijan relations with an-other Central Asian state, Ka-zakhstan, developed along similar

lines. The two countries, both Cas-pian states, were more interested in economic cooperation rather than deepening political ties, with both countries supporting one another’s position on the delim-itation of the Caspian’s offshore waters and seabed, among other political issues. Nevertheless, as with Uzbekistan, Astana did not press for deeper or strategic polit-ical cooperation with Azerbaijan. Similarly, Azerbaijan’s relations with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan did not develop far beyond its pro forma relations within the Com-monwealth of Independent States framework. The CIS, a loose po-litical affiliation that succeeded the Soviet Union, contained all former Soviet republics except the Baltic states of Estonia, Lat-via and Lithuania, while Georgia withdrew from the organization in 2008, following its border clashes with the Russian Federation.

Turkmenistan’s relations with Azerbaijan in the initial period of post-independence blew hot and cold. Since the death of for-mer Turkmen “Turkmenbashi” President Saparmurat Niyazov in December 2006 years of mutual mistrust and mutual accusations ended, and the two countries are now deepening their political and economic relations.

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICSDuring the Soviet era Central

Asia was a substantial market for Azeri goods, with products manu-factured there, such as petrochem-ical products, air-conditioners and machinery being traded. However, the collapse of the USSR in 1991 led to a disruption of national transportation networks, decreas-ing trade turnover. Azeri oil and petrochemical products continue

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to be the country’s major exports to Central Asia. Azeri imports from Central Asia are diverse, ranging from cotton to machinery.

The above tables illustrate that even today, multilateral economic relations between Azerbaijan and Central Asian countries is unstable and depends on market forces, but Azerbaijan’s intention to become a regional energy hub will increase doubtlessly increase this trade. In 2018-2020, Azeri energy expan-sion plans include constructing a natural gas processing plant capa-ble of processing 40 billion cubic meters per year, a 300,000 barrel per day oil refinery, and addition-al chemical, petrochemical, and power plants. With such complex-es operational, Baku will need ad-ditional oil resources for operating its infrastructure and accordingly would be happy to purchase oil at market prices from all the sellers in the region – Uzbekistan, Kazakh-stan and Turkmenistan – along with helping them to solve trans-portation logistics. Furthermore, constructing new ship-building facilities on the shores of the Cas-

pian would help Azerbaijan and other littoral states to break the current Russian monopoly on the supply of tankers and merchant ships.

Russian regional domination is also impeding the implementation of one of the Caspian’s most ambi-tious projects - the Trans-Caspian pipeline, intended to deliver nat-ural gas from Turkmenistan, and possibly from Uzbekistan in the future, to European markets. The project, approved by the Europe-an Union and actively supported by Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, would help to break Russia’s mo-nopoly on transporting Caspian and Central Asian natural gas to lucrative European markets. Mos-cow opposes the construction of the Caspian seabed pipeline, citing the unresolved legal status of the Caspian. Despite Moscow’s disap-proval however, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan are nevertheless rushing to launch the project that could be of immense benefit to the entire region.

Besides aspiring becoming a regional energy hub, Azerbaijan is also interested in developing its potential to become an important transportation network point in Eurasia. The U.S., China and the EU currently account for rough-ly 60 percent of the world’s trade, including 45 percent of global im-ports and 42 percent of the world’s exports. For Azerbaijan, locat-ed between the EU and China, its potential to capture a percentage of their trade via transportation links is a crucial concern. Baku is an important location astride the trade routes of EU commerce with China, India and the ASEAN countries. Azerbaijan is already building an International Logistics Center at Alyat, 40 miles south of Baku that is intended to play a piv-otal role in international transpor-tation for Eurasian commerce.

Furthermore, with the launch-

Azeri exports to Central Asia (all figures in $$$)

Countries 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Kazakhstan 127,594.3 290,248.5 142,154.1 44,591.4 58,281.5 Kyrgyzstan 2 ,698.2 3,585.1 4 ,558.5 40,541.2 21,151.3 Uzbekistan 4 ,454.7 7,454.1 5,769.3 20,301.4 21,881.7 Tajikistan 5 1,564.7 45,602.1 8,094.2 8,181.1 13,212.1 Turkmenistan 13,599.7 21,002.2 37,477.5 200,678.0 43,921.6

Azeri imports from Central Asia

Countries 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Kazakhstan 222,294.2 200,052.1 63,617.7 293,552.9 217,307.9 Kyrgyzstan 924.1 1,342.5 7 51.6 1 ,006.5 923.4 Uzbekistan 19,131.5 22,439.0 12,365.8 12,332.7 50,555.1 Tajikistan 5 14.6 500.3 742.9 1 ,256.1 2,773.5 Turkmenistan 40,294.0 51,559.0 26,172.3 13,918.4 12,913.6

Source: Azerbaijan State Statistical Committee, 2013

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ing of Baku-Kars-Akhalkalaki railroad, a rail link between Eu-rope and the western shores of the Caspian will be realized. For Azer-baijan to become an international transportation hub however, it will need more than infrastructure. Most importantly in this scheme is the willingness of Central Asian countries to transport their goods via Azerbaijan to Europe. For the landlocked countries of Cen-tral Asia, Azerbaijan represents a reasonable alternative to overland routes via the Russian Federation, and utilizing faster and cheap-er Azeri routes for the delivery of goods from Central Asian markets to Europe and back could signifi-cantly help economics of all inter-ested parties.

Until recently Azerbaijani business interests in Central Asia were limited to the transportation of Kazakh or Turkmen oil to the

world market via tankers and rail-roads. Azerbaijan was not involved in any major business project in the region due to the absence of financial resources and opportu-nities. Beginning in 2012 howev-er, the crown jewel of the Azeri economy, the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic began to expand its presence in the region. last year SocAR announced plans to build a $250 million oil refinery in Kyrgyzstan with an annual ca-pacity of 2 million tons, with con-struction planned for completion by the end of 2013 or the begin-ning of 2014. It is interesting that the oil for the refinery would come from Kazakhstan, which in turn would receive the same amount of oil from Azerbaijan either on the shores of the Black Sea or Mediter-ranean. Kyrgyzstan’s current an-nual consumption of oil is 1.3 -1.5 million tons, with 75 percent of the

market being supplied by Russian imports. The SocAR Kyrgyz oil refinery could then significantly reduce the Central Asian country’s energy dependence on Russia.

ConclusionsAzerbaijan has only recent-

ly begun to understand that the country’s future economic oppor-tunities lay more in Central Asia rather than anywhere else. Cen-tral Asian countries have untapped natural resources and businesses opportunities for Azeri businesses, which face difficulties operating in Europe and elsewhere because of stiff competition. Having a competitive advantage in Central Asian markets would allow Aze-ri businesses to thrive and expand here, while building business con-nections would strengthen political cooperation as well, bringing the family of Turkic speaking coun-tries closer again.

“We turn the deserts into gardens”

Turkmenistan’s“Golden Age”lake’s viability

Zhulduz Baizako-va is a graduate of Kazakh Nation-al University and has a M.Sc. degree in International Security and Global Governance from Birk-beck College, University of London. She served for 7 years in the Ministry for Foreign Af-fairs of the Republic of Kazakh-stan, which included a foreign posting to the United King-dom. Baizakova defended her MA candidate dissertation on NATO peacekeeping activities at Kazakh National Universi-ty and currently specializes in Central Asian security and en-vironmental issues.

by Zhulduz Baizakova

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rrigation issues present constant challenges for Turkmenistan, as 80 per-cent of its territory is desert. Accordingly, most

of the rivers flowing inside and across the country are used for irrigation purposes. In such an environment, the val-ue of clean drinking water paral-lels that of gold in the extremely dry and hot climate of the coun-try.

Apart from the booming gas industry, the economy of Turk-menistan is mainly focused on agriculture, in particular cotton production. During the Soviet era, Turkmenistan became the world’s tenth largest producer of cotton, which some Turk-men officials claim it still is. And as widely known, cotton needs significant amounts of water. Cotton’s water requirement is determined by the location and environment where it is being grown. The dryer and hotter the environment, the more water the plant requires. A desert envi-ronment with high temperatures and low humidity will result in high water requirements from 40-50 inches of water per year. Water issues accordingly still re-tain a high priority in Turkmen-istan.

Driven by the ambitious goal of growing cotton, beginning in the early 1960s the Soviet lead-ership had built up a solid infra-structure of drainage systems covering Turkmenistan’s main river basins, including the pride of the country’s irrigation infra-structure – the Garagum (“Black Sand” in Turkmen) Canal.

Started in 1954 and complet-ed in 1988, the Garagum Canal

is navigable over much of its 855 mile length, and carries 3.1 cubic miles of water annually from the Amu Darya river across the Ga-ragum Desert in Turkmenistan.

Unfortunately for Turkmen-istan, beginning in the Soviet era and extending through the country’s independence, the Amu Darya suffers from both inefficient and uncontrollable us-age for irrigation and other pur-poses. The drainage water (DW) that is not being used floods the agricultural lands and pastures, acquiring pesticide residues and creating salt marches, harming the country’s fragile ecology. De-spite the polluted nature of the runoff, these waters are what the Turkmen government is pro-posing to use to create its new Altyn Asyr (“Golden Age”) arti-ficial lake. There are also unset-tling accounts that sewage water might be diverted to the Altyn Asyr reservoir as well.

The idea of reusing agricul-tural drainage waters by divert-ing them into the Caspian first appeared in the 1960s during the Soviet period. In the 1970s the USSR developed the project of collecting the waters in Turk-menistan’s natural Karashor de-pression, where the Uzboy old riverbed would carry water from Dashoguz to Karashor passing by Sarykamish lake and from Turkmenabad to the center of the Garagum desert, where an artificial reservoir would be cre-ated. The project was abandoned after the 1991 collapse of Sovi-et Union. The same project has now been revived by the Turk-men government to create the Altyn Asyr reservoir.

As envisaged, Altyn Asyr will

be 64 miles long and 11.5 miles wide, with a storage capacity of 31.6 cubic miles of water and a surface area of about 740 square miles. Altyn Asyr will be locat-ed roughly 220 miles from the Turkmen capital Ashgabat and the project’s budget is estimated by Turkmen authorities at $4.5-6 billion.

Turkmen officials claim that the lake would facilitate biodiver-sity, bird migration, the growth of salt tolerant plants, fish and cattle farming and even facilitate the development of eco-tourism. Another great ambition is to free from flooding and/or irrigate roughly 1,550 square miles for agricultural use.

To develop the project the Turkmen government is doing its utmost to attract foreign in-vestment and advertise their en-terprise by arranging numerous international conferences and workshops involving the Global Water Partnership, he United Nations Environment Program, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organi-zation, the United Nations Eco-nomic Commission for Europe, the Global Environment Facility and other international entities.

The question remains, how-ever - what kind of healthy eco-tourism and farming might develop around a lake containing polluted, salty and sewage-laden drainage waters diverted from all over the desert, some of it divert-ed through ancient riverbeds?

Due to poor maintenance and post-Soviet dilapidation of Central Asian irrigation sys-tems, more than 50 percent of the state’s irrigation waters do not reach the crops. The same

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I

situation can be observed also in Uzbekistan. Some amount of the irrigation water flows back into the Amu Darya, but with an increasing mineral and pesticide content, which affects the local population in both Turkmen-istan and Uzbekistan, as they also use it as drinking water.

By some accounts out of the total amount of DW, only 13 percent is reused for irrigation, while 51 percent is discharged back into rivers, along with 110-120 million tons of salt. The rest is simply lost in the desert, either through evaporation or seeping into the soil.

Due to the inefficient func-tioning of Central Asia’ drainage system and DW being wasted on an unprecedented scale, 73 percent of the region’s irrigated

land is already considered to be salinized. Most of those canals transporting the DW were built in Soviet times and are unlined, meaning that the water con-stantly seeps away during its passage.

Turkmenistan already has one natural DW collector, Saryka-mish lake, which contains rough-ly two cubic miles of water, along with about 80 other smaller lakes where DW is collected. Saryka-mish lake is located roughly 125 miles southwest from the Aral Sea. Nowadays Sarykamish is primarily used as a discharge col-lector for saline irrigation water. Scientists estimated that its sa-linity had increased rapidly from 12-16 grams per gallon in the 1960s to 48-52 grams per gallon by 1987. Current rates are esti-

mated to be even higher.The new Altyn Asyr reservoir

is not far from Sarykamish lake. Environmentalist and ecologists are darkly imagining what the possible impact might be from having three of Central Asia’s largest water reservoirs (the Aral Sea, Sarykamish and Altyn Asyr) filled with salty and pes-ticide-laden waters on the local ecology, not only of the neigh-boring Aral region, shared by Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, but the entire Cen-tral Asian region and its popu-lation. Another factor to bear in mind is that DW from all three basins keeps constantly evapo-rating, due to the harsh climate.

Turkmenistan’s Minister of Water Industry Myratgeldy Ak-mammedov himself acknowledg-

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es that the biological productivi-ty of artificial lakes containing drainage water will gradually deteriorate and decrease because of the salinization process.

In contrast, among the goals Turkmen officials promote for constructing the Altyn Asyr res-ervoir are: stopping the drainage water flow into the Amu Darya, which would reduce its mineral-ization level; improve water san-itation; stop grazing lands from flooding; the creation of a single unified system for collecting DW; the creation of a water reservoir for developing new agricultural lands; extend water access for local farmers and a reorientation of the infrastructure of the en-tire Garagum desert. As noted above however, many specialists think differently.

Turkmen specialists in favor of the project argue that there have as yet been no comprehen-sive studies conducted concern-ing the efficient use of water re-sources and defining the amount of waste as well as the quantity and quality of drainage water and its implications for the en-vironment. Nevertheless, since most Turkmen drainage water now has a salt concentration of more than 40 grams per gallon, it cannot be used for watering the traditional crops grown in Turkmenistan, such as cotton, wheat and sugar beet without treatment.

Turkmenistan President Gur-banguly Berdymukhammedov claims that “as practice shows, water will undergo purification to be used again both for irriga-tion and other purposes.” There exists as yet however there no practice known in the world

dealing with such a large amount of water to be maintained and purified. Nevertheless the Turk-men government maintains that the Altyn Asyr lake will be the world’s first experiment to col-lect drainage water in a special reservoir for eventual recycling and reuse.

The major issue is - how a country that already wastes so much water for irrigation plans to recycle it later, after the same waters have undergone an in-creasing amount of salinization and mineralization?

Another of Berdymukhamme-dov’s statements about the dis-appearance of Caspian and Aral wetlands and saline sites since the start of the project collapses after one observes the increas-ing amount of white saline spots along the path of canals and riv-erbeds from satellite monitoring photographs produced by the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Ocean-ology and Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Scienc-es, together the Ukrainian Ma-rine Hydrophysical Institute as recently as July 2011. The visual evidence is undeniable.

The satellite imagery clearly shows that drainage waters are being spilt and wasted on their way to the Altyn Asyr reservoir, leaving behind the traces of salt marches. Moreover, it is not only salt that remains: there are pes-ticides and various other agri-cultural chemicals. Dust storms splay them out at a distance of up to more than 300 miles from their point of origin, potentially harming the health of local pop-ulation and the development of vegetation and crops.

Turkmen World Wildlife

Fund director Timur Berkeliyev believes that the contaminated Altyn Asyr lake will eventual-ly turn into an “artificial Dead Sea.” Many other experts worry that the collected drainage wa-ter might not be enough to fill the lake, because of the rapid evaporation and its soaking into the sands. Berkeliyev also con-firmed that the national project has never been publicly discussed before its launch. In 2004 Turken authorities banned the country’s only independent environmental body after its members inquired whether any ecological study had been conducted on the Altyn Asyr reservoir.

Meanwhile Ashgabat is trying to attract $1 billion in foreign in-vestments to expand its cotton industry up to 2016, which will necessitate the expansion of ir-rigated land, increasing demand for water. According to the Min-ister of Textile Industry, Sapa-rmuray Batyrov 2,100 square miles were sown with cotton in 2012. There are also plans to in-crease grain harvests.

While it is highly doubtful that the new lake might be of some help in supplying the wa-ter, no one in the Turkmen gov-ernment doubts the fact that it must be clean water in order to grow high quality market-able cotton to produce “made in Turkmenistan” jeans that would lead the country into its bright and shining future.

As Nurgozel Bairamova in her article, “The Great Lake or Turkmenistan’s Dead Sea?” sug-gests “the more deserts we turn into the gardens, the more gar-dens we turn into the deserts.”

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Kyrgyzstan seeks to improve its investment climate after years of instability by Roman Muzalevsky

nergy resource poor yet mineral rich Kyrgyzstan has long struggled to at-tract investment due to

prevalent corruption, red tape, and a lack of infrastructure. For many investors, the country’s two domestic “tulip” revolutions in the last eight years and ethnic clashes in 2010 have made that task even harder. However, recent domestic and regional economic dynam-ics and the growing interests of outside potential investors in the country’s favorable location and lucrative mining, transport, and hydropower sectors, have provid-ed potential opportunities for the government to advance reforms to improve its investment climate as it seeks to expand the economy.

After Kyrgyz President Kur-manbek Bakiyev’s government was overthrown by the country’s second “tulip revolution” in April

2010, the interim government headed provisional President Rosa Otunbayeva announced an ambi-tious “100 days” program of re-forms, intended to cut the number of public employees and improve conditions for business, agricul-tural and foreign investment. The provisional Kyrgyz government, headed by then Prime Minister Omurbek Babonov, subsequently reported a 90 percent completion rate by 30 March 2012. Many economists questioned the initia-tive, reportedly quipping that it should be better called a program of “100” problems for investors. The results of the program are under debate, but the government has since undertaken other initia-tives amid lingering concerns of investors about the country’s on-going political instability.

Former businessman and Prime Minister, President Alma-

zbek Atambayev views political and fiscal stability as critical for improving investment climate in the country that saw a peaceful transfer of power in 2011 and now boasts Central Asia’s first parlia-mentary system of government. In January 2012 Omurbek Ba-bonov unveiled a five-year nation-al economic development strategy, which sought to advance reforms, improve the investment climate, and double the country’s gross do-mestic product. Kyrgyz author-ities are confident that $7 billion in aid and investments will even-tually become available to fund 15 energy projects ($5.5 billion), transport and communication programs ($900 million), and ag-riculture initiatives ($400 million).

However, many both inside and outside the country remain skeptical about the plan, partic-ularly given the country’s ongo-

Roman Muzalevsky works for iJet Intelligent Risk Systems, Inc., focusing on security analysis and risk assessment. He is also a Contributing Analyst on Eur-asian Affairs and Security at the Jamestown Founda-tion and a contributing analyst on the Russia, Central Asia, and Globalization desks at the geopolitical and security consultancy Wikistrat. Muzalevsky received his MA in International Affairs concentrating on security and strategy studies from Yale University.

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E

ing poor investment climate, that many say has become even more tarnished due to ongoing disagree-ments between the government and the Canadian-based Centerra Gold mining venture at Kumtor in Kyrgyzstan. For better or worse, the Centerra Gold company is the country’s largest gold producer, responsible in 2012 for 70 percent of all gold production and 12 per-cent of GDP in Kyrgyzstan. In February 2013 the government fined Centerra Gold $315 million for environmental damages and demanded renegotiation of the contract that it says was conclud-ed unfairly back in 2009 under the regime of the former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, now in exile in Belarus after the 2010 coun-try’s second “tulip revolution.” In 2012, protests by opposition groups demanding environmen-tal compensation and larger taxes from Centerra Gold caused a halt in its operations, resulting in lost production equivalent to 1-3 per-cent fall in the country’s econom-ic growth rate. The issue remains unresolved.

According to the 2012 Survey by the International Business Council in Kyrgyzstan, compa-nies more often currently view the Kyrgyz investment climate as more negative rather than posi-tive, pointing to taxes, customs control and the lack of qualified personnel as particularly burden-some for businesses, despite noting major improvements in areas such as public regulations and access to finance. The companies surveyed in the report also highlight con-cerns with investing in southern regions that saw ethnic clashes in June 2010, three months after the popular uprising that toppled for-mer President Bakiyev.

Following Bakiyev’s downfall,

the provisional government took control over a number of enter-prises that allegedly had a share of foreign capital and shady ties to the Bakiyev family and its close associates. For some, the govern-ment’s actions prompted fears of nationalization and concerns about lack of due legal process. Others, who saw Bakiyev’s and his family’s corruption infecting the country’s business practices, the provisional government’s ac-tions produced a sense of justice and cleared a path for less cor-ruption in the country’s business practices. Among the major out-side business interests affected by the provisional government’s reform efforts were mobile oper-ator MegaCom and AsiaUniver-salBank, the latter which was apparently deeply involved in the Bakiyev regime’s corruption, wir-ing millions of dollars of assets out of the country in the waning days of the Bakiyev administra-tion.

Widespread corruption how-ever has persisted in Kyrgyzstan. In 2011 the Transparency Inter-national Corruption Perception Index ranked Kyrgyzstan 164 out of 182 countries surveyed. High corruption levels have prompted the government to establish an anticorruption service within the State Committee on National Se-curity. The government has also sought to reduce the share of the country’s underground “shad-ow” economy that reportedly represents about half of the to-tal economy, viewing further im-provements to the tax system as one of the most effective ways to achieve this.

Over the past two years Kyr-gyzstan has made some progress nonetheless. In 2012, it ranked 70 out of 183 countries in the Ease

of Doing Business rank, accord-ing to the World Bank’s “Doing Business” report. Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s most dynamic and largest economy, ranked 47, while Uzbekistan ranked 166. The re-port identified “paying taxes” as a reform making it more difficult to do business in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan’s other rankings are: paying taxes – 162, as opposed to Kazakhstan’s 13 rating and Uz-bekistan’s 157.

On the issue of protecting in-vestors Kyrgyzstan rated a 13, Kazakhstan - 10 and Uzbekistan - 133. As for enforcing contracts Kyrgyzstan achieved a rating of 48, versus Kazakhstan with 27 and Uzbekistan - 43. Trading across borders? Kyrgyzstan scored 171, Kazakhstan - 176 and Uzbekistan - 183. In the category of starting a business, Kyrgyzstan received a rating of 17, Kazakhstan - 57 and Uzbekistan - 96.

The reforms have enabled the country to prepare some favor-able ground for FDI, which today is concentrated in food process-ing, banking, manufacturing, and extractive industries. According to the 2012 Investment Climate Statement of the U.S. Depart-ment of State, the largest sourc-es of FDI in Kyrgyzstan in 2011 were Canada (48 percent), China (14 percent), UK (7 percent), and Germany (6 percent). A year earli-er, Canada was Kyrgyzstan’s lead-ing investor (37 percent), followed by the UK (16 percent), China (12 percent), and Russia (10 percent). Investments by China and Russia in 2013 and beyond are expected to increase their share relative to other countries.

Besides mining, tourism is an-other growing sector, accounting for $210 million, or 4.8 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP. Last year Kyr-

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gyzstan removed visa restrictions for citizens from 44 states, which facilitated a 14 percent increase in the number of tourists visiting the country. As a result, Kazakhstan and the Russian federation are among most prominent investors in the country’s tourism sector.

It is the development of the country’s mineral resources that remains a major priority for the government, seeking to mitigate the country’s excessive reliance on Kumtor by auctioning five mines this year: Jerooy (gold), Togolok (gold), Tegenek (coal), Chaartash (marble), and Akkart (marble). The projects are expected to bring in $480 million in revenues. Kyr-gyzstan is rich in mercury, urani-um, tin, antimony, lead, rare earth minerals, and other deposits and has more than 430 tons of proven gold reserves, 1 billion tons of coal and 340 million tons of aluminum reserves.

Kyrgyzstan finds itself in the midst of geopolitical and geo-eco-nomic dynamics that enable the government to link the country’s development with regionally sig-nificant projects spearheaded by Russia and China. Furthermore, Kyrgyzstan’s neighboring major actors are seeking to enhance their economic and political influence in the changing Central Asian land-scape as U.S-led coalition forces leave the war-torn Afghanistan in 2014.

The Russian Federation is a growing source of remittances from hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz laborers. Last year, remit-tances by Kyrgyz workers from the Russian Federation grew by 18 percent, accounting for about 29 percent of the country’s GDP, making Kyrgyzstan the third larg-est recipient of remittances in the world. In 2012, Moscow provided

Bishkek with a significant mili-tary and economic aid package, with planned investments worth more than $4.2 billion, according to some reports.

The Russian Federation’s In-terRAO and RusHydro energy companies are considering funding the construction of hydro pow-er stations, even though they are opposed by downstream Uzbeki-stan, while Russian Federation state-owned natural gas monopo-ly Gazprom is seeking to purchase Kyrgyzstan’s state gas company and modernize the country’s col-lapsing gas distribution system.

Some media sources allege that Moscow’s aid is tied to Kyrgyz-stan’s decision not to extend the lease for the U.S. base at Manas airport in Bishkek beyond 2014. The Russian Federation operates its own airbase at nearby Kant and has reportedly promised help with the government’s plan to re-develop the airport at Manas as a region’s civilian air hub following the departure of U.S. forces.

China, already Kyrgyzstan’s second largest investor, has in turn announced loans worth over $1 billion in the coming months. Chinese companies plan to devel-op Kyrgyzstan’s Kuru-Tegerek poly-metallic reserves, Ishtam-berdy gold deposits, Tegene coal reserves (585 million tons of re-coverable coal deposits), and rare earth mineral deposits. Beijing is also considering participating in the construction of a proposed China-Kyrgyzstan- Uzbekistan railway line, the Kazakhstan-Kyr-gyzstan-China oil pipeline and a natural gas pipeline that would extend from Turkmenistan through Kyrgyzstan. Besides pipelines and railway lines, land-locked Kyrgyzstan is looking to the world’s second biggest econo-

my to expand its trade infrastruc-ture by focusing on its Dordoi and Kara-Suu markets. These trade centers are Central Asian’s largest and serve as gateways for boom-ing Kyrgyz-Chinese trade that currently stands at about $5 bil-lion annually.

As a World Trade Organization member, Kyrgyzstan however has to navigate uncertain terrain, as it seeks to benefit from China’s ex-panding global trade even while being enticed by the prospects of joining the Moscow-led Cus-toms Union comprising Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. While Bishkek is certainly concerned about China’s growing economic presence in the country, it also un-derstands that Beijing’s regional economic plans can help Kyrgyz-stan develop its own economy and become a critical link in Eurasia’s Silk Road networks powered by China’s global ambitions.

As Kyrgyzstan seeks to cap-italize on both its modest do-mestic successes and the region’s dynamics, it must not lose sight of the importance of advancing major reforms across the board. This should not only enable the domestic economy to attract cap-ital from nearby investors but also entice FDI from countries in the West, whose technologies and business practices are critical for the country’s post-Soviet econ-omy that has long suffered from pervasive corruption, red tape, and political instability. Planned investments from nearby coun-tries may be a welcome sign, but attracting more investments from the West would make the coun-try’s investment climate and its progress on reforms look more credible, generating even more op-portunities for the country’s eco-nomic development.

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Jihadi internet literature and its potential impact on Central Asia

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Stephen Ulph specializes in the analysis of jihadist and Islamist ideology and regu-larly lectures on aspects of Islamist and Jihadist ideology impacting on Western democ-racies and the course of the war on terror-ism. His publications include an analysis on the course of jihadism in Syria for the CTC, an ideological analysis of the ‘Virtual Bor-der Conflict’ (the online arena for Islamist extremism) for The Borders of Islam, an in-depth examination of the relationship of Isla-mism to other totalitarian systems of thought in Fighting the Ideological War and a 4-part reference work Towards a Curriculum for the Teaching of Jihadist Ideology available online at the Jamestown Foundation.

by Stephen Ulph

nyone making even a cursory perus-al of the Islamist and Jihadist sites on the web is soon struck not only by

the sheer size of the endeavour, but by the range and quality of the websites in circulation, rang-ing from simple discussion forums to fullscale, media-savvy productions that combine visual impact with high technological competence.

Analysts have long agonised over how import-ant the internet has been to jihadists, whether the risk is primarily in terms of the cyber-terrorism threat, as a conduit for operational information or as a barometer of future intentions, but there is one element that remains of undisputed use for the mujahideen: the element of education and propaganda. For what is clearly in evidence, from all the proliferation, is the value of the In-ternet for promoting a common jihadist culture.

This is strategically more significant than it sounds. In the Central Asia region of the “Stans” the mujahideen have failed so far to threaten the state structures – due to the jihadist preoccupa-tion with Afghanistan and the ability to date of Central Asia’s strong, centralized governments to clamp down on militant activity or expression of support for Islamists.

But the jihad, perhaps more than any other ideologically-founded conflict, is a war of hearts and minds that is working to a much longer time-scale. Its proponents are convinced that the logic of a 1,400-year long history and faith is on their side and believe that every death evidences a per-sonal triumph for the “martyr,” every reverse on the field a step towards the final victory.

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Maintaining this perception is the strategic function of the jihadist internet endeavour, as the mujahi-deen await the onset of suitable po-litical conditions – political turmoil, economic collapse, ethnic conflict or any other crisis – so as to step in and launch their offensives over the ruins, as laid out by the strategist AbūBakrNājī in his work, The Man-agement of Savagery. Recent history has shown how patient jihadist mil-itant groups can be and – given the example of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan’s 1999 invasion of the Batken and Osh oblasts of Kyrgyz-stan – how willing they are to seek the vital bridgehead for the reestab-lishment of the Caliphate, beginning with Uzbekistan, one of the historic centers of Islamic culture.

How could distant Central Asia fit into this scheme? Jihadist ideologues are nothing if not diligent. The region was early identified as an arena of considerable importance, both reli-giously and strategically. For exam-ple, the famous strategist Abu Mus’ab al-Sūrī elaborated on the significance of “Khorasan” (conceived as embrac-ing parts of Iran, Afghanistan, Turk-menistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) in his 1999 work Muslims in Central Asia and the Coming Battle of Islam:

“The glad tidings from the Prophet’s ahadith are never chang-ing, and prophecies of the People of the Book concur ... The forces of Imam Mahdi will be victorious in Khorasan and will then get help from Yemen, Iraq, Syria. Then the centre of Imam Mahdi’s kingship will be transferred to Damascus.”

Fantasies aside, his practical ob-servations on the prioritisation of Central Asia focused on the area be-ing the “weakest spot of the enemy” and a “prudent epicentre for opera-tions.” He noted the natural geogra-phy of the countries, which “form a strategic natural fortification against the militaries of the world,” defying siege and control, and where “overall poverty in the population and other factors and specifications make this populace suitable for jihad at this

time.”While the core Arab Middle East

occupies the lion’s share of jihadist fo-cus, jihadis have long been at pains to underscore the Central Asian region’s contribution to the overall cause. For example, an Arabic language state-ment was put out in November 2000 by the IMU as an expression of soli-darity for the Palestinian intifada, and also as an argumentation of the central importance of Central Asia in the cause of jihad:

“As for the sons of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Cen-tral Asia, our movement is global and we experience the hopes and pains of all Muslims. We have con-tracted ourselves to aid Muslims in every place without respect for na-tionality or location ... We see the conquest of Uzbekistan as lying on the road towards the liberation of the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque [in Je-rusalem] ... For it is all one single vital effort along a single path ... Every one of us is manning an out-post of Islam.”

Keeping the Middle East centre informed was certainly the priority behind the production of Arabic-lan-guage online newsletters. Such a task was carried out by Talā’Khurāsān, the “Vanguards of Khorasan” publication which featured regular updates on the Afghan field operations, inter-views with mujahideen famous for successful operations, eulogies of martyred mujahideen and the correc-tion or denial of news reports put out by the regional and international me-dia. This was for the use not only of Arab speakers in the Afghan field, but also designed to promote the cause back home amongst their funders in the Middle East. Just how important the media message was to fighters in the field was underscored by the de-velopment of specialist media wings designed to take the militants’ propa-ganda war onto the offensive.

But the most important function by far is the propagandistic one, where the maintenance of morale is assured through the fostering of a comprehensive “culture of jihad.”

This is indicated by the proliferation of jihadist discussion forums and organisation websites. In a typical example of a jihadist forum the con-stituent sections divide themselves equally between pro-active reader communication and elements of ed-ucation and scholarship. Significant-ly, the more comprehensive the site, the greater space is given to doctrinal discourse motivating and justifying the actions of the mujahideen.

A good example of the genre is the IMU website Furqon, which features all these elements, providing not only articles and commentaries but also hosting an all-purpose jihad cultural center. The slick production features a Kutubkhona (“library”) section featuring works of a doctrinal na-ture underpinning the jihadist view with the copious materials on ‘aqī-da (“creed”), on hijra (“migration”) from the impure, infidel community), on al-wala’ wal-barā’ (the polarizing, hostile “Loyalty and Renunciation” doctrine codifying the repudiation of contact with infidels), morally im-proving tales on the pious ancestors (al-Salaf) and selections from the Qur’ān that emphasize the propriety of jihad.

The idea of “libraries” on jihad-ist forums might surprise many, and particularly libraries stuffed almost exclusively with doctrinal treatises. But the mujahideen are fighting a war conceived in a religious perspective, and therefore doctrinal propriety is the crux of their every action. This endeavour has generated by now a considerable corpus of literature. In-deed, the striking quantity and qual-ity of materials making up the body of the ideology indicates how much of an abiding preoccupation this en-deavour is for them.

All mujahideen aspire to doctri-nal legitimacy, and those that lack the training make continuous defer-ence to their supportive, like-minded scholars. For these extremists who are engaged in constructing a sub-culture, the internet is of crucial im-portance in enabling sympathizers to bypass the established community

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institutions and infrastructures.Reflecting the fluidity of the field

of operations of the IMU leadership and the fact that Afghanistan is a Pashto-dominated arena only in the country’s center and south, there is an obvious need for a multi-lingual approach. The website caters to this with its highly developed Filmlar sec-tion featuring videos from the “Jund Allah studio” and “Ummat studio” in Uzbek, Arabic, German, Russian, En-glish, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto on sub-jects ranging from interviews, ser-mons, to filmed jihadist operations in the field in Pakistan and India.

Other features include aNashīda-lar (“poetic composition and ad-dress”) section and a radio depart-ment, which offers downloadable broadcasts by the JundullahOvozi (“Voice of the Jund Allah”) alongside sections on shahīdlar (“martyrs”), which hosts uplifting accounts of the ultimate sacrifice of mujāhidīn in the various arenas of combat.

What is notable in the Central Asian online arena is the space given to Arabic-language materials. Arabic remains the lingua classica of jihad and there is still a sense of needing to present the importance of the region to Arab readers, even as its require-ment to be fluent in Arabic fortunate-ly limits its Central Asian readership.

This is particularly in evidence in the polished production of the Ara-bic-language online magazine Turk-istān al-Islāmiyya (“Islamic Turkes-tan”) of the Turkistan Islamic Party, the Uyghur jihadist group operating in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. Its founding edition in July 2008 fo-cused entirely on presenting what it calls the “Eastern Turkestan” region – its history, its place in the early Is-lamic annals its orthodox Sunni cre-dentials, reminding scholars of Islam of their responsibilities to preach the defence of the region and urging them to “save Turkestan before it is too late.” The latest edition, published last December, features the full comple-ment of political articles highlighting the “criminality” of the Chinese gov-ernment, notable arenas of militancy,

martyrologies of the fallen and bi-ographical literature on notable Mus-lim heroes of the region, alongside protreptic advice addressed to the Turkestan mujāhidīn from Abu Yahyā al-Lībī who, until his death in a drone strike last summer, was one of the leading successors to Bin Laden in al Qaeda. The production values call to mind the pioneering online Arabian jihad magazines of Mu’askar al-Bat-tār and Sawt al-Jihād, and indicate the growing media professionalism of its exponents.

Indeed, the production quality of the jihadist sites continues to advance by leaps and bounds, as does the com-prehensiveness of the vision that they are promoting: a surfer of jihadist sites has enough material to live an entire lifetime without ever having to stray from its cultural “curriculum.”

And this is perhaps the greatest danger that the jihadist fluency with the Internet poses to the Central Asian region, as it may soon find itself wrestling with elements of a young-er generation, Internet savvy but seduced into an alternative Islamist mental universe, one whose Salafist doctrinal underpinning denigrates the region’s deep historical weft of tolerant, pluralistic Islamic cultures, abasing their traditional latitude and pushing a purist Islamic identity that is founded upon an alien, peninsular Arab model, at odds with the region’s deep contributions to Islamic culture. Doctrinal purism of this nature im-munizes its advocates from nuance and harmonization, and fosters a rad-icalism that will not easily respond to alternative visions of how to lead a Muslim life, all too easily acquiesce to the employment of indiscriminate violence and terrorism in the name of “religion.”

For better or worse, the fate of Central Asia was inextricably bound up in the USSR for more than 70 years and the region’s populations, while rejecting Communism, will be far more reluctant to embrace a funda-mentalist vision that rejects some of the more constructive legacies from the Soviet period, from womens’

rights to industrialization, increasing integration into the world economy, universal education and a standard of living that post-Soviet Central Asians need only compare to Afghanistan to thoroughly reject.

While the jihadist websites profess to impart knowledge about how to re-store the “dignity of the Muslims,” the message that they convey up to date has been accompanied by terrorist violence, from the daily carnage tak-ing place in Iraq and Pakistan to the February 1999 car bombings in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, which killed dozens and wounded many more. The indiscriminate murder of inno-cent Muslim civilians in the name of advancing Islamic values is a cynical Islamic parallel to the civilian “collat-eral deaths” from claimed by Western military operations in Muslim lands.

It is essential that authorities in the region, political and religious, do not overlook the central role played by the Internet in jihadi radicalization efforts and would be well advised not only both to keep a watch at least as much on the quietly accumulating traffic of nuanced doctrinal discourse as on the bombastic political com-mentary splashed over the home page, while coordinating efforts with its allies to mitigate the dolorous ef-fects of such xenophobic, polarizing literature amongst its most impres-sionable citizens.

Central Asia’s Islamic past is a dis-tinguished one and it has made ma-jor contributions in its own right to the world of Islam – its future should be built upon this heritage, not upon agendas promulgated by outsiders foreign to its culture.

The spread of jihadi Internet ideo-logical viruses is far from solely a con-cern of Central Asian post-Soviet and Muslim nations, but ultimately China, the Russian Federation and the West as well, which should intensify its ef-forts to assist secularist Muslim allies in both secularist Central Asia and the Middle East in combating ideological attempts by jihadis to infect their na-tions covertly via the Internet in the name of “true” Islam.

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