By Robert M Cutler
The significance of the agreements on energy cooperation achieved during Russian President Vladimir Putin's recently completed visit to Kazakhstan is only an indicator of the consolidation of deeper tectonic shifts in Eurasian security and economic affairs. A new triangle is emerging in East Central Eurasian geo-economics among Russia, Kazakhstan and China. (It is being complemented by the emergence of another such triangle in West Central Eurasia among Russia, Turkmenistan and Ukraine.) Energy cooperation is a linchpin of each of the the emerging triangular ententes, but the ententes themselves go far beyond energy.
There is every reason to believe that the agreements signed by Putin and Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbaev are not mere diplomatic boilerplate, but instead concrete joint undertakings to be followed through on and implemented. The list of such
accords includes an agreement for Russia to continue to rent the Baikonur cosmodrome until mid-century, delimitation of 98 percent of the two countries' common border, provisions for enhancing "military-technical cooperation", and an affirmation of bilateral cooperation within a host of multilateral forums - the Eurasian Economic Community (including the Single Economic Space), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS - including the CIS Collective Security Treaty Organization), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia. To this inventory are then to be added the agreements on energy cooperation, ranging from Russian transit for Kazakhstani oil to world markets - not only the Caspian Pipeline Consortium's route to the Black Sea, but also the future prospect of a Baltic outlet through Russia - to the consolidation of electrical power networks, and, last but not least, the confirmation of bilateral cooperation in the development of oil deposits near the border between the two countries' offshore national sectors of the Caspian Sea.
Like Moscow, but with less success, Beijing has sought to use major domestic energy corporations to extend political influence into Kazakhstan. In this perspective, Kazakhstan's profile as a marchland acquires a new dimension. Kazakhstan, historically a borderland between Russia and South Asia, is now equally so between western China and the expanded post-Soviet Middle East stretching from North Africa to the South Caucasus. If in mid-2000, among the three issue areas of energy development, anti-terrorism and economic cooperation, Russia's relations with Kazakhstan were implicated in the first and the last, it is now implicated in all three; but if at that time China was implicated only in the last, it, too, is now also implicated in all three.
If from the north a Russian bear hug threatens to smother Kazakhstan, then from the east the Chinese dragon equally imperils its breathing space. Over the past 12 years, Nazarbaev has acted as if he believed there was no alternative to acquiescence before China's varied importunings. These have included insistence on the suppression of domestic Uighur social organizations and, in violation of Kazakhstan's international treaty undertakings, the forced return of Uighur refugees to certain death in Xinjiang. China has also accomplished the seizure, by diplomatic means, of the greater part of the Black Irtysh river headwaters in the course of negotiations over border delimitation in the 1990s.
Most recently, Astana has acceded to Beijing's pressure to grant long-term leases to large numbers of Han Chinese for agricultural development of Kazakh lands with a view towards exporting foodstuffs to China. This last runs up against domestic social opinion in Kazakhstan, for which land tenure has been an extremely sensitive political issue since the early 1990s and which has resented illegal Han immigration from China beginning in the later part of that decade.
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