Meanwhile, back in Turkestan

Jerusalem Post ^ | Jul. 31, 2003 | Amotz Asa-El

[yonif]

Though it's been 24 years since I read it, David Markish's Reshit is still etched vividly in my mind; not only because of its touching account of a Jewish boy's experiences in the godforsaken steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan, but particularly because of his description of a huge herd of wild horses that come out of nowhere stampeding through the hick town where Markish and his mother had been exiled after his father's execution by Stalin, along with other Jewish cultural icons.

The boy and his mother were eventually released from that hellhole after Stalin's death (and eventually moved to Israel), and the father - noted Yiddish poet Peretz Markish - was officially rehabilitated, but the Central Asian landscapes remained in subsequent decades what they had been to the adolescent David Markish: the ultimate combination of cultural provincialism, physical remoteness, and political irrelevance.

They no longer are.

Since the fall of Communism, the formerly Soviet, predominantly Muslim landmass that stretches from the outskirts of Turkey to the doorstep of China has become the free world's wild east. Once better known as Turkestan, what lies between the Caspian Sea in the west and the Taklamakan Desert in the east - an area larger than India and more mineral-rich than all of Europe - has since become a battleground for a plethora of isms, from fundamentalism and capitalism to secularism and despotism.

FORTUNATELY, the West's worst nightmares concerning that area's post-Soviet era have not materialized. Unfortunately, subsequent complacency might prove tragically ill-fated.

The nightmare scenarios were twofold: nukes and Islamism.

The nuke part was about Kazakhstan having hosted a large portion of the USSR's weapons of mass destruction, and emerged from the Cold War, to the international system's astonishment, not only as an independent state but also as a military power whose aims and wisdom were a mystery at best, a calamity-in-the-making at worst. However, the Kazakhs soon enough proved to be reasonable people, and voluntarily decommissioned the nuclear arsenal they had inherited.

The other nightmare, an Iranian inspired fundamentalist backlash, focused on other countries in the region: populous (25 million) Uzbekistan; Tadzhikistan, whose language is a Farsi dialect; and Turkmenistan, which borders on Iran and whose oil and gas deposits can turn it into a new version of Kuwait.

As it turned out, while thousands of new mosques sprouted along the historic Silk Road, the people generally shunned the anti-Western message the Iranians were trying to send across the region. According to a recent Economist report, even declared believers seldom visit a mosque more frequently than once a month.

However, while much of this has had to do with a genuine following of moderate versions of Islam, such as Sufism, it also has come coupled with a sometimes brutal war on religious freedom, including the jailing of clerics and, in one case in Turkmenistan, a presidentially ordered burning of hundreds of Korans. Judging by recent experience elsewhere in the Muslim world, from Algeria to Iran, secularist suppression will only deliver that much and last that long.

And not surprisingly, religious persecution has come coupled with police-state apparatuses and personality cults whose manuals were written by Leonid Brezhnev at best, his predecessors at worst, all of whom are vividly recalled by the region's leaders, who are usually graduates of the Soviet leadership school.

Even so, the West is turning a blind eye to all this, preferring to laugh away hail-the-leader posters in Dushanbe the size of Nike billboards in Times Square, and even a larger-than-life golden statue meant to immortalize Turkmen leader Saparmurat Niyazov. Needless to say, in this kind of setting, Western definitions of newspapers, parties and, of course, elections do not apply.

In short, the Western celebration of the Soviet Union's replacement by democracies was premature, not to say downright gullible. The way Western leaders see it, the important thing is that fears Iran would eclipse Turkey as an influence in the region have been dispelled, and that the region's untapped oil, gas, gold, copper, zinc, and diamond deposits flow westwards undisturbed. Understandably eager to nurture any appearance of moderate Islam, Israeli and Jewish leaders are joining the trend, enthusiastically embracing Central Asian leaders, who for their part are indeed shorn of other Muslim-populated states' anti-Israeli stances.

ADDED UP, it all leads to a familiar attitude, that which was formulated by Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Georgetown political scientist who, in the late 1970s, distinguished between total bad guys - the Eastern Bloc of those times - and those who, while not delivering freedom, also nurtured capitalism and accommodated America and its geopolitical interests.

In other words, today's Central Asians are for America and Israel much like what Augusto Pinochet was for Ronald Reagan: They may not be avid readers of John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" or Baron Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws, but they confront fundamentalism, fight terror, welcome business, host US bases, and reject anti-Semitism.

It all might have been nice had there not been sufficient, and very recent, experience with the tragic aftermaths of dubious Western allies' downfalls, from Sadat of Egypt to the Shah of Iran.

Surely, it would be futile to impose democracy in these places from above, let alone from without. Yet to be durable, the West's political investment in this part of the world must also include projects that would seed democracy, perhaps first in local government. Otherwise, the despots can be counted on to ultimately be despised, and the fanatics to storm through their palaces; like those stampeding horses from David Markish's childhood.

[yonif]

FORTUNATELY, the West's worst nightmares concerning that area's post-Soviet era have not materialized. Unfortunately, subsequent complacency might prove tragically ill-fated.

The nightmare scenarios were twofold: nukes and Islamism.