TASHKENT, 21 March 2003 — Central Asian countries yesterday braced for possible shock waves from war in Iraq, which some fear will unbalance a region already buffeted by recent conflict in Afghanistan. Central Asia “has long been a zone of permanent instability,” said Dosym Satpayev, director of Kazakhstan-based ARG risk assessment company. War in Iraq means “anti-American feeling will rise — it’s very dangerous for political stability,” Satpayev said.
An upsurge in Muslim extremism is feared in several ex-Soviet Central Asian countries, which, with a combined population of some 54 million, bridge the gap between volatile Afghanistan and the Middle East. Nowhere are tensions clearer than in Uzbekistan, identified by the United States as part of the “coalition of the willing” to fight Iraq and whose President Islam Karimov has won warm praise from US President George W. Bush for providing a base for US-led strikes against Afghanistan’s militant Taleban government in 2001.
“Uzbekistan’s contribution ... is significant and I’m extraordinarily grateful. We again face another challenge,” Bush wrote to Karimov in a recent letter distributed by the Uzbek state’s information agency. Karimov is widely criticized for having used torture and indiscriminate imprisonment to stifle opposition to his secular state.
With anti-war feeling running high Karimov’s closeness to the United States makes him vulnerable, Talib Yakubov, director of the Tashkent-based Organization for Human Rights of Uzbekistan, warns. “Karimov’s support for the United States allows him to hang on to power, but for your ordinary Uzbek it gets harder and harder to find a crust of bread — he sees Iraqis as fellow Muslims educated in Islamic culture like himself,” Yakubov said.
Iraq war fears are evident from mountainous Kyrgyzstan to the desert plains of Kazakhstan, a vast oil-rich country usually seen as having the best chances of developing into a stable Central Asian democracy. Well after Bush’s ultimatum on Monday for Saddam to stand down Kyrgyzstan’s Foreign Minister Askar Aitmatov was arguing that “the diplomatic path ... has not been exhausted.”
Valentin Bogatyreva, director of Kyrgyz government think tank, the Institute for Strategic Research, warned that US forces based at Kyrgyzstan’s Manas air base “face the possibility of terror acts by extremists ill-disposed toward the United States.”
In Kazakhstan, the worry is less about extremism than the possibility of Saddam’s overthrow reducing Western investors’ interest in Kazaskhstan’s nascent oil industry as their attention turns to Iraq’s huge mineral resources. US victory in Iraq would “reduce interest in Kazakh oil sites because production and transportation of Kazakh oil to the West is more difficult,” Parliament Speaker Zharmahan Tuyakbay told AFP.
In poverty-stricken Turkmenistan, whose severe and gas and oil reserves remain largely untapped, the jitters are less about Western investors, many of whom have already left after failing to agree terms with the isolated government of President Saparmurat Niyazov.
Turkmenistan’s fear that war could have “negative effects for the economy of the whole region,” in the words of a senior Turkmen official, reflects concerns about the future of Iran, which is an important market for Turkmen oil and gas.
