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Neweurasia Cross-Blog Survey: 2007 in Retrospect
The most striking thing about this year is that Central Asia’s leaders have shown their skills in successfully merging old with new.
One party rule has returned to the region; Kazakhstan’s Nur Otan party was the only one to make it “past the post” with the required seven percent minimum in the August 2007 Majlis elections. Kazakhstan, though, has been accepted as a proto-European country as the Kazakhs got the OSCE chairmanship that they so strongly lobbied for, and only a year later — 2010 — than they sought; they also promised to not change the basic institutions of the organization, including ODIHR.
Old leaders have gotten new leases on political life, while a “new generation” leader has developed what appear to be sturdy political roots. The Kazakh constitution has been modified to allow Nursultan Nazarbayev to continue to run for office should he choose to when his current term expires in 2012, while Islam Karimov has offered his own unstated interpretation of the Uzbek constitution. He simply declared his candidacy and faces certain victory on December 23.
Turkmenistan’s president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is proving much more of a political master than many anticipated. Not only has he held onto power, but he traveled to New York and Brussels basically to announce that Turkmenistan was reopened for international business. But just when U.S. and EU energy experts were getting their hopes up that Turkmen gas might be shipped more directly to market under the Caspian, he signed a new gas deal with Russia, albeit a much better one than the Turkmen have ever been offered before, so the threat of competition was of clear benefit to Ashgabat.
The Tajiks have opened new links to Afghanistan. There is a new bridge connecting Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and a new North-South energy agreement which someday could help solve Afghanistan’s electricity shortage, but it won’t deal with Tajikistan’s own energy shortages, which the delayed opening of Sangtuda I power plant means will likely not even begin to be addressed this year.
The Kyrgyz proved themselves regional champions in fusing old and new. There were lots of political demonstrations, something that has become rather a constant in national political life. They wrote a new constitution, then changed it before it was even introduced, not once, but twice, and then later on went back to an older version of the constitution anyway. They passed a new election law, held pre-term elections, with real slippage of international standards in part because of the rapidity with which everything was carried out. Then when only the pro-presidential party (Ak Zhol) passed the dual barriers of 7 percent and .5 percent in each region, the courts dropped the latter restriction. Change is such a fixture of Kyrgyz political life it is hard to know if it is old or new.
The leaders of the region have remained political masters, finding ways to adjust to new situations that leave their powers largely in tact, and often getting the international community to accept what they do, and simply smile at their eccentricities, rather than press hard for meaningful political change. But the real test of the old generation’s skills will come when the voting-age populations of these countries are dominated by a new generation. And the time when this will start to occur is coming soon.
Martha Brill Olcott
Senior Associate
Comments
On January 29 at 22:24, Raimundo Gregoire Delaunoy commented:
Hi there!
I am a Chilean journalist and I always try to read articles or books about Central Asian countries and specially about the ex-USSR states.
I really want to thank you for this information that is very useful for me, because I can learn new things about that region and, also, stay in constant contact with the nowadays situation.
Greetings from Chile!