Russia Bolstering Presence In Central Asia: Threats And Opportunities For Iran – Analysis – Eurasia Review

Russia has been habitually critical of the United States’ unilateral policies in the region. On the outward, Russia has been apparently following a multilateral policy at international level and has been encouraging the United States to follow suit by adopting similar policies. However, when it comes to Central Asia and Caucasus, Russia has been itself pursuing totally unilateral policies. Russia’s political behavior in this regard has been an obstacle to multilateral cooperation with such Asian countries as India, Iran and China. Moscow is actually willing to bolster its own influence in this region. Although Russia has close ties with a country like China, its major policy and measures taken by Moscow in the strategic regions of Central Asia and Caucasus have been largely unilateral.

Russia Bolstering Presence In Central Asia: Threats And Opportunities For Iran – Analysis – Eurasia Review.

Ruble Collapse a Problem for Central Asia | The Diplomat

Since October 9, the first day in post-Soviet history that the ruble-to-dollar exchange rate climbed above 40, the Russian currency was consistently hammered, until it managed to end last week’s rollercoaster below 60. Post-Soviet economies to the South of Russia have been hit by the financial crisis in Moscow. Although Central Asian trade with Russia is declining, in favor of a surge in business with China, all countries in Central Asia still maintain strong economic relations with Russia. This means that any crisis in Russia is immediately felt in Central Asia.

The two poorest economies in Central Asia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, are also among the most Russia-dependent in the entire post-Soviet space. Dushanbe and Bishkek’s budgets depend heavily on remittances from migrant workers living in Russia. The ruble, together with the dollar, is widely available in both countries and exchange rates are a significant indicator of the stability of their economies. With the ruble crumbling, Tajikistan’s somoni has reacted very slowly on the official market: The increase against the dollar since October 9 has been just below 3 percent. However, it is worth noting that for four consecutive days last week the official rate hiked almost 4 percent each day before rebounding back to 5.13 somoni per dollar. In the same period, the Kyrgyz som gradually weakened against the dollar, declining 4.5 percent. Notably, for the first time, the som became more valuable than the ruble.

In the past two months alone, the ruble has lost between 55 and 40 percent of its value against the dollar, and has also lost ground against the somoni and som. This could have dangerous consequences for worker remittances from expat Central Asian workers. The Kyrgyz government is preparing for windfalls from abroad to fall by at least $1 billion. The drought in remittances, accompanied by government spending to keep their currencies closer to the dollar, poses a direct threat to the budgets of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

 

Ruble Collapse a Problem for Central Asia | The Diplomat.

Henry Rollins: How the Soviets Nearly Ruined Central Asia – Los Angeles | Los Angeles News and Events | LA Weekly

I am a week into my visit to Central Asia. Besides a two-day excursion into Tajikistan, I’ve been here in Uzbekistan.

The border crossing from Uzbekistan to Tajikistan was one of the coolest and strangest I have made.

I often have a déjà vu sensation when going from one country to another, especially in cold weather. It started when I would pass through East Germany to get to West Germany. The East Germans would always regard us and our van with suspicion and barely concealed hostility. They had a way of leaning into the front windows so the barrels of their rifles would point at your eyes.

It is at the crossing point where either country can decide it doesn’t want you, and you could be in for quite an ordeal. That happened to me once on tour, trying to get out of Hungary and into Austria. The Hungarians were done with us but the Austrians were not a bit pleased with the idea of us in their country. We sat in a no man’s land for a long time, our dreams of soundcheck disappearing before we were finally allowed to enter.

On the day I was to cross into Tajikistan, I was warned by my Uzbek guide that the questioning and searches could be extreme. I went in and gave the Uzbek border officer my passport. She asked me why I was in Uzbekistan and wanted to go to Tajikistan. I gave her my whole rap about the only way to know about any place is to go, so here I was.

She and all the other heavily uniformed officers simultaneously lit up. They enthusiastically thanked me for coming all the way out to visit and fairly tossed me through the back of the building.

Suddenly, I was alone on a road. It’s a fair walk to the Tajik border.

Finally I arrived at a gate. A Tajik guard looked at my passport and pointed me onward. About a city block later, I was at a window. I gave the man my passport. He looked at me, pointed and said, “Beckpeck hevee!” He gave me the stamp and I was in Tajikistan.

My guide, conveniently named Chris, walked up and introduced himself. We got in his car and off we went to Khujand city centre.

Henry Rollins: How the Soviets Nearly Ruined Central Asia – Los Angeles | Los Angeles News and Events | LA Weekly.

Russia’s ruble collapse shakes Central Asian neighbours

While people in Moscow are already queueing outside foreign exchange shops to get rid of the ruble, eyeing the current 9.1% price inflation rate, neighbours of the “Russian bear” are likely trembling in fear.

Until a year ago, the Russian economy was flying high on the wings of a seemingly endless oil-fuelled boom, which showered economic migrants with hard cash to send back to their origin country. With the economic depression on the horizon and investors pulling their money out of the country by the billion each month, Russian companies have already started cutting wages and making redundancies.

Poor former Soviet republics with a troubled recent past like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are suffering the most. Millions of Tajik migrants live in Russia and send much of their salary back home. According to World Bank data, remittances in Tajikistan make up 42.1 % of the Central Asian republic’s GDP, making it the world’s biggest recipient.

A staggering 60% of those remittances come from Russia. If we consider that over a million Tajiks – half of the country’s workforce – work in the giant neighbouring country, we see why Russia’s incoming economic depression may potentially wreck those countries.

Neighbouring Kyrgyzstan is in a similarly desperate situation. The small mountainous state has a 32% share of GDP of remittances.

It has been calculated that Tajik growth will slow to 6.5% this year from 7.4% in 2013 as a result of the drop in worker remittances in the January-September period. Both Tajikistan, a state of 8 million, and Kyrgyzstan have a troubled post-soviet past. From 1992 to 1997, a civil war marred the prospect of economic growth in Tajikistan, which borders with Afghanistan and China.

Russia's ruble collapse shakes Central Asian neighbours.

Central Asia’s Hydropower Spat | The Diplomat

Uzbekistan continues its quest to choke its two poorer neighbors’ plans to attain and secure energy independence. During an official visit to Kazakhstan late November, Uzbek President Islam Karimov made sure to bring up the “dangers” the hydropower plants Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan want to build could pose. According to Karimov, the plans are “not coordinated with countries downstream,” i.e. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Flanked by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Karimov said, “We have affirmed our common position regarding the construction of new hydro technical facilities upstream of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya Rivers, which must strictly conform to recognized norms of international law and UN conventions as well as mandatory coordination with all countries located in the lower reaches of these rivers.”

Karimov conveniently forgets his administration bills Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for natural gas exports. Moreover, said gas is frequently shut off as a means of coercing the two countries, which are planning to build power-generating facilities on Central Asia’s two largest rivers. For instance, Kyrgyzstan has been struggling with not just a shortage but an absence of Uzbek gas, for most of 2014. Because mountainous Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan sit high above sea level, harsh winters create shortages of already scarce electricity, and any insufficiency of Uzbek gas only makes the two countries more anxious to secure energy independence.

From Russia With Love?

Despite Tashkent’s tactics, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which together own nearly 70 percent of the waters that flow into the dwindling Aral Sea, remain deaf to Uzbekistan’s demands and warnings of “water wars.” This is thanks in part to Russia. The Kremlin has not only been voicing its support for plans to revive the Soviet-era projects, it has actually invested millions of dollars in the idea. Russian President Vladimir Putin personally travelled to Bishkek and Dushanbe, the two regional hosts of Russian military bases, to sign bilateral agreements to that effect. On top of Russia’s support, Tajikistan secured the World Bank’s “green light” for what is expected to be the tallest dam in the world: Rogun at 335 meters. Meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan was actually able to launch parts of a cascade of Russia-funded hydropower stations.

If giving money and throwing political support behind Kyrgyz and Tajik energy initiatives is the Kremlin’s carrot, the stick it may wish to use can hit both sides of the conflict. Toughening conditions for millions of Kyrgyz, Tajik and Uzbek migrant laborers in Russia, thereby indirectly forcing them to return to their homelands, is a tool Moscow has used frequently in the past. And this time around these migrants could thwart Uzbekistan’s attempts to prevent Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan from building dams. The sanctions the West slapped on Russia for Crimea and Ukraine have obvious implications for millions of Central Asians seeking work in Russia. On top of this, a report the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released in November suggests that falling prices of oil coupled with sanctions will negatively impact the Russian economy next year, sending shockwaves across Central Asia. These factors could lead some migrants to return from Russia, permanently.

The return of even a portion of the migrants to join the growing local populations would put Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan under pressure. Ironically, therefore, both sides of the water conflict equally need it: Uzbekistan needs water to keep tens of thousands of returnees busy on agriculture fields, lest they voice discontent with the government’s inability to employ them, while Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan need water to generate electricity to keep their own returning migrants from taking to the streets in protest. No sane Tajik or Kyrgyz politician would back down in the face of such challenges.

Central Asia’s Hydropower Spat | The Diplomat.

Uzbekistan Seeks to Reinvigorate Diplomatic Clout In Region – Analysis – Eurasia Review

Since the fall of 2014, Tashkent has been boosting diplomatic engagement with its neighbors. In particular, Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov met with President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan in Dushanbe on September 11 (press-service.uz September 13, 2014), and visited Turkmenistan on October 23–24 (press-service.uz October 25), and Kazakhstan on November 24–25 (press-service.uz November 26). Two critical issues have pushed Uzbekistan to reinvigorate its diplomatic efforts in its immediate neighborhood—the future of water and energy use in Central Asia, as well as the forthcoming pull-out of Western military forces from Afghanistan.

In July 2014, to Uzbekistan’s utter indignation, the World Bank’s Fifth and Final Riparian Meetings on Rogun Assessment Studies, held in Almaty, technically gave a green light to the construction of the Rogun Hydro Power Project in Tajikistan (worldbank.org, July 18). Appealing also on behalf of other downstream Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan found the World Bank study’s conclusions “unsatisfactory and insufficient to form a qualified opinion” and categorically affirmed that “Uzbekistan will never under any circumstances provide support for this project” (mfa.uz, August 1). Tashkent’s discontent was mainly twofold—construction work at the Rogun site was never halted, even as Tajikistan waited for the feasibility study’s conclusion, and the World Bank allegedly did not take into consideration Uzbekistan’s concerns over the project’s environmental implications or considered building a series of smaller hydro-power stations instead.

Interestingly, Tajikistan is the only case in which Uzbekistan seeks outside backing via multilateral and international engagement. Tashkent prefers to deal with all other countries and address issues of global politics on a bilateral basis. But the current tangle of contradictions regarding Central Asia’s water and energy resources has arisen due to the gradual dissolution of the Central Asian Power Grid System, from which the downstream states of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan withdrew (the first in 2003, and the latter two in 2009) due to the upstream Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan both syphoning off electricity without due payment. This Grid System is still Central Asia’s most important energy and water dispatcher network, which links the entire region, and it functioned in central Tashkent throughout the Soviet period (Russiancouncil.ru, April 2, 2012). Consequently, not only has the transit of Turkmenistani electricity to Tajikistan and the shipment of Kyrgyzstani electricity to Kazakhstan been paralyzed, but the supply of electricity to Uzbekistan’s southern provinces has also partly malfunctioned due to the Grid System’s fragmentation.

Issues of water use and the energy deadlock are particularly acute between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan—even though bilateral Treaties of Friendship, Good-Neighborhood and Cooperation, and Eternal Friendship have been in force for decades among these three neighbors. Nonetheless, diverse national interests regarding the use of upstream hydro-power stations for energy by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as opposed to downstream Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan’s use of the water for irrigation leads to serious regional conflicts. And this situation is further exacerbated by the downstream agrarian communities’ rampant inefficient water use (Nature.com, October 1).

Uzbekistan Seeks to Reinvigorate Diplomatic Clout In Region – Analysis – Eurasia Review.

Mountain countries seek to unite, air concerns about climate change – CNN.com

Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) — Mountain countries from around the world are seeking a common voice in global climate change negotiations to draw attention to the vulnerabilities of mountain areas.

As part of this effort, government and nongovernmental representatives from 30 countries — from China to Uganda, Peru to Tajikistan — met in Kathmandu over the past two days to share knowledge and create an alliance.

“In global meetings of countries, whether in Copenhagen, Cancun or Durban, it was only the few countries from Central Asia and Nepal that raised the issue of vulnerabilities of mountains,” said Ilhomjon Rajabov, head of the Climate Change Center of Tajikistan’s Ministry of Environment.

According to David Molden of the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, a Kathmandu-based research and lobby group, mountain areas are responsible for 50% of the world’s fresh water and biodiversity.

He hopes that the alliance of the mountain countries will be as strong and influential as the alliance of island nations in global climate change negotiations.

“Governments like India also ignore mountain areas because only a small population lives in the mountains,” he said. “They are not vote banks.”

via Mountain countries seek to unite, air concerns about climate change – CNN.com.

Rahmon: Tajikistan Does Not Claim Monopoly of Water Resources in Region , 6 April 2012 Friday 16:37

Tajikistan has consistently advocated for the efficient sharing of water resources by all countries in the region of Central Asia, Tajik leader Emomali Rahmon said in an exclusive interview with the influential Al-Masa Egyptian newspaper which is now posted on the official website of the President in the Tajik language, ITAR-TASS reported.

“Tajikistan, where 60 per cent of the water resources are formed does not claim monopoly of them, but stands for co-efficient water use by all countries of the region,” Rahmon emphasised.

He believes “the management of these resources among the upper reaches of Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, which have abundant water resources and lower reaches in countries such as Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan which have rich reserves of oil and natural gas, requires an effective economic mechanism to ensure the long term and mutually beneficial use.”

According to local experts, it’s the “water problem and its potential shortage” that has become one of the main reasons for Tashkent’s tough opposition to erection in Tajikistan of the region’s largest Rogun hydroelectric power station with a design capacity of 3600 MW. However, as preceding statements by Emomali Rahmon and his interview with the Egyptian media show, Tajikistan will not abandon construction of this super energy giant.

“We ask our neighbours to understand the situation in which Tajikistan is lacking large reserves of oil and gas and facing great challenges due to the shortage of electricity and heat in the winter,” says the Tajik leader, pointing out that “the only way is construction of large hydroelectric power stations on our internal rivers.”

Rahmon’s emotional interview comes amid new tensions between the two neighbouring republics. The Tajik side has accused Tashkent of a transport blockade on the southern section of the railway, calling the Uzbek authorities’ explanation on the need for reconstruction of the worn-out ways a “farfetched pretext” and of the refusal of a supply of natural gas from April 1 as well as a simultaneous ban on the transit of Turkmen gas through its territory.

via Rahmon: Tajikistan Does Not Claim Monopoly of Water Resources in Region , 6 April 2012 Friday 16:37.

Saudi Aramco World : Land of the Naphtha Fountain

Land of the Naphtha Fountain

Written by Zayn Bilkadi

Illustrated by Bob Lapsley

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the undeveloped or underdeveloped oil resources of the new nations that were formerly Soviet republics have been much in the news. But that news is in fact very old. The existence of rich oil resources in the region from the western slopes of the Caspian Sea basin to the mountains of Afghanistan has been known for millennia.

The ancient Greeks and Romans could not help but notice on their travels the spectacular “eternal fires” that dotted the landscape all the way from Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan, to Persia and Turkmenia. Legend has it that one of the servants of Alexander the Great accidently struck oil while trying to pitch a tent for his master in Turkmenia. According to the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, Alexander the Great observed burning natural oil wells in Bactria, which comprised today’s northern Afghanistan and parts of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (See Aramco World, May-June 1994).

The land from northwestern Iran to Azerbaijan was known in ancient times as Media, where the most numerous “eternal fires,” or burning oil seeps, probably inspired Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persians that dates from roughly 600 BC. “The Pillars of Fire” near Baku became a center of worship and pilgrimage. The title of Zoroastrian priests was athravan, or “keeper of the fire.” Even the word Azerbaijan itself is rooted in the ancient Persian aderbadagan, “garden of fire.”

Neither Romans nor Persians, however, left us records of the trade in oil that must have existed in the region in ancient times. Such records were only written centuries later by the Arabs, who conquered the Caucasus within only 26 years of the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 and who, by 751, had become masters of Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Kashgar. The newly Muslim lands then included all the world’s known, major oil-producing regions outside China. Sargis Tmogveli, a Georgian scholar, quotes on that high point of caliphal power:

Thou art master of Eran and T’huran;

From China to Qirwan,

All is thine and under thy command.

In the Caucasus, the city of Tiflis—now Tblisi, the capital of Georgia—grew into a center of trade between the Muslim state and northern Europe. Gold and silver coins have been found in the city that date to the ninth century and were minted in Baghdad, Muhammadiyyah (in Armenia), Kufa, Basra, Aran and Balkh, as well as in Africa and India. In addition, according to the Arab geographer al-Maqdisi, Georgia had become an important exporter of naphtha and bitumen to Baghdad. Beyond that, the region was also strategically important to the caliphate: It was a buffer province facing northern Byzantium.

via Saudi Aramco World : Land of the Naphtha Fountain.