Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [55]
In the eyes of Ahmed Rashid, “The salient fact about Central Asia today is that independent statehood was neither coveted nor sought by the region’s ruling Communist elites. It was thrust upon them when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Thus the region’s rulers were suddenly compelled to fabricate a new identity for their five ethnically diverse states—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—and to contend for the first time with radically differing ideologies.”17 And, one might add, new economies.
After 1991, Kyrgyzstan became one of Central Asia’s smallest and most liberalized economies. With the sudden loss of Soviet markets and subsidies, Kyrgyzstan went to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for aid. These institutions in turn demanded an array of neoliberal reforms. The Kyrgyz political elites—high on the academic grog of neoclassical economic orthodoxy—complied more than willingly. Kyrgyzstan privatized agriculture, industry, and utilities; it moved to a freely convertible currency and removed most trade barriers. By the end of the 1990s, three-quarters of the economy had been privatized.18
This was supposed to spur growth, but it only deepened de-industrialization: markets were now swamped by cheap foreign products that entered free of charge. Unable to compete with imports, many privatized firms were simply stripped of assets. Unemployment soared, and workers moved from cities back to the farms or out of the country. Between five and eight hundred thousand Kyrgyz now work abroad, their remittances forming an essential part of the economy. The Kyrgyz GDP fell by approximately 45 percent between 1991 and 1996 as industrial production collapsed and Soviet markets for Kyrgyz dairy products evaporated; inflation hit 1,200 percent in 1993.19 Per capita income has not yet returned to its 1989 levels, and Kyrgyz income inequality is among the worst in the region. The collapse of public services, such as health care and education, has forced people to fend for themselves. Over 20 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. More than 40 percent of Kyrgyz are poor, meaning they struggle to meet life’s basic necessities.
Three-quarters of the government’s income from the sale of state assets went to paying off international debts. The privatization process was largely stopped and even reversed somewhat after the late 1990s. In 2010 the country had a GDP of about of $11.66 billion and (good news) an external debt of only about $3.4 billion.20 Kyrgyzstan’s mountains hold deposits of gold, rare earth, and other minerals, and its border with China means it could be pulled into the development vortex that is the PRC.
For now, however, Kyrgyzstan’s people are mired in poverty and corruption. 21 Official unemployment is 20 percent, and with little prospect for a better future, elements of the population—its lumpenized, angry young men—turn to crime, drug running, nationalist xenophobia, and radical forms of political Islam.
Central Asian Jihad
The new states of Central Asia are defined by kleptocracy, despotism, dysfunction, and weakness. Over the last two decades, nonstate armed actors—ethnic warlords, drug traffickers, mercenaries, tribal militias, bandit gangs, and internationally connected terrorist networks, like Al Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)—have traversed the region, fought wars in it, and when pressured, moved south into the lawless regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.22
Once economically and politically integrated and interdependent components of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian states now find themselves squabbling over previously shared resources and lines of communication and transportation. The ethnic populations that form these states’ nominal basis are also scattered across national boundaries. For example, Uzbek minorities live all across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,