Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 21 – Declines in
transfer payments from Central Asian gastarbeiters to their families in
their homelands is leading to “a decline
in the level of the loyalty of the population to the existing authorities”
there and prompting Central Asians to ask then “uncomfortable” questions that ISIS
can provide answers to, Gevorg Mirzayan says.
As a result, many of the tactics
that Russia and the Central Asian states are trying to put in place to stop the
spread of ISIS influence may go for naught, the Moscow commentator says,
because as of now, no one has come up with a way of compensating for these
losses (m.lenta.ru/articles/2015/10/20/khorasan/).
Because of Russia’s economic
difficulties and the outflow of gasarbeiters, the Russian Central Bank reports
that in the first quarter of 2015, transfer payments to Uzbekistan were 49
percent lower than the same period a year ago, those to Tajikistan 44 percent
lower, and those to Kyrgyzstan 41 percent down.
Those are critical declines,
Mirzayan argues, because none of the three governments has been able to come up
with jobs for most of the gastarbeiters returning from Russia and consequently,
that is hitting the population and the governments (from declines in tax
revenues) extremely hard.
In response, at least some in
Central Asia are likely to listen to the ISIS message especially since, as
Vladimir Putin pointed out in his speech to the CIS summit meeting in
Kazakhstan, “up to 60 percent” of those fighting for ISIS from CIS countries
are “from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan
and even relatively well-off Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.”
“We of course cannot allow that they
will apply the experience they’ve obtained in Syria at home,” Putin said.
After neglecting Central Asia for
some time, Moscow is finally focusing on it as a security matter, “literally at
the last moment,” Mirzayan says. There
has been a flurry of Russian military missions to the region to talk about what
can be done, but “the main problem is that military means for the stabilization
of Central Asia will be insufficient.”
It will be possible “to defend the
region against chaos only if there is a real transformation and modernization
of the Central Asian regimes.” Otherwise the radicalization of their
populations will only increase with all the instability that will involve.
“One must understand that ISIS arose
not as a project of the United States … but as a reaction to the failures of
national elites in their attempts at the creation of stable secular states in a
large part of the Muslim world,” including in Central Asia, the Moscow
commentator continues.
The flow of Muslims “into the ranks
of the radicals began precisely with disappointments in those forms of secular
governance which exist in their countries – in the widespread corruption, total
poverty, ineffectiveness of government, and what is most important with the lack
of hope that these problems will be solved in the framework of the existing
system.”
“And as a rule,” Mirzayan says, the
Muslims “are right.”
The Central Asian leaders have
destroyed much of the progress made in Soviet times, shuttering schools and
failing to protect economic development. But still more important, they have
created authoritarian systems which deny the population any possibility of
speaking out on issues of their concern.
“The absence of a legal opposition”
in most Central Asian countries and the tendency of rulers to call any
opponents “Islamists” have meant that an increasing number of people there view
the Islamists not as something alien but as the only group prepared to speak up
on their behalf.
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