Kazakh Organization Promotes Unity of Turkic World to Counter Chinese Expansion

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 9 – On a visit to Chuvashia and Tatarstan this week, Academician Ermentai Sultanmurat, the Kazakh president of the World Assembly of Turkic Peoples (VATN), says that his group seeks to promote unity among the world’s Turkic peoples by promoting a common worldview, a common language, and a common economic space.

            Moscow has been focused on and worried about Turkey’s promotion of such ideas (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/03/is-pan-turkism-again-on-march-in-north.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/02/fsb-reportedly-setting-turkish.html), but Sultanmurat’s visit suggests Kazakhstan may be playing an even bigger role in their spread.

           

            The Kazakh scholar tells Ella Kondratyeva of the Idelreal portal that one of the reasons that his organization’s goals are becoming ever more important is the expansion of China and the desire of Turkic peoples and others to limit it, as a group of Chuvash deputies has just demanded (idelreal.org/a/29808655.html).

            If Beijing is not limited in some ways, Sultanmurat says, “by the end of this century, the entire planet will have a Chinese face,” something totally unacceptable for the peoples of other countries, including Turkic ones. “We are for international cooperation but not in this form,” one that results in Chinese domination over everything.

            Moscow has talked about Eurasian projects that supposedly would contain the Chinese, but these projects have few prospects, he says. They are based on the acculturation and assimilation of the Turks into Russians. But such “’newly-minted Russians’ will not fight for the interests of Russians or the Russian sate as was the case under the Soviets.”

            “The consciousness of people now is different,” Sultanmurat says. Things would be different if the Russians and the Turks could be “equal partners,” but Moscow isn’t willing to allow that, although it could be forced to accept that by demographic change: later this century, the Turkic peoples of the former Soviet space will outnumber the Russians.

            Turks are “a world nation,” he argues, an ancient people divided by time and geography but one whose parties retain many common elements especially with regard to language and culture. Those should be emphasized, perhaps by having all Turkic peoples celebrate an annual Day of Turkic Culture and Language analogous to the existing Russian one.

            VATN has representatives throughout the world, including in the Middle Volga, Sultanmurat continues.  All of them are working to promote Turkic cooperation and to encourage Turks to think about the future, a future in which the world will change far more than anyone can now imagine.

            “We Turks must think about how to preserve our national face,” he concludes.