Putin

The Uighurs are unlike the Tibetans, whose cause is better known because of the genial Dalai Lama and the support of Buddhism-embracing celebrities. The Uighurs have no such leader, no such followers. On the other hand, Tibet is for all its publicity still a world apart, whereas the Uighurs belong to the one-billion-plus Muslim world community and are subject to all that has convulsed that world in recent years. And China’s policy of “Strike hard” against the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism has been applied too indiscriminately on the Uighurs. Beards have been forbidden, government employees forced to work and eat on holy days. And it is almost a given that where the green flag is trampled the black flag will soon be raised.

Dangerous enough in itself, the “East Turkestan” problem now has its force multiplied by events developing in Central Asia.

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“The Kazakhs never had any statehood,” said President Putin in August 2014 in what seemed a backhanded compliment to Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whom Putin was trying to credit for creating “a state in a territory that never had a state before.” These remarks caused outrage and alarm in Kazakhstan, especially in the wake of the Ukrainian incursion, which had been based in part on a similar sentiment. There are certain obvious and ominous similarities between the two countries. After the fall of the USSR both countries had voluntarily surrendered their nuclear weapons. At the time Kazakhstan had some fourteen hundred, making it the number four nuclear power in the world. However, as in the case of Ukraine, those weapons were not really operational, their codes being controlled by Moscow; but they could be repurposed for other weapon types or, falling into terrorist hands, be used for dirty bombs. Putin’s declaring neither country a real state, dubious in the case of Ukraine, is less so vis-à-vis Kazakhstan, since its people were mostly pastoral nomads until the Soviet era. Both Kazakhstan and Ukraine had significant clusters of populations that were Russian-speaking and/or identified as Russians. As a progressive twenty-first-century authoritarian, Putin would never use old-fashioned Stalinist methods of swallowing nations whole, preferring only to slice off the tranche that could be justified and would prove the most useful to his strategic aims. In his attitude toward Kazakhstan Putin derives a certain moral authority from the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, on whom he bestowed the country’s highest award, the State Prize of the Russian Federation, in 2007. In Rebuilding Russia, written in 1990, Solzhenitsyn advocated a new post-Soviet state shorn of the burdens of empire and consisting of Russia, Belarus, parts of Ukraine, including Crimea, and the north and east of Kazakhstan, which he contends were “actually part of southern Siberia.”

Often described as more than four times the size of Texas (though it’s hard enough to imagine the size of one Texas), Kazakhstan has copious quantities of gas, oil, and gold, and its uranium reserves rank second only to Australia’s. It sells fifty-five thousand tons of uranium to China a year, supplying nearly half its needs. China’s New Silk Road passes right through Kazakhstan, bringing goods to the market in the Netherlands two weeks faster than by sea. Energy flows to China through Kazakhstan. China has been assiduous in courting Kazakhstan and equally assiduous in avoiding the kind of contretemps caused by the insults, inadvertent or not, that Putin seems especially prone to.

By Central Asian standards, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev is a fairly reasonable autocrat. Early on he made a favorable impression on Margaret Thatcher, who saw him as a sort of Central Asian Gorbachev, a man you could do business with, telling Nazarbayev: “Mr. President, you seem to be moving from Communism to Thatcherism.” (This incident alone gives some feel for how long Nazarbayev has been ruling Kazakhstan.) And Gorbachev himself liked Nazarbayev “very much. He had an energetic and attractive personality. He was open to new ideas.” Though corrupt and authoritarian, like China and Russia, Kazakhstan is not an impossible place like its neighbor Uzbekistan, which has been called “Central Asia’s heart of darkness.” There, critics of the regime are routinely tortured, including being boiled alive, according to Great Britain’s former ambassador to that country, Craig Murray, who documented a whole series of such appalling injustices in his book Murder in Samarkand.