From Totalitarianism to Turbines: The Unending Struggle for Power in Central Asia

Dushanbe, Tajikistan- The deadly June crisis is southern Kyrgyzstan highlights the extreme fragility in Central Asia's inherently flawed post-independence nation-state structures while the five republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, often collectively referred to as the "Stans," are being simultaneously courted by the U.S. military, Western energy firms, China, and the region's resurgent former colonial power, Russia. It is not to Russia's pleasing that these republics each seem to following their own unilateral, currently discordant, energy and security policies often in the name of regime preservation.

Central Asia's leaders, seeing and citing the devastating 1990s war in Tajikistan that pitted a rebellious coalition of the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP) and aspiring democrats against an amalgam of communists and neo-communists, were desperate to avoid confrontations with both political Islamism and those wishing to institute a genuine parliamentary democracy. Seeking to cement post-Soviet identities that cast aside the massive Lenin statues in their midst (with a few exceptions that continue to salute to a non-existent Bolshevik future today), the then nouveau strongmen, former Sovietized apparatchiks and bureaucrats who had mostly inherited their posts of power either resurrected respective fathers of the nations as Manas in Kyrgyzstan, Ismoli Somoni in Tajikistan, and Tamerlane, or Amir Timur, in Uzbekistan. The others created personality cults from the comparatively mild one of Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan to the megalomaniacal of the late Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan. Unfortunately for many Turkmen, Turkmenistan's stunted modern narrative has changed little under his successor Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov who has erected one of his own since assuming office at the end of 2006.

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