← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Ragnar
Thread ID: 10810 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-10-29
2003-10-29 04:45 | User Profile
[B]GI Joes In Moscow's Backyard[/B]
[url]http://www.sundayherald.com/37675[/url]
By Nick Meo The Sunday Herald - UK 10-29-3
A dozen years after the USSR collapsed, peasants toil in Soviet-style cotton farms. But they fare better than the beggars around Uzbekistan's seedy clubs, where CIA men are the new tsars.
TASHKENT -- Like a scene from a bad movie, the CIA men and off-duty US military personnel sat slumped watching scantily-clad Russian women gyrate in front of them.
An American businessman leaning on the bar explained lazily that the girls had been classically trained in dance schools that survived the end of Communism.
But with no more state-sponsored culture, the only way to earn a living is dancing in seedy Tashkent nightclubs. He pointed out one woman whose idealistic parents had escaped from Greece to live in the proletarian paradise of Soviet Russia, then another sad-faced girl in a thong whose parentage was Korean ñ her family was deported by Stalin and dumped in Soviet Central Asia.
There were two kinds of Americans: shaven-headed agency men with trademark goatee beards relaxing from missions in next door Afghanistan, sitting quietly in a corner; and noisy young airmen, mostly from the Midwest, on weekend leave from the giant military base in the south.
And in the FM bar, as in the rest of central Asia, it's the Americans who call the shots now. The Russian gangsters have learned to sit at the back and make do with less attention, like the expatriate entrepreneurs losing their shirts in Uzbekistan's faltering economy.
Both have had to face the reality that since the Americans started turning up after September 11, they were going to be outspent by servicemen.
Tashkent's ethnic Russians and Uzbeks ñ including the girls at the FM bar who have to dance in stars-and-stripes bikinis and cowboy hats ñ have mixed feelings about the US invasion.
Muslim Uzbekistan, ruled by the tsars and then the Soviets for more than a century, is not particularly devout, and the low-key US presence here hasn't caused too much cultural upset.
But although there might not be many Americans on the ground, nobody doubts the real and growing power of the US since the September 11 attacks turned central Asia from a forgotten backwater into a key arena in the war on terror.
For many of the ethnic Russians in Tashkent, once the Bolshevik centre of operations during the bitter civil wars of the 1920s and then the Soviet capital of central Asia, the arrival of American troops is just another of the seismic changes that have shaken the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It's brought sights that would have been unthinkable once, like elderly Russian pensioners begging from foreigners outside nightclubs.
But that's just another humiliation to bear among many ñ and another change. Old enemy America now plays a key role in propping up Uzbekistan's ailing regime, led by dictator and ex-party boss Islam Karimov.
Since the US was given permission to move into the giant Khanabad airbase near the Afghan border in October 2001, he has relied heavily on American support.
US money has helped the dire economic situation ñ government development organisation USAID has spent generously in central Asia.
And nobody in the American government has complained too loudly about the 10,000 Islamist prisoners Human Rights Watch believes are being held without trial in Uzbekistan, or the two government opponents allegedly boiled to death in prison last year.
Similar aid is also finding its way to neighbouring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
An important airbase was set up in Kyrgyzstan near the border with China ñ unthinkable before September 11 when this whole region was still very much Moscow's backyard.
"Moscow may not like having the Americans in here," one Western diplomat said. "But they haven't got any money, so there's not really very much they can do about it."
The region's leaders all need US economic help. The break-up of Soviet central Asia into five independent states, all with irrational borders drawn up by Stalin, caused huge disruption and there is still a crippling legacy of Soviet mismanagement and red tape.
Bizarrely, in what is be coming almost a US client state, millions of Uzbek peasants still live in state-owned collective farms growing cotton, the crop that for decades Moscow ordered them to produce.
Their leaders fear that one day Russia may try to move back into its traditional backyard, and like the idea of America as a counter balance.
And American support is vital to dictators who were Communist bosses one day, independent presidents the next after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
But a miserable decade of failure later, time could be up for the leaders and their post-Soviet statelets.
Uzbekistan, the most important of the Stans, is a classic case. Vaguely threatened by an Islamic fundamentalist insurgency, President Karimov tolerates no opposition.
One foreign observer said: "Most Uzbeks are thoroughly fed up with Karimov, fed up with the hopeless economy, and fed up with being poor.
"For most people things were better in the Soviet days. They could travel where they liked within the USSR and prices for basic commodities were cheap.
"Now they can't travel anywhere because they can't afford to.
"They would like to organise into political opposition but they can't ñ anybody who tries to set up an opposition is persecuted."
There's little justification for the repression. Islamic fundamentalism is deeply unattractive to most Uzbeks but it's the excuse Karimov needs to run the country like a personal fiefdom ñ the former Communist is one of the world's richest men.
Meanwhile, the US base remains despite the overthrow of the Taliban and the promises that it was only there temporarily for anti-terrorism operations. Cynics laugh at that, pointing out the vast oil potential in neighbouring Turkmenistan and Kazakstan, described as new Kuwaits, and the proximity of the Stans to potential US great-power rival China, also beefing up its economic and diplomatic clout in the region.
Nobody expects America to pull out soon. Meanwhile, Russia is setting up an airbase in Kyrgyzstan too, moving a strategic military presence into the region for the first time in more than a decade, and Moscow still runs impoverished Tajikistan as virtually a protectorate.
Two decades after Afghanistan was destroyed by Cold War rivalry, the scene is set for a new great game between the major powers in central Asia.
*é2003 Newsquest (Sunday Herald) Limited. all rights reserved. *
2003-10-29 04:50 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ragnar]
Like a scene from a bad movie, the CIA men and off-duty US military personnel sat slumped watching scantily-clad Russian women gyrate in front of them.
:furious: This sentence alone makes me sick! I say the Yankees better watch out when a strong Russia rises and decides to assert its own interests in the region.
** "I foresee the re-establishment of a mighty Russia -- one yet stronger and more powerful [than she is today]. Remember that it is upon the bones of martyrs just such as these that a new Rus' will be erected, as on a firm foundation; and yet, she will be fashioned after the old model and firm in her faith in Christ [our] God, and in the Holy Trinity! And the Church will be as one, in accordance with the testament of Prince St. Vladimir! The Russian people have ceased to understand just what Rus' is: she is the foot-stool of the Lord's Throne! The Russian must realize this and thank God for the fact that he is a Russian." --St. Ioann of Kronstadt**
You can also read about the prophecies of St. Seraphim of Sarov and those of St.Hildegard of Bingen, Blessed Rabanus Megentius Maurus, St. Caesarius of Arles and St. Francisco de Paola. All of them agree that Russia will be powerful again, and not just in terrority!