AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA

163 Pages·01.012 MB·English

by  William M. Brinton

AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 1

AN ABRIDGED HISTORY
OF CENTRAL ASIA

By William M. Brinton

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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 2
Books:

Amazon.com is pleased to have The Abridged History of Central
Asia website in the family of Amazon.com Associates. All of the
books quoted in this online history are available from the
AMAZON.COM Web site. Click on the book title to find out more
about the book.
Chapter 1: Turkey
Constantinople : City of the World's Desire 1453-1924
by Philip Mansel
The Rommel Papers by Liddell Hart
The Dawn of Peace in Europe by Michael
Mandelbaum
Chapter 2: Armenia and Azerbaijan
The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the
21st Century by Robert D. Kaplan
Chapter 3: Iran
The Prize by Daniel Yurgin
The Iranians, Sandra Mackey
God Has Ninety-Nine Names by Judith Miller
Chapter 4: Iraq
Republic Of Fear by Samir AlKhalil
Chapter 5: The Peoples Republic of China
The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress by Andrew J.
Nathan
The Coming Conflict with China by Richard Bernstein
and Ross Monro
Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker
Chapter 7: Russia
Das Capital by Karl Marx
The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire by David
Pryce-Jones
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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 3
Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire
by Michael Dobbs
Afghanistan:Soviet Vietnam by Vladislav Tamarav
Without Force or Lies: Voices from the Revolution of
Central Europe in 1989-90, an anthology with essays
by Vaclav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Norman Manea,
and Adam Michnik. Edited by William M. Brinton and
Allan Rinzler.
Lenin by Dmitri Volkogonov
The World Cultures Report: Ecocide in the USSR
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander
Solzhenitsyn
Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Moscow and Beyond 1986 to 1988 by Alexander
Solzhenitsyn
Lenin:The First Account Using All the Secret Soviet
Archives by Dmitri Volkogonov
Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. by Dmitri Volkogonov
Russia: People and Empire. by Geoffrey Hosking
Chapter 8: Threat Perception and China's Role in Asia
China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Inc : The Dynamics of a
New Empire by Willem van Kemenade
Chapter 9: The Viability of Central Asia
Requiem for Modern Politics by William Ophuls
Ecology of and the Politics of Scarcity by William
Ophuls
Death by Default A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's
State Orphanages by the Human Rights Watch
Chapter 10: The Black Sea
The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the
21st Century by Robert D. Kaplan

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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 4

Interesting links to other Web sites:

AKA-Kurdistan
http://www.akakurdistan.com/
Contested Borders in the Caucasus
http://www.vub.ac.be/POLI/ch0101.htm
British Information Centre
http://www.britain-info.org/
United Nations
http://www.un.org/
ABC News Archive
http://archive.abcnews.com/
The World Cultures Report: Ecocide in the USSR
http://www.cpss.org/books/ecocide.htm

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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 5
INTRODUCTION

Global demand for oil, particularly in Asia, has been growing since 1985.
In that year, oil prices collapsed, and the Persian Gulf region suffered a
substantial decline in real income. In peacetime, oil is indispensable to
fuel expanding economies around the world. In wartime, oil is
indispensable to fuel the military forces of the various combatants. In
1918, for example, Germany surrendered because its military machine was
about to run out of oil.
In World War II, Germany saw its oil supplies cut off at Ploesti in
Rumania. American bombers led the attack on refineries and storage tanks
there. Adolph Hitler looked even further afield than Ploesti which
provided only 58 percent of Germany's oil imports in 1940. Hitler saw
Baku in Azerbaijan as the objective of his Panzer divisions. Baku and the
other Caucasian oilfields were central to Hitler's concept of his war against
Russia. This war was launched on June 22, 1941 and Germany's war
ended far short of Baku and Grozny in what is now Chechnya. Nazi
divisions were defeated just short of Stalingrad, about 200 miles from the
Caspian Sea. A violent confrontation for access to oil in the Caspian Sea
Basin could very possibly occur between Russia and China early in the
21St. Century.
In this remote part of the world, oil has been discovered in vast quantities
not yet measurable. Some familiar with the find estimate the oil reserves at
over 95 billion barrels in the Caspian Sea fields. In nearby Turkmenistan,
gas reserves are estimated at well over 18 trillion cubic metres. And only
recently, has Kazakhstan captured the interest of the international business
community. In addition to oil, Kazakhstan is thought to have the largest
reserves of gold in the world, together with copper and silver. The
People's Republic of China has more than a casual interest in Kazakh oil;
it must more that double its daily consumption of crude oil by the year
2000.
In October, 1996 Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan, was recently the
site of a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE). Human Rights Watch/Helsinki sent copies of its letter for
publication on the Internet. The letter addressed to America's am ii
bassador in Uzbekistan charged that OSCE's human rights staff was giving
its tacit approval to strict government control of the media and fierce
repression of free speech, not withstanding Article 67 of Uzbekistan's
constitution. In part, it read: "the mass media shall be free...censorship is
impermissible." Constituent countries once part of the Soviet Union, like
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan was once one of the constituent republics of the
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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 6
Soviet Union but now is independent within the Confederation of
Independent States (CIS). Chechnya has been recognized by Russia as a
state, but Grozny, its capital has been the site for two years of bloody
guerilla warfare with independent status as the objective. In early 1996,
General Alexandr Lebed signed an agreement with the rebel's leader, and
Russian forces withdrew with Boris Yeltsin's approval In May, 1997
Yeltsin went even further. He helped reinforce Aslan Maskhadov by
signing a peace treaty with this newly elected president of Chechnya.
Yeltsin promised "never to use force or threaten to use it in relations
between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Ichkeria." This is the
new name for Chechnya. According to a map prepared in Moscow by the
Russian Oil Industry in cooperation with Rosneftegaz, Chechnya and the
nearby Krasnodar area has some fifteen oil fields and one refinery with a
capacity of 22 to 28 million tons of oil per year. The same map shows that
only a small percentage of Chechnya's oil is exported. The bulk of this oil
is sold to Russia. By controlling the Chechen economy devastated by
years of bloody fighting and widespread destruction, Russia will probably
continue this arrangement. However, leaders in Chechnya have sharp
policy differences with Russia. One of them is capital punishment for
certain offenses under Islamic law. Boris Yeltsin publicly denounced one
such filmed execution. He still sees Chechnya as a province of Russia, not
the independent country it has been since 1991. Except for Belaurus, the
other countries on the Soviet periphery -- Georgia and Ukraine -- have
preserved their independent status but probably not without promises of
economic support from Moscow. The western geography of Russia
includes Ukraine, and Belarus in an arc turning north from the Black Sea.
The rulers of Russia have cut off Turkmenistan's oil and gas via pipelines
to Ukraine and on to Europe. Turkmenistan cut off Ukraine's supplies until
it agreed to pay in hard currency, not the inflated ruble.
Any attempt to present the search for oil in a region of the world iii riven
by the cultural wars and conquests during some two thousand years of
history must omit some facts considered relevant by students of history. I
refer, of course, to the Caspian Sea, a landlocked body of water
surrounded by Russia, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and
Kazakhstan. This latter country shares a common boundary with the
People's Republic of China, and its national neighbors include Uzbekistan,
Kyrgystan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. With the exception of
Russia, Armenia, and China, the populations of all the other countries in
this list are united by a common religion, Islam. While not now the lingua
franca of these Moslem nations, Turkic or some variant will become the
common language, probably by the next generation. According to Central
Asian expert, Martha Brill Olcott, "Few people in the world have ever
been forced to become independent nations. Yet that is precisely what
happened to the five Central Asian republics Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan in 1991 when the Soviet
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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 7
Union dissolved," she said, " these people wanted civil liberties, but not
necessarily freedom as citizens of new states. Each republic was named
for a local nationality, but was based on the borders of a state that had, in
fact, never existed. Therefore, all these groups have border claims on one
another, and large populations in the other's territory on which to base
such claims. " Stalin, for example, created Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan by
dividing the Kyrgyz nation into two republics.
In November, 1996 the Chevron Corporation announced the
consummation of an agreement allowing it and its consortium partners to
export up to at least 700,000 barrels of oil per day from the Tengiz oil
field in the Caspian Sea. The oil will be delivered by pipeline to the newly
constructed Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Oil reserves
in the entire Caspian Basin are estimated at ninety-five billion barrels.
Natural gas in Turkmenistan is estimated at more than eighteen trillion
cubic metres, enough to supply Russia with most of its industrial energy
needs. Russia once had adequate supplies of both oil and gas. However, its
pipelines and pumping stations have obsolesced and much of the Russian
plant and equipment have deteriorated. Furthermore, some of its wells
have been almost depleted over a period of ninety or one hundred years.
Besides Chevron, other companies with an interest in the consortium are
Lukhoil, the huge Russian oil company, Mobil Oil, AGIP S.pA., a unit of
ENI of Italy, British Gas, and Oryx Energy, based in Dallas, Texas. iv The
agreement signed in Moscow on December 6, 1996 was of major
importance to Chevron. Currently, it was shipping only 120,000 barrels
day. Its ability to ship more was limited by the current pipeline in Russia
which has run within a few miles of Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya.
For the last two years, there has been heavy fighting in that country. It got
its independence from Russia, now known as the Confederation of
Independent States (CIS). The government of Turkey has expressed
disappointment with the route chosen by the consortium. Turkish officials
had prepared a position paper with reasons for getting Caspian Sea oil on
the international market by shipping it through pipelines via Turkey to
Ceyhan for delivery to European markets. Except for Kurdish nationalists
in the southeastern area of Turkey, a pipeline from, for example, Baku to
Ceyhan, might well work under conditions of relative political stability.
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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 8

Central Asia

Seven time zones to the east of the Caspian Basin, Chevron announced a
new crude oil discovery in the South China Sea in the Pearl River Mouth
Basin. The China National Offshore Oil Corporation will own 51 percent
of the oil discovered in this prolific Huizhou area, with AGIP and Texaco
being the other consortium partners. This latest discovery in October, 1996
brought total production to 120,000 barrels a day during a period that
began in 1983 with the formation of what is now known as the CACT
Operators Group. Each of the three corporate partners own a 16 1/3
percent interest in the South China Sea oil field, while CNOOC owns a 51
percent interest.
On June 10, 1997 the official China Daily Business Week reported that
China would have to import nearly one million barrels of oil a day by the
year 2000, twice the normal level. With the domestic oil industry
struggling to maintain production at about 3.1 million barrels a day,
imports must increase sharply to keep up with China's rapidly expanding
economy. China will continue as a net importer of oil well into the 21st
Century, while its population continues to expand at an exponential rate.
With this expansion, China needs far more oil than it will ever discover in
either offshore or onshore oil drilling. Over the long term, Chinese
economic growth will require the import of more oil. By 2010, China must
quadruple its oil imports to at least 14.5 million barrels a year. Only two
areas in the world produce oil on this magnitude, the Middle East and the
Caspian Basin. Oil v from the Indonesian wells is barely enough to satisfy
the requirements of Japan and the Malaysian Peninsula countries. On June
3, 1997 China announced a $4 billion deal under which Kazakhstan would
deliver its oil to Sinkiang, a UighurHan Chinese province in the Northwest
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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 9
of China via pipeline. China National Oil Company also announced an
agreement with Iraq to develop two major oilfields with about 340,000
barrels of oil per day. Some officials note that Russian intransigence over
pipeline routes to Europe via Turkey caused Kazakhstan to negotiate with
the China National Oil Company, a statewide company.
In 1994, China was considered to be the sixth largest oil producer, but the
country consumes most of its own output. China refined 2.5 million
barrels of oil per day in 1994, but is still 300,000 barrels short of its target
for 2000. The present government in Beijing has other policies related to
energy development. It is interested in American refinery technology and
crude oil in the ground in countries like Kazakhstan and Russia. However,
ever since the end of World War II, Russia has been a net importer of oil;
its own oil facilities have become hopelessly inefficient, and its nuclear
power reactors are dangerously unsafe. With the collapse of the old Soviet
Union in 1991, some of its national areas have spun off into independent
states. Georgia is one of them, and other states like Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan have become the key players in the search
for oil and gas.
Republics on the periphery of the former Soviet Union -- now the
Confederation of Independent States (CIS) -- are often at war over issues
of power. Belarus, for example, recently had a referendum which left the
status of President Alexandr Lukashenko in some doubt. He had
announced the referendum to seek near absolute power of a country of
about 10.5 million people still living in the shadow of the radioactive
fallout after Chernobyl in 1986... Belarus its capital is Minsk lies between
Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine (World War II in Ukraine). In
1994, Belarus established its own currency, the ruble, but its value against
the dollar is practically nil. The Ukraine has no serious internal disputes,
but it does have a boundary dispute with Rumania going back to the
MolotovRibbentrop Pact in 1939. Ukraine's population is estimated at 52
million, and its capital city is Kiev. Ukraine shares access to the sea with
Georgia via the Black Sea. Chechnya shares a border with Georgia to the
south and Dagestan to the east. The vi status of Chechnya was on hold in
1996 after an agreement was signed suspending hostilities between it and
Russia for five years. However, Yeltsin finally signed a treaty with
Chechnya in 1997. As already noted, China and Kazakhstan have a
common border in western China where no substantial oil drilling is likely
to take place without some assurance of results in commercial quantities
of oil or gas. Chevron recently signed an agreement with China allowing it
to explore for oil on land.
China has a badly split personality. As of 1992, the Chinese economy was
growing at an annual growth rate of 12.8 percent. Despite the one child
per family policy, its population is growing at a rapid clip. By 2010, the
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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF CENTRAL ASIA 10
population is expected to increase by 25 percent. Expansion on such a
scale is simply not sustainable because of environmental degradation.
Arable land has nearly lost its capacity to grow crops sufficient to feed the
growing population. About 25 percent of the entire population in rural
China has less arable land than the Bangladeshis. Over the next fifteen
years, this already disastrous condition of agriculture will become
dramatically worse. As of 1990, about 77 percent of China's agricultural
land was being irrigated, but this irrigation water has become increasingly
polluted by industrial wastes. Anyone who has seen what an American
forest looks like after clear cutting will recognize a grotesque scene. As
river beds silt up from soil washed out by normal rainfall, the river beds
rise above the normal surface and increase the danger of floods. Water and
air pollution are increasing rapidly, as the population grows and has to
feed itself. As the population expands, its rural component moves closer to
the coastal population centers.
Internationally, China has been criticized for its repressive human rights
violations. Western businessmen tend to ignore all this for the lure of low
wages and high profits on exports. Faceless Chinese bureaucrats routinely
describe criticism of China's dismal human rights record as interference in
the internal affairs of the Peoples' Republic of China. However, Europe
has worked with the European Convention on Human Rights since 1951,
and the thought of complying with this convention didn't even slow down
the race to the banks by American businesses anxious to make money in
Europe.Turkey has the worst record of human rights violations of the
convention. Furthermore, the Council of Europe just rejected Russia's
application to become a member of the Council of Europe. The Council
vii executive ruled that Russia could not satisfy the requirements of the
European Convention on Human Rights.
The Peoples' Republic of China cannot survive without access to far more
oil than it has in 1996. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Reform
with its Red Guard excesses were both utter disasters. The terrible famine
in the years between 1959 and 1962 caused the deaths of some 30 million
peasants in the rural areas of China. Then, when Lin Biao was Minister of
Defense beginning in 1959, he moved to politicize the army. Military
professionalism must yield to strict ideological controls.
Deng Xiaoping himself was a victim of the Red Guard cadres in 1966. He
was humiliated in public rallies and attacked in insulting posters. He
retired in time to avoid the blame for the chaos of 1967 caused by the Red
Guard units. By 1968, these units were at war with one another, and the
government infrastructure all but collapsed. Mao Tsetung was close to
presiding over social breakdown. Mao distrusted Lin, so he is thought to
have had Lin removed. Actually, Lin was reported to have died in a plane
crash in 1971. This was the year in which the PRC got Taiwan's seat at the
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