Analytical Articles

After over fifteen years on the drawing-boards, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project was approved by the four countries’ leaders, meeting in Ashgabat in December. While the intergovernmental agreement naturally depends upon follow-on negotiations to be realized, it is anticipated that sales and purchase agreements will be signed at another four-way meeting that could take place as early as April 2011. The success of such a project would continue diversification of Turkmenistan’s gas export directions, provide needed resources to gas-hungry Pakistan and India, and not least give Afghanistan a keystone development project upon which to build economic reconstruction.

The leaders of the various ethno-republics in the Northern Caucasus rely on different personalities to represent their political interests at the federal level. Presidential aides Sergei Naryshkin and Vladislav Surkov represent the leaders of Ingushetia and Chechnya respectively. Meanwhile, the embattled leader of Dagestan, Magomedsalam Magomedov, is represented by Suleiman Kerimov, a billionaire oligarch who represents Dagestan in Russia’s upper house of parliament. Kerimov’s influence is such that it would be difficult for the Kremlin to interfere in Dagestan’s political system without first coordinating with him.

The opening of the International Uranium Enrichment Center in Angarsk, Russia in early December 2010 was a milestone in Kazakhstan’s efforts to pursue a parallel policy of promoting peaceful nuclear energy while opposing nuclear arms proliferation. Kazakhstan’s state-controlled nuclear complex, Kazatomprom, was a co-founder of the fuel bank concept along with Russia.  Kazatomprom is likely to be a major beneficiary of the IAEA and western sponsored nuclear fuel bank idea, given that Kazatomprom has grown in just over a decade from its beginnings as a disorganized collection of inefficient and unprofitable Soviet-era mines and factories to become the world’s largest producer of uranium ore for nuclear power reactors.   

Over the past six years, Kyrgyzstan has lived through two forceful regime changes – one in March 2005 and another April 2010. Both times, the reconfiguration of political power required Kyrgyz citizens to adapt to a new reality and try to cope with the dual feelings of optimism after unpopular dictators were ousted and uncertainty about the new leaders. Kyrgyzstan’s complex and volatile criminal underworld needed to adapt to the new political conditions as well, in order to ensure continuity of the vast shadow economy and maintain their influence over government officials. The state-crime dynamics have therefore been changing rapidly during 2005-2011.

On November 24, 2010, the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR announced the discovery of the largest gas field in Azerbaijan after the Caspian giant Shah Deniz deposit. This offshore field is named Umid, meaning “Hope”. President Ilham Aliyev met with the management of the company on that day and expressed his hope that the gas field would ultimately prove to contain more gas than the initial estimates had suggested. If current calculations hold, Azerbaijan will be considering new gas exports far beyond those currently supplied to regional and European markets.

In early January 2010, the Kremlin decided to unify the North Caucasian autonomous republics of the Russian Federation with that of the Stavropol region, still mostly populated by ethnic Russians. The plan was a bureaucratic design by the Kremlin that supposedly would increase the ethnic/social cohesiveness of the region and the country and promote economic development in the region. This merger has received a strong response among locals who demanded that the Stavropol region remain a separate entity. This seemingly indicates the rise of what could be called “Russian separatism,” based on an ideology which is remarkably similar to that held by many Russians on the eve of the collapse of the USSR.

On November 9, the Kavkaz-Tsentr website posted a video entitled “Address of Chechens Living Abroad to Organizers of fitnaht al-mujahedin”, showing unidentified people, one of whom was speaking in Chechen. He delivered a message connected to the recent split among Chechen rebels and the renunciation of the bayat (oaths of allegiance) to North Caucasus rebel leader Doku Umarov by rebel leaders in Chechnya. This video has been interpreted as signaling that Chechens abroad have aligned with Umarov and the jihadi faction in opposition to the national faction in the recent rift between the two parties. However, the long-term influence of Chechens settled in Europe on the conflict is likely to assume quite a different form.

Russia’s growing alienation and isolation from Europe’s NATO-dominated security order was evident when President Dmitry Medvedev delivered a speech in June 2008 proposing a restructuring of Europe’s security architecture. In place of “a bloc politics approach that continues by inertia,” the Russian President raised the idea of convening a summit of European governments to draft a new legally binding European security treaty that would establish equal and indivisible security throughout the continent. At the recently completed Astana OSCE summit, Medvedev acknowledged that his efforts to restructure Europe’s security order had failed. Russian security efforts are now focused on enhancing the role of the Collective Security Treaty Organization in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The unsettled legal status of the Caspian Sea has put brakes on the construction of undersea pipelines. Last month the third summit of all five littoral countries at the head-of-state level took place in Baku. Not only did Turkmenistan for the first time declare that undersea pipelines could be built without the approval of all littoral states, opening the way for such a pipeline to Azerbaijan. Also, Iran expanded its claim beyond the 20 percent of the Caspian Sea upon which it has heretofore insisted, yet without saying how far beyond or upon what justification. The others in attendance took the new claim as an attempt to sabotage the possibility of any agreement whatsoever.

The OSCE summit in Astana on December 1-2 concluded Kazakhstan's OSCE chairmanship and was designed to finalize the results of the year-long foray to reinvigorate this Euro-Atlantic body. Many international experts including Kazakhstan’s policy makers have been divided over the evaluation of the goals and outcomes. One group believes that the main goal of Kazakhstan’s diplomacy at the OSCE was to focus on the regional security issues and to reconfigure the security architecture in the region, making sure that Central Asia is not marginalized in the European security strategy. The other group believes that Kazakhstan’s main goal was no more than placing the country on the international map as an outspoken and visible player.