Analytical Articles

Bulgaria and Romania have over the course of the summer been setting down their markers as regards the Nabucco and South Stream pipeline projects in an on-again, off-again manner. What they finally decide may determine which pipelines from the South Caucasus and Turkey get built where in Southeast Europe. Major investment decisions are also on the line in coming months. It is consequently little exaggeration to say that the next year, if not the next half-year, will set the main lines of the blueprint for Caspian/Black Sea hydrocarbon development for the better part of the oncoming decade.

On July 16, 2010, Azerbaijan and the European Union (EU) started to negotiate for the signature of an Association Agreement. In the framework of the Eastern Partnership, launched in May 2009, it will provide a new basis for the relationship between Baku and Brussels. These negotiations will help updating the latter, highlighting both the changes of perceptions of Azerbaijan in Brussels and the new regional role Baku intends to play in the South Caucasus.

In recent months, the Russian government has stepped up its attacks on NATO governments for failing to curb Afghanistan’s exploding opium production and the resulting surge in Eurasian drug trafficking. Since Western troops occupied Afghanistan in late 2001, opium cultivation has soared and the Russian government argues that NATO should take more vigorous action to repress the cultivation of narcotics in Afghanistan. Russian officials have indicated that they will press for aerial spraying of herbicides on the poppy fields. Although sympathetic to Russian concerns, neither the Afghan government, nor its NATO backers, are prepared to take such risky action, which could greatly assist Taliban recruitment efforts.

Alexander Khloponin is no economic visionary. His economic values are based on open markets, free movement of capital, public-private partnership – in short, what might be termed the neo-liberal economic agenda. These economic values brought him success as governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai. Now, as President Medvedev’s representative to the North Caucasus Federal District, Khloponin proposes to use many of the same economic policies to bring prosperity to Russia’s most destitute region. However, these policies will hardly suffice to attract significant investment to a region which remains the base of an armed insurgency.

This spring, hundreds of young professionals, scholars and PhD students across Central Asia packed their books, research projects and CVs and headed for foreign countries to get professional training, education, or internships. This movement of highly skilled specialists has become a hotly debated issue among intellectuals in the region. One camp argues that it is a brain drain, as much needed specialists leave their home countries, contributing to shortages of highly skilled professionals. Others argue that it is a brain gain, because if even a few of them come back with world-class expertise, they will contribute to reforming national economies – and those who do not return will transfer remittances from developed countries to their nations.

On June 9, the director of Russia’s federal security service, the FSB, announced that his organization had detained Emir Magas, the leader of the rebel insurgency in Ingushetia. The capture of Magas comes on foot of a series of recent successes by security forces against the insurgent organization in the Northern Caucasus. In February, security forces accounted for Seif Islam, a military counsellor to rebel leader Doku Umarov. In March, Anzor Astemirov and Said Buryatsky, two leading rebel ideologists, were eliminated. These losses have created vacancies in at least two key leadership positions within the Caucasus Emirate organization. 

The ceasefire in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh has for the past two years appeared ever more fragile and a recent shootout, which left six soldiers dead, once again demonstrates that the conflict is far from frozen. This incident was explained as a consequence of a breakdown in the ongoing peace talks, but it also reflects mounting tensions ever since the recognition of Kosovo in February 2008. Kosovo’s recognition, the war in Georgia and Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia stirred things up and led to a change in the dynamics of the conflict.

Turkmenistan has broken Russia’s stranglehold on its gas exports by opening a pipeline through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to China. The country’s president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has just made his first trip to New Delhi where the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline project was discussed. Earlier this year a short pipeline was opened in order to increase exports to Iran, and gas is in the process of being identified for eventual export to Europe via a Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline and the EU’s Southern Corridor. The era of Russian control over the country’s exports is over, and Ashgabat is taking care to make certain that it is not squeezed between Moscow and Beijing.

The ferocity of the interethnic conflict in Kyrgyzstan has caught many international players off guard. The OSCE could be an obvious candidate for an unbiased and trusted mediator and a key international coordinator for the stabilization efforts, however, Kyrgyz experts are deeply divided over its role. Some believe that this organization has played a positive role in stabilizing the country, pointing to the quick response in negotiating a deal with ex-President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to leave the country and thus averting a possible civil war. Others believe that the OSCE was quite ineffective in responding to the conflict in Kyrgyzstan, as it failed to prevent conflict between Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities.