Analytical Articles

On June 4 to 6, an intensive shootout occurred on the Azerbaijani-Armenian border in the Gazakh-Tavush area that claimed the lives of five Azerbaijani and three Armenian soldiers. This could be termed just another skirmish in a series of low intensity fighting that costs hundreds of lives on both sides of the conflict. Yet the high death toll and the geographic occurrence of the recent incident far away from the Karabakh front lines evoked debates about the prospects of renewed war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Is the risk of war becoming imminent in this part of the South Caucasus?

On May 15, the presidents of the member countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) met in Moscow to discuss further initiatives aimed at building the organization’s peacekeeping potential. Kazakhstan’s role in the CSTO, its views on security in Central Asia and how Astana perceives the threats facing the region are among the numerous aspects addressed in the 2011 Military Doctrine. This security document is an essential element in assessing Kazakhstan’s defense agenda in the near term and beyond the NATO drawdown in Afghanistan.

At the end of May, Kazakhstan hosted two important economic events – the 25th Council of Foreign Investors meeting and the Fifth Astana Economic Forum. On these two occasions, the country’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, announced upcoming changes in public policy with regard to foreign companies working on Kazakhstan’s lucrative energy market and formulated several proposals concerning the state of the world economy. However, apart from purely economic thoughts, the Kazakh leader also addressed a political message reflecting his preoccupation with the recent wave of instability in certain authoritarian countries.

Kabul greatly needs to strengthen governance at all levels and to think about sustainable development, with the NATO summit in Chicago having clarified the date of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In an attempt to contribute to public policy capacity building and long-term stabilization of the country, several governments from around the world have offered various forms of assistance in training and re-training the national cadres of professional and effective civil service officials. Among these, the government of Kazakhstan has designed a special program in which the doors of this country’s most prestigious universities are opened to about 1,000 graduate students from Afghanistan, to study under Kazakh governmental scholarships.

The U.S. and Afghanistan continue to refine their relationship while managing the deepening fears of abandonment in Kabul and unease in Washington about being entrapped in an unwinnable war. The peace talks with the Taliban have stalled, with the parties treating the negotiations as an extension of their conflict through verbal means. The U.S. and its NATO allies and partners now need to fulfill their commitments to support the Afghan government while also sustaining pressure on Kabul and its neighbors to make more progress in addressing the underlying socioeconomic, political, and other drivers of the insurgency.

Kavkaz Center, the major publication of the North Caucasian resistance, has always provided positive evaluations of any anti-Kremlin activities. For example, the clashes between protestors in Moscow and riot police on 7 May, the day of Putin’s inauguration, led Kavkaz Center to present the protestors as heroic fighters. In February 2012, the emir of the North Caucasian Emirate, Doku Umarov, made a statement where he termed the anti-Putin demonstrations a manifestation of the discontent of considerable segments of the Russian population with the regime, implying that the Russian masses and North Caucasian fighters have a common enemy. Consequently, Umarov stated that he ordered his fighters to stop attacking Russian civilians. 

In mid-March 2012, the Russian Migration Service announced a halt to the previously introduced simplified procedures for granting Russian citizenship to Kyrgyz labor migrants.  On April 23, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev dismissed his special representative to Kyrgyzstan and denounced the post. The moves came after President Atambaev demanded that the Kremlin pays its arrears for renting military bases on Kyrgyz soil and threatened to close the Russian airbase in Kant. 

The ongoing trials of those indicted for crimes related to labor strikes in the western Kazakhstan city of Zhanaozen appear unlikely to answer questions about the country’s domestic security policy, or prevent repeat incidents. While President Nazarbayev has declared that the striking workers were acting within their rights, and his ambassador to the U.S. insists that the trials will vindicate Kazakhstan’s progress towards the rule of law, the proceedings appear to demonstrate otherwise. Prosecutors have cast a wide net that entangles striking workers, local activists, opposition politicians, and vague foreign instigators in the plot to destabilize social order in the country.

The high profile military exhibition KADEX 2012, held in Astana on May 3-6 underlines a number of security issues intensifying Kazakhstan’s search for foreign defense industry partners. The trend to buy abroad to fill gaps in the modern weapons and equipment inventory is coupled with a desire among the political-military leadership to fundamentally transform the ability of the domestic defense industry to manufacture the hardware and systems needed to conduct future military operations. This will gradually reduce reliance upon foreign, including Russian built, military hardware and is in response to a significant shift in the country’s threat perception contained in the new Military Doctrine signed by President Nursultan Nazarbayev in October 2011.

Bilateral relations between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have deteriorated significantly. In April 2012, Tajikistan’s Embassy in Moscow issued a harsh diplomatic demarche against Uzbekistan, blaming the country for attempting to establish a blockade of Tajikistan. Tashkent responded that it has no such intention. Given the long-lasting fragile relationship between these two Central Asian countries, chiefly over the construction of the Rogun Hydropower Station in Tajikistan, the recent demarche has the potential to cause severe geopolitical implications to the detriment of both countries. While it is frequently suggested that the deadlock can only be resolved through international mediation, solutions should preferably be found between the antagonists themselves.