Kazakhstan - a booming Central Asian Republic

New Foster designed Entertainment Centre in Astana, Kazakhstan's capital.

The five Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have collectively gained an immense strategic importance over the last two decades, thanks to their geography and vast deposits of natural resources including oil, gas, uranium and gold.

The 16m citizens of the oil-rich Kazakhstan have plenty to be proud of. Growth has averaged 8pc a year for the past decade, a far better performance than the other Central Asian economies. Average income per person is now over $11,000 a year, twice as much as Turkmenistan and six times more than Uzbekistan, which, with 28m people, is the region’s most populous country. This puts Kazakhstan among the ranks of middle-income nations.

Kazakhstan is already the world’s biggest producer of uranium. It is set to join the world’s top ten oil-producing countries, when the giant Kashagan oilfield in the Caspian Sea comes on stream soon. So far the country has managed to balance cleverly between its giant neighbours, Russia and China, and the US and Europe.

But who are the Kazakhs and what of their ancient nomadic culture?

Map of regions of Kazakhstan

Ancient Greeks had a word for the people who lived on the wild, arid Eurasian land area stretching from the Caspian Sea to the border of China. They were nomads, which meant “roaming about for pasture.” They were wanderers and, not infrequently, fierce mounted warriors. Essentially, they were “the other” to the agricultural and increasingly urban civilizations that emerged in the first millennium B.C.

 

As the nomads left no writing, no one knows what they called themselves. In any case, historical records show that their literate neighbours looked down on the nomads and considered them to be in an intermediate or an arrested stage in cultural evolution. They had taken a step beyond hunter-gatherers but were well short of settling down to planting and reaping, or the more socially and economically complex life in town. But archaeologists in recent years have moved beyond this mind-set by breaking through some of the vast silences of the Central Asian past. Findings in graves from as early as the eighth century B.C. show that the Kazakhs maintained networks of cultural exchange with powerful foreign neighbors like the Persians and later the Chinese. 

 

The first US exhibition devoted entirely to the nomadic culture of ancient Kazakhstan opened in March 2012 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) in New York. Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan focuses on the people of the Altai and Tianshan Mountain regions, located in the eastern part of the country, from roughly the eighth to first centuries B.C. Featuring around 250 artifacts, the exhibition dispels the notion that nomadic societies were less developed than sedentary ones. Rather, they are revealed to have been highly sophisticated, with strategic migratory routes, active networks of communication and cultural exchange with their neighbors. 

 

Artifacts range from bronze openwork stands, superbly decorated with animal and human figures; to “petroglyphs” or rudimentary drawings, which marked important places in the landscape; to dazzling gold adornments that signified the social status of those who wore them. One of the highlights is the recently excavated, but never-displayed material from a fourth–third century upper-class burial-site in Berel, near the Russian/Chinese border, where permafrost conditions enabled the preservation of organic materials. The exhibition contains some 120 artifacts from this rich site.

Beginning in the third century B.C., Chinese luxury items, like the Wusun diadem, appeared in nomad burials, mainly associated with Han dynasty. According to Chinese accounts, the Wusun nomads may have furthered contacts between Central Asian nomads and Han China, at the time expanding westward and in need of horses in its campaign against borderland rivals. The below video provides more insight on the Central Asian nomads and images from the exhibition.

 

The Turkic Peoples – who are they?



The mountain ranges of Central Asia with tribal horsemen

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 a broad buffer zone where Europe meets Asia, mostly straddled by Turkic populations was re-discovered. Turkic-populated lands have not drawn intense Western interest since the rivalries of 19th century empires.

Five hundred years ago, Turkic people ruled much of Eurasia. The Turkic dynasties held sway over India, Persia, North Africa, the Balkans, Russia and parts of China. Arab caliphs hired tough Turkic fighters as mercenaries for the armies of Islam from the 7th century onwards, and soon afterwards Turkic warriors became the military backbone of the Muslim world. From the tenth through the fourteenth centuries, Turco-Mongolian horseback fighters and their families spread westwards across the Middle East under conquerors such as the Genghis Khan.

Khazak Nomadic family tents in 21^st century

The Turkic people account for around 140 million people worldwide. Their several nations constitute one of the ten largest language groups in the world, and their biggest state, Turkey, has the largest economy and army between Europe and India. Turkey and the five new mainly-Turkic states of Eurasia - Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic are becoming increasingly important again in the 21^st century.

During the 19^th and 20^th centuries Turkic ascendancy ended but the Turkic people remained. Turkic customs, language and identity has remained throughout these lands despite Soviet rule. The Turkish language and its dialects is still a rite of passage for the traveller who wishes to trade along the ancient Silk Road from Iran to the Western provinces of China.

A new 21^st Century Power Game in Central Asia

Central Asia has become an area of increasing strategic competition to secure access to the region's oil and energy resources. China, Russia, US, India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey are locked in a tightly contested competition.

China has been building new security relationships to match its growing economic ties with the Central Asian countries through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a six-member group founded in 2001 that includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. China has committed itself for the first time to a regional collective security agreement focused on enforcement of borders. Beijing has already conducted joint military maneuvers with Kyrgyzstan.

The United States has not been absent from this competition, having acquired a military base, known as Camp Stronghold Freedom, in Uzbekistan, as well as a presence in Afghanistan.

Trade between China and Kazakhstan has increased substantially as China's economy has become more dominant regionally, but Russia still remains a significant trading partner too. The Russians are trying to set up an OPEC-like cartel to tie down gas in Central Asia.

China has been seeking to increase its influence in a part of the world long dominated by its historic rival, Russia. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have followed the Kazakh example in looking toward China, rather than to Western-dominated international financial institutions, for development funding and economic thinking. China's politics and central planning policies have a strong appeal for many of the former Soviet republics of the region.

Government in Central Asian Republics

The Central Asian Republics are largely ruled by autocrats and strong men to varying degrees. The regimes generally restrict the freedom of speech, put down any opposition fiercely and fix elections. Uzbekistan, the most populous has been ruled by Islam Karimov, Nursultan Nazarbayev has ruled Kazakhstan, both since 1989. Emomali Rakhmon has run Tajikstan since 1992. Turkmenistan had a colourful dictator known as Turkmenbashi (Head of the Turkmans) until 1996. Only Kyrgyzstan has the region's first experiment in parliamentary democracy since last year.

There has also been conflict in recent years in China's most far-western province, Xinjiang between the Uighur people and the Chinese Government. The Uighur people whose Turkic language and Islamic faith draw them toward kinsmen in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian Republics have been seeking a Turkic leader and their independence from China.

It is unclear if the Turkic peoples will re-assert themselves to play a leading role, again, in the 21^st century, although what is clear is that they are a large group of people, 140 million people worldwide, not to be underestimated, that will form an important part in shaping the region that lies between Europe and Asia, the lands they have inhabited for centuries.