Central Asia moves center stage

The Obama administration is now decisively shifting the focus of US military activities from Iraq to Afghanistan. That war effort has now significantly affected US-Russian relations: In response to sustained US-NATO pleadings, Russia has now given permission for 4,500 overflights of Russia by US military aircraft every year, in an attempt to maintain US supply lines into Afghanistan that have been severely curtailed by anti-US activities along the road route in Pakistan.
The US military effort in Afghanistan has not been going well. Indeed, it is very clear by now that the gross mis-match between the US-NATO’s over-militarized tools and methods and the real requirements of the Afghan people for peace and stability, the cultural mis-match between NATO powers and Afghanistan’s people, and the sheer length of the US-NATO supply lines into land-locked Afghanistan, between them guarantee that there will be no US military victory there.
And it’s very hard to see the US and NATO as being capable of any other kind of victory, either.
Afghanistan lies at the heart of what, in the 19th century, the British called the “Great Game”, which was a free-wheeling and often very violent contest between Russian power coming down from the north and British power coming up from India.
The “Great Game” was most likely never viewed as particularly enjoyable or fun by the majority-Muslim populations of Central Asia over whose homelands it was fought…
In the early years of the 20th century China started to join the “Game”, as the Han Chinese became able to push their influence deep into the far-west hinterland of their earlier zone of influence.
In the 1980s, when most of the central Asian ‘Stans were still firmly part of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan became a big battle-ground between the Soviet Union and the “west.” In that battle, the US (as we know) threw a lot of resources into supporting the emergence of militant Muslim organizations who were considered of use in the fight against the Soviets.
Now, once again, Central Asia is emerging as a battle-ground between big global powers. My first cut at defining the big players in this contest– which still has a great deal of fluidity– is that they are: the US/”west”; Russia; China; and various forms of indigenous social power, whether Islamic-based or ethnic-based (or some combination.)
We should also note that Iran is a non-trivial actor in Central Asia, as well as in the Persian Gulf.
The past weekend saw the outbreak of some very serious inter-communal clashes in far-west China, in what the Chinese call the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. These mainly pitted indigenous Uighurs against Han Chinese immigrants.

Chinese authorities have already reported that 156 people have died in these clashes, which means the casualty toll may be much higher. No ethnic breakdown for the casualty toll has been provided.
It is very possible that Uighur activists, many of whom cast their people’s struggle in religio-nationalist terms, may have taken some inspiration from the numerous images that came out of last month’s street demonstrations in Iran, in which opposition activists massed in center-city streets and raised the traditional Muslim rallying cry of “Allahu- Akbar.”
In the modern world, clashes between different interests are fought at the level of ideas as much as, or perhaps even more than, at the level of military hardware. (This is another reason why the US-NATO mission in Afghanistan seems so evidently doomed. How can those heavily armed and fearsomely self-protected American forces ever hope to “win Afghan hearts and minds”– even if they had the language and inter-cultural skills to do so, which so evidently they don’t?)
So I’ve been very interested to see the way the Uighur-Han clashes have been framed and presented in different big public media around the world.
China’s official Xinhua news agency (English edition) is describing the disturbances as the country’s “deadliest riot since New China was founded in 1949.”
That report quotes Li Zhi, the Communist Party of China (CPC) chief of the province’s capital, Urumqi, as saying, “The rioters violated laws and harmed the fundamental interests of all Chinese ethnic groups.” It notes that, “Police in Xinjiang have arrested 1,434 suspects over Sunday’s deadly riot, including 1,379 men and 55 women… ”
I have remarked before on the generally excellent presentation of the material on Xinhuanet’s “China View” website in English. This page is no exception. It has photographs, a link to a more extensive photo gallery, and links to many related stories Xinhua stories from around the world.
Another indication of the Chinese authorities’ awareness of the importance of the global “battle of ideas” is the fact that as soon as news of the Xinjiang riots broke, they invited a number of foreign journalists resident in Beijing to go to Xinjiang and “see for themselves.”
Forbes magazine’s Gady Epstein gives an interesting appraisal of this PR effort, here.
He wrote:

In public relations speak, they set out to define the story before the story defined them. What is remarkable about this is that Party leaders were able to act so promptly and so decisively on multiple fronts: the comprehensive security lockdown, the timely (if terse) official news reports, the Internet and communications controls, the deft handling of foreign media. The government was ready to handle a PR crisis with a sophisticated authoritarian strategy, and clearly has been crafting this strategy since the disastrous handling of the Tibet unrest last year.
Virtually everything substantive about the government’s reaction to the Urumqi protests is a replay of Tibet, only now at broadband speed…
Now that Communist Party leaders have embraced the 24-hour news cycle, will they come to regret it? I suspect not. Domestically, the government still tightly controls its message, and has little to worry about from its mostly Han Chinese audience. Internationally, crisis PR works in your favor especially when you have a reasonable storyline to push, and for now the reports coming out of Urumqi indicate that many of the killed and injured Sunday were Han Chinese and, as state media reported, “innocent victims” of rioters.
That doesn’t change the fact that Uighurs have legitimate grievances against Chinese government policies, and as in Tibet, it doesn’t appear that Chinese officials feel moved to address the root causes of ethnic unrest in Xinjiang. The foreign media will continue to report that angle of the story, regardless of how the government spins it…

Epstein adds a useful link to this late-June blog post from the Hong-Kong-based China Media Project, which talks about Beijing’s well-prepared project of “Control 2.0”– evidently, its response to the western concept of the use of “Web 2.0” for social-media-based mass organizing.
He also notes in passing that western PR firms like Ogilvy and Hill& Knowlton have conducted numerous seminars for Chinese officials “in more serene times.” (Though personally, I’m note sure how much value-added those antediluvian firms could actually add to the CCP’s wn very evident media smarts.)
Anyway, the Chinese charm/PR offensive with foreign journalists has already resulted in the publication of many compelling stories. Including this amazing account by the Guardian’s Tania Branigan about a confrontation between Uighur protesters and a phalanx of paramilitary police, armed apparently only with long night-sticks but backed up by armored cars.
She wrote:

Women in the market place burst into wailing and chanting as foreign reporters arrived, complaining that police had taken away Uighur men. Authorities have arrested 1,434 people in connection with Sunday’s unrest.
“The policemen took away my husband last night. I don’t know why and I don’t know where he is,” said one woman called Abdurajit. “Mine was taken too. They still have him,” broke in another woman.
As they streamed out on to the main street, the crowd swelled to around 200, with Uighur men and more women joining them, shouting and waving their fists.
And then the old woman emerged from the crowd and moved slowly down the street. An Uighur police officer came forward to escort her away. She could not be persuaded.
As older residents stepped forward and attempted to calm the crowd, she advanced steadily towards the line of armoured vehicles. She halted inches in front of one. The driver started its engine. For a long moment they faced each other. Then the carrier slowly began to roll backwards and the line of officers inched away, back down the road.
She walked forward. They stepped back. She continued – while the officer pleaded with her to turn away.
Suddenly he turned to me and grabbed my notebook, ripped out a page and scribbled a note for her; apparently his name and identity number – proof of his willingness to help her. He thrust it at her. Reluctantly, she agreed to leave.
For a moment, it seemed, tensions had ebbed in this riven city…

Al Jazeera didn’t appear to have anyone in Urumqi. But they’ve done a decent job reporting the political background to the Xinjiang conflict, here.
I’ve been interested to look at the coverage of the Xinjiang events in the Turkish press, especially given that the Uighurs are an ethnically Turkic people– and also because of the wide support enjoyed in Turkey and several of the Turkic-speaking republics of Central Asia of the Turkey-based Islamist movement headed by Fethullah Gulen.
Gulen’s Zaman media chain seems to be reporting the Xinjiang events in a very sober and non-inciteful way. Here is a report Today’s Zaman has today about an appeal by Turkish FM Ahmet Davutoğlu for the “restoration of tranquility” in Xinjiang.
The report continues,

“Turkey pursues the developments with concern and sorrow and assesses what it could do on the matter,” Davutoğlu said at a news conference with UAE’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdallah bin Zayid al-Nuhayyan in Ciragan Palace in Istanbul.
Asked about initiatives of Turkey to stop the incidents in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, Davutoğlu said, “Turkey has rooted ties with China and Uighur Turks. More than 150 people lost their lives and more than 800 people were injured. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry made a statement on Monday and wanted perpetrators to be found as soon as possible.”

Turkey’s moderately Islamist president, Abdullah Gul, was actually in Beijing and Urumqi on a state visit as recently as the last days of June.
Today’s issue of Today’s Zaman also has short articles about an appeal by a Turkish business association for a boycott of China and a protest by “several hundred Uighur and Turkish demonstrators” outside the Chinese embassy in Ankara, where they “hurled eggs at the embassy building and held up banners calling for an end to what they called Chinese aggression against Uighurs.”
Well, there we are: Turkey to China; Russia to Pakistan: Central Asia is a large and fascinating– and currently very important– part of the world.
How US-NATO forces can ever hope to operate effectively within this rich regional mix is still a mystery to me…
By the way, one last pair of important links for anyone following Afghanistan: Afghanistan Conflict Monitor is an excellent news aggregator; and Joshua Foust’s Registan is simply the best English-language blog there is on Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia.