TURKESTAN
The land covered by the current republics has undergone dramatic shifts in political control. Like layers of ash left by successive eruptions of distant volcanoes, present-day Central Asia is a complex set of identities, norms and beliefs, inconsistently distributed and variously upheld. Nevertheless, common historical experiences unite the peoples of the region, and a shared destiny in the coming years will force them down similar paths. One of the earliest significant was the 751 AD Battle of Talas, in which Ummayad troops defeated their foes from the Chinese Tang Dynasty, ensuring the spread of Islam into Central Asia. This clash marked the last physical incursion by the Chinese across the Tien Shan mountains. Buddhism came to Mongolia from Tibet when the when the ruler Altan Khan invited Sonam Gyatso, the first officially recognized Dalai Lama to visit, thereby establishing the dominance of the Gelug (‘Yellow Hat’) sect of Buddhism and the control, until the Soviet era, of the “lamaist church.” Various warlords gained and lost power until Genghis Khan swept through the region, eventually conquering the Kwarezm Empire in 1220. The conqueror brutally annihilated the small political entities that stood in his way, uniting them into a massive militaristic empire, centered in Kharkhorin on the vast Mongolian steppe, that became the largest in world history. As Barthold notes, the Mongolian hordes displaced peoples from their ancestral lands, further stirring the region’s ethnic mixture. Like that of Alexander the Great, his empire splintered among his successors, with Central Asia proper falling under the dominion of Chagatai. This kingdom crumbled and fell to Timur (Tamerlane), who, while sharing Genghis Khan’s bloodthirstiness, managed to establish a foundation for the flourishing of art and architecture in the region under his grandson Ulugh Beg. After the Timurid decline in the sixteenth century (when power shifted south to the Safavids and Mughals), the region lay dormant until the ascendant Russian empire made incursions into the region, with the last outpost of independence, the Emirate of Bukhara, falling in 1868. For the first time in three centuries, Central Asia was politically unified, albeit under foreign rule. The region was plunged into violence by the 1916 Basmachi Revolt, sparked by military conscriptions and economic hardships brought on by Moscow’s engagement in World War I. Mongolia, which had been annexed by the Manchu Qing Dynasty, broke away in 1911 following the Wuchang Uprising that established the Republic of China. However, Mongolia became increasingly dependent on Russia, which used Mongolia as a bulwark against Chinese incursion: “The plan was to achieve Mongolian ‘liberation’ with Russian assistance. When ten thousand Red Army troops entered Mongolia alongside seven hundred Mongolian ones, however, it was hard to avoid the interpretation that Russia was directing events.”
Although the Bolshevik Revolution swept across Central Asia, it unfolded primarily in Tashkent, the capital of the Turkestan Governorate and, after the rise of Lenin, the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Mongolia’s nominal independence from Russia meant that it did not immediately become part of the USSR. Rather, “the Peoples’ Revolutionary Government and local Soviets were established in Mongolia in 1921. The constitution of the republic, closely modeled on that of the U.S.S.R., was promulgated in 1924.” Writing in 1933, Connolly asserts that Mongolia “serves a twofold object. It is regarded as a convenient laboratory for carrying out an experiment in world revolution and also as a closed preserve for certain raw materials needed by the Soviet Union.” Mongolia, in all but name, became the sixteenth republic of the Soviet Union, a pawn in the Kremlin’s global chess game.
For seventy years Moscow held in an iron grip Mongolia and the Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics, whose borders were drawn by Stalin with little regard for natural geography or history. Power was centralized to the capitals, which, as historically insignificant cities dependent on external recognition for legitimacy over and against longtime power centers, kowtowed to the Kremlin. This system wrought great devastation in Central Asia, particularly through the near-annihilation of the Aral Sea, the brackish endorheic lake in western Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, through diversion of the rivers that replenish its water, the Syr-Darya (Jaxartes) and Amu-Darya (Oxus), to irrigate cotton fields. The Soviet agricultural policy of monoculture (wheat in the north under the disastrous Virgin Lands scheme, cotton in the south) and policy of treating the region exclusively as a source for raw materials left Central Asia highly dependent on Soviet transportation, industrial and commercial infrastructure, as well as regional cooperation, both of which would not survive past the moment of independence.
Nevertheless, as a Soviet-era guidebook author, who seems to be writing on the take, remarks enthusiastically, “Bourgeois sociologists predicted a gloomy future for Kirghizia: poverty, ignorance and gradual physical extinction. In reality, however, the problem of universal literacy was solved in Kirghizia within the lifetime of one generation.” While Soviet Central Asia suffered under profound political economic repression, the author is not entirely incorrect: the USSR thoroughly modernized the region, bringing health care, industry, education, transportation, and communication systems that had never before existed in the area. The positive legacy is still visible today in the unusually high rates of literacy compared with other countries in similar states of economic development. Moreover, the Soviet belief in a multinational state meant that native artists who properly toed the line by integrating indigenous motifs into the structures of Soviet realism won great acclaim (even if their works were heavily censored), as a congratulatory review of Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov’s Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years indicates. However, such a fantasy was maintained strictly for demonstration; the proof of the pudding was in the eating: “not a single decision of the Central Committee of the Council of Ministers demonstrated interest in the economic development of non-Slavic national republics, or in the republics’ broader social-economic development.” Gorbachev’s perestroika allowed the first hints of political openness, and the beginnings of economic liberalism challenged the leadership of the Central Asian SSRs. “Glasnost was welcomed without enthusiasm by the Central Asian leaders, who belonged to communist parties considered the most conservative in the USSR,” and, as Rumer noted, the most deeply entrenched and corrupt. However, “when Gorbachev’s regime sought the opinion of the confederating units…in regard to the continuance of the union, all five Central Asian states opted to remain within the union…in direct contrast to the [decision] taken by the Baltic states and the states of the European part of the Soviet Union.” Nevertheless, with the August Putsch in 1991 heralding the crumbling of Gorbachev’s regime, the dominion of the Soviet Union, and also that of Russia, over Central Asia and Mongolia, had come to an end.
MONGOLIA
Long the fulcrum of the Sino-Soviet axis, Mongolia’s emergence from communism’s long shadow began in earnest in December 1989, when hundreds of people gathered in Sükhbaatar Square to protest against the food shortages, elite privilege and lack of sociopolitical reform, and for perestroika and glasnost. The rhetoric of nonviolence, promulgated by Sanjaasürengiin Zorig, set the tone and encouraged the government of the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had long used violence to purge the country of its enemies, instead listened to the demands articulated by the nascent Mongolian Democratic Movement. The deadlocking in the Khural between reformers and traditionalists within the MPRP motivated the swift proliferation of opposition movements. Protests continued as opposition demands solidified, until an unprecedented hunger strike on March 7 precipitated the equally exceptional resignation of the entire Khural on March 9 and the repeal of the constitutional article declaring Mongolia a one-party state. Reconstituted under new leadership, the Khural held the country’s first multiparty election in July 1990, in which the reformers, thoroughly eclipsed by the MPRP’s financial colossus and political machine, were utterly crushed at the ballot box. The new Mongolian leaders opened their country to the West, beginning with a diplomatic visit in August 1990 by US Secretary of State James Baker, opening the doors to international aid and development organizations, ranging from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the International Republican Institute (IRI) to Christian missionary groups. This led to the formation of the Little Khural, which drafted a revised constitution of Mongolia, leading to the competitive 1992 parliamentary election, which the MPRP won decisively. In 1996, the Mongolian Democratic Union, taking a page from the 1994 Republican Party congressional strategy, won a majority in the parliament.
KYRGYZSTAN
“In September 1991, scarcely two weeks after the Moscow coup blew the lid off the USSR, loud music was heard booming from a basement window of the padlocked Lenin Museum in the center of Bishkek. The music was rock’n’roll. The song was ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Rolling Stones: ‘Killed the Tsar and his ministers/Anastasia screamed in vain…,’ Lenin’s statue seemed to be singing to passers-by. Whoever played the music was making a gesture that was incomparably Kirghiz-through the people’s beloved medium of song it achieved more radical iconoclasm than all the tearers-down of statues in other republics.” While the fall of the Moscow hegemony took the Kyrgyz Republic by storm, the seeds of political change had been sown much earlier, during Gorbachev’s perestroika. After 1986, “the conditions for mass mobilization in Kyrgyzstan were favorable due to the opening of the political system.” Clubs such as the Demos political discussion group, which began in 1987 as an affiliate of the Komsomol organ, allowed the first breath of free political expression, opening the door for more openly politicized organizations in 1988. The Ashar Voluntary Movement, an inchoate political party, organized in 1989 as a nationalist youth movement, and was soon joined by Asaba, the Erkyn Kyrgyzstan Democratic Party and the Osh-Aimagy movment. However, the overall volume of political activism was quite low: “only 8% of the total population 353,892 people were reported by the local newspapers to participate in some type of collective action promoting national interests in the period from 1986-1991.” Thus, it would be inaccurate to characterize any or all of the groups as being truly representative of Kyrgyzstan’s citizenry. Nevertheless, these groups made a significant impact on the course of events: Osh-Aimagy’s mobilization of ethnic Uzbeks living in the southern Osh province against the perceived policy of favoring ethnic Kyrgyz forced a confrontation with the Soviet government in June 1990. This protest erupted into the interethnic violence known as the “Osh Incident,” which clearly illustrated Soviet authorities’ inability to maintain order, one of the most basic charges of any political administration: “Siding with conservatives both in the republic and in Moscow, the head of the Kyrgyz Communist Party, Absamat Masaliev, was unresponsive to the protesters…In the eyes of the population, Masaliev had been discredited for failing to address the country’s socioeconomic problems and ethnic tensions, especially because he came from the south of the country himself.” At the same, the political order within the institutions of governance in Bishkek was rapidly deteriorating. Askar Akayev, a physicist and political outsider, emerged as a “compromise candidate.” According to Kiaspour, a peaceful transition of power was facilitated by the fact that, compared with Tajikistan, “in Kyrgyzstan while there were fewer and less powerful moderate groups, there were plenty of reformers who could and did negotiate with radicals and engineered a compromise.” However, even the real power struggle within the Kyrgyz government, consisting of shenanigans of the highest order, nevertheless concurred with Levitin’s gloomy summary of post-Soviet transitions: “the replacement of undemocratic regimes has been imposed from above by the new political leaders and ruling elites, which are split between reformers and conservatives who opposed change. Thus, these processes were not genuinely democratic, since they were almost entirely controlled from above.”
As the decade progressed, Akayev, hailed in 1994 by Undersecretary of State as the "Thomas Jefferson ... of Central Asia," with "more than a bit of Benjamin Franklin in him as well," gradually consolidated power around himself, enacting decrees in 1994 and 1996 to change the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan to restructure the processes for electing parliamentarians to better suit his interests. He won the 1995 presidential election in a landslide, and so thoroughly controlled the political sphere that “no constructive or competent opposition surfaced by early 2000,” when he was overwhelmingly reelected and accompanied by a resounding (though universally condemned) margin of victory for his party in the parliamentary election. Akayev’s increasing authoritarianism, combined with economic stagnation and skyrocketing debt incurred from loans by international financial institutions, made the situation no longer favorable for Akayev to maintain power. The political situation became especially tense in 2002 after police in the southern town of Aksy shot five peaceful protestors. However, looking to the rest of Central Asia proper (rather than to Mongolia), he saw no example to follow in relinquishing political power, particularly to someone from the increasingly vociferous opposition.
The exact causes of the ‘Tulip Revolution,’ as the Western media quickly dubbed the uprising that filled Bishkek’s Alatoo Square on March 24, 2005, may forever remain hidden beneath the fog of history. The proximate spark that ignited the sociopolitical tinder was the fraudulent parliamentary elections that returned the pro-government faction to power despite its widespread unpopularity. Protests began in the southern cities of Osh and Jalal-abad following the March 13 runoff, increasing in intensity (despite Akayev’s dismissal of the minister responsible for administering the election) and leading to a chaotic day in which a large mass of people filled the streets of Bishkek. Notably, opposition figures leading the protestors exhorted them to remain peaceful and demand negotiations, and the crowd mostly complied. Eventually, Kurmanbek Bakiev emerged from the negotiations, promising to restore order and leadership. Akayev had vanished, and “people in general were surprised at the government’s swift surrender,” although the ousted leader’s flight may have been precipitated by his perception of a complete lack of options for a peaceful exit from power, which Leonid Levitin had noted five years earlier. With Akayev out of power, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, a former prime minister and leading opposition figure, stepped into the White House as Interim President, scheduling elections for the summer. At this point, international donors and NGOs turned their attention towards funding local organizations such as the youth movement KelKel.
TAJIKISTAN
The Persian-speaking oasis in an otherwise Turkic realm, the Tajiks fell in and out of power for a millennium, eventually becoming the subjects of the Emir of Bukhara, who was co-opted and eventually betrayed by Russian and, subsequently, Soviet, authorities. The Soviets built the city of Stalinabad next to the ancient village of Dushanbe and proceeded to single-handedly modernize the country with roads and industry. Independence hit Tajikistan particularly hard: the massive inflows of Soviet capital dried up, leaving people waiting for pensions that would no longer arrive, jobs that no longer existed, and a centralized authority that suddenly disappeared:
Tajikistan could easily qualify…as the most artificial republic of the old Soviet Union, not so much because there are artificial differences between it an the other former Soviet Republics, such as between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, but because little of the country is linked with areas of Tajik ethnic heritage. Indeed, no ‘Tajik’ entity had arguably existed independently in the region since the Samanid empire collapsed under continuous assault by Turkic tribes in A.D. 999.This artificiality meant that once the clamp of Soviet dominance vanished, underlying regional tensions seized the country. Although certain reformist groups, namely Rastokhez, and intellectual movement, formed, as Kiasapour notes, “there was no such squatters’ movement or economic-social association. In fact, the Tajik organizations were more cultural and political even in their early stages.” Moreover, within the government, “Tajik reformers were overwhelmed by the strength of conservatives and centrists in parliament and were purged from party and government positions.” Unlike in Kyrgyzstan or Mongolia, where small demonstrations pressured elites to reform the structure and/or content of the government, in Dushanbe a revolving door of prime ministers guaranteed government instability during the critical period of transition. Their inability to address reformers’ political demands polarized the polity, and conflict was inevitable:
In March 1992 a demonstration, mostly spontaneous, broke out in Dushanbe, and turned into a face to face confrontation between the two camps…The demonstration ended in the victory of the opposition, and on May 15, 1992 a coalition government was born of the crisis. The coalition government contained only 8 members of the opposition in a total of 24, but the presence of an important personality of the Islamic Renaissance Party in a key position, such as ‘vice-president,’ provided a pretext for the Communists to call the government ‘Islamic.’…On these pretexts, the Communists of Khujand (Leninabad region) and Kulob rerfused to recognize the new government, and declared it illegal. Therefore, these regions escaped from government control.Thus began the devastating Tajik Civil War, which “reveals a country ripped apart along clannish lines within artificially drawn borders.” The conflict spiraled beyond the control of the token military presence, and was ended due to the leadership of Emomali Rakhmonov, who commanded a broad base of support in the south, where the most powerful warlords held the most concrete control over territory. Peace agreements, led by the UN with Russian and Uzbek support, defused the conflict and brought peace. However, like a rock thrown in a pond, the Tajik Civil War generated ripples in every sector and aspect of life, ranging from devastated infrastructure, an increased presence of Russian troops that weakened the country’s political sovereignty, a weakened central government, “the gross erosion of the fabric of society” that result in “tensions and stresses” that “create an environment that readily lends itself to exploitation by internal and external forces” and a subsumed national identity beneath a dominant regional one: “as some observers argue it is problematic to talk about Tajik ethnicity as such, since clan warfare has increased regional loyalties at the expense of the national Tajik identity.” With opposition movements unable to organize behind a single candidate, Rakhmonov successfully secured power through in the 1994 and 1999 presidential elections. However, without the resources necessary to maintain basic measures of police control (particularly considering the tumultuous decade experienced by its southern neighbor Afghanistan), Tajikistan has descended into a “culture of lawlessness,” which, when combined with breathtaking material poverty, creates immense incentives for political corruption, seeming to preclude any democracy promotion efforts.
However, into the gulf created by the civil war numerous foreign powers have jumped, attempting to be the one responsible for the country’s revitalization. Besides American and European assistance, Iran has played a major role in promoting Tajik culture and Saudi Arabia has been financing the construction of mosques. In Tajikistan, “Iran is playing the big brother role in the strife-torn and beleaguered republic. Through careful and calculated moves, Iran is making deeper inroads into Tajik life, society and politics,” particularly the Democratic Party. However, of all the foreign powers, “the history of Tadzhikistan,” Akiner notes, “is particularly bound up with that of Uzbekistan.” Ever since Stalin’s dissection of the Transoxanian Tajik heartland into Uzbek territory and a titular republic, the Tajiks have depended on Tashkent (and Moscow) for regional protection and political support, and Rakhmonov is inclined to take his cues from his Uzbek counterpart. The view towards Tashkent and the authoritarianism that the Karimov regime displays, represents the most clear and present threat to democracy in Central Asia. However, in order to understand Uzbekistan’s ruthless rejoinder to the political challenge represented by the West’s use of democratization as a tool of modernization, it is necessary to first consider Karimov’s construction of the Uzbek national identity.
UZBEKISTAN
In this study of Tajikistan, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, it is critical to consider the example of Uzbekistan which, while far from the worst case scenario of post-Soviet political transitions, the example of Islam Karimov’s squelching of political freedoms represents, in the minds of both leaders and opposition throughout the region a valid and tenable model of governance. How did the heart of Central Asia rot? The negative case of Uzbekistan provides important lessons for practitioners of democracy promotion and a classic example of the effect of myopic foreign policy. During Soviet times, Uzbekistan became the anchor of the Central Asian cotton industry, producing, in 1983, almost as much of it as the entire United States. However, the intense pressures to maximize production, combined with increasing corruption and the increasingly apparent environmental devastation, pushed the Uzbek SSR into a political crisis and rendered its historically people without land arable enough to grow staple foods. Price adjustments eased the disaster but ingrained a deep resentment of Moscow’s control.
On the eve of the fall of the U.S.S.R. Carlisle warned that “it should not be assumed that an Uzbek identity and an identification with Uzbekistan as a state have penetrated the personal sense of belonging of all strata of the population equally and now firmly integrate all regions of the republic.” This has remained true despite the Uzbek government’s campaigns to favorably rewrite the remembrance of cultural figures. This cultural fragmentation may have invigorated the subsequent intense action by Tashkent to forge national unity by any means necessary. Post-independence Uzbekistan is largely the story of Islam Karimov, the first secretary of the Uzbek CPSU, who was elected president in March 1990. After 1991 August Putsch in Moscow failed, when it became clear that Uzbekistan could no longer maintain membership in the Soviet Union, Karimov banned the Communist Party and formed the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan in November out of largely the same leaders. After independence, the Uzbek government “went through an important phase…which at best may be described as a ‘training period.’ It cautiously, and somewhat reluctantly, experimented with a nascent political pluralism while erecting new barriers to confine socio-political forces and defend itself against any serious challenge to its authority.” Having polarized the polity, Karimov next targeted his political enemies: the nascent Islamist movement Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an illegal group that sought the restoration of the Caliphate, albeit through nonviolent means. The group won support from members of the former Islamic Renaissance Party, but became radicalized by Karmov’s hard-line policies against political Islam. After September 11, “fighting Islamic extremism became the catalyst for the US-Uzbek rapprochement,” and Karimov used the external legitimacy that the relationship generated to cover an encroaching purge of his political enemies out of the deepest layers of Uzbek society. As Human Rights Watch documented, the mahallas have become co-opted by Tashkent and used as agents for spying and uprooting suspected Hizb-ut-Tahrir.
Thus, the brief window of political space that opened after the fall of the Soviet Union quickly closed and has remained tightly shut. While some NGOs currently exist in Uzbekistan, “it is, however, important to note that this apparent freedom of association does not extend to public initiatives that have the potential to question the political legitimacy of the ruling regime.”
PEOPLES OF CENTRAL ASIA
The roots and effects of ethnicity in Central Asia are elusive at best. While some clear lines can be drawn (Turkic-speaking Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen and Persian-speaking Tajik; conservative and religious Tajiks and Uzbek, less intensely Islamic Kyrgyz and Kazakh, and Buddhist Mongols; more Russified Kazakh and northern Kyrgyz, less Russified Uzbek and Mongol; nomadic Mongols, Kazakh and Kyrgyz, sedentary Uzbek and Tajik and semi-nomadic Turkmen), the region’s history of foreign invasions shaking up the distribution complicates matters. Nevertheless, each ethnic group can trace their practices and traditions to foundational literary works. The Kyrgyz, and in particular Askar Akayev, uphold the pre-Muslim Manas epic, which is similar in form to the Uzbek national epic Alpamysh, as their sacred keystone text. Tajiks share with Persians the c. 1000 work Shah-nama but trace their heritage to the poet Farid ed-Din Mohammed Abdallah Rudaki (c.860-940) and the glory of the ancient Samanid state. Mongolians glean their mythic history from the Secret History of the Mongols, “the only genuine (not to be confused with reliable) native account of the life and deeds of Činggis Qan – our Gengis Khan” whose “poetry reflects the pure, unmitigated tradition of the nomadic tribes of Mongolia”
Most recently, the Soviet practice of creating titular nationalities (e.g. Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic) created a political disparity unfavorable for some groups (for example, the Karakalpaks) and disenfranchised others (namely, the Tajik-dominated populations of Samarkand and Bukhara, which, in an effort to avert uprising, were assigned by Stalin to the dominion of Uzbek Tashkent). People were free to choose nationalities and, especially in cases of children born from mixed marriages, it was often more convenient to join the titular nationality.
While Islam plays a nontrivial role in the lives of everyday people throughout Central Asia (except Mongolia), it has never been, and can never become, a potent unifying force. example, while Kunitz notes that although Dushanbe had no mosques, he observes that “still found among some sections of the Tadjik population is the worship of living saints, the so-called ishans. These are the spiritual leaders and exponents of the mystical teachings of sufism.” In other words, the religion is observed through mystical and highly localized forms. Examining the constellation of Islamic peoples in Central Asia, Akiner notes that “what binds them together can be summed up very briefly: they share a common citizenship and a common religion.” In other words, “the Muslim population…is formed of a great number of separate elements that have no direct links to each other.” Any discussion, therefore, “of an ‘Islamic revival’…is surely a misinterpretation of the situation.”
In the three cultures at the center of focus of this study, local structures play a dominant role in shaping the political outlook of ordinary (largely rural) people: “Uruuchuluk…is the term for the Kyrgyz traditions of blood relationships. Uruuchuluk has enabled the Kyrgyz to preserve their ethnic identity, together with the stability of their primary social structures.” Similarly, the mahalla, the neighborhood organization, creates for urbanized Kyrgyz and Uzbek a sense of membership and participation. Their governance structures (usually a council of wise elders) can exert significant influence on individuals’ decision making.
OTHER NEIGHBORS
Besides Russia and the United States without and Uzbekistan within, other regional powers are playing the New Great Game. It is all too easy to depict Central Asia as the next global fault line or, worse, the next front in the ‘clash of civilizations’: “The emergence of six independent Muslim states bordering China, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia and in close proximity to India, Pakistan and Turkey is a fact of great geostrategic significance. Islam, hunger and nuclear weapons make a very explosive mix. And this game has just begun.” However, given their limited stake and inability to effect a complete hegemonic capture of the region, it is unlikely that any of these secondary states can compete on the same geopolitical and economic level. Nevertheless, their nontrivial influence must be considered when calculating the future course of the Central Asian republics. “Turkey plays the ethno-linguistic card to revive the Greater Turkestan concept with Pan-Islamic undertones…From this Turkey wants to derive political mileage.” However, given Turkey’s relatively small base of investment capital, “a Turkic culture area may remain only a pipedream, but barring a major upheaval, the ties that bind Turkey and the Turkic states are likely to be tightened rather than loosened.” Moreover, Turkey’s cultural ascendancy is challenged by the economic incentives offered by states that directly border the republics. Like the other peripheral governments that pursue natural resources, “the Iranian government has signaled its intention to develop ‘good neighbourly’ relations with the Central Asian republics based, first and foremost, on economic cooperation.” Pakistan has influenced political developments in Central Asia both officially (through diplomatic recognition and development projects) and unofficially (through the regional exchange of Islamic fundamentalist ideas).
Table of ContentsThe Central Asia Democracy Project is written by Alan Cordova.
