From: celep@nunki.usc.edu (Omer Halid Celep)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Atlantic'ten  - 3/3
Date: 9 Apr 1992 16:48:59 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: nunki.usc.edu









(devamla)




  At least Turkey and Iran are distinct national entities, more or less easily 
defined by means of language and culture. But farther to the east identities 
are multiple and no border can ever be right. 

  Take the case of Afghanistan. In the mid-eighteenth century the Pathans, a 
Muslim people probably of Indo-Iranian stock, created a buffer between the 
Safavid Persian Empire and the Moghul Empire, established by Turkic invaders 
in India. This buffer zone -Afghanistan- kept moving around as the czars 
extended thir control southward while in the east the Moghul Empire gave way 
to a Sikh empire and then a British one. Afghanistan came to consist of a 
fragile balance of Pathan, Turkic and Persianized (Tajik) tribesmen, surviving 
finally as a buffer between the British and czarist or Soviet empires. British 
rule in the Indian subcontinent ended in 1947. Soviet rule in Central Asia 
ended a few months ago. As a result, the psychological links uniting Uzbeks, 
Turkomens, and Tajiks living on both sides of what was once the Soviet-Afghan 
border have been invigorated.

  Eight of Afghanistan's nine northern provinces abutting the former Soviet 
Union are largely Turkic. The internecine fighting among Afghan mujahidin is 
taking on the air of an ethnic struggle between, on one side, Tajik and Turkic 
guerillas from northern Afghanistan, whose politics are increasingly oriented 
toward the former Soviet republics, and, on the other, Pathans from southern 
Afghanistan, whose military and political base has since 1980 been in 
ethnic-Pathan areas of Pakistan.

  These divisions are mirrored in the regime of Najibullah, Afghanistan's 
President, which is also fracturing along Pathan-Tajik lines, even as fighting 
between the regime and the mujahidin dies down. As Afghanistan evaporates, the 
border between Central Asia and South Asia is effectively shifting northward 
from the Khyber Pass to the Hindu Kush mountains, which seperate the Turkic 
world from the Pathan one. No doubt we will be hearing more about 
"Pakhtunistan," meaning a seperate nation for the Pathans. That was a notion 
one heard little about in the 1980s, while the challenges of expelling the 
Soviets from Afghanistan were being met. In the 1990s it could become a 
rallying cry for ethnic upheaval in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Pakistan is where the fault lines of Central Asia join up with those of the 
Indian subcontinent. Pakistan, like Iran, is an Islamic republic. But its 
regional subdivisions, unlike Iran's, have little in the way of shared history 
and ethnic identity. The very word Pakistan is said to be an acronym invented 
by a Muslim intellectual for Punjab, Afghania (the Pathan-inhabited Northwest 
Frontier Province), Kashmir, Iran, Sind, "Tukharistan" (a region no scholar 
seems to be able to locate), Afghanistan, and Baluchistan (which donates the 
n) - attesting to the unwieldy and artificial nature of this austere 
"ideological state" where religion was meant to serve in place of nationality. 
After a long bout of military rule, which clamped a lid on ethnic-regional 
divisions, civilian rule in Pakistan has led to mob violence and anarchy on a 
monumental scale. Though India, too, is plagued by intercommunal strife, India 
has the advantages of a territorial logic and an institutionalized democracy 
that is more than four decades old. Following the collapse of ideological 
states from Berlin to Samarkand, and the outbreak of civil war in Yugoslavia 
(a state deliberately created, like Pakistan, out of disparate groups), one 
must seriously worry about this volatile society whose political establishment 
is hellbent on acquiring a nuclear arsenal.

  Finally we come to China, whose communist gerontocracy is close to a 
historical reckoning similar to that which occured in the former Soviet Union. 
Perestroika in China - which must sooner or later take place - will involve 
the liberation of several million Tibetans and perhaps also the 12 million 
Turkic Uighurs who inhabit western China. Besides the Uighurs, there are 
Kazakh, Uzbek, and other Muslim minorities in western China, which was in fact 
independent of Chinese rule for brief periods in the 1930s and 1940s. The 
founder of Nationalist China, Sun Yat Sen, recognized the right of these 
Muslims to self-determination. To this day the secretary-general of the 
national government in East Turkistan in the 1940s, Isa Yusuf Alptekin, lives 
in exile in Istanbul. He meets regularly with the leaders of all of Turkey's 
major political parties. In Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, a Uighur 
"liberation organization" has just been established. Reports of demonstrations 
in Muslim China continue to reach the outside world.

  What does the future hold for Central Asia ? "Had the Bolsheviks not come to 
power, you would have had a pan-Turkic nation take shape earlier in the 
century," says Martha Brill Olcott, a professor of political science at 
Colgate University. "But now I'm not so sure. The decades in between, though 
not creating nations in the traditional sense, have created different 
interests and cleavages. The Kazakhs, who have a large Russian population to 
think about, are focusing on ties to Russia. The Uzbeks have a Muslim 
orientation. And the Azeri Turks in Transcaucasia are the focus of Turkic 
re-entry into the Middle East, via Iran and Turkey." Azizullah Aral, an Uzbek 
born in Afghanistan who now works for Radio Liberty, sees the other side of 
the coin : "History will force these peoples together because we know each 
other much better than we know the outside world. It will take ten or fifteen 
years, but then there will be some sort of Turkic federation of Central Asia. 
The comparison with the Arab world is natural."

  No doubt the years ahead will see neither complete anarchy nor tidy 
cohesion. They may very well see a series of fractious experiments in free 
trade and the free movement of peoples which might offer lessons in the 
virtues and drawbacks of national ambiguity. And they may rescue from 
hyperbole (inspired, no doubt, by the adrenaline of travel) Justice Douglas's 
prediction that Central Asia would become "one of the most dramatic and 
important political stories of the century."


Robert D. Kaplan
The Atlantic, April 1992










-- 
----------------
Omer Halid Celep
celep@usc.edu
Xref: sparky soc.culture.turkish:4184 talk.politics.mideast:10699 talk.politics.soviet:3407 soc.culture.soviet:3046 soc.culture.greek:3293 soc.culture.europe:3715 soc.history:3575 soc.culture.german:3035