Giant Steppes: Turkey and Central Asia Are Riding Together Once Again

Via The Economist, a report on the Organization of Turkic States:

Just outside Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital, a woman whips her horse into a canter, raises a wooden bow and sends three arrows whistling through the air, one after the other, to the delight of spectators. Golden eagles perch on their owners’ shoulders. Nearby, men on horseback fight over a goat carcass (made of rubber, a concession to animal-rights activists) in a game of kokpar. Smoke from vats of grilled lamb curls past dozens of white yurts.

There is no mistaking the Nomad Games, which closed on September 13th, for the Olympics. They boast athletes from 89 countries, up from 19 at the first tournament in 2014. But they are a Turkic project at heart. “When I do this,” says Kyrgyz archer Ishak Tokonov, drawing his bowstring, “I hear my ancestors speaking.”

Map: The Economist

The Turkic world bridges Europe and Asia, covering Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. It spills into Russia, with its many Turkic minorities, and China, home to 12m Uyghurs. The idea of a common Turkic identity, a bogeyman for the Soviets and for today’s Russia and China, is flourishing. The Nomad Games are one sign.

Another is the Organisation of Turkic States (OTS), which has evolved from a talking-shop for autocrats into a vehicle for co-operation in areas ranging from education to foreign policy. The OTS helps counterbalance other regional groupings dominated by Russia. “These countries are trying to reposition themselves and to keep Russia at bay,” says Nargis Kassenova of Harvard University.

Turkey, the biggest and richest OTS country, has taken the lead. Its trade with other Turkic states has doubled since 2015, reaching $12.6bn last year. Turkish contractors built most of Astana’s skyline, including the biggest mosque in Central Asia and the arena where the Nomad Games’ opening ceremony took place.

Other than the host country, it was the Turkish team that got the loudest welcome in Astana. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reviled in the West, is admired across Central Asia. In a survey of Kazakh support for foreign leaders last year, Mr Erdogan easily came first. At the games, Mr Erdogan’s son, who heads the World Ethnosport Confederation, got a bigger ovation than Kazakhstan’s own leader, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has damaged Central Asian countries’ trust in Russia. Support for Russia among OTS countries is higher than in Europe, but has been eroding, polls show. Publicly, Kazakh officials are careful not to offend their northern neighbours. Privately, “they’ve had it up to here with them,” says a Kazakh analyst. “At the defence ministry and the secret services, the mindset has changed completely.” Demography matters, too. At independence in 1991 there were nearly as many ethnic Russians as Kazakhs in Kazakhstan. Today they have fallen to 15%.

Turkey has cashed in on the region’s need to reduce dependence on Russian arms, underlined by the Ukraine war. Azerbaijan used Turkey’s TB2 drones to devastating effect against Armenia in 2020. Now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan have bought them too. Kazakhstan has signed a licensing deal to produce Turkey’s ANKA drones. Officers from OTS countries are flocking to Turkey for training; Turkish military advisers travel the other way. For the region’s mostly untested and out-of-date armies, working with Turkey, a NATO heavyweight, has value.

Western sanctions against Russia are reshaping the region’s economy. Thousands of Russian companies have relocated to Kazakhstan; some Central Asian ones funnel banned goods to Russia. At the same time, Central Asian exporters who depended on Russia to reach international markets are looking for new routes. This has revived interest in the Middle Corridor, which connects China with Europe by way of the Caspian Sea. The volume of goods it handled rose from 530,000 tonnes in 2021 to a projected 4.2m this year, says Roman Vassilenko, Kazakhstan’s deputy foreign minister.

But poor infrastructure and receding water levels in the Caspian mean high transport costs. Corruption does not help. Urgent upgrades, according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, would cost €18.5bn. A container from China can take up to 60 days to reach Europe using the corridor. Removing bottlenecks could cut that to 13 days.

The Middle Corridor cannot replace the route via Russia, which is quicker and much cheaper. Trade between the OTS countries, $42bn last year, is worth much less than their trade with Russia and China. Turkey’s ambitions are also hobbled by its economic problems. And cultural affinity only goes so far. In theory, one can walk thousands of kilometres from Istanbul to Urumqi and get by with basic Turkish. In practice, Turkic languages are distinct. In a hotel lobby in Astana, a Turkish businessman praises the ease of doing business in a country where Turks feel at home, only to greet a Kazakh colleague in Russian.

Russia remains influential. About 95% of Kazakhstan’s oil exports and a similar share of its internet traffic go through Russia. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are members of the Russian-controlled Collective Security Treaty Organization. Other than their local broadcasters, Central Asians mostly watch Russian television channels. Oligarchs, politicians and spooks across the region have close links to Moscow.

Russia may not be loved by its southern neighbours, but it needs to be feared. In 2022, after Mr Tokayev, the Kazakh leader, refused to recognise Russia’s puppet “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine, a Russian court temporarily suspended shipments through Kazakhstan’s main oil pipeline. Kremlin proxies have also spread unfounded claims of Kazakh discrimination against Russian-speakers. The message is that Russia could stir up trouble in the country’s north, as it did in Ukraine’s east a decade ago.

The region cannot pivot away from Russia yet. Officials in Astana speak of a “multi-vector” foreign policy. Co-operation among OTS countries is an alternative to Russia, not a substitute, they say. But by closing ranks and building bridges with Turkey, they can at least balance Russia. They think time is on their side. 



This entry was posted on Saturday, October 12th, 2024 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan.  You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.  Both comments and pings are currently closed. 

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