By Kairat Abdrakhmanov
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 19 2015 (IPS)

This September, we usher in the post-2015 development agenda with a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed upon by Member States, with civil society participation, based on national, regional and global consultations.

These goals are transformative and their impact goes far beyond the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in vision, complexity, outreach and implications.

Kairat Abdrakhmanov, Permanent of Representative of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the United Nations. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

Amongst them is Goal 16, according to which countries will “promote peaceful and inclusive societies with justice for all and build effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels”.

Building civil service excellence will therefore certainly be critical to achieving this goal. Likewise, the proposed Goal 17 on means of implementation calls for institutional capacity building in developing countries to support national plans to operationalise all the SDGs, including through North-South, South-South and Triangular cooperation.

Both of these gave birth to the idea of creating the Regional Hub of Civil Service in Astana, at the initiative of the Republic of Kazakhstan with a view to seek innovative mechanisms to ensure equitable, effective and efficient delivery of public service to its people.

But the intent was also for the wider region of Central Asia and CIS countries to gain from it through advancing “the knowledge base, evidence-informed solutions, practical tools and guidance, and pursuit of emerging and innovative public administration and management models and thinking”.

The idea of setting up this Hub arose from the struggles of a country in transition. Kazakhstan, since its Independence, just like other newly independent nations in the region witnessed profound political, socio-economic and administrative transformations.This scholarship scheme has been serving to level the playing field by providing access to quality education and developing capable and well qualified human capital.

In the early nineties, the economic linkages of Kazakhstan with other 14 republics were abruptly discontinued which led to increased unemployment, devaluation of savings and galloping inflation of up to 2500 per cent.

Against this backdrop, the President of Kazakhstan, H.E. Mr. Nursultan Nazarbayev, first of all, initiated socio-economic reforms, followed by innovations and reforms in the administrative sphere, which the evolving times demanded.

Having no experience of market economy, the Government had to implement reforms with the available personnel. However, the President’s long term vision of subsequent reforms required a new generation of public sector leaders and technocrats which resulted in a generous scholarship programme offered by the Government.

The objective was to provide talented youth with free access to education in leading universities globally. Since 1993, about 10,000 Kazakh students gained degrees in the best universities and joined the job market at home, including the civil service.

This scholarship scheme has been serving to level the playing field by providing access to quality education and developing capable and well qualified human capital.

Having stabilised economic growth in the 1990s, Kazakhstan went further and was first among the CIS countries to significantly modernise its civil service with meritocracy as the key principle.

We acknowledged that the sustainability of reforms was heavily dependent on the quality of institutions, and of the civil service, in particular.

Importantly, the key characteristics of reforms in Kazakhstan have always been logical consistency and continuity. A clear indication of this is the set of five institutional reforms recently announced by our President, the first of which is improved civil service modernisation.

The aim here is to form a professional, accountable and transparent state apparatus in order to ensure sustainable development of the country. The responsible body for this is the National Commission on Modernisation headed by the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan.

Under this process of transformation, criteria will be established to monitor activities and evaluate the efficiency of each Government agency, concerned minister or local governor.

The role of communities in state bodies and local administration will also be strengthened by allowing them to participate and monitor results of strategic plans and development programmes. Civil society will also be engaged in the process of identifying budgets, relevant laws and regulations.

In this endeavour, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) as a trusted partner has been continuously supporting the reform efforts in Kazakhstan since our Independence. Now, we count on the longer term strategic partnership with UNDP all the more, particularly with regards to all the five institutional reforms.

Clearly, Kazakhstan believes in sharing accumulated experience and knowledge, as well as promoting cooperation among the countries and institutions in its region and beyond. Therefore, Kazakhstan’s initiative of the Regional Hub of Civil Service in Astana was founded by 25 countries and five international organisations, at a founding conference in 2013, with UNDP as the key partner.

The aim of the Astana Hub is to facilitate regional, as well as inter-regional professional dialogue in order to promote civil service excellence. This idea has resonated with the Hub today comprising more than 30 countries in 2014, including OECD and EU member countries, as well as China, India, Turkey, and CIS countries. The Hub is thus fostering dialogue between countries of Europe and Asia.

Last year also saw the Hub taking concrete shape with an agreement between the Government of Kazakhstan and UNDP, by which Kazakhstan agreed to make considerable resources available to support the Hub and thus expand its scope and gains to enhance the field of civil service in the region and beyond.

As Helen Clark, the Administrator of UNDP, noted, “establishment of the Hub and its success has been made possible because countries like Kazakhstan are ready to share their experiences with reforms…such as the introduction of meritocracy into professional civil service”.

According to UNDP, “the Hub also offers the potential for continuing Kazakhstan’s emerging global role in providing official development assistance (ODA) to other countries”.

Kazakhstan, with guidance from UNDP, has established its national agency for international aid, called KazAID, which marks an important evolution and achievement in the country’s significance regionally and globally. The support and partnership will focus on Africa, the landlocked countries and small island developing states.

Kazakhstan will continually aspire to serve as an active contributor to the global development agenda. Our efforts will add practical solutions for implementing the post-2015 phase most effectively, with particular relevance to Sustainable Development Goal 16, which calls for inter alia promoting accountable institutions and ensuring responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.

To conclude, Kazakhstan, stands ready and is fully committed to help facilitate regional and interregional initiatives in civil service excellence, and contribute concretely to the achievement of the SDGs in the coming years.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Migrant workers ride in a bus through northern Kazakhstan in May 2014 on their way to find employment in Russia. As the value of the Russian ruble continues to fall, labour migrants from Central Asia say they are less inclined to work in Russia. Credit: Konstantin Salomatin

By EurasiaNet Correspondents
TASHKENT, Dec 26 2014 (EurasiaNet)

Sardor Abdullayev, a construction worker from eastern Uzbekistan, had planned to go to Russia next spring to join relatives working construction sites in the Volga River city of Samara. But now, he says, “I am better off staying at home and driving a taxi.”

As the value of the Russian ruble plummets and Russia’s economy tumbles into recession, millions of Central Asian migrants have seen their real wages dwindle. On top of that, Russian authorities are introducing new, expensive regulations for foreigners who wish to work legally in the country.The return of tens of thousands of labour migrants and the prospect of them joining the vast pool of the already unemployed is making some officials nervous.

Some Uzbek migrants in Russia now say they are contemplating a return home. Such an influx of returnees could have uncertain ramifications for their impoverished country.

According to Russia’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, there are about three million Uzbek labour migrants in Russia, the most from any Central Asian country. Others estimate the number of Uzbeks could be twice that.

Unofficial estimates put their remittances in 2013 at the value of roughly a quarter of Uzbekistan’s GDP. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are even more dependent on labour migrants, with remittances contributing the equivalent of 30 percent and roughly 50 percent to their economies, respectively.

Data from Russia’s Central Bank shows that the funds Uzbeks send home dipped nine percent year-on-year during the third quarter of 2014. Analysts predict the fall will continue. The Russian business daily Kommersant estimates that remittances fell 35 percent month-on-month in October alone.

That was before the ruble, which has steadily fallen since Russian troops seized Crimea in February, nosedived earlier in December. Thanks to Western sanctions, the low price of oil, and systemic weaknesses in Vladimir Putin’s style of crony capitalism, the currency has lost roughly 50 percent against the dollar this year. Most migrants convert their rubles into dollars to send home.

“My salary was 18,000 rubles a month, which several months ago would be equivalent to 500 dollars. Now, it is less than 300 dollars,” Sherzod, a 29-year-old from the Ferghana Valley who was working at a shop in Samara, told EurasiaNet.org.

Sherzod returned home in November and he is not planning to go back to Russia. “The salary is too low.”

It is not only falling wages that labour migrants must consider. Starting on Jan. 1, Russia will require labour migrants to pass tests on Russian language, history and legislation basics, as well as undergo a medical examination and buy health insurance (the entire package will cost migrants up to 30,000 rubles (currently about 500 dollars), by some accounts).

The Moscow city government is also more than tripling the fee for work permits, from 1,200 rubles monthly to 4,000 rubles (currently 64 dollars).

Citizens of countries that are members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which will come into force on Jan. 1, will not be affected by the new regulations. That adds an incentive – some might say pressure – for migrant-feeder countries like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to join. (Kyrgyzstan is hoping to join in early 2015).

Sherzod, the Uzbek labourer, says that faced with falling real incomes, many Uzbeks working in Russia find themselves in a quandary. Thousands are eager to return home. But many simply do not have funds to buy a return ticket. Others worry about being seen in their native villages as failures.

Russian media outlets have quoted a migrant community leader who projected new requirements for guest workers, along with the falling ruble, will prompt up to 25 percent of migrants to leave Russia in the coming months.

With fewer dollars entering Uzbekistan, the Uzbek sum has fallen 15 percent against the greenback on the black market, according to several Ferghana-based shop owners interviewed by EurasiaNet.org. (The tightly managed official exchange rate has declined about 11 percent against the dollar this year. To help support it, from Jan. 1 fruit and vegetable exporters will be required to sell 25 percent of their hard currency earnings to the state at the official rate, Interfax news agency reported Dec. 18).

Despite the economic fallout from Russia, Uzbek leaders remain open to doing business with the Kremlin. During a visit to Tashkent on Dec. 10, Putin wrote off most of Uzbekistan’s 890-million-dollar debt. That deal paved the way for new loans from Moscow. It is unclear what Uzbek leader Islam Karimov promised in return.

Uzbek authorities and well-connected businessmen claim they are prepared to manage the economic fallout, and the large number of returning migrants.

“We have numerous [state-sponsored] urban regeneration construction projects across the country. One can say that the whole of Uzbekistan is a massive construction site. So if migrants return, many of them will find work,” Nazirjan, a former government official who how heads a private construction company in the Ferghana Valley, told EurasiaNet.org on condition his surname not appear in print.

On Dec. 15, President Karimov signed a decree that increased state employees’ salaries by 10 percent. Still, the return of tens of thousands of labour migrants and the prospect of them joining the vast pool of the already unemployed is making some officials nervous.

“The SNB [former KGB] has instructed local authorities and mahalla [neighbourhood] committees to create lists of labour migrants who are returning from Russia. The arrival of migrants usually increases the crime rate, and local authorities have also been instructed to be more vigilant,” a secondary school teacher in the Ferghana Valley told EurasiaNet.org.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Young boy sitting on a wall outside 'Way Home', a UNICEF-assisted shelter providing food, accommodation, literacy trainings and HIV/AIDS-awareness lessons to street children in Odessa, Ukraine. Because of unsafe sex and injecting drug use, street adolescents are one of the groups most at risk of contracting HIV. Credit: UNICEF/G. Pirozzi

By Pavol Stracansky
KIEV, Dec 9 2014 (IPS)

Marginalised communities and civil society groups helping them are warning of a “tragedy” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) as international funding for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) programmes in the regions is cut back.

The EECA is home to the world’s only growing HIV/AIDS epidemic and is the single most-affected region by the spread of multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB). For years, HIV/AIDS and TB programmes in many of its countries have been heavily, or exclusively, reliant on funding from theGlobal Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

But this year has seen the Global Fund move to a new financing model based on national income statistics, under which funding in many EECA countries has already been – or will soon be – heavily cut.“This [reduction in Global Fund financing] could lead to tragedy because governments are not yet ready to take on the responsibility for addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I would like decision-makers to understand that this is not just [about] epidemiological statistics but that our lives and health are at stake” – Viktoria Lintsova of the Eurasian Network of People Who Use Drugs (ENPUD)

Some of those likely to be most heavily affected by the cuts say that the reduction in Global Fund financing is putting essential HIV/AIDS and TB services, and with it lives, at risk.

Viktoria Lintsova of the Eurasian Network of People Who Use Drugs (ENPUD) told IPS: “This could lead to tragedy because governments are not yet ready to take on the responsibility for addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I would like decision-makers to understand that this is not just [about] epidemiological statistics but that our lives and health are at stake.”

At the heart of their concerns are worries over funding for not just medical treatment for existing patients but prevention and other services for at risk and marginalised communities.

Injection drug use has been identified as the main driver of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the EECA but HIV/AIDS is also being increasingly spread among men who have sex with men and sex workers – groups which are heavily marginalised because of political and societal attitudes to homosexuality and women.

TB, an equally severe health problem in the EECA, is closely linked to the HIV/AIDS epidemic because co-infection rates are often high.

Throughout the region, prevention and harm reduction services for marginalised groups are provided by civil society groups which rely almost exclusively on international funding.

Sveta McGill, health advocacy officer at international advocacy NGO Results UK, told IPS that the withdrawal of Global Fund funding could see many sick people slip under the health care radar.

She said: “It is affecting services provided by NGOs covering at-risk groups. These ‘low threshold entry’ services, while not necessarily medical interventions, are crucial to keep people from risk groups coming to centres where they get referred to medical institutions to get treatment and can access medical services as well.

“Often, they would not feel comfortable going straight to state health care institutions, and closing down these venues would mean that less people would be referred to state health care institutions.”

Critics point to rising HIV/AIDS infections in Romania in recent years as a sign of what could happen in other EECA countries when the Global Fund cuts back its financing.

The Global Fund ended financing for programmes in the country in 2010. According to data from the Romanian government, since then there has been a dramatic rise in HIV infections among people who use drugs: in 2013, about 30 percent of new HIV cases were linked to injection drug use compared with just three percent in 2010.

Under the Global Fund’s New Financing Model (NFM), the major change is a reduction in financing to middle income countries. Many EECA countries are now classified as middle income and critics say that while the organisation’s goal of looking to prioritise use of finite resources is sensible, national income data does not always accurately reflect the ability of people to access health care services, nor whether a country has the funds for an adequate disease response.

They point to studies showing disease burdens shifting from low income countries to middle income states, and poverty being greatest in middle income countries. Also, most people living with HIV live in middle income countries.

But some have also dismissed as naive the notion that, as the Global Fund wants, national governments will automatically fill the gap in funding left as the Global Fund cuts back its financing.

Many point to the situation in Ukraine as an example highlighting the problems of the NFM.

According to a report from the Open Society Foundations, Global Fund spending on HIV will drop by more than 50 percent for Ukraine between 2014 and 2015. This includes reductions in unit cost spending for people who use drugs by 37 percent, for sex workers by 24 percent and for men who have sex with men by 50 percent.

Meanwhile, the national HIV prevention budget was slashed by 71 percent in 2014 amid political and economic upheaval.

Lintsova, who lives in central Ukraine, told IPS of the problems drug users are currently facing.

She said that not only are there shortages of the right drugs to treat TB in some parts of the country, but that very few drug users have access to them. Places on opiate substitution treatment (OST) programmes are very limited and waiting times to join them long, sometimes fatally so.

“I know two people who died waiting to get on an OST programme,” she told IPS. “And there are other problems like a lack of needle exchange centres in rural areas, in fact a lack of any harm reduction services in small towns, which leads to high rates of HIV in those places.”

She added that without proper funding, the situation would not improve. “The only solution to these problems is financing,” she said.

But other stakeholders have also privately raised fears that a greater government role in fields such as drug procurement could see authorities looking to save money and procuring larger quantities of cheaper TB drugs of worse quality. Meanwhile, local legislation also makes procurement tenders long and difficult, leading, some health care experts predict, to governments running out of stocks of some essential medicines.

It is unclear how governments will deal with the reduction of Global Fund financing. The transition from Global Fund to domestic funding, although widely announced and anticipated, is not going smoothly in all countries.

Many are often unclear when the Global Fund will actually leave because no straightforward timing plan has been set. There are also specific problems in individual states. In Ukraine, in particular, domestic TB funding has been severely affected by the military conflict, struggling economy and currency fluctuation.

Late last month, these growing fears prompted 24 prominent NGOs in the region to send an open letter to the Global Fund warning of their ‘grave concerns’ over the allocation of funding in the region and calling for it to work with local groups and affected communities.

They specifically asked it to look at each country individually, rather than adopt a “one size fits all” approach.

The Global Fund declined to respond when contacted by IPS.

However, drug users who spoke to IPS said there was little hope of an improvement in the region’s HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics if the Global Fund fails to heed NGOs’ warnings.

Lintsova told IPS: “A lack of reaction to our calls could lead to problems accessing prevention and treatment programmes and a deepening of the EECA’s HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a signing ceremony of bilateral documents during the APEC summit in Beijing on Nov. 9. The two big powers are looking separately toward Central Asia to expand trade, economic, and political relations. Credit: Russian Presidential Press Service

By Chris Rickleton
BISHKEK, Nov 20 2014 (EurasiaNet)

There is a good chance that economic jockeying between China and Russia in Central Asia will intensify in the coming months. For Russia, Chinese economic expansion could put a crimp in President Vladimir Putin’s grand plan for the Eurasian Economic Union.

Putin has turned to China in recent months, counting on Beijing to pick up a good portion of the trade slack created by the rapid deterioration of economic and political relations between Russia and the West. Beijing for the most part has obliged Putin, especially when it comes to energy imports. But the simmering economic rivalry in Central Asia could create a quandary for bilateral relations.At the APEC gathering, Xi and Putin were all smiles as they greeted each other, dressed in summit attire that was likened by journalists and observers to Star Trek-style uniforms. Yet, the public bonhomie concealed a “complicated relationship."

Chinese President Xi Jinping elaborated on Beijing’s expansion plans, dubbed the Silk Road Economic Belt initiative, prior to this year’s Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which concluded Nov. 12.

The plan calls for China to flood Central Asia with tens of billions of dollars in investment with the aim of opening up regional trade. Specifically, Xi announced the creation of a 40-billion-dollar fund to develop infrastructure in neighbouring countries, including the Central Asian states beyond China’s westernmost Xinjiang Province.

An interactive map published on Chinese state media outlet Xinhua shows Central Asia at the core of the proposed Silk Road belt, which beats a path from the Khorgos economic zone on the Chinese-Kazakhstani border, through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, before snaking into Uzbekistan and Iran. Turkmenistan, already linked to China by a web of pipelines, would not have a hub on the main route.

The fund’s aim is to “break the bottleneck in Asian connectivity by building a financing platform,” Xi told journalists in Beijing on Nov. 8. Such development is badly needed in Central Asia, where decaying Soviet-era infrastructure has hampered trade among Central Asian states, and beyond.

No matter the need, Russia, which is busy promoting a more protectionist economic solution for the region in the form of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), may not share Beijing’s enthusiasm for the Silk Road initiative.

At the APEC gathering, Xi and Putin were all smiles as they greeted each other, dressed in summit attire that was likened by journalists and observers to Star Trek-style uniforms. Yet, the public bonhomie concealed a “complicated relationship,” according to Bobo Lo, an associate fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House.

The Silk Road Economic Belt is a case in point, explained Lo. The “mega project”, much like the original Silk Road, could eventually encompass several routes and benefit Russia’s own infrastructurally challenged east, he noted. But it might well dilute Russian influence in its traditional backyard of Central Asia.

“If you are sitting in Moscow, you are hoping that Russia will be the main trunk line [of the belt], but it seems likely it will be more of an offshoot,” said Lo. “[The belt’s] main thrust will be through Central and South Asia.”

Chinese leaders are intent on linking their Silk Road initiative to a broader project, the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP), which they touted during the APEC gathering.

FTAAP and the Silk Road Economic Belt, along with a similar strategic plan called the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, are pro-trade in the broadest sense, seeking to break “all sorts of shackles in the wider Asia-Pacific region to usher in a new round of higher level, deeper level of opening up,” according to Li Lifan, an associate research professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Under the Chinese vision, its “grand idea” would seek to “absorb the Eurasian economic integration [project] led by Russia,” Li told EurasiaNet.org via email.

In contrast to the expansive Chinese vision for Eurasia, early evidence suggests a Russia-led union, with its tight border controls and levied tariffs, could end up stifling cross-border trade among members and non-members. Under such conditions, Central Asian states could experience a decline in their current level of trade with China. The existing Kremlin-dominated Customs Union is set to evolve into the Eurasian Economic Union on Jan. 1.

At least since the build-up to the 2013 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Central Asia-focused security organisation of which China and Russia are both members, Beijing has been very public about wielding its economic might in the region. Back then, Xi jetted across the region speaking of the belt for the first time as he signed deals worth tens of billions of dollars, most notably energy contracts with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

Ever since, discussions of how to turn the belt into a reality have been uncomfortable. Moscow is reportedly steadfastly opposed to the idea of turning the SCO – which also comprises all four Central Asian countries positioned along the proposed belt’s route – into an economic organisation.

Uzbekistan has refused to join the Customs Union, which also excludes China. But the Kremlin expects Kyrgyzstan to join at the beginning of next year and Tajikistan to follow. Currently, the bloc’s only members other than Russia are Kazakhstan and Belarus.

For countries that have already been on the receiving end of Chinese largesse, the prospect of deeper economic integration with Russia may begin to seem like a limitation.

During a Nov. 7 meeting in Beijing ahead of the APEC summit, Xi and Tajik President Emomali Rahmon signed agreements securing Chinese credit for a railway to connect Tajikistan’s north and south, a new power plant and local agricultural projects. They also agreed on investments for the state-owned aluminium smelter Talco, an entity that once enjoyed close ties with the Russian conglomerate RusAl. Bilateral trade for the first eight months of this year increased by 40 percent compared with the same period last year, reaching 1.5 billion dollars.

“If we compare something like the Customs Union to the Silk Road Economic Belt, then of course the belt is preferable for Tajikistan,” Muzaffar Olimov, director of the Sharq analytical centre in Dushanbe, told EurasiaNet.org in a telephone interview. Tajikistan “has not decided” if it wants to join the economic bloc [the EEU], he added.

Editor’s note:  Chris Rickleton is a Bishkek-based journalist. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Immigrants in Russia could face a wave of violence following thousands of arrests in a crackdown on illegal immigration which has been condemned not only for human rights breaches but for entrenching a virulent negative public perception of migrants.

More than 7,000 people were arrested across Moscow – and more than 800 already served with deportation orders – under Operation Migrant 2014 which ran between Oct. 23 and Nov. 2 in the Russian capital.

The scale of the operation and methods used by the authorities has left international and local rights organisations outraged.

They say police used violence during raids on thousands of locations, including work places, markets, lodgings, hotels and people’s homes. They said that some migrants were forcibly taken from their families with no information given to relatives of where they were being taken.“Operations like this [Operation Migration 2014] only reinforce negative images of migrants in Russia and increase violence towards them. Once Russians see images of the raids in the news they will rally to support the government's actions” – Tolekan Ismailova, Vice-President of the International Federation for Human Rights

Some were deported without proper procedures being observed, according to local lawyers while others claim many of an estimated up to 100,000 migrants detained had money confiscated by police before being released without their detention being recorded.

Tolekan Ismailova, vice-president of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), said: “This is simply an institutionalised way of intimidating migrants and their families. The operation violates Russia’s international obligations to respect human dignity and ban the practice of arbitrary detentions.”

But beyond the rights abuses, the highly-publicised raids are, critics argue, also helping foment and entrench a xenophobic attitude to migrants in wider society that increases the risk of violence against them.

Ismailova told IPS: “Operations like this only reinforce negative images of migrants in Russia and increase violence towards them. Once Russians see images of the raids in the news they will rally to support the government’s actions.”

The warnings come amid hardening attitudes towards what some Russian MPs estimate to be as many as 10 million migrants across Russia.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s large cities have been a magnet for migrants, mainly from former neighbouring Soviet states. Wages on offer in cities like St Petersburg and Moscow are often enough for immigrants to support entire families back at home. In some Central Asian countries, remittances sent home from workers in Russia account for as much as one-third of national GDP.

But successful assimilation of those migrants has been limited for a number of reasons. Migrants, especially those from Central Asia, have tended to interact within their own communities while support from Russian authorities and representatives of their own states has often been weak.

Rights groups say local employers routinely exploit migrants, refusing to give  them proper contracts, leaving them with no rights, often working in poor conditions and for low wages. Many are de facto working and residing illegally, and unable to access health care and pension systems.

Their situation also forces many to live in bad conditions and fuels criminality and violence in migrant communities, leading to further arrests and a perpetuation of negative attitudes towards migrants in wider society.

Ismailova told IPS: “Central Asian migrants are harassed because there is a culture of racism in Russia that perpetuates the stereotype that they are ‘black’ and they do the ‘black’ work in Russia. Many Russians have prejudices against Central Asians.”

Attitudes to migrants hardened in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008 and have worsened considerably since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012.

Critics say that the Kremlin is pursuing a xenophobic and anti-migrant policy in an attempt to distract Russians from wider problems in society.

They point to Operation Migrant 2014 as just the latest in a string of recent highly-visible crackdowns seemingly aimed at reinforcing the public perception of illegal immigrants posing a threat.

Operation Illegal 2014, similar to Operation Migrant 2014, was conducted in St Petersburg from Sep. 22 to Oct. 10, resulting in charges being brought against 437 migrants. And just last month, draft legislation was heard in parliament which would increase the penalties for foreigners exceeding maximum stay periods in the country.

Rights campaigners also point to other methods being used to fuel distrust of migrants, including authorities’ encouragement of citizens to report migrants they suspect of working illegally to a special hotline which passes the information to the police.

According to Ismailova, “this is exactly the same strategy that was used by the KGB. It creates a sense of distrust among people and is a major obstacle against securing human rights for migrants.”

The raids, arrests, anti-immigrant legislation and rhetoric from public officials – last month Moscow’s mayor said that were it not for illegal immigrants Moscow would be the safest city in the world – are little more than a “PR exercise” designed to deflect attention from other issues.

Tanya Lokshina, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Moscow, told IPS: “With the ruble suffering an alarming drop, the government is apparently trying to divert people’s attention from concerns over living standards by turning their discontent towards migrants and, at the same time, demonstrating its own ‘effectiveness’  by attacking that ‘enemy’.”

Lokshina also said that “part of the problem with irregular migration is that employers don’t provide migrant workers with proper contracts. No one wants to work without a contract or permit – they do it because they have no other option. The government should ensure that migrant workers have contracts and relevant guarantees.”

Authorities have defended the need to tackle illegal immigration. They say that, among others,  illegal immigrants put a massive strain on state resources, particularly the health care system – migrants seeking medical help costs Moscow alone a reported 150 million dollars each year.

But rights campaigners say the government should be looking to strengthen migrants’ rights instead of enforcing repressive crackdowns.

They say authorities should give more notification to migrants to have residency and other documents in order before any raids are carried out and that a current three-month entry and exit visa regime for many migrants should be cancelled.

Even migration experts have openly questioned the policy of mass arrests.

Vyacheslav Postavnin, president of the Migration XXI Century foundation which cooperates with the Russian government working on migration policy, told Russian news agency TASS last week: “There are a lot of question marks around operations like this. I can see no quantitative value in them.

“Even if a thousand people were detained, there are thousands more that have not broken laws. The question is why were they arrested, taken away somewhere  and to some extent humiliated? What happens when it is found out that they are working legally?”

Others warn that the situation for immigrants is becoming increasingly fraught and there are serious concerns about the risk of violence against the immigrant community in the near future.

The Russian public holiday of Unity Day on Nov. 4 is often marked by massive nationalist and anti-migrant demonstrations in major cities and was last yearpreceded by violent riots in Moscow after an ethnic Azeri was alleged to have killed a Russian. Meanwhile, in St Petersburg, a migrant of Uzbek origin was killed during the national holiday.

When asked whether further violence against immigrants could be expected following the publicity around the arrests, Lokshina told IPS: “It’s certainly likely.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Sep 19 2014 (IPS)

At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed themselves to reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion of the hungry.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The latest State of World Food Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2014 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that 805 million people – one in nine people worldwide – remain chronically hungry: 789 million are in developing countries where this share has declined from 23.4 to 13.5 percent.

By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015.

Some 25 countries have made more impressive progress, achieving the more ambitious WFS target of halving the number of hungry. However, the number of hungry people in the world has only declined by one-fifth from the billion estimated for 1990-92.

Major effort needed

The proportion of undernourished people – those regularly not able to consume enough food for an active and healthy life – has decreased from 23.4 percent in 1990–1992 to 13.5 percent in 2012–2014. This is significant because a large and growing number of countries show that achieving and sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.

However, the MDG target of halving the chronically undernourished people’s share of the world’s population by the end of 2015 cannot be met at the current rate of progress. Meeting the target is still possible, however, with a sufficient, immediate additional effort to accelerate progress, especially in countries which have showed little progress so far.

Progress uneven

“By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015”
Overall progress has been highly uneven. All but 14 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases. While sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished.

Marked differences in reducing undernourishment have persisted across regions. There have been significant reductions in both the estimated share and number of undernourished in most countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean – where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has been reached, or nearly reached.

West Asia has seen a rise in the share of the hungry compared with 1990–1992, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

In several countries, underweight and stunting persist in children, even when undernourishment is low and most people have access to sufficient food. Such nutrition failures are due not only to insufficient food access, but also to poor health conditions and the high incidence of diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Food security and nutrition

Hunger is conventionally measured in terms of the prevalence of undernourishment, the FAO estimate of chronic inadequacy of dietary energy. While such a measure is useful for estimating hunger, it needs to be complemented by more measures to capture other dimensions of food security.

SOFI’s suite of indicators measures different dimensions of food security. Information thus generated can guide priority policy actions. For example, in countries where low undernourishment coexists with high malnutrition, specially-designed nutrition-enhancing interventions may be crucial to address early childhood stunting.

With the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals likely to seek to overcome hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, FAO has recently developed and tested a new Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) in over 150 countries to measure the severity of reported food insecurity.

Lessons

Improvements in nutrition generally require complementary policies, including improving health conditions, hygiene, water supply and education. More sophisticated and creative approaches to coordination and governance are needed, with more, and more effective, resources to end hunger and malnutrition in our lifetimes.

With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment continuing and likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome without universalising social protection to all in need, but also to provide the means for future livelihoods and resilience.

The forthcoming Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome on November 19-21 is expected to articulate coherent bases for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition as well as for greater international cooperation and support for enhanced and more integrated national nutrition efforts.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

Healthcare systems in Eastern Europe and Central Asia remain woefully unable to cope with HIV/AIDS as the region’s raging epidemic – the fastest growing in the world – takes on a new dimension, a senior UN official has told IPS.

Until now the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) epidemic had been driven by injection drug use. But data and anecdotal evidence has shown a strong rise in the spread of the disease through heterosexual transmission as well as via men who have sex with men – potentially throwing up a new set of challenges for governments and healthcare ministers.

But, says the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Michel Kazatchkine, until a new approach to treating the disease is taken in countries worst affected by it, the response to the epidemic will continue to be poor and largely ineffective."In some countries it will probably take a wave of deaths, or the death of someone famous or a prominent member of the Church for anything to change.”

He told IPS: “HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia needs to be taken out of the medical ghetto which it is in at the moment.

“Regardless of whether it is driven by heterosexual transmission or drug-injection, I am afraid that until the disease gets visibility and health systems get geared up to take it on, it will not be dealt with properly. In some countries it will probably take a wave of deaths, or the death of someone famous or a prominent member of the Church for anything to change.”

For many years Eastern Europe and Central Asia has had the world’s fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The estimated number of people with HIV has grown by 140 percent in the past ten years, according to UN figures. Russia has 70 percent of all people living with HIV in the region and together with the Ukraine accounts for 90 percent of the region’s HIV infection cases.

The epidemic remains primarily linked with injection drug use with over 35 percent of case reports in the region associated with drug use.

But in the last five years, there has been a marked increase in heterosexual transmission which now accounts for 30 percent of reported cases, according to Kazatchkine. Much of this is believed to be between male drug users and women.

However, the exposure route of 40 percent of infections in the region is classified as ‘unknown’. It is thought that most of these are among men who have sex with men.

Discrimination, persecution and stigmatisation of homosexuals, drug users and people with HIV/AIDS means that it is impossible to collect accurate data on the spread of the disease.

Gay men are often fearful of admitting to doctors how they became infected and instead say that they contracted it through heterosexual sex. Drug users, who can face long prison sentences in some countries in the region, do the same.

Recent legislation banning the promotion of same sex partnerships and long-standing travel restrictions in some parts of the region for people with HIV have only further marginalised groups in which the disease is spreading rapidly.

This presents a major problem in effectively dealing with the epidemic, say doctors, as it adds to existing barriers to the prevention and treatment of the disease.

Prof. Jens Lundgren of the European Aids Clinical Society (EACS) told IPS:

“What we know is that any policies, anywhere in the world, which are introduced and which marginalise or stigmatise people with HIV are counter-productive to treating the disease.

“A good, rational health policy is one that involves a clear view of a disease’s epidemiology – where, in what communities and how it is being spread.”

This comes on top of what has been repeatedly criticised by international bodies as a continuingly poor healthcare response to the disease in many countries.

Access to anti-retroviral treatment is very low – with as little as eight percent of all those in need of it being able to obtain it in Russia, for example.

Systematic care of those diagnosed with the disease is also inadequate.

“One of the problems in Russia is that there is no integration of a patient with HIV into the primary health care system,” said Kazatchkine. “When someone is diagnosed they are simply referred to a special centre and passed on. It is as if they are something to be got rid of. No one follows up on them and they are essentially forgotten.”

There are fears that news of the changing nature of the epidemic’s spread could be used by some authorities to push their own political agendas on how to deal with the epidemic.

International bodies have urged countries in the region to adopt harm reduction programmes, including needle exchanges and drug substitution therapy, which are recommended best practice in the West as a front-line measure to help prevent the spread of the disease.

While some countries, notably the Ukraine, have had some success in rolling out these programmes and helping bring down new infection rates, others, such as Russia, are apathetic or even hostile to harm reduction.

Drug substitution therapy is illegal in Russia as political and medical authorities refuse to sanction it and there are no state needle exchange programmes.

The vast majority of funding for prevention programmes has come from foreign organisations, but some of these have left the country as its regime has become more authoritarian.

Some of the few organisations in Russia offering harm reduction services, such as the Humanitarian Action NGO in St Petersburg, have told IPS of the problems drug users face in accessing harm reduction programmes and of the difficulties they have in providing them, from almost absent funding to hostile police and societal attitudes.

That the disease is being spread more and more by sexual behaviour could provide ammunition to those who argue harm reduction programmes are a waste of resources.

“There are some authorities in the region which take every opportunity to use something that takes attention away from the need for continued harm reduction strategies and programmes and I fear the fact there is a rising heterosexual spread of the disease could be instrumentalised to attack harm reduction programmes among drug users,” Kazatchkine told IPS.

This would further hamper efforts to combat the epidemic as injection drug use is expected to remain the main route of transmission of HIV in the region for some time to come.

“There will continue to be an increase in sexual transmission while the epidemic among drug users will not slow down,” said Kazatchkine.

Traditionally the bulk of migrant labourers in Russia’s Far East have come from China, with a few North Koreans mixed in. But of late, workers from Central Asia have been pushing their Chinese competitors off the lowest rung on the labour ladder in eastern Siberia.

Chinese citizens still comprise a sizeable majority of the foreign workforce in the Amur Region, as well as other areas of the Russian Federation that border China. But in just the past few years, the migrant worker ratio of Chinese to Central Asians in the Amur Region has gone from four-to-one down to just over two-to-one, according to official statistics.

Employers in the Amur regional capital Blagoveshchensk, a city of 220,000, say rising wage expectations of Chinese workers make it more cost-effective for them to employ migrants from formerly Soviet republics like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. China’s rapidly rising prosperity at home is putting pressure on Chinese migrants to earn more and send more home to relatives.

At the same time, traditional migrant labour markets for Central Asians in Western Russia, especially Moscow and St. Petersburg, are becoming glutted, prompting an increasing number to explore opportunities in the Far East.

“For sure it’s the best option to make money in Moscow. But it’s too hard to find a place there these days. There are too many of us Uzbeks over there already,” said Batyr, a migrant from Uzbekistan who has worked for the past six months in Blagoveshchensk laying asphalt.

It’s not uncommon to encounter lots of Central Asians in the city these days, mainly in the construction sector. In other Far Eastern cities, including Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Central Asians have found work driving public buses.

Regional officials aren’t unhappy to see Central Asians replacing Chinese migrants, especially in the agricultural sector. Local authorities explain that Chinese farm workers on numerous occasions have disregarded local regulations.

Tatyana Yakimenko, the head of the External Labour Migration Regulation Department of the Amur Regional Government, noted several instances in which the improper use of fertiliser caused soil degradation on farmland.

Aside from lower wage expectations, Central Asians have a competitive advantage because they don’t need visas to travel to Russia. Chinese workers, on the other hand, must cope with a visa regime that hampers many would-be migrants from crossing the border. For those wishing to work officially, the approval process takes months.

The demand for undocumented workers in the Amur Region is significant, official statistics suggest. The local office of the Federal Migration Service issued a quota in 2013 for 13,000 migrant workers, a number that is about 1.5 percent of the overall regional population.

At the same time, regional officials estimate there is demand for about 37,000 migrant labourers. The labour gap is the largest in the agricultural sector: one estimate for 2014 projects that for every four farm jobs that will be open, only about one officially registered migrant worker will be available.

Given the regional imbalance of supply and demand, Central Asian undocumented migrants appear to be finding life a little easier in the Far East than their counterparts in big cities in European Russia, where harassment and extortion on the part of local officials and law enforcement officers are the norm.

To help blend in, Batyr, the migrant worker from Uzbekistan, says he’s adopted a Russian name – Dmitry. Batyr’s mannerisms and physical traits are such that locals don’t immediately take him to be from Central Asia as he moves about the city when not on the job. As long as he keeps his mouth shut, he tends not to get hassled. When forced to speak, though, his halting Russian reveals him to be a foreigner.

The influx of Central Asian migrants is reaching the point where local officials’ comparative tolerance may start to dissipate. In the Kamchatka Region, for example, officials are already showing signs of wanting to impose stricter regulations.

A Public Chamber meeting in the region is scheduled for September in which one of the items on the agenda has to do with overcrowding in kindergartens, local media outlets report.

Locals say that that the children of citizens should be guaranteed slots in public kindergartens before the kids of migrant labourer families are offered seats. Others complain that pregnant Central Asian women are traveling to the Far East to give birth in public hospitals, placing a burden on health services that are already stretched thin.

Editor’s note:  Evgeny Kuzmin is a freelance journalist. He worked as an editorial associate for EurasiaNet.org in 2012.

Central Asian states do not face an “imminent” threat posed by Islamic militants, but they need U.S. assistance to help defend against potential dangers, according to top U.S. diplomats.

Such assistance, it appears, may include drone aircraft delivered to Uzbekistan, which democratisation watchdogs rank as one of the most repressive states in the world.

“We do not assess that there is an imminent Islamist militant threat to Central Asian states,” said Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake, speaking at a hearing held by the U.S. House of Representatives on “Islamist Militant Threats to Eurasia” on Feb. 27.

“The most capable terrorist groups with links to Central Asia, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan [IMU] and the Islamic Jihad Union, [IJU] remain focused on operations in western Pakistan and Afghanistan,” added Justin Siberell, the State Departments deputy coordinator for counterterrorism. “Neither the IMU nor IJU are considered exceedingly powerful individually, and will likely remain focused on operations in this same region, even after 2014.”

The hearing took place as Congress, the State Department and Pentagon discuss expanding military aid to Central Asian countries, in particular Uzbekistan. These countries have cooperated with the United States in establishing transportation routes for U.S. and coalition military cargo to-and-from Afghanistan, a network known as the Northern Distribution Network.

Some Central Asian governments are arguing that they need U.S. assistance to protect themselves against Islamist militants following the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014.

The threat may not be imminent, but extending security assistance to the Central Asian states is justifiable, Blake maintained.

“Although the threat has been kept at bay, as our forces withdraw from the region we must continue our efforts to help prevent terrorist recruitment and strengthen the Central Asian countries’ [counterterrorism] capacities, so they can defend themselves in a responsible and measured fashion,” Blake said.

“With Uzbekistan, we’ve begun a very careful, calibrated approach to supporting the defensive needs – because they face real threats, not just because of their support to the Northern Distribution Network, but because of groups like the IMU and the IJU are actively targeting them.”

While Islamist threats do exist in Central Asia, they do not necessarily justify expanded U.S. assistance, said Nathan Barrick, a consultant for CLI Solutions working on a contract for U.S. Central Command, who also testified at the hearing. The threats are likely to be minor, and the security services of Central Asia have proven effective in containing them, he said.

“The desire in Central Asia for U.S. assistance in countering Islamist militants is not the same as a ‘need’ or ‘requirement’ for U.S. assistance,” he wrote in testimony for the committee.

Stephen Blank, of the U.S. Army War College, said that whatever the terror threats in Central Asia, the U.S. military would probably not be able to do much to counter them.

“To bring about good governance that would preclude the outbreak of terrorism in these and other places is probably beyond our capability and resources. … And the U.S. military is no more equipped to undertake those responsibilities than is the rest of the government,” he said in his testimony to the committee. [Editor’s note: Blank is an occasional commentator for Eurasianet.]

Ariel Cohen, of the Heritage Foundation, added that “U.S. assistance must be careful not to strengthen the repressive law enforcement and security services components that the regimes deploy against political opposition.”

The prospect of additional military aid to Uzbekistan has alarmed human rights activists, who assert that Uzbekistan exaggerates the threat of Islamist radicalism to justify its harsh dictatorship. Activists also say U.S. equipment is likely to be used against existing or future political opponents or protesters.

Blake attempted to downplay such concerns, saying he was confident “that the approach we have taken with Central Asia helps proactively strengthen the region’s capacity to combat terrorism and counter extremism, while encouraging democratic reform and respect for human rights.” He also said that Uzbekistan taking steps to improve its respect for human rights “will enable us to do more on the weapons side.”

Some members of Congress did not appear to be so concerned about Uzbekistan’s human rights record. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who was recently named chairman of the Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats Subcommittee, returned on Feb. 25 from a trip to Uzbekistan, where he met with President Islam Karimov.

Rohrabacher suggested that the Uzbek government’s restrictions on human rights are justified because of the threat of Islamism. “Some of the things that they are being criticised in Uzbekistan for denying religious rights and freedom of speech are basically trying to prevent radical sects of Islam from taking hold,” he said. And he recommended treating Uzbekistan like Saudi Arabia, another country with a poor human rights record to which the United States sells weapons for strategic reasons.

Ted Poe, a Texas Republican and chairman of the subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation, and trade, was in Uzbekistan with Rohrabacher, and said that Karimov’s concerns about Islamists were justified.

“They [Islamist groups] want to establish Islamic rule in the region, institute sharia law,” he said. “If they had their way they would take over Central Asia just like the Taliban took over Afghanistan. The issue is, can they?”

The particulars of expanded U.S. aid to Uzbekistan remain unclear. The White House agreed last year to reinstate military aid to Uzbekistan after freezing it for several years as a result of human rights concerns. The United States has already said it will provide Uzbekistan with global positioning system equipment, night-vision goggles and body armour. U.S. policymakers are now discussing various proposals for new aid, though few details have emerged.

After the hearing, Blake told reporters that the State Department has formally notified Congress of its intent to supply Uzbekistan with unmanned aerial vehicles, or drone aircraft, but State Department officials declined to provide any details.

Blake told the committee that “his supposition” was that the U.S. aid would not include lethal equipment. “Uzbekistan is not asking for major weapons systems, at least not offensive weapons systems. Their major ask of us these days is to help them defend themselves,” he said.

But Rohrabacher said that in his conversation with Karimov, the president indicated that he wanted dramatically expanded military cooperation with the United States. “They made it clear to us that they would prefer replacing all of their former Soviet equipment … with American equipment,” he said.

The United States is also expanding assistance to Uzbekistan’s law enforcement agencies. The FBI, for example, is providing an Automated Fingerprint Information System to Uzbekistan, which “will make it possible for authorities to identify fugitives while still in custody” and for Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to share that information, Siberell said.

And the United States and Uzbekistan are in talks about reinstating aid under the State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance programme, which aids law-enforcement agencies and which had been suspended as a result of human rights concerns, Blake noted.

*Editor’s note: Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC-based writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East. He is the editor of EurasiaNet’s Bug Pit blog.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

China is increasingly active in Central Asia, building pipelines and infrastructure projects, as well as expanding its diplomatic and cultural presence in the region.

At the same time, Beijing is shoring up its control over Xinjiang, the restive province that borders formerly Soviet Central Asia, relying on ambitious development projects, encouraging settlement by China’s majority ethnic Han, and acting aggressively to contain expressions of indigenous Uyghur nationalism.

But it has been difficult to define the main motivation in China’s so-called Western policies. Scholars and analysts studying China’s activity in Central Asia differ on what is the driver: whether the effort to pacify Xinjiang is intended to build that region into a secure platform from which to expand economically into Central Asia, or the opposite – that Beijing is building up its Central Asia ties in order to more strongly bind Xinjiang to the rest of China.

The most notable Chinese projects in Central Asia have been pipelines, especially a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan. China also is working to improve transportation networks in the region, building new roads and tunnels, for example, in Tajikistan. In addition, it has provided low-interest loans to Central Asian countries in the wake of the recent financial crisis, and has sought to increase educational and cultural contacts.

But what China’s goal is with these projects remains opaque. Part of the reason is that Central Asia remains a low priority for the government in Beijing, and so policy is shaped on an ad hoc basic via deals made by various companies and government organs, said Alexandros Petersen, an analyst and fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center who studies Chinese policy in Central Asia.

“There is no grand strategy for Central Asia on the part of Beijing,” Petersen said. “What there is, however, is a confluence of all the activities of these multifarious actors which, regardless of what Beijing wants or doesn’t want, means that China is nonetheless the most consequential actor in the region.”

In some ways, China’s ties with Central Asia resemble those that it is building in Africa and Latin America, with a strong focus on resource extraction.

Beijing’s strategy toward Central Asia “may be a reflection of China’s larger strategy toward the external world, which involves a lot of natural resources coming in and a lot of trade going out,” said Sean Roberts, a professor at George Washington University and expert on Central Asia.

“And Central Asia is just a perfect storm,” given that it is both rich in natural resources and a key to exporting goods as the first leg on westward transportation routes that China is working on building.

But other analysts argue that, in the case of Central Asia, that energy extraction focus is secondary compared to the need to pacify Xinjiang.

“The stability of East Turkestan is the most significant, both in terms of attracting foreign direct investment, or any kind of investment, to the region or providing a safe ground for trade and international economic interactions,” said Kilic Kanat, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania at Erie. (East Turkestan is the name some use to describe Xinjiang).

“Yes, the stability of the region will contribute to the global economic perspective of China, but … they feel they need to put their house in order first.”

China’s strategy of pacifying Xinjiang and quelling separatist movements there has been rooted in economic development. But it has not worked out as originally envisioned because Uyghurs’ dissatisfaction has to do with cultural and political rights, rather than economic issues, and because economic development in any case has only widened the wealth gap between Uyghurs and the Han Chinese, Kanat said.

Nevertheless, China’s strategy towards Central Asia may be a function of its need to pacify Xinjiang, Petersen said: “The engagement in Central Asia … has to do with security concerns about Xinjiang, number one, and only secondly, after that, is it about resources and economic development.”

Kanat, Petersen and Roberts all spoke at an event on Dec. 13, “Borderlands, Development and Indigeneity: China in South, Central, and South-East Asia,” held at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Editor’s note: Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East. He is the editor of EurasiaNet’s Bug Pit blog.

This article originally appeared on Eurasianet.org

A Third World War is not impossible, but fortunately is rather unlikely. Let us explore why, and what can be done to prevent it.

Johan Galtung

The worst-case scenario is a world war between the West — NATO, U.S., EU with Japan-Taiwan-South Korea — and the East—the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) with Russia, China, Central Asia as members and India, Pakistan, Iran as observers. With four nuclear powers on each side, and West versus Islam as a major issue. In the centre is the explosive mix of a divided territory (Israel-Palestine) and Jerusalem, a capital divided by a wall.

We have been there before: the Cold War, with West versus Communism as a major issue. In the centre was the explosive mix of a divided Germany, and Berlin, a capital divided by a wall; and a divided Korea, by a demilitarised zone. And yet no direct, hot war, except by proxies; Korea, Vietnam. Why?

No doubt nuclear deterrence was one factor. They went to the brink but turned around–like in the 1962 Cuba-Turkey missile crisis. And no doubt nuclear deterrence also plays a role today, limiting the attacks on Israel, U.S. support for Israeli attacks on Arab-Muslim states ­ Syria-Iran in particular ­and any attack on Russia-China. But nuclear deterrence is not the material out of which positive peace is made: no depolarisation, and certainly no solution and conciliation.

The Cold War NATO-Warsaw Pact system was polarised, with secret police controlling contacts, speech and thoughts, looking for traitors. But the world was not polarised: there was the huge non-aligned movement. Europe was not polarised: there were the 10 neutral, or non-aligned, countries. And ultimately a strong movement against war emerged.

The NATO+-SCO+ system is less polarised, but the world and Europe more. So far, no non-aligned movement, and no strong peace movement.

The United Nations vote showed a 3/4 world united in YES for Palestine, NO to USA-Israel. Both are turning any moral high ground into moral deficit through continued expansion-occupation-siege and invasion-occupation-extrajudicial killings. The world is not against U.S.-Israel defending true homeland borders or 1967 borders but against the force and excesses they seem incapable of reversing. Reverse those policies and they could regain the moral high ground.

But still no actors carrying concrete peace policies like the Helsinki Accords. The reason lies in the difference between the West-Islam and the West-communism conflicts. Islam, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, covers more of the world territory and population than the West, but has few friends outside; unlike the West, emulated and admired by Russia-China-India, by Latin America and Africa. In all but Israel, Islam has a huge and growing diaspora by immigration-birth-conversion. Not a superpower, not an alliance, only “Islamic cooperation”; but present everywhere.

The result is uncertainty and fear: what do they want? A challenge to other worldviews, guaranteed by the freedoms of speech and religion. Islam offers healing togetherness and sharing to a West suffering from materialist individualism and egoism.

But Islam also threatens Western institutions with unwanted change. Western secular states won the struggle against the church with a secularism also exported to the Muslim colonies as loyalty to the state and the empires behind them. Today parts of the Islamic diaspora hit back, demanding loyalty to Alla’h and the ummah (community) beyond loyalty to Western states.

For immigration to be a peace-building effort, immigrants must respect laws and customs of the host country and be met with curiosity and respect in dialogues, for mutual learning benefiting all. If broken by either or both, stop immigration, and build ummah at home.

How about the other danger spots and zones in the world?

Afghanistan is coming to a close, not only with NATO withdrawal–except to guard what it was all about: a base for a possible war with China and an oil pipeline. There may be wars between India and Pakistan, but no other country feels strongly enough about Kashmir to participate. The world is concerned with Israel not because of anti-Semitism, but because of an alliance that may involve so much of the rest of the world.

North Korea has both nuclear arms and missiles, and will neither attack nor be attacked. The fight for peace treaty and normalisation with the U.S. will probably bear fruits, in the interest of all.

Taiwan and China will slowly converge toward a Hong Kong style solution of one country-two systems, Taiwan as part of China yet highly autonomous. Wisdom would urge the same for a limited Tibet. In neither case do we have conflicts out of which a third world war is made. For that to happen the ties have to be tight, like U.S. to other NATO countries and to Israel. Or, presumably, Russia and China to each other.

We are left with West-Islam. The lack of cohesion on the Islamic side helps. But we are missing a non-aligned Hindu India, lined up with the West in any major confrontation. Indonesia and Egypt are on the Islamic side, neutral Yugoslavia no longer exists, Latin America is Christian-West, and Africa is divided.

We need moderates on both sides. Tunisia-Turkey and the non-aligned powers, Egypt and Indonesia. And the West—maybe Germany, experienced in inter-faith dialogue? Germany should play a major peace role!

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of “The Fall of the US Empire–And Then What?” (www.transcend.org/tup)

U.S. officials are happy with a programme that helps steer Pentagon contracts to local businesses in Central Asia. But Central Asian governments are grousing that they aren’t making enough of a profit off of the Afghan war.

In 2010, the U.S. Congress and Department of Defence changed regulations on how supplies can be procured for troops fighting in Afghanistan. The changes aimed to encourage a larger share of supplies to be bought from sources in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Pakistan.

Later, the programme was altered to focus only on the five Central Asian republics. The hope in Washington was that spreading the wealth, in terms of Pentagon contracting, would strengthen the support of Central Asian governments for the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a network of road, rail and air routes that now comprises the main supply line to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

NDN stands to be a critical element in ensuring that foreign troops meet a 2014 withdrawal deadline.

“The procurement of supplies (to include construction materials) and services from the CAS [Central Asian states] will provide economic opportunities and bolster stability in that region and could impact positively our ongoing negotiations with the CAS to gain regional access and permissions to support current and future supply and retrograde operations in Afghanistan,” wrote Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of defence for acquisition, technology and logistics, in a September 2012 memo.

“In addition, procuring products and services from the CAS will reduce the distance, complexity, risk, and cost associated with these operations.”

Since 2010, U.S. forces in Afghanistan have purchased about 40 million dollars worth of office supplies, construction equipment and other goods from businesses in Central Asia and the Caucasus, according to officials from the General Services Administration, the U.S. government agency that provides supplies for federal government offices.

That is more than expected, and in the coming year the U.S. expects to make another roughly 50-60 million dollars in local purchases, said Joel Lundy, the GSA’s programme manager for Central Asia and South Caucasus local sourcing and logistics.

“We’re very pleasantly surprised,” he said.

The 40 million dollars pertains only to products bought by the GSA, and does not include food, fuel and other categories of goods the United States procures in the region.

Of that 40 million dollars in local goods, 51 percent has come from Kazakhstan, 39 percent from Georgia, nine percent from Uzbekistan and small amounts from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, according to Boban Simonovski, programme manager for TWI, the company contracted by the GSA to implement its purchasing programme in Central Asia.

Officials from the GSA and TWI described the programme at an Oct. 24 event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

The most common items bought in Central Asia are paper towels, toilet paper and cleaning supplies. The largest single item is printer cartridges, which alone account for 9.1 million dollars of the total. The cartridges aren’t produced in Central Asia, but are purchased through a distributor in Kazakhstan.

The GAS has produced a catalog for U.S. forces in Afghanistan of 140 items that can be bought from Central Asia. Lundy said Americans in Afghanistan have been pleased with the quality of goods they get from Central Asia, and have asked for more to be put in the catalog because locally procured items can be delivered much faster than their U.S. equivalents.

That has done little to assuage the concerns of Central Asian officials, particularly those of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, who frequently complain to their U.S. partners about the paucity of business, Lundy acknowledged.

“The Uzbek government was probably the loudest among the Central Asian countries, they say: ‘You said you were going to buy from U.S. – why don’t we see 100 million dollars being spent each year in our country by the DoD?’ But doing business in Uzbekistan has been hampered by the common business practice there of paying for goods upon order, rather than upon delivery as the U.S. requires,” Lundy said.

Lundy added that officials in Kazakhstan want the Pentagon to buy more locally manufactured goods. “The Kazakh government is very sensitive when U.S. Central Command goes to them and says ‘here’s what we spent in your country in support of the NDN, to keep allowing our trains to roll through,’ they say ‘well, how much of that is manufactured here? We don’t care about anything else,’” Lundy said.

Central Asian governments had unrealistic expectations of the business they could do with the United States, said Marc David Miller, executive director of the Kyrgyz-North American Trade Council. This was an opportunity for Central Asian businesses to get a jump start in international markets, but Central Asian governments didn’t think of it that way, Miller said.

First, they had in mind the fuel contracts for the Manas air base, as a way for government officials to enrich themselves, and also thought they would be able to dictate to the U.S. what to buy and how much.

“Local governments did not take this seriously enough, they saw it as a way of generating cash for whoever controls the purse strings,” he said.

*Editor’s note: Joshua Kucera is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. He is the editor of Eurasianet’s Bug Pit blog.

This story originally appeared on Eurasianet.org.

As a child, Feruza Alimova dreamed of becoming a lawyer so she could help disabled people.

But the 22-year-old cannot pursue a law degree because a bone deformity keeps her homebound. Her parents, who make a living growing cotton and tobacco in the Kyrgyzstani hamlet of Chekabad, in the Ferghana Valley, spend a large chunk of their income on expensive medications for Feruza and two other children suffering a similar bone condition.

Mukhabat, Feruza’s mother, says neighbours blamed her and her husband for their children’s disabilities. “We were also ashamed at the beginning, but gradually we decided that what mattered is not the opinions of others, but the happiness of our children,” Mukhabat told EurasiaNet.org.

Because public minibuses do not accommodate her wheelchair, Feruza could not attend law school. Instead, last year she completed a knitting course offered by a local vocational school.

Across Central Asia, hundreds of thousands of disabled people are unable to attend school because they live in a world with few handicap-accessible amenities, according to the State Department’s 2011 Human Rights reports for Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

In Tajikistan, the law “requires government buildings, schools, hospitals, and transportation to be accessible to persons with disabilities, but the government did not enforce these provisions,” the report states.

In Uzbekistan, the State Department maintains that disabled Uzbeks are stigmatised and educational opportunities are limited for those unable to walk on their own. “Many of the high schools constructed in recent years have exterior ramps, but no interior modifications that would allow wheelchair accessibility,” the report stated.

Civil society groups say Central Asian governments are resistant to addressing the issue.

“Authorities (across the region) view a disability as a medical ailment that can be treated, and not as a social condition that needs to be accepted by society,” said Azat Israilov of Kelechek, a Bishkek-based non-governmental organisation that works with disabled children. As a result, state assistance is often limited to monthly payments to help cover medicine, he said.

In a continuation of Soviet-era practices, all of the Central Asian republics divide disabilities into three groups. People with “category one” disabilities are completely dependent on others for care; people in “category two” can take care of themselves with assistance (blindness, some intellectual disabilities, and bone deformities fall into this category); “category three” can include impaired vision and rheumatism. State-run medical commissions assign the categories.

According to official data, in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, individuals in category one receive up to 70 dollars per month; no precise figure is available for Kazakhstan, though the number is sometimes reported as 100 dollars.

The cash is welcome, but nothing like the benefits that disabled people received a generation ago, before the Soviet Union collapsed.

“During the Soviet period, we (disabled people) enjoyed many privileges such as free healthcare, state subsidies, and allowances. Now most of these perks are gone,” said Ilkhom Madumarov, a Tashkent resident in his late fifties who, missing a leg, is in category two.

Mukhabat, Feruza’s mother, says the cash benefits for her children, whose disabilities all fall into category one, is not enough to cover their monthly treatment. But it’s not the size of the payments that makes her angry.

“What my children need is not just small monetary compensation; they want to be treated like everyone else. The government needs to create conditions in which children like mine can function like normal people despite their disabilities,” she said, such as access to schools.

For years, international aid agencies have promoted reform. But in recent years, their support has dwindled. Following the May 2005 massacre in Andijan, a suspicious central government in Tashkent forced many foreign non-governmental organisations out of Uzbekistan. And since the 2010 political turmoil in Kyrgyzstan, Israilov of Kelechek complains, much of the donor community’s attention has focused on post-conflict reconstruction efforts.

In some cases, too, aid agencies appear to be suffering from donor fatigue. Despite pressure from international development outfits, endemic corruption and bureaucracy have hampered reform efforts, aid workers say privately.

For example, given the monetary compensations and other perks associated with disability status (people with disabilities pay lower taxes, obtain subsidised medical treatment at state-funded clinics, and receive discounts when using public transportation), government disability commissions throughout Central Asia often try to extort bribes from applicants, some of whom do not have disabilities.

A December 2010 law adopted by Uzbekistan’s parliament abolished financial payments for category three disabilities, a move that impacted 200,000 individuals, who lost monthly benefits of 60,000 sums (37 dollars) a month. Legislators said they were trying to make the system more efficient. Observers in Tashkent believe the law is also intended to crack down on corrupt government employees selling disability permits.

More generally, benefits seem to be on the chopping block in budgeted-squeezed Central Asian states. On Oct. 18, Kyrgyzstan’s government announced budget cuts that will affect social spending.

Some disabled people have taken radical measures to improve their plight. Since the April 2010 uprising in Kyrgyzstan, a group of disabled people have illegally occupied a mansion belonging to the ousted president’s hated son.

In Uzbekistan, meanwhile, a group of people with disabilities petitioned several independent news outlets in March, blowing the whistle on alleged infighting within the Society for Disabled People of Uzbekistan, a quasi-government agency that administers some of the state’s assistance programmes. The petition claimed the Society is rife with corruption and nepotism.

Such outspoken criticism of the government is rare in Uzbekistan and often punished severely. “These protest letters indicate the extent of despair,” said a local teacher familiar with the campaign.

*Editor’s note: Alisher Khamidov is a researcher specialising in Central Asian affairs.

This story was originally published by EurasiaNet.org.

U.S. military assistance to key Central Asian governments has increased dramatically in recent years, but remains highly “unexamined”, according to new research presented in Washington on Tuesday.

Military assistance, which stood at around five percent of all U.S. aid to the region during the 1990s, today constitutes nearly a third the total. This added up to around 100 million dollars in 2010 alone, although these figures remain “opaque”, according to researcher Joshua Kucera, who is associated with the Open Society Foundations here in Washington.

In a new paper, Kucera notes that many of these aid programmes “do not require public notification (although they are not classified)” and that “recipient governments have chosen not to publicize the aid, afraid of arousing leftover Cold War suspicions of the U.S. military.”

He says the U.S. is especially focused on strengthening the special forces in the region’s militaries, particularly in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, while significant assistance is also going toward nonlethal equipment and some light weapons.

“Very soon, the military aid to these countries is going to enter a new phase,” he said on Tuesday. “As the U.S. starts to pull its forces out of Afghanistan by 2014, it has said that it intends to leave some of that equipment behind for its Central Asian partners. We don’t yet know what kind of equipment that will be.”

These programmes took a significant shot in the arm in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, with overall aid to the region more than doubling in 2002, to 476 million dollars. Within that, security assistance went up by a factor of five.

While those figures declined somewhat in subsequent years, U.S. military assistance to Central Asia really took off in 2007-08, as Washington turned its attention back to the situation in Afghanistan. Indeed, threats emanating from groups within Afghanistan continue to be the central public rationale – by both U.S. officials and Central Asian governments – for the need for the continued significant military assistance being poured into the region.

Kucera says that Central Asian governments have “a long history of overstating threats from Afghan groups” in order to gain international support and increased aid.

Quid pro quo</>

“You don’t need to scratch beneath the surface too hard to find another more significant justification for the aid, which is in effect to pay for the cooperation of the Central Asian governments for U.S. operations in Afghanistan,” Kucera said at a presentation of his work here on Tuesday.

“The United States needs these countries as transit points for shipments going into Afghanistan … It’s a fairly open secret that this quid pro quo is the real driver of the assistance.”

A key example of how this has hamstrung U.S. policy is Uzbekistan. In 2004, the U.S. Congress restricted military aid to the country due to its wretched record on human and civil rights. Yet last year several of those restrictions were lifted, despite the fact that the Uzbekistan’s rights record had not improved in any significant way.

“The U.S. needs Uzbekistan’s cooperation for the Northern Distribution Network,” Kucera says, referring to the critical western supply route into Afghanistan that bypasses Pakistan, where NATO supply trucks became a target of insurgent attacks over the past year. “So, the decision was made to reinstate that aid.”

The U.S. government roundly rejects any suggestion that military aid is being used as payment to Central Asian governments for Afghanistan operations.

“I really want to push back on this notion that Central Asia is adjunct to the Afghanistan operation,” Lynne Tracy, with the U.S. State Department, said Tuesday. “That conclusion is belied by our long history with the Central Asian states, dating back to their independence two decades ago.”

Tracy also urges caution on speculating that the U.S.’s assistance to the region would change significantly after U.S. troops pull out of Afghanistan in 2014. “Despite tight budgets, our assistance has stayed stable in recent years, and we have several other long-term interests in the region.”

Still, Tracy does allow that there is “room for debate” on the strength of the current threats emanating from Afghanistan, but she warns, “There is real reason for concern following 2014, and now is the time to prepare, while we’re in good position.”

Weakened leverage

A broader concern is that U.S. military assistance to authoritarian governments could be working directly against espoused U.S. values on democracy and rights.

Kucera’s work suggests that not only could direct aid be strengthening potential tools of government repression, but also that whatever tacit agreement may have been made regarding U.S. military aid might be undercutting Washington’s ability to enforce rigorous standards.

“It needs to be remembered that U.S. training focuses on special forces, because they’re the most capable units. But they’re also the units that would be the first to respond to internal instability,” Kucera says.

While there are mechanisms for oversight to ensure that such a situation doesn’t become a problem, Kucera says these depend on the United States’ political will to actually respond when that aid might be being misused.

“Instead, we have a situation in which both sides understand that the aid is not really meant to improve the capacity of the security forces, but rather in effect is payment for the services that those countries render to the U.S. vis-à-vis Afghanistan,” he says.

“In that situation, the U.S.’s leverage over these countries in the way they use that aid is limited. If the U.S. pushes too hard, those countries could cease their cooperation with the U.S. – and that is thought to be too great a risk.”