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A Marriage of Convenience
Why China is cozying up to Central Asia
By ANTHONY DAVIS
Since the first Shanghai conclave in 1996, annual summits between China and its Central Asian neighbors have become a regular event on the Asian diplomatic calendar. But the backdrop to last week's meeting of the "Shanghai Five" - China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan - in the leafy Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek was anything but routine. It was, in fact, a case study of just the sort of cross-border mayhem that Chinese and Central Asian leaders are increasingly anxious to head off.
Even as the Shanghai Five leaders discussed regional security, ill-prepared troops were facing hundreds of Islamist guerrillas in the country's mountainous southwest. There, the intruders had seized several villages and hostages, including four Japanese geologists and a Kyrgyz general.
Backed by a sprinkling of Arabs and Afghans, the militants were mostly Uzbek Islamists based earlier in Tajikistan where they had fought in the civil war. Others had been involved in the Afghan conflict. But with the onset of peace in Tajikistan in 1997 and the final disbanding of the United Tajik Opposition forces last month, pressures to head home had pushed them into Kyrgyzstan on a march to Uzbekistan where they hoped to spark a holy war against Tashkent's rigidly authoritarian regime. The clashes soon drew in Uzbekistani air strikes on militant targets in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
The crisis threw into graphic relief new transnational threats of an era far removed from the 1970s and 1980s when millions of Soviet and Chinese troops faced off across Central Asia. The post-Cold War dangers involve cross-border terrorism and crime, ethnic separatism, and the growing appeal of Islamist militancy in a region where grinding poverty remains endemic.
China and its Central Asian neighbors are moving rapidly to establish new security mechanisms to counter new threats. In the first years following the inaugural 1996 summit, the Shanghai Five focused on winding down Cold War troop strengths and establishing such confidence-building measures as moving forces back from border-zones. Three years later a whole new security and economic agenda is opening up that includes such cross-border issues as international terrorism and arms smuggling.
The speed at which the Shanghai Five are moving has surprised analysts. "Four years is a short time to get down to brass tacks," says Janes Defence Weekly's Robert Karniol. "They're moving very fast in a practical direction. Unlike the ASEAN Regional Forum, this is not a talk-shop - they're actually doing things."
Beijing's concern for stability and economic growth along its Central Asian border is the prime motivator. Russia too has had a vital interest in promoting stability in her exposed southern Near Abroad. But for all Five, Bishkek's expanded agenda has been given added urgency by events in Afghanistan, a revolving-door training camp for Islamic militancy that has reached Kyrgyzstan and the borders of Uzbekistan.
For Beijing the destabilization of Xinjiang remains a consuming worry. Anti-Chinese disaffection remains widespread among the region's 8 million Uighurs, pushing recruits into the Islamic-inspired, nationalist underground. While maintaining an iron grip across the territory, Beijing is all too well aware of Uighur minorities in both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan sympathetic to their cousins in China - and of the need for cooperation from Bishkek and Astana in clamping down on illicit cross-border movements of people and weapons. Not by coincidence exchange visits between senior Chinese defense and security officials and their Kyrgyz and Kazakh counterparts have increased in the last three years.
Defining areas of common security concern may prove easier than managing economic integration, given residual Russian and Central Asian fears of Chinese expansionism, both commercial and demographic. But the latest summit has confirmed that, as Russia's Boris Yeltsin put it, "we have huge potential for cooperation in that area." Much of that potential will hinge on untapped energy reserves in Siberia and Kazakhstan that China requires for continued economic growth.
A key indicator of the progess of economic integration will be the future of the 3,200-km, $2.4-billion pipeline projected to carry oil from Aktyubinsk in Kazakhstan's northwest to Xinjiang. Tough negotiations over financing and ownership of the pipeline have cast doubts on its viability. Last month, the China National Petroleum Corp. said it was shelving plans for construction.
Not all analysts believe this chapter of Central Asia's new Great Game is over, however. "China has an acute need for overland supplies to reduce dependency on Mideast oil that comes on sea-lanes it cannot control," says Ross H. Munro, a China analyst at the Center for Security Studies in Washington. "There's no timetable, but I'll wager this pipeline is going to go ahead." As will the Shanghai Five's ambitious security agenda.
bron: http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/magazine/99/0910/centralasia.html
