Central Asia

Tajikistan, Central Asia’s poorest state and a key logistical link for international forces in Afghanistan, faces a growing security threat from both local and external rebels.

Only a concerted effort from national governments, donors and the international community to modernise Central Asia’s infrastructure can avert the region’s decline into chaos.

Without prompt, genuine and exhaustive measures to address the damage done by the pogroms, Kyrgyzstan risks another round of terrible violence.

The collapse of the Kyrgyz regime is a case study of the risks facing authoritarianism in Central Asia. What happened in Kyrgyzstan could happen in most of its neighbouring countries. And the consequences could indeed be much worse.

The economic crisis has caused millions of migrant labourers from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to lose their jobs in the boom economies of Russia and Kazakhstan.

The number of Islamists in Kyrgyz and Kazakh prisons is small but growing, in both size and political significance.

Kyrgyzstan’s in­creasingly authoritarian government is adopting a counter-productive approach to the country’s growing radicalisation.

Far from being a bulwark against the spread of extremism and violence from Afghanistan, Tajikistan is looking increasingly like its southern neighbour – a weak state that is suffering from a failure of leadership.

Long viewed as a relatively liberal aberration in Central Asia’s authoritarian landscape, Kyrgyzstan has since the autumn of 2007 transformed its political system into a functional one-party state ruled by a small elite, with President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s family at its core.

Kyrgyzstan’s judiciary is failing to act as a neutral arbiter of political disputes or as a fair channel for economic arbitration.