The Red Line: The Geopolitics of Tajikistan

 No country could possibly feel more like "the edge of the known world" than the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. A nation where the president has been in power since '92 and has ruled the country with an iron fist, amassing a huge amount of wealth for himself using everything from Aluminum to Heroine; but things are beginning to change and Dushanbe could very soon be answering to new masters. Tajikistan is the latest battleground between Beijing and Moscow, the winner of which is yet to be decided. This weeks panel Peter Leonard (Eurasianet) John Heathershaw (Exeter University) Edward Lemon (Oxus Society) Mathieu Boulegue (Chatham House) Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Or follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus More info at - www.theredlinepodcast.com Support the show at - https://www.patreon.com/theredlinepodcast

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The Guardian: When Soviets met Stans: the tower blocks of central Asia – in pictures (3 May 2019)

Shares 544 Two Italian photographers, Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego, documented Soviet-era buildings in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – and saw how Eastern characteristics crept into the brutal USSR designs.

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The Guardian: As a system, foreign aid is a fraud and does nothing for inequality

he five poorest countries in the world, measured by GDP per capita, are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Uganda, Tajikistan and Haiti.

One might imagine, then, that these countries are among the top recipients of UK aid. Wrong. The main beneficiaries are, in fact, Pakistan, Syria, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Afghanistan. Not one of the five poorest countries is among the top 10 recipients of British aid. [...]

Nor is it any different with multilateral aid (funds channelled through international organisations such as the World Bank rather than directly between donor and recipient). Again, not one of the poorest countries is among the top 10 recipients of multilateral aid. [...]

Half of all international development aid is “tied”, meaning that recipient countries must use it to buy goods and services from the donor nation. As the USAid website used to boast (until the paragraph became too embarrassing and was deleted in 2006): “The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programmes has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the US Agency for International Development’s contracts and grants go directly to American firms.” Aid has “created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans”. Long before Trump entered the White House, USAid was “putting America first”. [...]

Aid not only boosts the economies of rich countries but also promotes their foreign policy aims. As a 2014 report by the US Congressional Research Service put it, aid “can act as both carrot and stick and is a means of influencing events, solving specific problems and projecting US values”.

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Nautilus Magazine: When Climate Change Starts Wars

This has been the situation in this borderland since March, when Uzbek troops cut off the road to the town of Ala-Buka, near the reservoir. This move was sparked after Kyrgyz authorities denied an Uzbek request to repair the reservoir in Kyrgyz territory using Uzbek engineers. The security situation escalated from there and culminated in August with the seizure of a Kyrgyz communications relay tower on a disputed mountaintop by helicopter-borne Uzbek police, who detained a number of Kyrgyz technicians.  [...]

But this is all in flux. Climate change will continue to increase the area’s “environmental insecurity,” with the densely populated Fergana Valley being the most vulnerable, reads a 2014 report by the World Bank, which is funding economic research into how climate change will alter how people live around the world. Some 22 million people in the valley depend on irrigation for their livelihoods, and shortfalls in water—due to increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures and because glaciers are disappearing—are predicted to become a bigger problem. [...]

“We keep telling these guys about climate change,” Kadyrov, the USAID agricultural specialist, said. “There are some good farmers who understand they need to worry about it, but they do nothing.” Because their plots are small, most farmers in the Fergana do not have the money to invest in new equipment or infrastructure, and they are not trained in water conservation. [...]

Besides ethnicity, evaporation, misuse, population, and poverty, the issue of water is further complicated by the borders in the region. Before the Soviet Union’s breakup, water ran through a united country. Now the water courses through independent countries, crossing disputed borders. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan control most of the sources, while Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have to either accept what their upstream neighbors give them, pay, negotiate, or try to take it.

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Slate: A Return to Yaghnob Valley

n March 10, 1970, when Kurboon Idliev was 23 years old, Soviet helicopters landed in the remote Yaghnob Valley in northwest Tajikistan and forcibly removed every person from their house. “They transferred us to the lower flatlands to work on cotton plantations. Those who resisted were killed,” he recalls now. It would be 47 years before he returned to the valley again.

Officially, the Soviet government claimed that the Yaghnobi kishlaks—the local term for rural hamlets typically consisting of three to ten families each—were unsafe due to the threat of avalanches. A more likely motivation was the growing need for manpower in the cotton fields and the forced assimilation of isolated minority groups into the Soviet cultural system. Whatever the reason, Yaghnobis were legally denied access to their homes for more than two decades. [...]

In the 4th century, Alexander the Great defeated the Achaemenids and invaded Sogdiana, taking the Sogdian princess Roxana as his bride. From the Greek invasion until the 8th-cenutry Arab conquest, Sogdiana was passed from empire to empire, a remote province of the Greco-Bactrian, Kushan, and Sasanian empires. With the arrival of Islam, the Sogdians, refusing to relinquish their Zoroastrian faith, fled to the Yaghnob Valley. Though today Yognabis are mostly Muslim, they still preserve certain traditions from their Zoroastrian past, including their unique language; the celebration of Navruz, the feast of spring; and a clutch of ancient superstitions, including prohibitions against blowing out a candle and shaking water off your hands after washing. [...]

Since independence, the Tajik government has promoted national awareness of the country’s Sogdian heritage as an essential component of their national identity. As Tajik people develop a sense of nationhood, they have, for the most part, associated themselves with the Samanid Empire, the first Tajik-ruled state, which flourished in the 9th and 10th centuries and supported the revival of the Persian language. The Yaghnobi people, with their language and culture rooted in the distant Sogdian (i.e. ancient Persian) past, have become an important symbol of that heritage.

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Bloomberg: America Is Not the Greatest Country on Earth. It’s No. 28

Every study ranking nations by health or living standards invariably offers Scandinavian social democracies a chance to show their quiet dominance. A new analysis published this week—perhaps the most comprehensive ever—is no different. But what it does reveal are the broad shortcomings of sustainable development efforts, the new shorthand for not killing ourselves or the planet, as well as the specific afflictions of a certain North American country.

Iceland and Sweden share the top slot with Singapore as world leaders when it comes to health goals set by the United Nations, according to a report published in the Lancet. Using the UN’s sustainable development goals as guideposts, which measure the obvious (poverty, clean water, education) and less obvious (societal inequality, industry innovation), more than 1,870 researchers in 124 countries compiled data on 33 different indicators of progress toward the UN goals related to health.

The massive study emerged from a decadelong collaboration focused on the worldwide distribution of disease. About a year and a half ago, the researchers involved decided their data might help measure progress on what may be the single most ambitious undertaking humans have ever committed themselves to: survival. In doing so, they came up with some disturbing findings, including that the country with the biggest economy (not to mention, if we’re talking about health, multibillion-dollar health-food and fitness industries) ranks No. 28 overall, between Japan and Estonia.

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