Iron Fist or Velvet Revolution?

Abstract

This book has concentrated on the internal divisions and concomitant legitimacy problems of the Central Asian states, endeavouring to establish to what extent these fledgling states are prone to internal instability. In so doing little emphasis has been placed on the many inter-state agreements that have been successfully negotiated. Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan and Kirghizstan have become members of the Economic Co-operation Organisation originally consisting of Iran, Pakistan and Turkey; Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan are members of the new Caspian Council which involves all of the Caspian’s littoral states.¹ At the beginning of 1994 an agreement was signed by all five states to set up a fund to save the environmentally devastated Aral Sea.² There is also the possibility of a Central Asian common market being created following the recent (February 1994) agreement between Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan to abolish customs tariffs on trade among the three states.³ At the beginning of 1993 Turkey added five letters to its alphabet that represent sounds in the Central Asian languages, and the five states have responded by a long-term plan to swap the Cyrillic alphabet for the Roman script.⁴ The Ankara government is also contemplating the introduction of an identification document for citizens of the former Soviet Central Asian republics permitting them free travel and free business activity.⁵ Given these contemporary developments one could possibly foresee some type of Central Asian common market that would include at least the four Turkic states of Central Asia and Turkey.

The title alludes to the two possible outcomes at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, authoritarian rule or democratic consolidation. Martha Brill Olcott refers to the former as the rule of the ‘iron fist’ and the latter as the ‘silk revolution’. Refer to Olcott, Central Asia’s New States, op. cit.