Donald Rumsfeld, a former U.S. secretary of defense, has started a foundation that includes as one of its main areas of focus Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Thus far, the foundation's work on Central Asia has been modest: he has started a fellowship program for young scholars from the region, administered by the Central Asia Caucasus Institute at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. CACI's head, S. Frederick Starr, is a personal friend of Rumsfeld's.
Rumsfeld himself has provided most of the money for his foundation. (Before joining the Bush administration in 2000, Rumsfeld had a successful business career as an executive in the pharmaceutical and communications industries). The foundation has received a small amount of outside funding, "from friends," said Keith Urbahn, a spokesman for the foundation. Mandatory tax documents outlining its donations and finances have not yet made public, and Urbahn declined to name any specific donors.
The first five scholars are now studying in Washington and spoke at an event at CACI on November 5, titled Central Asia and Caucasus after the August War.
In an interview last year with the Washington Post, Rumsfeld explained that many of the peoples emerging from communist governments had ethnic communities in the US supporting and advocating for them. But those from the Caucasus and Central Asia don't have that advantage, and a goal of his foundation is to help ameliorate that.
"We don't have, in Chicago or Detroit or Pittsburgh, Uzbeks or Tajiks or Kazakhs," Rumsfeld said. "I think that we need to have people who understand what's going on in Central Asia ... and the difficulty of that transition."
"He made it a priority to visit that part of the world because he thought it was important. His interest there predated 9/11, he wanted to create linkages with countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus that really haven't existed over the last several decades," Urbahn said.
CACI head Starr said that Rumsfeld was the only senior Bush administration official who paid more than token attention to Central Asia and the Caucasus. While, as a whole, "at higher levels, we've neglected [the region], plain and simple," Rumsfeld was an exception, making many trips to the region and building strong relationships with its leaders, Starr said. "Secretary Rumsfeld was, at the secretarial level, by far the most active in the last 18 years of any senior administration official," he said.
"This is a program that arises from his experience in the region and his sense of its importance as an emerging area of the world and also the sense that there were very talented young people emerging that should be given every possible exposure to the world and vice versa," Starr said.
The other main focus of the foundation will be micro-finance, and in that regard the foundation is taking the same strategy of merely providing funding to established micro-finance programs. But Urbahn said the foundation's micro-finance work has included programs in Eurasia, specifically in Tajikistan, Georgia and Afghanistan.
Despite Rumsfeld's status as one of the Bush administration's most notorious neo-conservatives, Urbahn said the foundation's work would be "totally non-political and non-partisan" and would continue to cooperate closely with CACI.
If the presentations at CACI were any indication, the scholars are not vetted for their neo-conservative credentials. One speaker, from Kyrgyzstan, criticized Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic states for repudiating their common Soviet history. Another, from Azerbaijan, suggested that his country, wavering between the United States and Russia, would choose an alliance based only on whichever country helped it regain Nagorno-Karabakh.
Editor's note:
Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based freelance writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East.
