The latest round of negotiations between the Taliban and supporters of Burhanuddin Rabbani ended in deadlock on May 9 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The two sides agreed to continue talks in June, but many observers are skeptical about the potential for a negotiated peace in Afghanistan.
Much concern has been raised since the Soviet breakup over the possible Balkanization of parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus. This threat was the most plausible of the many suspect reasons cited by Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev when he shifted the country's capital from Almaty to Astana.
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright concluded a three-country tour of Central Asia on April 19. During stops in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Albright focused talks with regional leaders on a variety of security-related issues, including drug trafficking, counter terrorism and border control.
A 1600 year old statue of a sleeping Buddha - uncovered by archeologists from the former Soviet Union 35 years ago and never before seen by the outside world - will soon be on display in Dushanbe, the capital of the Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan.
Kovalev: I believe there is no clearly formulated strategic standpoint on this. The role of Russia in politics of the CIS provinces is being dictated by the current situation in those countries, their current state of affairs. That doesn't mean, however, that there are not constant factors influencing Russia's position.
What happened? The Aral Sea disappeared. Forty years ago, the Aral was the fourth-largest lake in the world. Today the sea, which straddles the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, has shrunk by half, creating a vast toxic desert. The Aral and the area around it have suffered an almost complete ecological collapse, devastating the region known as Karakalpakstan.
The State Department reports reflect both new priorities in the US government's human rights agenda, and old problems inherent in this type of reporting.
The US State Department evaluates human rights conditions of the eight nations of the Caucasus and Central in its twenty-second Annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The country reports, released on February 25, describe conditions as "uneven" in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan; "poor" in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan; and "extremely poor" in Turkmenistan.
A prominent Kyrgyz human rights activist warned that Central Asia faces a summer of tumult, saying that repressive political regimes in the region are pushing discontent to dangerous levels.
Much of the debate over Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia is cast in monolithic terms: Islam is contrasted to secularism, fundamentalism to democracy. In considering complex issues in mutually exclusive categories, we reduce each side to a homogeneous whole. Yet, Central Asia, in common with the rest of the Muslim world, is heir to a rich tradition of debate and contention.
