U.S. spreads poverty in Central Asia

Kyrgyzstan’s June 22 decision to keep the U.S./NATO military base open at Manas will enhance the U.S. government’s ability to wage its brutal war on Afghanistan. Seventeen miles from Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, the Manas base houses over a thousand U.S. military personnel and hosts transport aircraft and mid-air fuelling vehicles.

U.S. forces have had access to the Manas air base outside Bishkek since 2001. The base has been a transit point for 15,000 troops and 500 tons of cargo per month en route to the war in Afghanistan. After Washington increased greatly the amount given to the Kyrgyzstan government for use of the base, the regime decided to renew the lease. (Workers World, July 16)

A continuing conflict between Washington and Bishkek has been over legal immunity, which U.S. soldiers had in Kyrgyzstan. In at least one case a soldier from the Manas base was involved in the death of a local resident, and Kyrgyz authorities could not prosecute him, spurring a scandal in the country. (Russia Today, June 23)

Kyrgyzstan (formerly Kirghizia) is a rugged country; the Tien Shan mountain range covers approximately 95 percent of the whole territory. Kyrgyzstan borders Kazakhstan on the north and northwest, Uzbekistan in the southwest, Tajikistan on the south, and China in the southeast.

Kyrgyzstan’s natural resources lure speculators. The capitalist government is always open for business. When it was part of the Soviet Union, there was socialist planning. Now the capitalist “free market” has lowered the living standards of the workers and farmers. It’s so-called Tulip Revolution was aimed at accelerating the process of privatization.

Kyrgyzstan’s strategic location is key to U.S. military planning. Russia and China perceive that the U.S. government interference in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is encircling them militarily. The United States ruling class is working toward the privatization and takeover of the vast natural resources of Eurasia. A meeting of regional countries in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in June mounted an unsuccessful attempt to counter the presence of the U.S. and its NATO stooges in Central Asia and the Caspian region.

Kyrgyzstan has not only been vital to the U.S. war against Afghanistan. It sits on the border of China’s oil-rich Xinjiang desert province where the Open Society Institute, National Endowment for Democracy and other U.S. agencies have courted bourgeois elements in its Moslem Uighur minority. The Chinese government has accused the Washington-based World Uighur Congress, funded by billionaire George Soros, of leading riots in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. (New York Times, July 7)

These same groups have encouraged the anti-communist Tibetan followers of the Dalai Lama in an attempt to foment unrest against the Peoples Republic of China.

Economic crisis in Central Asia

Like most of the former socialist countries of Eurasia, Kyrgyzstan is a nation with high unemployment, where factories are closed after decisions made on Wall Street. Kyrgyzstan ‘s inflation rate in 2008 was 24 percent. In 2004, the unemployment rate was 18 percent. (www.infoplease.com) It’s much higher now. In some regions, since then, unemployment has doubled.

The economic situation has only deteriorated since the world recession began. Until now, economic troubles had been more or less confined to the private sector, but today the Kyrgyz government is cutting jobs and wages at state companies in the public sector.

For youth the situation is intolerable. The youth unemployment rate before the recent recession was 26 percent, while their share in the total population was lower than 20 percent. Now their situation is even worse.

According to the International Labor Organization, after Kyrgyzstan privatized industry “the number of poor increased to more than 60 percent of the population” of over 5 million.

This poverty has forced the migration of hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz workers. About 70 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s poor reside in rural areas. Since the end of socialist planning, the “decline in employment has been compounded by the reduction or withdrawal of a range of subsidized goods and social services previously available to the workforce, including ongoing education, skills training, supplementary nutrition, health care, and sports and cultural facilities.” (www.ilo.org)

This migration has produced a dependence on remittances, where workers have to leave to earn enough money to support their impoverished families back home. As the world economic crisis accelerates, migrants face diminished opportunities to work and hence send fewer remittances home. They also face declining wages in the countries to which they migrate. For the workers and peasants of Kyrgyzstan, the outlook is bleak.

The U.S. government’s multi-million-dollar bribe for use of the Manas airbase is unlikely to change the deteriorating conditions for Kyrgyzstan’s poor. Corruption is rife, and unrest among the population will not be bought off, since the government is unlikely to distribute this newfound U.S. money to the suffering workers and farmers.