post-gazette.com
Eurasian threat / A distant region packs a dangerous potential
Monday, January 10, 2005
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sixth in a series: A World in Focus
Defining Eurasia is no easy thing. It is the part of the world that lies
north of South Asia, east of Western Europe and west of East Asia. It
includes Russia and Iran as well as many smaller countries, some facing
complex issues. The countries have relatively little in common, and the
region does not approach problems as a region.
Russia is the giant, stretching from Western Europe to the Pacific Ocean. In
2004 it grew in strength economically, largely on the back of high prices in
the oil industry. Presidential elections gave President Vladimir V. Putin 72
percent of the vote, which he promptly used to increase his authority.
Problems for Russia came from Chechnya, where a recently elected president
was assassinated; anti-Russian Chechen militants also killed at least 335,
including many children, in a tragic incident at a school in Beslan.
Mr. Putin had his fur singed when the pro-Western candidate, Viktor
Yushchenko beat his favorite in the Ukrainian elections. Add that to the
European Union’s having tucked six former Soviet protectorates under its
wing in May, and 2004 became a not-so-great year for Russia and its leader.
Mr. Putin’s relationship with President Bush seems to be holding, but Russia
bears close watching.
It has scheduled joint military maneuvers with China for 2005, a new
development in their relations. To the degree that there is still a
three-cornered rivalry between the United States, Russia and China, Russia
may just have played its “China card.”
The drama with Iran in 2004 was over potential weapons applications of its
developing nuclear capacity. The Europeans are playing a constructive role
in seeking to bring Iran’s facilities under the supervision of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, to that body’s and America’s
satisfaction. In the meantime, Israel is threatening to attack Iran, as it
did Iraq in 1981, to erase or diminish the threat it perceives to itself
from Iran’s nuclear program. If it were to do so, it would set off the
mother of all wars in the region and there would be a high risk of the
United States being drawn into the conflict.
In the continuing push and pull between the conservative clerics and
cautiously-modernizing political elements in Iran, 2004 saw the
conservatives win parliamentary elections hands-down. Presidential elections
scheduled for June are likely to provide another setback for the reformers,
in spite of a general diminishing of conservative clerical influence in the
population as a whole.
Democracy is a delicate plant in much of Eurasia. In Georgia, disputed
results of presidential elections apparently marked by fraud were overturned
by demonstrators, putting a pro-Western president in office. Elections and a
referendum in Belarus were judged to fall far short of standards. Elections
held in Kazakhstan, single-party Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in 2004 were
not considered democratic either.
There will be more elections this year, in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Azerbaijan and Moldova, all of which should be closely monitored by
international observers to try to make them as credible as possible.
Government control is either shaky or heavy-handed in all of these places,
making a credible electoral process difficult to achieve.
The United States has to be interested to a degree in all of these
countries, for different reasons. Some, such as Kazakhstan, have oil; some
border on Afghanistan; some present humanitarian issues. The Armenians and
Georgians have descendants in the United States, who lobby on their behalf.
Iran and Russia remain obvious concerns to Washington. What happens in
Eurasia may seem a faraway concern; it can’t be.