Nuuk, Greenland, is a poky little place. Its fanciest hotel shares a building with a grocery store. A town of brightly painted wooden houses against a dramatic mountain backdrop, Nuuk looks like a western ski resort with some European-style public housing thrown in. But in this sleepy setting, where a population of 15,000 lives a mere 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle, a revolution is brewing. Very ­slowly.

For decades, Greenlanders have gently agitated for greater freedom from Denmark, the nation that colonized them centuries ago. In 1979, they attained home ­rule—­which produced, among other changes, a new, Inuit name for the capital, Nuuk (pronounced “nuke”), formerly known by the Danish name Godthåb. On November 25, Greenlanders will go to the polls to take another major step out of Denmark’s shadow: They are likely to approve a law that will formally give Greenland the right to declare ­independence and make ­Green­landic—­which is closely related to the Inuit languages spoken in ­Canada—­rather than Danish, the official language.

In an age of violent independence movements such as those of Kosovo and East Timor, this is national liberation in slow motion. The impulse toward self-determination is the same as in liberation movements elsewhere across the globe: Greenland’s 56,000 people are mainly Inuits who have little in common with Danes. But Greenland’s independence aspirations are also getting a boost from an unlikely source: global ­warming.

Americans might joke about the visible effects of climate change during a spell of warm weather. But more than anywhere else in the world, Greenland is experiencing ­honest-­to-­God warming. The island’s ice ­sheet—­which contains 10 percent of the world’s fresh water, equivalent to the entire Gulf of ­Mexico—­is melting at a rate of 57 cubic miles a year, and the loss is apparent everywhere. Midway up the back side of Nuuk’s landmark mountain, Sermitsiaq, which looms over the city like Mt. Rainier does over Seattle, Greenlanders point out a gray band where the ice on the mountaintop has shrunk and the glacier below has receded. In 2007, the Northwest Passage, which runs south of Greenland and along Canada’s northern coast, was free of ice for the first time since scientists began monitoring it. All of this melting is helping to unlock the mineral and petroleum resources under land and sea, offering the prospect of Kuwaitesque wealth to Greenland’s ­citizens.

Greenland is an unusual place. It’s the world’s largest island, three times the size of Texas, but it has no intercity ­roads—­people travel between Greenland’s “cities” (a word Greenlanders use to describe even settlements of 2,000) by boat and helicopter. Jets arriving from abroad can’t land in Nuuk because the airport runway is too short, so they must fly to one of two remote former U.S. air bases, hundreds of miles away, from which travelers continue on by helicopter or prop plane.

More than 80 percent of Greenland is covered by an ice cap so thick—10,000 feet at the center—that no one knows whether the island is a single landmass or an archipelago. Settlements lie only on the coasts; the icy interior is uninhabitable year round. But in summertime the coastal regions of the south are verdant with grass and wildflowers, and it is not difficult to understand why Erik the Red named the place Greenland when he was exiled there from Iceland in ad 982. (The commonly told story about his attempt to trick invaders by switching the names of Iceland and Greenland is almost certainly false; it is more likely that Erik gave Greenland an attractive name to lure other settlers there.)

Denmark’s colonization of Greenland began in 1721, when a missionary, Hans Egede, came there looking for the Norse settlers, who hadn’t been heard from since the 14th century. Egede worried that the Protestant Reformation had passed Erik’s descendants by, leaving them unredeemed Catholics. He found no Norsemen (they died out under mysterious circumstances in the 15th century), but stayed on to convert the Inuits to ­Christianity.

Egede’s efforts opened the door to a Danish mon­o­poly on trade in whales and furs with the island, and eventually colonization. Denmark’s rule was marked by a combination of benign neglect and paternalistic social engineering. For example, while 18th-century missionaries attempted to end the Inuits’ traditions of polygamy and communal living, a 1782 directive prohibited Danes from “corrupting” the Inuits with alcohol, limited contact between Danes and Inuits, and urged that the Inuits’ welfare “receive the highest possible consideration, even override when necessary the interests of trade itself.”

Though most Inuit Greenlanders converted quickly to Christianity, economic change came more slowly. Until the beginning of the 20th century they lived a life of dogsleds, igloos, and subsistence seal hunting, as their ancestors had for millennia. Then Denmark embarked on various modernization schemes that converted the economy into one based on industrial fishing and fish processing, and forced Inuits to abandon their traditional ­semi­nomadic lifestyle and settle in towns in ­Danish-­built wooden ­houses.

A visitor familiar with Native American reservations or Canadian Inuit territory—the closest historical analogues to Greenland’s experience—will notice the difference between such places and Nuuk immediately. Nuuk has the feel of a well-tended frontier outpost, with cheery wooden houses painted in primary colors competing for space with 1960s-era apartment buildings. (One such building houses a full one percent of Greenland’s population.) Lately, the city has added a bit of cosmopolitan flair with several handsome examples of avant-garde Scandinavian architecture. The gently undulating wood-and-glass Greenlandic cultural center has been written up in the international design magazine 

But aside from the dramatic scenery and Inuit faces, Nuuk isn’t so peculiar as most visitors expect. Several years ago the Danish author of an academic paper on Greenland felt compelled to add in a footnote: “Most Danish cities have a minority of Greenlanders. Most blend in, but a small fraction constitutes a highly visible group of bums, carrying always an open beer bottle. Many Danes are surprised to come to Greenland and see cities that, as much as conditions permit, look like other small North European cities. On Sunday mornings many Greenlanders walk to the local bakery to buy freshly baked rolls.”

Still, the social dislocation caused by Danish urbanization schemes is evident. The suicide rate is five times that of Europe, and one politician told me that the rate of child sexual abuse is 15 times higher than in Denmark. Alcoholism is rampant. I went to Nuuk’s oldest watering hole, Kristinemut, on a Friday night, and encountered an unprecedented scene of drunkenness: Fully half the patrons were incapable of walk­ing in a straight ­line.

Yet most Greenlanders acknowledge that their experience with Denmark has been more positive than negative. “Denmark is the best colonial power we could have had,” ­Lars-­Emil Johansen, a former prime minister in his sixties, told me. Johansen, like most Greenlanders, regardless of their ethnic background, has a Danish name and speaks Danish. (A notable exception is the current prime minister, who speaks only Greenlandic.) “We’ve never been at war with them or been oppressed, and the process of independence is not a protest against Denmark. But we want a relationship based on mutual respect. We don’t want to rely anymore on the goodwill of the Danes.”

The negotiation of Home Rule put a Greenlander-run government in administrative control of nearly all state responsibilities in 1979. Today the only Danish government presence in Nuuk is a high commissioner of Greenland and a staff of a dozen to act as a liaison to the Danish prime minister’s office. The Self-Government Act to be voted on in November lays out 32 areas, including the court system, immigration and border control, and education, in which the Greenland government will take more responsibility. Most significantly, the law will allow Greenland the right to exercise self-determination, or to declare independence outright.

This may seem like a tame step. But it suits the cautious nature of both Danes and Greenlanders: One scholar at the University of Greenland has argued that Danish rule has been so successful because both cultures value communitarianism, egalitarianism, and emotional ­restraint.

But it’s not just emotional restraint that is keeping Greenlanders from impetuously throwing off the Danish yoke. There is also the matter of the most frequently cited number in Greenland: three billion Danish kroner (about $600 million), the amount of the annual Danish subsidy to Greenland’s home-rule government. That amounts to more than $10,000 for each of the island’s residents, and about half the government budget. With independence, Greenland would lose that ­subsidy.

Traditionally, Greenland has had few options for industry: Seafood accounts for roughly 90 percent of its export income. It also depends on Denmark for access to higher education institutions (only 150 students attend Greenland’s sole university) and health care. But Greenland’s financial dependence on Denmark very soon could be history. Companies around the world are realizing that Greenland, that vast yet obscure country to the north, is sitting on a mother ­lode.

In the last four years mining companies, primarily based in Canada, Britain, and Australia, have begun operations at Greenland’s first two ­mines—­one for gold and another for olivine, a greenish crystalline mineral increasingly used in ­pollution-­fighting carbon dioxide absorption. (The Danes operated mines throughout their colonization, but on a relatively small scale; all of them closed decades ago.) The government has given the green light to other companies to open five new mines by 2011. Thirty companies carried out another 78 prospecting explorations last year, and the government expects that gold, diamonds, rubies, and minerals such as olivine and niobium (used as a steel alloy) could soon become mainstays of Greenland’s economy. Alcoa and the Greenland government are also contemplating the construction of an aluminum smelter there, which would begin operating around 2015. (Greenland produces none of aluminum’s ingredients, but its abundant hydropower can cheaply power smelters.)

Oil and natural gas exploration, too, have begun in earnest. Last year, the U.S. Geological Survey released its first comprehensive assessment of the oil and natural gas potential of the Arctic, and found that the seas off northeastern Greenland were among the most promising, with an estimated 8.9 billion barrels of oil and 86.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. “If this resource is proved and realized, northeastern Greenland would rank 19th” among the world’s 500 oil and gas provinces, the report predicts. The seas to the west of Greenland are also rich with promise, estimated to contain beneath their floors 7.3 billion barrels of oil and 51.8 trillion cubic feet of natural ­gas.

To say that change in Greenland’s economy is moving at a glacial pace doesn’t mean what it used to. The country’s underground wealth, unlocked by global warming, promises to revolutionize the ­economy—­and fast. In 2005, a British mining company announced that it had found “massive” deposits of zinc and lead on land that had recently been exposed by a retreating glacier. A dramatic reduction in sea ice—10 percent every decade since 1979—has made it easier to prospect for oil offshore. In a PowerPoint presentation at a Texas energy conference this year, Greenland’s Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum maintained that while some models predict that the Arctic Ocean will be ice free in 2080, others show an ­ice-­free Arctic Ocean as early as ­2040.

The changing climate is even creating new opportunities in agriculture. ­Farming—­a relatively new occupation in Greenland introduced by Danish ­settlers—­is thriving on the southern coast. On a bucolic hillside near the town of Qaqortoq, I visited a government agricultural research station where agronomists experiment on little rows of turnips, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, and strawberries, and then teach local farmers to raise the crops. The government is hoping to reduce Greenland’s dependence on food shipped from Denmark, and these efforts have gotten a boost from global warming: Since 1990, the growing season has lengthened by about three weeks, said Kenneth Høegh, the station’s director. Agriculture will always be a niche activity, but the greening of Greenland has spurred its (surprisingly numerous) swanky restaurants to build menus around local foods. They proudly serve dishes that include ingredients such as reindeer, muskox, angelica root, snow peas, potatoes, and rhubarb (which featured in a cold dessert soup I sampled) that were grown, hunted, or gathered in the ­country.

Greenlanders have always been subject to the vicissitudes of the weather. Their traditional beliefs hold that the weather is a demanding god, named Sila, who must be appeased. Until the 1920s, nearly all Greenlanders survived by hunting seal, whale, and muskox. But hunting requires favorable ­conditions—­clear skies and solid ice. Bad weather frequently meant ­starvation.

Few Greenlanders live as subsistence hunters today, but in the northern part of Greenland many do, and they are keeping alive the traditions that all Greenlanders used to observe. Global warming threatens their livelihood and way of life. Solid ice is necessary for dogsleds (and the increasingly common snowmobiles) to get around, but as winters become milder, the Greenlanders’ “roads” are growing slushy and dangerous and the hunting season is ­shrinking.

More snow is falling (warmer air holds moisture), making it harder for game animals to forage. Thunder and lightning, once unheard of, have been reported. Jacky Simoud, a tour operator in southern Greenland, said, “Here, a good winter is a cold ­winter—­the sky is clear and the fjord is frozen so you can go anywhere by snowmobile. But for the last four or five years it gets warm and cold, warm and cold, and you never know what will happen with the ice. So you just stay home.”

But for every negative effect of global warming, there is a positive one for Greenlanders. There is less hunting but more farming. The thawing of the fjords makes navigating northern Greenland in winter on a dogsled more difficult, but kayaking in the spring and fall is easier. Shrimp are fleeing the warmer seas, but cod are ­coming.

Overall, Greenlanders are fairly sanguine about these shifts. “We’ve always been subject to the weather in Greenland, and this has made us adaptable to the changes taking place,” said former prime minister Johansen. “We need to use the opportunities that climate change gives us rather than complaining about the downsides.”

Global warming presents “huge opportunities,” said Mininnguaq Kleist, the bookish young head of the government office that is coordinating the transition to ­self-­government. “Ten or 15 years ago, people would say you were completely unrealistic if you talked about independence. But now it’s very realistic.”

It’s realistic in large part because the route to economic ­self-­sufficiency is more apparent now than it’s ever been. The most important part of the November referendum is a ­revenue-­sharing arrangement for the petroleum and mineral wealth. Under the new law, Greenland and Denmark would split the revenues until Denmark’s share became equivalent to its annual $600 million subsidy. After that, Greenland would keep the rest. Once Greenland no longer needed the subsidy, the main argument against independence would ­disappear.

The Greenland government is confident that the referendum will pass, but not everyone supports ­independence—­at least at the pace at which the government appears to be pursuing it. One opposition party, the Democrats, has come out against the referendum, arguing that it adds extra responsibilities without creating any additional income. “The law is the next step to independence, and we want to see the oil before we start spending the money from it,” said Jens Frederiksen, the Democrats’ leader. “Independence is important, but not to the little child who goes to bed hungry, and there are a lot of children in Greenland like that.” He sees a timeline of “30, 40, 50 years” before such an eventuality. Independence “depends on so many things, and maybe in the end it won’t be possible,” he ­said.

Others worry that independence would make Greenland vulnerable to other powers that may not have Denmark’s gentle touch. That’s the concern of Aqqaluk Lynge, the top Greenland representative to the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an international organization representing Inuits in Greenland as well as Alaska, Canada, and Russia. He has argued that independence would put Greenland at the mercy of the United States and its oil ­companies.

The United States has another key interest in Greenland: Thule Air Base on the far northern coast of the island. On the ­base—­built immediately after World War II, during which the United States assumed military control over Greenland to keep it out of the hands of ­Germany—­is a radar installation that is part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. Independence advocates argue that the radar site gives Denmark, and by extension an independent Greenland, some leverage over the United States. The base “is a ticket to the world’s only superpower,” Kleist ­said.

Denmark is likely to go along with whatever Greenlanders decide on the independence question. A few Danish ­right-­wing politicians oppose Greenland’s independence, arguing that after supporting the island for decades, Denmark should reap the material benefits to come. But that’s a minority opinion. Though some Greenlander politicians accuse Denmark of dragging its feet, the Danes have largely gone along with the independence ­drive.

Pro-­independence Greenlanders take inspiration from the experience of Iceland, which declared independence from Denmark in 1944 and now enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. Icelanders return the affection: Icelandic superstar Björk has dedicated “Declare Independence,” a song on her most recent album, to Greenland. “Damn colonists,” she sings. “Ignore their patronizing/Tear off their blindfolds/Open their eyes.”

But Björk’s angry rhetoric doesn’t jibe with the mood in Greenland. In a more nationalistic place, Hans Egede, Denmark’s first missionary colonizer, might be seen as a villain; in Greenland he’s regarded with indifference. (Statues, paintings, and memorials to Egede are ­everywhere—­Nuuk’s main hotel is even named after ­him—­but all the Greenlanders I asked said they didn’t think much about his role in their history.) Some politicians suggest that Greenland might choose to stop somewhat short of independence from Denmark and opt instead for a free association arrangement, wherein Greenland would have its own constitution but retain some ties, mainly in defense and diplomacy, with Copenhagen. Aruba (the Netherlands), the Cook Islands (New Zealand), and Micronesia (the United States) are potential ­models.

In Johansen’s small office in Nuuk’s government building hangs a poster ofhis political idol, Nelson Mandela. Johansen identifies with Mandela not because he believes the Greenlanders suffer as grievously as blacks did in apartheid South Africa, but because Mandela emphasizes reconciliation. “His idea of looking to the future, not dwelling on the past, is something I admire,” Johansen said. “We don’t want to be a colony anymore, but we will still be friends with Denmark.”

is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. His articles have appeared in

14370439575_41a89cdf72_o.jpg

Global warming is shrinking Greenland’s ice sheet—and heating up its movement for independence from Denmark.

The Big Thaw

When Muammar al-Qaddafi faced worldwide condemnation this past winter as he brutally struck back against a popular uprising, the Libyan dictator may have taken comfort from knowing he had at least one friend left: Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. The two have forged close political and economic ties during Chávez’s dozen years in office, and the Libyan leader had already bestowed the Qaddafi International Human Rights Prize on his Latin American ally and named a soccer stadium in Benghazi in his honor. In February, Chávez repaid the favors by offering to mediate a peaceful solution to the fighting—at a time when the rebels seemed likely to triumph—and defending his old friend on Twitter: “Teach another lesson to the extreme right-wing little Yanquis! Long live Libya and its independence!”

Chávez’s quixotic intervention was only the latest of his efforts to play a role in world affairs larger than most leaders of a midsize Latin American country might hope for. But Chávez has emerged at a fertile moment in world history. The apparent waning of U.S. power has opened up the possibility of a new geopolitical order, and the worldwide financial crisis and the rise of China have shaken the conventional wisdom that capitalism and democracy are superior to the alternatives.

Chávez has seized the moment by forcefully declaring his intention to change the world. “What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceania,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in 2006. “I want to emphasize that optimistic vision. We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.”

Of course, that speech is better remembered for Chávez’s characterization of President George W. Bush as the “devil,” and his claim that the General Assembly chamber, where Bush had spoken the day before, still smelled of sulphur—only the most legendary example of Chávez’s frequent and colorful denunciations of the United States.

Chávez’s torrid rhetoric has earned him both admiration—in a 2009 opinion poll of several Arab countries, Chávez was the most popular leader, by a large margin—and fear. And he has backed up his anti-American rhetoric by courting nearly any country that challenges the United States, including Iran, Russia, China, Belarus, Libya, and Syria.

Under Chávez, Venezuela has spent billions on Russian rifles, fighter jets, and other weapons, and it recently won Moscow’s help in developing civilian nuclear power. Chávez has threatened to stop selling oil to the United States—the customer for more than half of Venezuela’s output—and ship it to China instead.

It is the relationship with Iran and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that makes Chávez most effusive and worries Washington most. Chávez has hailed the Iranian leader as a “brother” and as a “gladiator in the anti-imperialist struggle.” Publicly, their two countries have collaborated to build joint banks, as well as car, tractor, and bicycle factories, in Venezuela. But much of the relationship is not transparent, and there has been a great deal of heated speculation (though little hard evidence) that Venezuela has offered to host Iranian missiles on its territory and is cooperating with Russia and Iran on nuclear weapons development. Some say that the banks are being used to evade international sanctions imposed on Iran.

Chávez has also been accused of supporting FARC guerrillas in neighboring Colombia and Hezbollah terrorists in the Middle East. In 2008, the U.S. Treasury Department formally accused a Venezuelan diplomat who had served in Lebanon and Syria of acting as a fundraiser for Hezbollah, and froze his U.S.-based assets. Last year, a Spanish judge charged a Venezuelan official with terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder based on evidence that he had helped coordinate training sessions involving operatives from FARC and ETA, the Basque separatist organization known for its bombings and assassinations.

Meanwhile, Chávez has been creating an alliance of like-minded neighbors in Latin America, which are also building their own ties with Russia and Iran. “Today Venezuela is accompanied by true friends,” Chávez said in 2009. “They range from large countries like China, Russia, and Iran, to smaller countries in size but big in solidarity, like Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Bolivia, among others.” Nicaragua and Ecuador are also on the list of friends.

In Washington and other capitals, there is much speculation about what Chávez really intends to do with these new alliances. Are his foreign-policy moves, as he claims, the first steps in creating a post-capitalist world order independent of the United States and oriented toward justice rather than corporate profit? Or do they have the makings of a Cold War reprise, leading us toward bloc-on-bloc geopolitical struggle (complete with the potential for a rerun of the Cuban Missile Crisis)? Or are they neither, amounting to little more than self-aggrandizing speeches and photo ops?

In an effort to get some insight into these issues, I traveled to Caracas in February to talk to diplomats, political figures, and analysts from both the pro- and anti-Chávez camps—there is very little middle ground in Venezuela—and see where they thought the country’s foreign policy was headed, and what role these alliances play in it. It was not a topic government officials were very interested in talking about; they would much rather let the world know about their health care and education programs (which, by all accounts, have been successful). Eventually, with great effort and the help of personal connections, I was able to meet a couple of government officials in their offices in Caracas’s crowded, historic center, where our conversations were more often than not punctuated by the sounds of lively pro-Chávez rallies featuring equal parts salsa music and shouts for 

Opposition figures, contrary to Venezuela’s reputation as a place where free speech is muzzled, were eager to talk about Chávez’s new alliances. I got many invitations to their homes and offices in tranquil, elegant Caracas neighborhoods where sleek modern houses and apartment buildings stood behind walls topped with electric fences.

Many in Washington, Cold War nostalgists in particular, see Venezuela’s foreign policy as nothing less than the embryo of a new evil empire. The relationship with Iran has aroused particular suspicion, with China and Russia seen as superpower patrons, and Syria and others as partners in a budding anti-U.S. coalition. Conservative think tanks hold frequent events on Venezuela’s ties with China and especially Iran, and regularly publish alarmist reports and op-eds on the topic. “The Tehran-Caracas alliance now represents the biggest threat to hemispheric stability,” contends Jaime Darenblum, a Hudson Institute scholar, in a typical example of the genre. The new chair of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), has vowed to hold hearings on Venezuela’s relationships with Iran and Russia.

Chávez’s hero is Fidel Castro, and like Castro a generation ago, Chávez is using his position as leader of a middling regional power—along with fiery rhetoric and a resonant message of social justice—to reach for a global role. And Chávez has one advantage Castro didn’t: oil. According to one recent estimate, Venezuela has the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and even though its output has declined under Chávez, it is the world’s 11th largest producer, almost matching Kuwait. Chávez has used Venezuela’s oil wealth not only to fund ambitious social programs at home but to gain influence abroad. That has allowed his nation of 28 million people, not much larger than Texas, to gain an outsized presence on the world stage.

While the list of Venezuela’s new allies may look like a global rogue’s gallery in Washington, among Chávez’s supporters in Caracas it looks like freedom—specifically, freedom from the United States. “Until 1999 [when, a year after Chávez was elected, Venezuela adopted a new constitution], our foreign policy was basically following the orders of the State Department,” said Carlos Escarrá, the garrulous chairman of the Venezuelan National Assembly’s foreign relations committee. Venezuelans especially objected to unbalanced trade agreements that they say would force them to buy U.S.-made products instead of cheaper regional alternatives. For example, U.S.-promoted pacts such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas would forbid countries from buying less-expensive copies of costly drugs that are protected by U.S. patent law.

Chávez made some moves toward what he calls “multipolarity” in his first years in office—for example, by trying to reinvigorate OPEC and get it to support higher oil prices—but his resolve to radically change Venezuela’s foreign policy was hardened by a coup attempt in 2002. What exactly happened remains murky, but Chávez says it was orchestrated by the United States. If nothing else, the Bush administration recognized the coup leaders with unseemly alacrity. The incident “helped us to identify the empire as an aggressor, so we had to look out in the world to compensate, to create an equilibrium,” Escarrá told me. And if Washington doesn’t like Caracas’s new friends, so be it. “The U.S. isn’t the sheriff of the world anymore. So calling other countries ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is just McCarthyism. Now we have to speak of ‘sovereign’ and ‘nonsovereign,’” he said, meaning, respectively, free of U.S. influence and not free.

How do Chávez’s principles translate into practical foreign policy? Step one, of course, is knocking the United States off its perch, in particular so it can’t dominate the international organizations that Chávez blames for Venezuela’s past ills, such as the Organization of American States, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Chávez has also moved to create new regional organizations that exclude the United States and operate on what he considers more equitable terms, going so far as to provide for trade by barter rather than with money. These include Petrocaribe, which supplies oil to poor Caribbean countries at preferential terms, and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which will include every country in the Americas except the United States and Canada when it is launched in Caracas in July.

The most advanced of these integration projects is the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, or ALBA. Chávez founded the alliance to act as an alternative to the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas. ALBA, backers say, is shaping up to be a trade bloc oriented toward poverty reduction rather than investment and commerce. (The members include Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.) ALBA figures heavily in the government’s domestic political rhetoric. Liberation hero Simón Bolivar’s tomb, housed in a Caracas temple called the Pantheon, is now festooned with flags from all the ALBA countries, as is his birthplace in Caracas’s historic center. The government bought a Hilton hotel and renamed it Hotel ALBA; next to the shop selling swimsuits is a bookstore whose shelves are dominated by works of leftist political theory that are a far cry from ordinary beach reading, including books by Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and the American anti-Iraq war activist Cindy Sheehan. The government also has opened a chain of ALBA shops that sell low-priced clothing from ALBA countries, such as $5 pants made in Bolivia and advertised as “jeans for a socialist man.” (The knockoff Polo and Abercrombie & Fitch shirts the stores sell, however, strike a discordantly bourgeois note.)

For domestic audiences, Chávez does not create nearly as much fanfare around Venezuela’s alliances with Russia, Iran, and China as he does around ALBA. Indeed, when assembling an alliance based on justice and generosity, those are not the first countries one usually thinks of. But government supporters insist that even these new friendships are allowing Venezuela to take the first steps toward greater self-sufficiency and independence.

As justification for the country’s quest for Chávez-style sovereignty, his supporters frequently cite the saga of the fighter jets. The nation’s air force has operated a fleet of U.S.- and European-built aircraft since its inception. But in 2005, the United States moved to block weapons sales to Venezuela, not only by U.S. companies but by its allies as well. The justification was that the Chávez government had not done enough to combat human trafficking and terrorism—spurious pretexts, Venezuelans say. As a result, Israel was forced to freeze a $100 million contract to repair and upgrade the nation’s F-16s, and 10 of the 30 in its possession remain grounded. Washington also blocked the sale of Spanish military transport aircraft and naval vessels to Venezuela, using laws that allow it to veto sales of equipment that includes some U.S. parts. Those moves virtually forced Chávez into the Russians’ arms, his supporters assert. In the last few years, he has signed contracts worth $4.4 billion for combat and military transport helicopters, fighter jets, and small arms. Venezuela also has ingratiated itself with Russia by becoming one of only four countries in the world to recognize the Russia-backed breakaway Georgian republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

This raises an obvious question: For all the faults of the United States, why would Venezuela think that Russia (or China, or Iran) would be any more generous a partner? Won’t Russia someday make the same demands on Venezuela that the United States has? I posed this question to Omar Galíndez, the academic director of Venezuela’s government-run Pedro Gual Institute for Advanced Diplomacy Studies. “No, Russia is our friend,” he said, adding that Moscow has agreed to help Venezuela develop the capacity to build parts for the equipment itself. “We have a strategic relationship, not a relationship of dependence.”

One could ask similar questions about Venezuela’s new ties to China. In 2008, the Chinese launched a Venezuelan communications satellite named the Simón Bolivar that Chinese engineers built under an arrangement with the Chávez government. The United States would only offer to sell space on one of its satellites to Venezuela, while China has offered to train engineers so that Venezuela will be able to build a satellite itself in 10 years, according to Carlos Escarrá. “The satellite will be used for health, education, and the development of all the people of Latin America,” he said. “We wouldn’t be able to do this without opening up our foreign policy to other countries.”

There are, of course, simple alternative explanations: Russia and China are happy to take Venezuela’s money and cheap oil. Neither has embraced Chávez as warmly as he has embraced them, and both see him merely as a willing customer for their goods, argued Julio César Pineda, a former Venezuelan diplomat who now hosts a foreign affairs show on the opposition television network Globovision. “Russia and China are closer to the U.S. than they are to Venezuela, but Chávez thinks he can move them against the United States—it’s absurd.”

One Venezuelan blogger wrote at the time of the satellite launch: “The President stated, ‘What does a satellite have to do with socialism? A capitalistic company launches a satellite to make money. This is an act of liberation and independence . . . to construct socialism within Venezuela and to work together with other countries,’ something that I think is great. It is a shame that the Chinese did not think the same when they charged Venezuela $241 million, on top of the $165 million in the construction of the two ground control sites.”

This raises an obvious question: For all the faults of the United States, why would Venezuela think that Russia (or China, or Iran) would be any more generous a partner? Won’t Russia someday make the same demands on Venezuela that the United States has?

Many of the alleged social benefits of the deals with other countries exist, at least for now, only on paper. That has led to a widespread belief in Venezuela that the government is giving away more to its new friends than it is getting in return. “There are so many agreements, it’s impossible to keep track of them all, but most of them are giving things up,” said Arlan Narvaez, a professor of political economy at the Central University of Caracas. “It’s [Chávez’s] way of buying attention.”

The most significant element of the China-Venezuela relationship is a $20 billion loan Beijing pledged to Caracas, which is partly repayable in oil. Many Venezuelans worry that Beijing got by far the best of the deal. The exact terms have not been made public, but a U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks quoted a Venezuelan state oil company official saying that China was getting the oil for about $5 a barrel, then reselling it at a large profit.

Maryclen Sterling, a sociologist and radio host who is generally pro-Chávez, said that although she understands the necessity of new alliances, she is uneasy about how the government is going about it. “We’re in a war, and in a war the goal is to defeat the enemy, at all costs,” she said. But Sterling is not confident that Venezuela’s new allies will be any more selfless than the United States was. “Chávez is very naive in certain things, and in general we’re a naive country, and a lot of people say we’re doing terrible business,” she said. “I’m concerned that we could be trading one empire for another.”

In opinion surveys, Venezuelans seem tepid toward their new allies. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, in 2007 (the most recent year Venezuela was included in the poll) 48 percent of Venezuelans had a positive opinion of Russia. Only 16 percent had at least “some confidence” in Ahmadinejad. Meanwhile, 56 percent had a positive opinion of the United States—a slightly higher level of enthusiasm toward the Yanquis than Britons and Canadians had.

Whatever the effects of Chávez’s foreign policy at home, its potential impact beyond Venezuela’s borders falls far short of the president’s rhetoric. While it’s impossible to prove that Chávez is not helping Iran with its nuclear program, for example, there have been so many allegations, repeated for so long, that they are starting to lose their potency. Despite some well-publicized attacks by Chávez on press freedoms, the country has an aggressive opposition media and a sizable foreign press corps. And no one has come up with the smoking gun to prove the worst of the allegations.

Most circumstantial evidence suggests that cooperation between Venezuela and Iran is neither as nefarious as its critics tend to believe, nor as fruitful as its defenders claim. One U.S. diplomatic cable from Caracas, written in 2009 and released last year by Wikileaks, concluded that there is little reason to believe the claims of nuclear weapons cooperation: “Although rumors that Venezuela is providing Iran with Venezuelan-produced uranium may help burnish the government’s revolutionary credentials, there seems to be little basis in reality to the claims.”

Those who suspect the worst of Chávez had a tantalizing morsel dropped in their laps in 2007 when the Venezuelan airline Conviasa and Iran Air inaugurated direct flights between Tehran and Caracas. To make it even more intriguing, the flights were said to be unavailable to the general public and free of normal security procedures. “These planes are most likely carrying bad actors from the likes of Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Guard’s Qods Force,” wrote Peter Brookes, a former Pentagon official, in 

When I was in Caracas in February, I went to the Conviasa ticket office at the Hotel ALBA, and inquired about buying a ticket to Tehran. The agent told me that, unfortunately, the service had been canceled “about a year ago.” (She gave me a number where I could reach Conviasa’s public relations department for more information, but publicity is apparently not a priority for the airline; nobody ever picked up the phone.) In its day, the flight was something of a sensation among aviation enthusiasts, and there was a lot of chatter about it on their Web sites. The posts painted a picture of something more like a political boondoggle than a cloak-and-dagger operation. One German traveler who took the flight in 2007—and apparently had no trouble getting a ticket—said he had an opportunity to speak with the Iranian flight captain, who told him, “With every transatlantic flight from Tehran to Caracas we create a loss of more than $100,000, but get compensation from the government.”

Veniran, the joint Venezuelan-Iranian car and tractor manufacturer, seems to be another triumph of politics over substance. I went to a Veniran dealer in Caracas to see about buying a car, but found that there weren’t any for sale. The salesman told me there was a waiting list from 2010 of more than 4,000 customers, while only a few dozen cars had been produced last year. (He also advised me not to buy a Veniran, arguing that although the initial price was low, many replacement parts are expensive imports.) A former Veniran employee told me that when the factory was being built, the Venezuelan side skimped on some key equipment, trying to reuse old assembly-line machinery instead of getting new gear. Predictably, it gummed up the works, setting back production.

Opposition leaders in Venezuela don’t criticize Chávez’s foreign policy on the grounds that it is opening the door for Hezbollah or Iranian nuclear weapons, but because Chávez is extravagant in subsidizing other countries for political reasons while Venezuelans need better schools and health care. In fact, spotlighting the danger of Venezuela’s new alliances only plays into Chávez’s hands, said Teodoro Petkoff, a leftist turned Chávez critic and editor of the Caracas newspaper 

. He brought up Representative Ros-Lehtinen’s threats to hold hearings on Chávez’s ties with Russia and Iran. “I’m very worried about the Republicans taking power” in the U.S. House of Representatives, Petkoff said. “They will be a big help to Chávez. Every time any American leader speaks against Chávez, he has material for one month of speeches.”

Chávez’s enthusiasm for attention, positive or not, is obvious. He thrives on conflict and on standing against the United States, and flaunting a close relationship with Iran achieves both of those objectives. “In general, he loves to cultivate an air of mystery, and particularly in this case [with Iran]. He knows it makes a lot of noise,” said Elsa Cardozo, a professor of international relations at Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas. The official Iranian Fars News Agency quipped that the Veniran factory was “designed to produce three things: tractors, influence, and angst.”

There are signs, though, that Chávez’s international influence is waning. Its apex may have come with his United Nations speech five years ago, or the Summit of the Americas in Argentina in 2005 when, with the blessing of then-president Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, a major regional power, Chávez directly challenged U.S. leadership in the region. But no countries have joined ALBA since June 2009, and polls have found that his popularity has declined substantially in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. As early as 2006, a Latinobarómetro survey of Latin Americans had him tied with President George W. Bush (at 4.6 on a scale from one to 10) in popularity. Classified materials released by Wikileaks have shown regional leaders speaking dismissively of Chávez. While Brazilian leaders have publicly embraced Chávez, in one U.S. cable Foreign Minister Celso Amorim is quoted saying, “His bite is not as bad as his bark,” and in another, “Chávez is not a threat.”

Other critics pointedly note that Chávez’s claims of a commitment to justice are undermined by his embrace of some of the world’s worst dictators. In the past he has praised Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe, and more recently, Hosni Mubarak and Qaddafi, arguing that the protests in Egypt and Libya were orchestrated by the United States. Al-Jazeera English, which promotes itself as the voice of the global South and would seem a natural ally of Chávez, has been highly critical of him for his support of the dictators rather than the people of the Arab world. The rebels in Libya, when they took Benghazi in early March, quickly removed Chávez’s name from the soccer stadium.

Chávez’s embrace of dictators has turned off much of the European and global Left as well, according to Petkoff. Chávez does not realize that his message plays very differently in Europe, he said. “He doesn’t understand what Iran or Belarus means for Europe. Iran is very far away from [Venezuela]; eight out of 10 Venezuelans don’t know where Iran is. But for Europeans, Iran is a real problem. And 9.9 out of 10 Venezuelans don’t know where Belarus is, but Europeans know that it’s the last communist government in Europe, the last remnant of the Soviet empire.”

Chávez’s revolutionary, anti-U.S. efforts can perhaps be usefully compared with those of his idol, Castro. For all of the doom-and-gloom scenarios Chávez’s new alliances have engendered, he has not gone nearly as far as Castro did in his heyday. Chávez has not sent troops or military aid to like-minded governments, as Cuba did in Angola and elsewhere, nor has he offered to host foreign military installations, as Cuba did with the Soviet Union.

Chávez’s critics might respond, well, give him time. But Chávez also faces constraints that Castro did not. He does not have a superpower patron, as Cuba did (though Chávez reportedly hoped that China would fill that role), and he is limited by domestic politics. Although Venezuela may be creeping toward authoritarianism, it’s not there yet. Chávez faces an election in 2012, and opposition figures believe they have a chance to win if they can agree on a good candidate. Getting cozy with Iran and China is not likely to be a winning campaign theme, especially if people perceive that Chávez’s oil diplomacy amounts to spending money abroad that could go to domestic social programs and other needs.

But Chávez also has a unique opportunity. The United States’ influence is declining, and many people are looking for something to replace the liberal model of economics and governance. By hitching his wagon to so many dubious allies, Chávez could be squandering a chance to promote an alternative. But if nothing else, his new alliances have gotten the world’s attention. “If we weren’t doing all this, you wouldn’t be sitting here in my office,” Escarrá, the parliamentarian, told me. “Venezuela isn’t mute anymore.”

is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C.

3158761878_e7de9af824_o.jpg

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has set alarms ringing with his efforts to create a global anti-American coalition. 

What Is Hugo Chávez Up To?

With its inspiring images of citizens around the Middle East

 taking to the streets to demand an end to dictatorship, the Arab Spring rekindled our faith in democracy. As the dramatic events unfolded on television, it was impossible not to believe that however tightly autocrats may try to hold on to power, and however messy transitions may be, in the end, despotism must yield to the will of the people.

But a look to the east and north, toward the former Soviet Union, provides a sobering reminder that democracy is not the inevitable result after dictatorships fall. The 15 former Soviet republics have seen dictatorial regimes ousted in not one but two distinct waves — the first after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the second a dozen or more years later in the so-called color revolutions that brought down autocrats in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. Yet no real benefits have accrued to political and civil rights in the region; indeed, they are more limited than before. (The three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, are exceptions; not absorbed into the Soviet Union until 1940, all three have become democracies and members of the European Union.) Freedom House, an American organization that promotes the advancement of democracy worldwide, produces annual measures of political and civil freedoms in every country. According to its data, only two of the ex-Soviet republics outside of the Baltics — Georgia and Moldova — have better scores today than they did when they gained independence in 1991. Armenia’s have not changed. The scores of the other nine states have gone backward.

Two leading scholars on democratization, Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, of Harvard and the University of Toronto, respectively, have written that “expectations (or hopes)” for democracy in the former Soviet Union have “proved overly optimistic,” and that it may be “time to stop thinking of these cases in terms of transitions to democracy and to begin thinking about the specific types of regimes they actually are.” And that was in 2002. Yet U.S. officials still cling to the notion that the region is in a “transition” to democracy. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a visit in 2011 to Uzbekistan and its president, Islam Karimov, one of the harshest dictators on the planet and perhaps the least likely leader in the region to move anywhere close to democracy, a State Department official told reporters on the trip that “President Karimov commented that he wants to make progress on liberalization and democratization, and he said that he wants to leave a legacy of that for his — both his kids and his grandchildren.” Pressed by an incredulous reporter, the official added, “Yeah. I do believe him.”

Evidence, however, is mounting that not only has democracy failed in most countries of the former Soviet Union, but that people there do not particularly regret it. Surveys by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project have found that the percentages of Lithuanians, Russians, and Ukrainians who believe that a “strong leader” is preferable to a democratic government have risen significantly over the past 20 years. A survey last year of 10 ex-Soviet states by the Russian research institute Integration found that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is even more popular in other parts of the former Soviet Union than in Russia itself. “People want a strong hand, stability, growth, and prosperity,” explained the institute’s director, Sergei Moroz.

The divergent trajectories of two neighboring countries in Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, are illustrative. In the early days of independence, Kyrgyzstan was widely described as an “island of democracy.” It had genuinely competitive political parties, an open, combative press, and a parliament that was popularly elected, not a rubber stamp. In 1993, Strobe Talbott, then President Bill Clinton’s special envoy to the new post-Soviet countries, called Kyrgyzstan’s president “a true Jeffersonian democrat.” And while Kyrgyzstan’s politics have had their ups and downs since then, it still has the most open government in Central Asia. For instance, the constitution promulgated in 2010 established a parliamentary system, a marked departure from the strongman model that is ubiquitous in the region.

Kazakhstan, meanwhile, is still ruled by the same ex–Communist Party boss who was in control in 1991, Nursultan Nazarbayev. He has systematically eliminated any political competition and built an extensive cult of personality. In the last presidential election, in 2011, his three token opponents endorsed him and one said he voted for him. Nazarbayev won 96 percent of the vote.

Yet Kazakhstan is prospering and stable, and is building a middle class, while Kyrgyzstan is chronically mired in chaos. Kazakhs, at least in the big cities, can shop at nice malls and afford beach vacations in Turkey. One Western expat who has worked throughout Central Asia told me that Kazakhstan is the only place in the region where you can go to a restaurant where entrées cost more than five dollars and be surrounded by locals, not other expats. One of my visits to Kazakhstan, in 2010, happened to coincide with a bout of horrific ethnic violence between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan. Several hundred people, mostly Uzbeks, were killed. When I broached the subject of Nazarbayev’s rule with Kazakhs, I heard the same thing over and over. After some complaints about cronyism and corruption, my interlocutors would add, “But at least we’re not Kyrgyzstan.” An opinion poll conducted around the same time found that 39 percent of Kazakhs blamed the violence in Kyrgyzstan on a “low standard of living,” while 38 percent attributed it to “the authorities’ weakness.” The same poll found that only seven percent of Kazakhs opposed recently passed constitutional amendments that cemented Nazarbayev’s rule into the future, giving him the title “Leader of the Nation.”

In 2009, Kazakh human rights advocate Yevgeny Zhovtis, who had testified several times before the U.S. Congress about his country’s lack of progress toward democracy, was sentenced to a disproportionately long prison term following a conviction for vehicular manslaughter. The harsh sentence drew the ire of human rights groups around the world, which argued that its severity was related to Zhovtis’s political activities. Yet in Kazakhstan his plight did not appear to move anyone. One official at a Western democracy-promotion organization told me about observing a rally in support of Zhovtis shortly after his sentencing. The official approached carefully, not wanting to appear to be part of the event and give credence to the inevitable government claims that it was organized by foreigners. But when he got to the demonstration, he realized that “it was maybe 25 people, and I knew all of them — they all worked for NDI, DRL,” and other Western democracy-promotion organizations, he said, referring to the National Democratic Institute and the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. The ranks of such groups in the region have been shrinking for years. Some have simply closed their operations, while others have shifted their focus to consumer rights and other issues more relevant to the day-to-day concerns of Central Asians, concluding that, at least for now, the ground in the region is simply not fertile for democracy.

And Central Asia is not unique in the former Soviet world. In 2010, disillusioned with the 2004 Orange Revolution that was supposed to have ushered in democracy, Ukrainians voted back into office Viktor Yanukovych, the very apparatchik whose attempt to steal the election six years earlier had sparked the “revolution.” In Belarus, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, pro-democracy movements have failed to gain any traction, and autocrats seem as entrenched as ever.

So what happened? Why has democracy failed to gain any purchase in the former Soviet Union?

 Political scientists have identified a number of possible explanations. Some are not specific to the region: Low levels of economic development mean that people are more focused on economic issues, while countries that do succeed economically, but only on the strength of oil and gas or other natural resources (e.g., Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan), tend to breed autocrats.

But some explanations are unique to the region. All the countries of the former Soviet Union maintain close ties to Russia (often willingly, sometimes not) and, increasingly, China, neither of which do much to help the cause of democracy. In particular, China’s economic success has inspired poor countries around the world, not least those just across its northern and western borders in Central Asia. And the fact that Beijing has achieved such success while maintaining the Communist Party’s monopoly on power feeds into the widespread belief in the former Soviet countries that a leader’s strong hand is what is needed to grow. Meanwhile, the other major regional power, India, is a democracy — and has not done nearly as much to relieve the crushing poverty under which many of its citizens suffer.

“China is a model to be copied — India is just a basket case,” said Stephen Kotkin, a historian who specializes in the former Soviet world. Central Asia’s leaders know that China is rising, and that its model will be the dominant one in the region, he said in an interview.

Some scholars advance cultural explanations for the region’s lack of interest in democracy. The dominant religions of the former Soviet lands are Orthodox Christianity and Islam, both of which cultivate values not conducive to democracy, this argument goes. In the case of Orthodoxy, writes former Georgian government official Irakli Chkonia, those values include “submission to authority, discouragement of dissent and initiative, discouragement of innovation and social change, [and] submissive collectivism rather than individualism.”

Citizens of the former Soviet states also suffer from ideology fatigue. Especially on the periphery of the former Soviet Union, where communism was experienced as a reform imposed from a distant capital, many people today see democracy in similar terms, as a foreign ideology that has little to do with their lives. Sean Roberts, an anthropologist and Central Asia specialist at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, writes that “most citizens of Kazakhstan, and perhaps most post-Soviet peoples outside the Baltic states, engage the concept of democracy much as they embraced communism before — as a mostly empty ideological framework to facilitate deference to the authority and power of the state, not as a system of formal institutions that can effectively represent people’s interests and make governance more successful in serving the people.” Roberts further observes that “if many Americans saw in the end of the Cold War the victory of American ideals, per [Francis] Fukuyama’s ‘end of history,’ most former Soviet citizens viewed it more as an ‘end of ideology,’ or a sign that grand ideals are essentially incompatible with the realities of life.”

In each of these countries, the dictator, too, has done his part to discredit democracy, painting it as “alien to the country’s history, tradition, and identity, funded by foreign security services, or driven by U.S. and Western geopolitical and economic interests,” political scientists Evgeny Finkel and Yitzhak M. Brudny wrote in a recent article. And in every case, the ruler has taken aggressive steps to nip democratic movements in the bud by restricting independent media, muzzling opposition, trying to censor the Internet, and using state resources to buy political support. The dictators of the region reacted to the color revolutions by kicking out Western democracy-promotion organizations they believed were responsible for orchestrating those events.

Fear of democracy per se has not been a driving force in the region. To Western audiences the Arab Spring and color revolutions may have looked like inspiring outbursts of people power, but they were read very differently by the leaders, and many of the citizens, of the former Soviet countries. There, the Arab Spring was seen from the beginning more as an outbreak of chaos and Islamist extremism. The color revolutions, too, failed to inspire many people in neighboring states — the events in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, in particular, were seen primarily as events that weakened those countries.

If democracy can have any claim to success in the former Soviet Union, its best case is Georgia

, whose 2003 Rose Revolution, led by the U.S.-educated Mikheil Saakashvili, brought dramatic reforms and a sharp geopolitical turn toward the West. Saakashvili’s affection for the United States was reciprocated: President George W. Bush visited the country in 2005 and famously called it a “beacon of liberty.”

But “democracy” was never quite the right word to describe what Saakashvili was trying to implement. His successes, while undeniable, are better thought of as progress toward modernization or good governance. Saakashvili’s youth (he became president at 36), fluency in English, and rhetorical embrace of “democracy” cleverly disguised what was in effect a more enlightened version of the strongman model favored in many parts of the former Soviet Union.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia was notorious as its most corrupt republic. After independence, things failed to improve. The government of Edward Shevardnadze was so corrupt that when the noted foreign-affairs writer Robert Kaplan visited in 2000, he couldn’t imagine the pervasive venality ever being weeded out: “Corruption is deeply rooted — perhaps the most corrosive ultimate consequence of communism. It will continue at high levels long after Shevardnadze’s death.” But Saakashvili wasn’t so fatalistic, and he undertook an ambitious project to reform the police, then one of the most corrupt institutions in the country. In a massive housecleaning, he laid off 16,000 police officers. He also dramatically restructured the police bureaucracy and raised salaries. The reforms worked: By all accounts, Georgian police are far less corrupt now than they used to be. In 2010, the international corruption watchdog Transparency International found that 78 percent of Georgians believed that corruption overall had decreased in the previous three years — the highest such figure in the world. (And for what it’s worth, despite Kaplan’s prediction, Shevardnadze is still alive.)

This was Saakashvili’s greatest achievement. But the reforms were far from democratic, and couldn’t have even taken place in a democracy, according to Matthew Light, a University of Toronto criminologist who has studied Georgia’s police reform. Saakashvili “was able to do those things because there was no one he had to bargain with,” Light said in an interview. “Institutional change of the kind Saakashvili implemented would involve more stakeholders in a fully functioning democracy.”

While the reforms succeeded in rooting out corruption and improving the performance of the police, it did so at the cost of remaking the force into a politicized institution responsible to Saakashvili personally. The fruit of that politicization was visible in 2007, when the police violently broke up anti-government protests and shut down a major opposition-friendly television network, events that did “serious damage to Georgia’s reputation as a champion of human rights,” Human Rights Watch said in a report analyzing the crackdown. Furthermore, the reforms failed to create the sort of oversight of a police department that would be expected in a democracy, and other parts of the justice system remained unreformed. Of cases brought to court, for example, 99 percent resulted in convictions. In other words, Saakashvili’s reforms were about strengthening the power of the state, not democracy.

Meanwhile, according to Freedom House, measures of civil and political rights in Georgia flatlined from 2003 to ’10 (but did tick up slightly thereafter). The organization bluntly concludes, “Georgia is not an electoral democracy.” That is hardly surprising, given that Saakashvili has frequently cited authoritarian Singapore as a model (as does Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev). “Singapore has a lot going for it, but that [Saakashvili] says that is revealing,” Light said. “He doesn’t say Switzerland, or Sweden, or Canada, or the U.S.; he says Singapore.” It was not democratic principles that inspired Georgia’s focus on police reform. That was motivated largely by Saakashvili’s fear of Russia and his worry that a dysfunctional state would not be able to defend itself against its superpower enemy to the north.

“I don’t think they were lying when they said they wanted a democracy, but they saw Georgia as on the brink of state failure,” Light said, referring to Saakashvili and his allies.The president gave “lip service to democracy, and he believed it on some level, but it just wasn’t the priority. That’s the benign interpretation. The less benign was that he genuinely saw the model for Georgia as authoritarian capitalist development like [that in] Singapore.”

The contradictions of Georgia’s democracy were on full display during the 2012 parliamentary election, the first in which Saakashvili’s party faced a truly credible opponent. When billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili formed a political party called Georgia Dream to vie for power, Saakashvili’s government threw up substantial roadblocks. It stripped Ivanishvili of his Georgian citizenship (after several years of living in Paris, he had also acquired French citizenship), levied extraordinary multimillion-dollar fines on his party for campaign finance violations, and harassed and intimidated his supporters. In the end, however, Ivanishvili’s deep pockets helped Georgia Dream overcome these obstacles. While Georgians were pleased by the drop in corruption under Saakashvili’s administration, that was outweighed by their discontent over its failure to raise living standards.

Ivanishvili had warned his supporters to be ready for the incumbent president to steal the election, and even sympathetic outsiders wondered how Saakashvili — who holds an outsized impression of himself and his role in Georgian history — would take a loss, but he graciously accepted defeat. “There are very deep differences between us, and we believe that their views are extremely wrong, but democracy works in this way — the Georgian people make decisions by majority,” he said. “That’s what we of course respect very much.” Peacefully handing over the reins of government to a rival was perhaps Saakashvili’s most democratic move.

In the end, Saakashvili was trapped by his own rhetoric: Though he knew that democracy wasn’t what he was bringing to Georgia, his legacy depended on outsiders perceiving that to be the case. Democracy, while it may not be particularly relevant in places such as the former Soviet Union, remains the standard of the “international community,” or at least the portion of it that wields the most power — the United States and its allies. So Saakashvili and his Western backers had to carry out a sort of mutual charade: He had to pretend that Georgia was “transitioning” toward democracy, while the United States — which wanted good relations with Georgia for a variety of geopolitical reasons — had to pretend it cared. This phenomenon can be seen in the emergence of several ersatz “democracies” in the former Soviet Union, with varying degrees of credibility.

Kazakhstan provides an especially stark example

. President Nazarbayev has shrewdly developed what he calls a “multivectored” foreign policy, trying to maintain good relations with many powers so as to not be too dependent on Russia. Ties with the United States and Europe depend to some degree on being democratic, so even while it in no way resembles a democracy, Kazakhstan makes great efforts to pretend to the world that it is one. The country’s diplomats campaigned hard, over several years, for it to be given a turn as chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a multinational body that is perhaps best known for its election monitoring. Many OSCE members had reservations, but as part of its campaign Kazakhstan’s government promised wide-ranging reform of laws relating to national elections, political party registration, and the news media.

The gambit worked, and Kazakhstan was awarded the chair for 2010. But the reforms were only partially implemented, and the experience of chairing the OSCE for a year seems not to have done much to whet Kazakhstanis’ appetite for democracy. Indeed, 2010 was the very year they named Nazarbayev their de facto president for life. Kazakhstan recently celebrated a new national holiday in his honor, First President’s Day, amid a fresh assault onopposition media and political figures.

Meanwhile, the government’s PR efforts continue unabated. Shortly after the Arab Spring began, 

 touting Kazakhstan as a model for Middle Eastern countries. “It took the great democracies of the world centuries to develop,” he declared. “We are not going to become a fully developed democracy overnight. But we have proved that we can deliver on our big ambitions. Our road to democracy is irreversible, and we intend to provide economic and political opportunities for our citizens.”

The Kazakhstani government has on retainer several Washington lobbying and public-relations firms, and it has contributed to prestigious Washington think tanks. In 2009, for example, it gave the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a smaller organization, the Institute for New Democracies, a $290,000 grant to create a task force to prepare for Kazakhstan’s then-upcoming OSCE chairmanship.

Ironically, when Kazakhstan held parliamentary elections early last year, the OSCE was critical, saying the process “did not meet fundamental principles of democratic elections.” Nazarbayev fired back at the organization he had been so eager to have his country chair, saying that “hired” monitors with an agenda would not be invited to observe his country’s elections in the future. But in Washington, Kazakhstan’s lobbyists put a brave face on the results, and a Kazakhstan-funded group of American experts who made up their own smaller observer mission praised the vote. “Kazakhstan has taken an important step forward towards a multiparty polity with the election,” the group said in its official statement. “The conduct of the election, while falling short in some respects of the ‘gold standard’ ... demonstrated a commitment to widen voter choice.”

At a press conference, one member of the group lauded what he called the “orchestrated approach” to the elections. “The opening of the political process cannot proceed in a chaotic, disorderly fashion,” said Vladimir Socor, an analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank that recently signed a partnership agreement with the Nazarbayev Center, an institute run by the Kazakhstani government. “When that happens, as in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, the consequences can be disastrous. Reforms need to be coordinated from above.”

But could all this be changing? In Russia, the massive, unexpected protests that erupted in 2011 in reaction to Vladimir Putin’s announcement that he would seek another term as president have changed the political landscape. Putin still won handily, and democracy still seems a distant prospect, but the demonstrations — in a country with an illustrious thousand-year history of despotism — suggested that the relationship between the Russian government and its citizens has changed. Russians seem to be demanding more say in how things are run. More than half now believe that voting matters, according to the Pew Research Center’s surveys, a significant increase from only a few years ago.

Russia is the wealthiest of the ex-Soviet republics, with the largest middle class. A substantial scholarly literature has correlated rising incomes with increased expectations of political liberalization, and indeed it was Moscow’s middle class that led the anti-Putin protests. Over the past three years, Pew’s surveys found, Russians have increasingly come to value a judiciary that treats all citizens equally, a civilian-controlled military, uncensored media, and honest elections — the building blocks of democracy.

Even in Kazakhstan, a few months after Nazarbayev bragged in 

 about how his country avoided mass protests by meeting its people’s economic needs, riots broke out (and were violently put down) in the remote city of Zhanaozen among oil workers who had been striking for months. This was a different sort of protest from those in Moscow: mounted by the working class rather than the educated elite, and demanding not political rights but higher wages. Yet it similarly demonstrated the fragility of the strongman model.

Could these developments in Russia and Kazakhstan be the first cracks in the anti-democracy façade of the former Soviet states? As fearful as people in this region are of chaos, could that fear one day soon be outweighed by their desire to have more say in how their countries are run? Even if that is the case — a big “if” — that is the easy part, said Stephen Kotkin, the historian specializing in the former Soviet states. Far harder, he noted, is the work of building the institutions of a democratic society, such as a responsible parliament and an effective bureaucracy. Protests can’t do that, he said, drawing a parallel to the Arab Spring. 

“You can break the regime with protests, but then you’re Egypt,” he said. “Then what?”

 is a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C., who specializes in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

BOTOKSSVELO.jpg

Recent history in the countries of the former USSR suggests that the appetite for freedom may not be as strong everywhere as we assume.

Voting Against Freedom

The small town of Rogun resembles many other remote settlements in the former Soviet Union.

 Giant factories gone to rust and empty concrete apartment blocks, once brightly painted, now crumbling, achieve a sort of grandeur set against spectacular natural surroundings — the snowcapped peaks of the Alay Mountains and, about 1,500 feet down a steep bluff next to town, the rushing Vakhsh River. Yet, as a reminder of the past, and perhaps a portent of things to come, the occasional cement truck still chugs down the steep road into town and roadside signs still exhort the citizenry, though they no longer quote Lenin or Marx: “Rogun Is the Source of National Pride for All Children of Tajikistan.” “The Establishment of the Rogun Hydroelectric Plant Is the Bright Future for Tajikistan.” “Water Is the Source of Life.”

There is a special sense in which that last slogan is truer for Tajikistan than for most other countries. Geography — and the Stalin-era officials who drew the borders of this erstwhile Soviet republic — dealt Tajikistan an unlucky hand. Ninety-three percent of its surface is mountainous, which means there is very little arable land. As part of the demarcation process in the 1920s, Moscow denied Tajikistan the once glorious Silk Road cities of Bukhara and Samarqand that Tajiks consider the jewels of their culture, instead putting them in Uzbekistan. The country is profoundly isolated, with borders either remote and inaccessible or shared with difficult neighbors. One indication of the vexed state of Tajikistan’s surroundings is the fact that, during the civil war of the 1990s, Tajikistani refugees fled to Afghanistan.

What Tajikistan does have in abundance is water. Its mountains hold some of the world’s largest glaciers, and the hydropower potential of the country, about the size of Iowa, ranks among the largest in the world. So President Emomali Rahmon has staked the future of his country on building the world’s tallest dam, here in Rogun. Electricity from the hydropower plant would end the country’s chronic power shortages, while the surplus would create a lucrative export to power-hungry Pakistan, India, and China. President Rahmon has repeatedly said that the dam is of “life or death importance” to Tajikistan.

But Tajikistan is not the only country with an interest in that precious liquid. Downstream, water from Tajikistan’s mountains flows into Uzbekistan’s vast cotton fields, and the Vakhsh is a significant tributary of the important Amu Darya River. Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, fears that the dam could interfere with that lucrative cash crop, Uzbekistan’s top export, and has threatened war to prevent it from being built.

The conflict between the two nations is linked to a global increase in tensions over fresh water. In the Middle East, for example, Turkey’s ambitious hydroelectric and irrigation plans have stirred fears among downstream countries in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, and in Egypt there is talk of war over an Ethiopian dam that is rising on a major tributary of the Nile. A retired Egyptian general told 

 that his counterparts on active duty may decide that “it is better to die in battle than to die in thirst.” A 2012 U.S. intelligence report minimized the possibility of “a water-related state-on-state conflict” anywhere in the world for the following decade, but warned that“as water shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basins will increasingly be used as leverage; the use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives also will become more likely beyond 10 years.”

That future could come sooner in Central Asia.

 Two decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, the region’s five now-independent states have become increasingly isolated from, if not hostile to, one another. Borders have hardened as corrupt governments, focused primarily on extracting as much wealth as they can from their own land and citizens, see no need to cooperate with their neighbors. As the outside world has become more involved in the region, each country has come to see its neighbors as competition for aid, investment, and geopolitical clout. And no two countries are more sharply at odds than Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

“It all started in the 1920s,” said one prominent Tajikistani intellectual when I asked about Rogun. Like many conflicts in the lands of the former Soviet Union, the one between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan was both created by the Soviets and kept in check by them. Until the 20th century, notions of “Tajik” and “Uzbek” identity didn’t have much meaning. For at least a millennium of Central Asian history, people speaking Tajik and other Persian languages coexisted peacefully with those speaking Turkic languages such as Uzbek. When Russian Orientalist scholars arrived in the region in the late 19th century after Central Asia’s conquest by the tsarist empire, they were confounded by the fact that identity in Central Asia did not conform to their expectations of nationality or ethnicity. “The settled population of Central Asia think of themselves primarily as Muslims, and think of themselves as only secondarily living in a particular town or district; to them the idea of belonging to a particular people is of no significance,” wrote Vasiliy Bartold, an early Russian scholar of Central Asia.

The Uzbeks “do not really know what they are,” lamented another Russian scholar, Ivan Zarubin, writing in the early 1900s. “They call themselves Turks. But their Turkmen and Kyrgyz neighbors call them ‘Sart,’ which word they also use for Tajiks.” (“Sart” was a plastic term, used in many different ways by people in this part of Central Asia.) Bilingualism was widespread. In the region’s austere, monophonic traditional music, shashmaqam, “singers switch almost unconsciously from one language to the other, and it is not uncommon to find Uzbek and Tajik couplets mixed together in the same song,” wrote scholar Theodore Levin in his study of Central Asian music, 

When the Soviet Union was formed, fitting the square peg of Central Asians’ identities into the round hole of “peoples” living in separate soviet socialist republics became state policy. The new boundaries placed large groups of Uzbeks in northern Tajikistan, and Tajik-speaking people in Uzbekistan. The Soviets proceeded to codify the differences between Uzbeks and Tajiks and standardize the two languages, with Uzbek partly cleansed of its Persian elements and Tajik purged of its Turkic features. Shashmaqam was officially separated into two distinct genres. Interethnic tensions grew — Tajiks bitterly complained about the loss and “Turkification” of Bukhara and Samarqand — but the Soviets kept the lid on. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the last constraints.

The two new nations began their lives amicably enough. 

During Tajikistan’s civil war, Uzbekistan took the side of the eventual winners — members of the ex-Communist nomenklatura and the regional clans that supported them. President Karimov was instrumental in installing Rahmon as Tajikistan’s president in 1994. Indeed, at one time Rahmon referred to Karimov as “our father.” But by 1997, when the civil war ended, leaving more than 50,000 dead, the two had already begun to fall out. Before long, each was accusing the other of backing rebel groups bent on overthrowing his regime.

Today, both countries stagnate under the oppressive rule of dictatorships. Uzbekistan has become a global pariah because it uses forced labor, including the toil of children, to work its cotton fields, whose output benefits a small group of politically connected businessmen. Both countries rely heavily on remittances from citizens living in Russia, where Central Asian construction workers, cleaners, and other menial laborers play a role comparable to that often taken by Mexican and Central American migrant workers in the United States. With more than a million migrants in Russia, Tajikistan has seen entire villages emptied of their working-age men. It is the most remittance-dependent country in the world, deriving nearly half of its gross domestic product from its citizens abroad.

One huge relative advantage Uzbekistan holds over its neighbor is location. It is at the center of what was once Soviet Central Asia, with the largest population (about 30 million, almost as much as the other four “stans” combined) and the greatest concentration of industry and transportation links. Tajikistan, with just seven million people, is stuck in an especially isolated corner of this isolated region. It has boundaries with China and Kyrgyzstan, but they are far from the country’s population centers and difficult to reach. The border with Afghanistan only opens the door to more trouble. Tajikistan’s only real access to the outside has been via Uzbekistan — nearly all of the railways, pipelines, and roads that reach the outside world pass through Karimov’s country.

As relations have worsened, Uzbekistan has carried out what Tajikistan calls a “blockade.” It now requires Tajikistan’s citizens traveling to Uzbekistan to obtain a visa, and it has mined the border since 2000. Seventy-six people have been killed as a result. The Uzbekistanis have blocked shipments of natural gas to Tajikistan, repeatedly stopped rail shipments — in one case appearing to fabricate a terrorist attack on a key rail line — and increased cargo tariffs. On several occasions, border guards have exchanged shots across the frontier.

The divide between the countries has been widened by history — or, more precisely, by newly invented histories designed to make it seem that these are ancient states with great traditions rather than artificial creations of 20th-century Russians. For Uzbekistan, that has meant emphasizing the Turkic character of Central Asia and glorifying Tamerlane (or Amir Timur, as he is known in Uzbekistan), the 14th-century conqueror who established Turkic rule that reached into the Middle East from his capital in Samarqand. In Tajikistan, meanwhile, the need to fashion a usable past has led to the creation of a historical narrative centered on Ismail Somoni, the founder of the Persian Samanid dynasty, which ruled during the eighth and ninth centuries from Bukhara. Somoni’s name now graces Tajikistan’s tallest mountain, the former Mount Communism; the Tajikistanis’ currency bears his name as well. In each of these national tales, the myth-spinning country avers that its rival’s territory was once included in its own.

Myths aside, the two countries’ disputes have become personal.In 2009, Rahmon bragged to Tajikistani journalists (in an event that was supposed to be off the record) that he had been in two fistfights with Karimov. (Once, the two were separated by Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the other time by Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma.) Rahmon said that he had had the last word, telling Karimov, “Anyway, Samarqand and Bukhara will be ours again one day!” and vowing, “We will bring Uzbekistan to its knees.” The way he would do that, he said, was with the Rogun dam.

Tajikistan already has several hydropower plants, including one at the world’s highest dam, Nurek, at 300 meters, or just under 1,000 feet. Rogun, which could rise 35 meters higher, was designed by the Soviets, who began construction in 1976 but had not gotten very far by 1991. It was meant to be part of an integrated Central Asian power system in which water would be released from the dams in summer, when Uzbekistan needed it for its cotton crop, while in winter Uzbekistan would supply its neighbor with electricity generated in plants burning its plentiful natural gas. (The Soviet system also included Kyrgyzstan, another upstream country, as well as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan downstream, and today there are similar though much less heated disputes among these countries.)

After 1991, this integrated system started falling apart. Uzbekistan reduced winter power supplies, and Tajikistan took more electricity than it was allotted during the summer, exercising an “unfortunate ... lack of grid discipline,” the World Bank dryly noted in a 2012 report. Last winter, amid bitter cold, rural Tajikistanis had electricity for an average of only five to seven hours a day. In some past years, the outages have been far worse.

As a way out of Tajikistan’s energy woes and general economic dependence, Rahmon dusted off the old Soviet plans for Rogun.

 The dam would generate 3,600 megawatts of electricity, about as much as three nuclear power plants, almost doubling Tajikistan’s capacity. That would easily meet the country’s needs and provide a surplus for export.

But Tajikistan has been vexed by one singularly difficult question: Where will the money come from? Because it will cost at least $2 billion (and up to $6 billion) to complete the dam, foreign investment will be essential. A deal with a Russian company collapsed in 2007 after the firm reportedly proposed constructing a dam only 285 meters high, rather than the full 335 meters — not tall enough to beat the world record.

In 2009, Rahmon tried another tack. In what became known as the People’s IPO, the government “offered” citizens the opportunity to buy shares in the dam, setting a goal of about $680 per family, even though per capita income is about $25 a month. Most in Tajikistan saw the effort as a throwback Soviet-style campaign to rally public support. But Rahmon did not rely only on PR. “Government officials at all levels and in all regions extorted money from citizens and businesses,” the U.S. State Department said in its 2010 Human Rights Report on the country. “Teachers, doctors, and government employees were instructed to buy shares or their employers would fire them. University students were forced to show their professors share certificates before being allowed to sit for exams. Businesses were told they would be assessed fines for failing to purchase shares.” In the end, the government collected less than $200 million. But work on the dam got started, though at a very slow pace, according to local residents.

In 2011, the World Bank agreed to underwrite two technical assessments of the Rogun proposal. Although the bank has made it clear that it does not intend to fund the dam, a favorable assessment could encourage potential investors, including the Asian Development Bank, Russia, China, and Iran. With foreign funding, of course, would come geopolitical complications: Any backer trying to gain clout in Central Asia would have to weigh the consequences of alienating regional power Uzbekistan. The United States, which relies on the Central Asian countries for various forms of logistics cooperation for the war in Afghanistan, has tiptoed around the Rogun issue, though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed doubts about the value of hydropower projects 

when she visited Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, in 2011

The same U.S. intelligence report that warned last year of coming conflicts over water around the world also noted that “historically, water tensions have led to more water-sharing agreements than violent conflicts.” In theory, there is great potential for such agreements in Central Asia. The region has the highest per capita rate of water consumption in the world, and inefficient agriculture is the chief culprit. While about 75 percent of the fresh water consumed in the world is devoted to agriculture, in Central Asia that figure is over 90 percent.

It was folly of the Soviets to establish such a thirsty crop as cotton in this part of the world.By diverting Central Asian rivers to irrigate the fields, they caused the greatest ecological disaster of the Soviet era: the drying up of the Aral Sea. Poor management and dilapidated infrastructure have compounded the water problem many times over. The World Bank has pushed for various reforms, including water conservation measures in Uzbekistan and utility price increases in Tajikistan to reduce consumption of electricity, but neither country seems interested in changing its ways, preferring to use Rogun for high-stakes brinksmanship.

Rahmon’s promotion of Rogun has been accompanied by a growing predilection for the grandiose and megalomaniacal.He seems to have begun emulating the cults of personality and Dubai-style architectural excesses of leaders in nearby countries, especially Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. But those countries all enjoy substantial oil and natural gas income. Nevertheless, Rahmon has in recent years gone on a building spree, erecting several ornate new structures in Dushanbe’s formerly modest center, including the massive, Doric-columned Palace of Nations (which reportedly cost about $300 million to build and now sits largely empty) and the world’s tallest flagpole, which, topping out at 541 feet, is visible from almost the entire city.

For Rahmon, Rogun seems to have taken on a symbolic significance greater than its practical value. In Dushanbe, diplomats and officials of international nongovernmental organizations — who have a nearly unanimously poor view of the president and his capabilities — say he has seized on Rogun as a single solution to all of the country’s problems. “Rogun has become a symbol of how he can break free of everything,” said one longtime Dushanbe-based diplomat. “He thinks that he has found the panacea for his reputation, his legacy.” Others suggest that Rahmon, who began his career as a collective farm leader, still sees development in Soviet terms — the Rogun dam certainly has all the appearances of a classic Soviet-style, top-down megaproject.

There is also a simpler explanation: money. Rahmon’s government is deeply corrupt, and anyone with money in Tajikistan can be traced through very few degrees of separation to the president. “Tajikistan’s elite appears driven by one overwhelming motive: self-enrichment,” the International Crisis Group concluded in a 2009 report. The Rogun dam would create the potential for massive amounts of graft. In fact, one obstacle to obtaining foreign financing is that the accounting of the state power company and other Tajik entities that would be involved is opaque, and the government has resisted efforts to get them to open their books.

The World Bank assessment is scheduled to be released at the end of this year.

 It will not give the project blanket approval or disapproval but will evaluate three different variants of the proposed dam, two of which would fall short of Rahmon’s 335 meter goal. It will be up to the Tajikistan government, and whoever funds the project, to weigh those options. But early indications have been positive for Tajikistan. In February, the World Bank’s regional director, Saroj Kumar Jha, said that the findings on dam safety, water management, and flood risk — all concerns that Uzbekistan has raised — were, so far, positive.

Karimov’s invocation of water wars was likely hyperbole, but given the rising tensions and increasing frequency of border skirmishes, there is a risk of “low-level armed conflict” between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, according to a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The United Nations is trying to conduct shuttle diplomacy between the two countries and has enlisted Kazakhstan to act as mediator.

It is impossible to predict how Uzbekistan will respond if the World Bank assessment is positive and a funder steps forward. It is a common belief in Dushanbe that Uzbekistan has plans, once the dam is almost complete, to launch air strikes against it or to carry out sabotage disguised as a terrorist act. And Uzbekistan retains the ability to cripple construction efforts with a blockade.

In theory, the dam could be beneficial to Uzbekistan. Tied in with the existing Nurek dam, it could allow the restoration of the kind of resource-sharing scheme that prevailed in the Soviet era. Karimov has even voiced interest in the past in participating in a more modest version of the Rogun project. But given the mutual acrimony, and his belief — probably correct — that part of why Rahmon wants the dam is to exert control over Uzbekistan, Karimov is unlikely to see anything but harm in the facility’s construction. “If there were a pro-Uzbekistan government in Tajikistan, no doubt Uzbekistan’s attitude to Rogun would be different,” said an activistin Dushanbe.

Tajikistan will hold presidential elections in November, and though the constitution would seem to prevent Rahmon from running for a fourth term, no one expects such a technicality to keep him from trying to hold on to power. A leader of the most popular opposition party, the Islamic Renaissance Party, was badly beaten outside his home in April. Police raided the home of another politician shortly after he announced the formation of a new party and charged him with embezzlement and polygamy. Opposition to Rahmon appears to be growing, and it is nearly universal among the educated elite.

Rahmon’s government seems to be tightening its controls over society. On my most recent visit, I was unable to get official accreditation to work as a journalist in Tajikistan, though I have done so easily on two previous occasions. Government officials declined to talk to me, and local journalists and experts spoke only on condition of anonymity, expressing fear that speaking to a foreign journalist could expose them to unwanted attention from the authorities, even when their comments about Rogun were positive.

Still, there is little dissent within Tajikistan on the subject of Rogun. People who generally oppose the government believe that building the dam is the best way for Tajikistan to free itself from Uzbekistan’s stranglehold. Even those in communities that would be displaced by the project — where resistance was strong during the Soviet era — have come to see it as a national necessity. During the People’s IPO, Muhiddin Kabiri, the leader of the Islamic Renaissance Party and Tajikistan’s most principled opposition figure, said the party would buy shares.

“For Uzbekistan it’s a political issue, but for Tajikistan it’s an issue of survival,” said the Dushanbe activist. In a similar vein, a prominent local analyst told me, “It’s a question of resisting control. The Uzbekistan elite and intelligentsia still consider Tajikistan part of ‘greater Uzbekistan.’ This is a part of their official ideology.” He added, “Now, Tajikistan doesn’t have any levers to withstand this pressure. This would be a lever.”

 is a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C., who frequently writes about Central Asia. This essay was made possible by a grant from the 

A_valley_in_Ayni,_Tajikistan.jpg

Poor, landlocked, and bedeviled by its neighbors, Tajikistan is staking its future on the one resource it has in abundance.

Joshua Kucera