The first region we want to look at, which is rife with enclaves, is the Caucasus. I recently noted the tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan which are a direct result of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karbagh. Indeed, enclaves are almost always consistent causes of trouble whether due to ethnic tensions, smuggling, terrorism or other. While Georgia has problems of its own due to break-away regions like South Ossetia, only Armenia and Azerbaijan have problems with enclaves.
In Armenia,three exclaves of Azerbaijan exist Barxudarli and Yuxari Askipara in north-eastern Armenia. The other one, Kaki, is located north of the region of Nakhchivan (which is a detached fragment of Azerbaijan).In Azerbaijan, there is only one Armenian exclave, , a village called Artsvashen in the north-west of the country near Lake Sevan.
Still up in the air, however, is Nagorno-Karbagh, currently occupied by Armenia and though ethnically Armenian, technically belongs to Azerbaijan. At the moment, it has declared itself to be an independent state, although it has been recognized by no one. Were it to eventually become a state, around seven further enclaves would exist inside of it.
Enclaves and exclaves create a variety of problems for states. Smuggling becomes easier and more difficult to stop. Terrorists or separatists have an easier time ducking back into safe territory (such as the IMU in Uzbekistan) out of reach of the other country’s military. Separatists tendencies are often strengthened as the motherland has difficulty exerting control over the detached territory such as in Naxcivan, the detached piece of Azerbaijan. Residents who formerly enjoyed free movement in the area before the creation of the two states often face border difficulties and customs which makes it either near impossible or financially worthless to sell their goods in nearby markets because traveling a few miles to the market forces them to suddenly pay duties on their goods.
Armenia and Azerbaijan remain in a state of war with each other specifically because of the swiss cheese style borders they ended up with. Most of these ethnic troubles reach back far before the USSR collapses and are instead the result of Stalin’s mass deporation and relocation programs. His legacy lives on not only in the Caucasus, but in Central Asia as well, perpetuating many of the troubles there today.
Next up in the series: The Fergana Valley
Note: Extremely detailed maps of both countries can be found here (for Armenia) and here (for Azerbaijan) however they are only in Russian. If anyone wants to help double check please do (*ahem*…Nathan) as I can’t read Russian.
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Comments to this entry
Nathan Hamm
December 21, 2005
10:02 pm
Chirol
December 21, 2005
10:09 pm
snow
December 22, 2005
1:59 am
Elizabeth
December 22, 2005
3:06 pm
I take issue with your use of the acronym "IMU" as if it referred to anything other than the category of all individuals that the Uzbekistan and Tajikistan governments would like to lock up, including little old ladies who complain when their sons are harassed for wearing tyubeteykas in urban areas.
You also wrote that with enclaves, "Smuggling becomes easier and more difficult to stop." Well, it's hard to tell, since the entire band of border police everywhere in the former USSR is complicit in around 85% of all smuggling. So I'm not sure that the abolition of enclaves would help.
You kind of bring this point up yourself when you point out how inconvenient life is for people now. It certainly is, because those borders are far from porous. If the authorities WANTED to really stop smuggling, they could, because they are already controlling movement- only it is free, with a fee, rather than restricted. They could pay their border guards and institute law and order. Kickbacks are much more profitable, however.
You also wrote, "Residents who formerly enjoyed free movement in the area before the creation of the two states..." Ahem. Before the independence of these states from the USSR, that is. Actually up until the nineties there were never really borders there- the USSR instituted nominal national boundaries, believing that they would become weaker over time, not instituted as international borders. This goes for the Ferghana.
You also wrote "enclaves are almost always consistent causes of trouble whether due to ethnic tensions, smuggling, terrorism or other...Armenia and Azerbaijan remain in a state of war with each other specifically because of the swiss cheese style borders they ended up with..."
I think you are overlooking the facts that:
(a) Even before the two nation-states were at war, many of the villages and ethnic groups were in conflict... this conflict actually was repressed during communist times. It wasn't created.
(b) While enclaves and exclaves are generally the scenes of conflict, you do not consider whether past conflicts might have been a motivation to create enclaves (see (a)).
Michael Hancock
December 22, 2005
6:46 pm
Lucca2000
December 23, 2005
12:20 am
Sorry if this not the place to post this.
Enjoy it !
Chirol
December 23, 2005
5:32 pm
You are right that border issues are complicated by corruption as well. However, the point stands that enclaves further complicate border security.
Michael: Thanks, the next post will be up soon!
Nathan Hamm
December 23, 2005
9:53 pm
And what he's saying about smuggling and heightening tensions really isn't all that controversial. Some concessions have to be made to ease travel to and from enclaves, and people take advantage of these concessions. And when such enclaves exist, it makes interstate conflict all the more likely. That applies not just to political enclaves but to ethnic enclaves. Chirol made quite clear he is only dealing with the former in his first post on enclaves. While I agree with you that the enclaves aren't the sole cause of continued conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, his points are quite correctly made.
Elizabeth
December 30, 2005
11:04 am
rare is the occasion that the Uzbek government still accuses people of membership in the IMU anymore so much as they do other groups
Because they long ago started saying that the IMU morphed into different, smaller organizations, etc. etc. in order to maintain some semblance of realism for the international press. I do believe this supports my point that anyway, it never really existed in the sense that they meant.
This does not change the fact that the proposition- that enclaves are used by the IMU and other terrorist and/or Islamist organizations- is (a) one that gets most of its support from Uzbekistan's and Tajikistan's need to justify repressive and anti-democratice practices and (b) is unlikely, given the nature of those enclaves.
what he's saying about ... heightening tensions really isn't all that controversial
I agree about the heightened tensions. When ethnic groups congregate, it is either because things were tense or ends up making them tense.
Some concessions have to be made to ease travel to and from enclaves
Not in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan or Kyrghyzstan they don't. Not a single concession. Which is why the Ferghana Valley enclaves are such pains. Because you go through exactly the same procedures- bag searches, body searches, bribes, sniffer dogs, car searches, or huge bribes- as you do in the airports and at the regular borders, only three times more often. If you did go through and didn't encounter this, consider your taxi driver to be a smart man who included the price of your passage in the fare.
Also, I would like to ask: Since none of these enclaves have airports, how do you explain the security risk? Do you suppose that in the Tajik enclave they are making bombs and moving them into Uzbekistan, or vice-versa? It would be much, much easier to do it in the country where you intend to blow somebody up. It's not like you can bring explosives or anything like that into the enclaves without it getting noticed, whereas industrial quantities of certain goods could be moved around Uzbekistan and Tajikistan within the county with much less difficulty.
"And when they were making incursions into Uzbekistan, they did go right up through the area where all the enclaves are"
That's because they went through the mountains as opposed to through the desert, because of the forest cover, and because it was during civil war in Tajikistan, not because there were enclaves there. Believe me, the number of times I have gone through there, I can tell you, you'd be much better off crossing at Gulbahor or Saresiyo with a fake NGO badge. Once we had a race in which one car went through the enclave, and the other drove around it. Not surprisingly, the five-hour detour was still less than waiting in line at both ends of the enclave and spending time paying bribes to policement along the way.
Read Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid
I read that book and his book about the Taliban. I don't know where he's from or how long he lived here but he needs to talk to more people. Then he'd know:
-That the wars in this area are not about Islam, but have much more to do with
-Regionalism among Tajiks and Uzbeks and
-Ethnic quarrels dating to long before the Russians stepped in, in Afghanistan, and that
-Information by the Uzbekistan government handed out to the New York Times and other news agencies is not to be trusted, nor are their rosy-eyed analyses of the region at that time, so you can't really use it as a reference, and
-more, but this post is already way too long.
I stand corrected, though. Perhaps the IMU does exist as a real, self-recognizing group in Pakistan. But then, what doesn't? And what does that have to do with Central Asia? Pakistan is like the second capital of Jihad Central, but the fact that freaks congregate there (among a generally decent population) doesn't really support your thesis on enclaves. You might as well mention that Al Qaida and Chechen rebels, or even Uighurs, are using the enclaves to smuggle arms.
However, the point stands that enclaves further complicate border security.
But they do not complicate it in a way that would make smuggling easier. They complicate it in a way that makes smuggling much harder. Maybe not so much in the Caucases, however, I can tell you honestly that it's not exactly difficult to get 10 g of hashish and a bottle of vodka from Kabul to Tblisi through any route except Hairaton anyway, so why on earth would you focus on the enclaves?
That's at least part of the reason Uzbekistan mined the borders of them so heavily.
I will grant that Uzbekistan might have, at one point, had a chance at legitimizing the murder-by-negligence of hundreds of Central Asian shepherd children when they put up those mines during and right after the Tajikistan civil war- they considered it self defence from the IMU. At that time, the IMU, Al Qaida, and all sorts of semi-structured, decentralized freak shows were sponsoring little conflicts around Central and South Asia to destabilize the region. However, the mines in the Ferghana are to prevent illegal imm/emigration, on the contrary, and nationalism. They don't want people resettling in corridors to make land to annex, and a million other things.
Elizabeth
December 31, 2005
4:36 am