Turkey is upset about the resolutions in the United States and Sweden regarding the alleged Armenian Genocide. Logical reaction from Turkey? Threaten to deport 100,000+ Armenians because it worked out so well the first time and all.

“There are currently 170,000 Armenians living in our country. Only 70,000 of them are Turkish citizens, but we are tolerating the remaining 100,000. If necessary, I may have to tell these 100,000 to go back to their country because they are not my citizens. I don’t have to keep them in my country.”

Turkey will always be haunted by the fact that Turks “settled” land that has been occupied for thousands of years by many other peoples with various religions. Worse still for the Turks, they are still around and the Turks are in complete denial about it. In some ways, their problem is similar to Israel where the very identity of their state is inseparable from ethnicity (and in some ways religion) and yet a big percentage of the population in territory under their control is not only foreign, but was there first. They haven’t made much progress thus far and its very uncertain as to when or if they ever will.

Old Town sprawls behind People’s Square in Central Kashgar. The Han crowd in.

China Digital times features a photo essay of The Demolition of Old Kashgar from the French paper Le Monde. The old brick houses and streets have been declared vulnerable to earthquakes. The English translation of the accompanying article argues that the complete levelling of the town, rather than the clean up and protection of heritage buildings, shows that this is just another campaign in the war of cultural dominance between the Han and the Uighur. Human Rights Watch researcher Nicholas Becquelin sums it up: “… it is much easier to control the population in a modern city.” The NYT covered this last May as well.

During my trip to Chinese Turkestan in 2004 I visited Kashgar’s Old Town and took some (rather unworthy) photos myself. Check out the gallery to see some photos of:

• Streets of Old Town
• People’s Square and downtown
• Yusup Has Hajip’s tomb
• Sunday Market
• Animal Market

Don’t forget to click on the IMAGE INFO in the bottom left corner of each pic for an explanation.

As an adherent of the Robert D. Kaplan school of travel, I’m a big fan of overland travel. Given the choice and when time allows, I’d much rather travel by boat, train, or bicycle. Flying is convenient—but it rushes you to your destination without letting you appreciate the distance. But like any form of mass public transportation, it can present opportunities to meet people (some interesting, some weird). Flying from Tokyo to Dubai, I introduced myself to my seatmate and we began chatting. It turns out he was an Afghan national living between Japan and the UAE, and once we spoke a bit and he saw that I knew something about Afghanistan, or at least enough to have a conversation about his country, we spent several hours chatting on world affairs and his life story on our many hours together. (The moment when he opened up and began to talk about his life story was after this exchange: Him: “I’m not a Pakistani Afghan, I’m Persian.” Curzon: “Persian? Do you mean Hazara or Tajik?” Him: “Yes, Hazara, you know well…”)

My seatmate was born in Kabul in the post-monarchical Republic of Afghanistan, the period after the fall of the monarchy and before the Soviet invasion. His father was Hazara and his mother was Pashtun, but his family was culturally Hazara and he spoke Persian, although he did not elaborate further. He attended one of the best private schools in the city until the age of 8, when the fighting forced his family to flee Kabul, and they relocated to the mountains to the west of the city (the town name began with a “b,” I cannot recall further). After surviving the violence there for four years, they moved to Mazar-e-Sharif in the north and spent several years there. At the age of 14, his family was separated and he spent three weeks walking, alone, from northern Afghanistan to the Pakistan border, where he spent a few months at a border camp until being reunited with his family in Iran. From there, they immigrated to a town to the north of Dubai. For the past decade he’s lived half his life in the UAE and half in Japan, and runs a business exporting second hand cars from Japan to the Middle East region together with other members of his extended family.

He recieved very little schooling through his ordeal. Although an advanced speaker of English and Japanese, he could not write any Japanese and only very little English. He took more than a minute to write his short e-mail address on his business card and wrote the letters “h” and “m” backwards.

It’s a weird experience to hear tales of brutal violence from someone who experienced such a traumatic childhood. He had horrific stories that he spoke of with a straight face, looking almost bored, with piercing and unwavering eye contact that disturbed me. One such story he recounted was a mortar attack he and his family survived at age 11. The next day he helped lift dead bodies and body parts into a truck to be taken away to a mass grave. Another story was about a makeshift school he attended in the mountains, where gunman walked in, grabbed several of the oldest children in the room, and brought them away, where they were reportedly drafted into fighting and never heard from again.

He did not have much to say on the future of Afghanistan except that it was bleak. He visited once after the fall of the Taliban and said he would not go back again, and the country will remain poor and chaotic for the next 100 years. The problems? One is education. People have no education and can’t read and are not literate. The other is the different ethnicities. What I took from several minutes of talking on the topic was that the problem was not hatred between ethnic groups, but the loyalty that was exclusive to ethnic groups and clans.

He also said the Taliban were all foreigners. To paraphrase him, they were Russians, Americans, Indians, and especially Arabs who grew their beards and tried to dress like locals, but who were just foreigners with guns who were the guests of the Taliban bosses.

Speaking about his family, he reported that he had relatives in his extended family across the world in Los Angeles, London, Japan, Sydney, and New Zealand, many of whom are naturalized citizens. The UAE does not offer such an easy path to naturalization and limited benefits when he considered getting a UAE passport. He cannot read or write Japanese, not even the phonetic katakana or hiragana alphabets, and thus does not meet the third grade reading requirement to apply for Japanese citizenship (about 400 kanji characters).

One fun fact about renewing a passport at an Afghanistan embassy overseas, which he has done in the UAE and Tokyo, is that the embassy always asks random questions to confirm the true Afghani nationality of the passport holder. Questions such as, “Where was your grandfather born?” and “How long does it take to drive from Kandahar to Kabul?” Apparently, an Afghani passport can be purchased for $20-50 in Afghanistan, and lots of Pakistanis use it to try and apply for refugee status overseas, and the phenomenon is broad enough that embassies check.

That I write this of course means that I’m safely in Dubai. The big local news is that the new metro line opens today. I’ll be back with more on the city soon.

From June 26-30, Turkish President Abdullah Gul visited China, visiting the capital of Beijing, the cultural city of Xi’an, and the heart of Turkic China, Urumqi. His visit brough the signing of major bilateral business cooperation pacts worth more than a billion US dollars, involving infrastructure, power, mining, agricultural, and trade. And in Urumqi, Gul told press he was deeply impressed by the development of the region and the large-scale construction. Gul also said, “Uyghurs act like a bridge of friendship between Turkey and China. Such role will contribute to the further improvement of our relations.”

What Gul did not know at the time was that ethnic riots had broken out in southern China between Turkic Uyghur migrant workers and Han locals which would spark ethnic riots on the streets of Urumqi just days later, resulting in the death of at least 180 people.

Left: Gul in Urumqi. Right: Victims of the riot.

Those riots resulted in an immediate about-face stance from Turkey with regard to China relations. The political leaders have since called for discussing the Xinjiang riots in the UN Security Council. Prime Minister Erdogan also said that Turkey would grant a visa to Rebiya Kadeer, the Uighur political activist who China blames for the unrest, were she to travel to Turkey. (The day before she said that her visa to visit Turkey in 2006 and 2007 had been denied.) And Turkey then went on to call China’s acts in Xinjiang “genocide.” (On an interesting sidenote to this, you can read this article on China’s longstanding sympathy for the Kurds here, which may partially explain why Turkey’s leaders are taking the opportunity to stick it to Beijing.)

The only other fierce call was from Al Qaeda in Algeria, an independent branch that remains probably the most active cell of the network, has issued threats at Chinese interests. (While that might not sound like a big deal coming from a provincial terrorist organization, consider that there are 50,000 Chinese working in construction and energy projects in Algeria, and hundreds of thousands more across the Middle East and North Africa.)

However, the response from political leaders and media outlets in the Middle East was muted. Arab newspapers made gestures of sympathy in news reports, but none called for condemnations of China from their governments. There were no loud calls for boycotts. And the issue has since fallen off the pages of the newspapers as the event is quietly forgotten. No one in the Arab Middle East appears to want to make China out to be the new Israel.

So why is Turkey so excited? Turkey has long occupied both a cultural and geographic pivot, positioned between three key areas—Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. 21st century geopolitical thinkers such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington have written of Turkey’s unique position and how Ankara has the most choices of any other state in its weight class as it moves into the future. Does it look west and try to become part of Europe? Does it look south and try to lead and ally with other Sunni Muslim states? Or does it look east towards its Turkic breathren, recently freed from Russian imperial power?

Through the 1990s, it looked as if Turkey wanted to join with Europe and become a member state of the EU. The Middle East was an afterthought—Turkey has acted as a slight counterweight to Saudi Arabia, financing more moderate Turkish Cultural Centers in various parts of the globe. And in Central Asia, Turkey has financed the construction of mosques in the wake of the Soviet collapse, but otherwise has not been proactively involved in the culture or politics of the Turkic states to the east. Does Turkey’s position in Ankara signal a change? It will be interesting to see if this is just a temporary barrier to good relations, or a sign of things to come.

In today’s completely random note of trivia, it turns out that Scott Reiniger, a minor horror film actor best known for his role as the ill-fated police officer in the 1978 zombie cult film Dawn of the Dead (and who played a minor cameo role in the 2004 remake of the same name) is actually Afghan royalty!

Reiniger’s great, great, great grandfather, Josiah Harlan, was an American assisting several independent rulers of South Asia, and became the first American to set foot in Afghanistan on a punitive expedition against an Uzbek warlord. He set off with a completely modern army, and came into contact with Mohammad Reffee Beg, an ambitious prince of Ghor, located in the western part of today’s Afganistan. He and his retinue feasted for ten days with Harlan’s force, during which time they observed the remarkable discipline and organization of the modern army, while Harlan was amazed by the working feudal system and the gender equality.

At the end of Harlan’s visit, the two agreed that Harlan and his heirs would be the Prince of Ghor in perpetuity, in exchange for raising and training an army with the ultimate goal of solidifying and expanding Ghor’s power. (Harlan ended up leaving Afghanistan, enjoying a brief period of fame in the U.S., but then failed at several unique ventures and ended up working in San Francisco as a doctor, dying a forgotten man.)

Scott Reiniger is the current descendant of Harlan with claim to the title, but has stated that he considers the title a historical anecdote with no real world importance (and it seems unlikely that anyone in Kabul, or Ghor, would be ready to accept him as their sovereign). But it’s amusing that, while director George Romero is still the “King of Horror,” a star of one of his zombie films is the Prince of “Ghor.”

More and more people in the U.S. are becoming less and less shy regarding the possibilities of how the U.S. will act in Afghanistan:

U.S. mulling expanded covert war in Pakistan: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama and his national security advisers are considering expanding the covert U.S. war in Pakistan far beyond the tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Two high-level reports on Pakistan and Afghanistan that have been forwarded to the White House in recent weeks have called for broadening the target area to reach the Taliban and other insurgent groups to a major sanctuary in and around the city of Quetta, the newspaper said on its website, citing senior administration officials.

Missile strikes by Central Intelligence Agency-operated drones have until now been limited to the tribal areas, and never been extended into Baluchistan, a sprawling province under the authority of Pakistan’s central government, and which is next to parts of Afghanistan where recent fighting has been fiercest, the newspaper website said.

Some American officials say the missile strikes in the tribal areas have forced some leaders of the Taliban and al Qaeda to flee toward Quetta, making them more vulnerable, the Times said. Pakistan has complained that the missile strikes violate its sovereignty.

Many of Obama’s advisers are also urging him to sustain orders issued last summer by former President George W. Bush to continue Predator drone attacks against a wider range of targets in the tribal areas, and to conduct cross-border ground actions, using CIA and Special Operations commandos.

The Times said a spokesman for the National Security Council had declined to provide details, saying only “We’re still working hard to finalize the review on Afghanistan and Pakistan that the president requested.”

No other official would talk on the record on the issue, citing the administration’s deliberations and the politically volatile nature of strikes into Pakistan’s territory, the report said.

Color me shocked that Coming Anarchy’s favorite regional Chinese capital has a law firm going international, and into the wilds of Central Asia of all places.

Urumqi legal market evolving as cross-border trade flows

In preparation for the flourishing of cross-border trade, Xinjiang Gonglian, a law firm based in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, is now busy preparing for a branch office in Bishkek, the capital city of neighbouring Kyrgyzstan. The new office is expected to open in May 2009. Gonglian will be the first PRC law firm established in Kyrgyzstan.

In the past few years, the legal market has been growing rapidly in Urumqi, the most inland city in the world. By the end of 2008, Urumqi had more than 600 lawyers in 57 firms, a dramatic increase compared to the 1980s, when there were only 20 lawyers…

In 2008 alone, Xinjiang’s total import and export levels hit a historical high, exceeding US$22bn. Regarded as the bridgehead for trade ties with Central Asia, Xinjiang’s trade dominates the mid- and west-China regions, and ranks number 11 in trade among all China’s provinces.

The autonomous region borders eight countries – Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and trade ties have been established with more than 100 countries and regions. There are approximately 6,000 trading companies in Xinjiang, most of which are headquartered in Urumqi…

“International companies are starting to show their interest in Xinjiang, and many companies from Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea and the US hope to use Xinjiang as a springboard for entering central Asia,” said Zhang Jianwu. “But for us, as a local inland firm, we’ll try to use our geographic and language advantages to shine in the regional market, rather than trying to expand to south or east China where the legal market is more competitive.”

The past six months have made us think that the foreign policy action in 2009 will be seen along the Russia-Georgia border, in Gaza, or off the coast of Somalia. Yet it is Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan where we should see the biggest issues tackled and the biggest changes coming. Elections in Iran and Afghanistan are scheduled that could have a major impact on policy. Other events are already in motion that will make change inevitable. Here’s what we’re seeing.

IRAN
Obama has reached out to the former axis of evil with warm words about talking. For his part, hardline President Ahmadinejad has refused to deal with the US yet, and talked about the need for a US apology for past wrongs before there is any progress.

But now there is movement in Iran as we head into the June presidential election. Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s former reformist president, just announced he would stand as a candidate to try and deprive Ahmadinejad of a second term. Khatami, a 65-year-old reformist cleric, whose served two-terms from 1997 to 2005, retired from politics after he stepped down but saw no one step in to head the reformist faction. There is potential for real change, but any movement seems unlikely before the critical issue of who runs the country is decided. That means waiting another 5 months before anything happens—but expect changes after the election, on both the US and Iranian side.

AFGHANISTAN
Last February, when Joe Biden was a senator who had lost a primary run very badly, was visiting Afghanistan, he queried President Karzai in Afghanistan on the corruption, which Karzai brushed off and which led Biden to storm out of the room.

Today, Biden is the US vice president on a world tour speaking about how the new administration will run foreign policy, Obama has spoken of Karzai as unreliable and ineffective, Secretary of State Clinton said called Afghanistan a narco-state, and the Americans are bypassing Karzai to deal directly with the governors in the countryside. Karzai is unpopular at home, with polls suggesting that 85% of voters want to vote for “the other guy”—and there is an alection scheduled for August.

PAKISTAN
Pakistan is identified as the top priority for the new administration as a nuclear-armed country hurtling towards chaos, namely:

The security situation in Pakistan seems to deteriorate daily. Last week’s headlines, for instance, included: a bombing of a religious procession in the central town of Dera Ghazi Khan, which claimed at least 27 lives; government helicopter gunship attacks that killed 52 militants in the Khyber area of the tribal region; the kidnapping of a senior UN official by gunmen; and the beheading of a Polish engineer who was abducted five months ago. A videotape of the execution was released last night by his captors.

A year ago democracy was restored after eight years of military rule but many believe the government is in a state of paralysis, as an unwieldy coalition and a cabinet of about 70 ministers jockey for position – ever wary of the army, which has ruled Pakistan for most of its existence. Government decision-making is concentrated in the hands of President Asif Zardari, creating a log-jam, critics say.

But behind the new democratic government, the cause of the Taliban uprising and its backing is opaque. Some blame the Indian intelligence agency (RAW) while others accuse Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Agency ISI. Some even blame the CIA. And India wants questions answered also.

Our man is unstoppable! Kaplan writes in The Atlantic that he is very unimpressed with Pakistan’s new President, Asif Ali Zardari. Kaplan calls Zardari a “feudal lord” and describes him as a man whose main political achievement was that he “got Bhutto to marry him.” Touché!

Kaplan’s analysis:

If Zardari fails, the military might once again step in to fill the power vacuum—but in a manner different from previous military coups. In Pakistan’s muddled history, generals and politicians have taken turns in power, and both have failed. But the West would condemn another coup, and Baluch and Sindhi minorities—who see the military as a Punjabi conspiracy—would erupt in nationalist fury if the military seized power. What we might watch for in the months ahead are signs of a creeping, undeclared coup, in which Zardari and opposition leader Sharif engage in a soap opera of political machinations against each other, while the tribal areas and other parts of the country slip into partial anarchy. The military would quietly assert itself, filling the gap in governance. Military rule would prevail, in all but name. That scenario is what the former playboy Zardari threatens to unleash.

Turkmenistan has been making tremendous strides since the death of President “Turkmenbashy” Niyazov several years ago. For example, the country has reinstated the PhD degree, which was abolished in 1997. But some bad ideas remain, one of them being the “Golden Age Lake.”

As much a wasteland as California’s Death Valley, the 90 mile long Karashor Depression is a natural depression filled with black sand. Yet in 2000, Niyazov leaned against a spade and breached an earthen dam that started the flow of putrid water into the first segment of a canal intended to fill Karashor to its rim. Niyazov touted Golden Age Lake as a symbol of Turkmen revival.

The plan calls for two canals to bisect the country and funnel runoff from heavily irrigated cotton fields into Karashor. The $6 billion project is designed to drain swamps and combat the buildup of salt and other minerals that have degraded Turkmenistan’s arable land and eroded renowned archaeological monuments. Next month, Turkmen engineers will complete phase one, excavation of the two “collector” canals, each hundreds of kilometers long.

Of course, most experts—i.e. PhDs—are highly skeptical of the project and believe the putrid runoff will poison the land and turn the lake into an artificial Dead Sea. Some experts believe that runoff will be insufficient to fill the lake, as the drainage water will evaporate or seep into the desert through unlined feeder canals. And to prevent Golden Age Lake from running dry and to dilute tainted water, Turkmenistan might top it off with fresh water from a river on Uzbek border that Uzbeks rely for irrigation.

To the north of the Golden Age Lake you’ll see the arid Aral Sea, drained by decades of irrigation of Central Asia that had little net positive result. I don’t have an engineering degree and know nothing about the hard numbers behind environmental science, but the inner skeptic in me thinks this is yet another bad idea.

(Map and information from a recent article in “Science” magazine.)