Central Asia's Catapult to Independence

Few peoples of the world have ever been forced to become independent nations. Yet that is precisely what happened to the five Central Asian republics after Russia, Belarus and Ukraine—the three original signatories of the U.S.S.R.’s founding 1922 constitution—met in Minsk on December 8, 1991, and created a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

That action by the three Slavic presidents left Central Asian leaders with an unpleasant choice: they could go it alone—either singly or as a group—or they could shrug off the intended snub by their Slavic counterparts and agree to join the Commonwealth. After a hurried meeting in Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan’s capital, they chose the latter course. If independence had to occur, it was best achieved gradually; the new Commonwealth structures, they conceded, would make it easier to regulate their interdependent economies.

To salve the smart of their initial exclusion the first meeting of the expanded Commonwealth was held in the Kazakh capital of Alma?Ata; the original Slavs?only club was thus recast in a Eurasian mold. That December 21 meeting declared the former Soviet republics sovereign and independent, as well as part of an extragovernmental union. Each republic, for the first time, had full control of its own natural resources and local economic enterprises.

Newly independent nations face extraordinary challenges, even under the best circumstances, and they usually hold the leaders who "won" that independence in high regard. The Central Asian leaders, however, were inadvertent founding fathers. Most were once part of the old Soviet Union’s nomenklatura, which was in turn largely drawn from the region’s traditional ruling elites. These leaders were neither democrats nor dictators, nor nationalist heroes. Some were opportunists; most were sincere in the desire to secure their countries’ economic survival. All were aware of the highly vulnerable nature of their nations’ premature births, and each leader recognized the risk of his own ouster.