Q&A with Dilip Hiro, author of INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA, in Harper's Magazine

Dilip Hiro, author of Inside Central Asia, is interviewed by Scott Horton in Harper's Magazine:

"With unrest and another revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian region is back in the news. I put six questions to Dilip Hiro, one of the region’s most prominent observers, on the basis of his recent book Inside Central Asia.

1. Your discussion of Central Asia includes Turkey and Iran, whose historical importance to the region can’t be questioned, and who continue to play significant roles that you describe—but you omit discussion of Afghanistan, even though its centrality to current Central Asian politics is apparent from every morning newspaper. Explain your call.

Dilip Hiro: My answer lies in examining the list of the 68 countries attending the international conference on Afghanistan hosted by Britain in London on January 28. Of the three Central Asian republics present—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—only Tajikistan has a common border with Afghanistan. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the remaining two immediate Central Asian neighbors of Afghanistan, were absent. Their absence was all the more striking when juxtaposed with the presence of such countries as Cyprus, Slovenia, and Switzerland: they are not members of NATO and have no or little contact with or interest in Afghanistan.

So it is hard to agree with the statement about Afghanistan’s centrality to current Central Asian politics being highlighted in the Western press. What comes through in the Western media, though, is the inextricable linkage between Afghanistan and Pakistan; and rightly so.

Nonetheless I have described at length the impact that the events in Afghanistan have had on Central Asian republics, starting with the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. I have also dealt in detail with the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in September 1996 and how the independent Central Asian states and Russia reacted.

Overall, the recent history of Afghanistan is incorporated into the general narrative of Central Asia, with emphasis on its impact on Afghanistan’s immediate Central Asian neighbors, particularly Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. By the way, this is also the case with Russia: its relationship with the Central Asian republics is a common thread in the chapters dealing with individual regional states."

To read the entire interview, click here.

Inside Central Asia is also reviewed in the March/April issue of International Affairs: "Few people know Central Asia better than Dilip Hiro does… Inside Central Asia is a major contribution to the study of post-Soviet Central Asia, interesting for both specialized and non-specialized readers for its solid analytical framework, the author’s engaging style and the remarkable amount of information provided in the volume.” - Luca Anceschi

Dilip Hiro, author of INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA, on the Current Crisis in Kyrgyzstan

Dilip Hiro, author of Inside Central Asia, provides some insight on the current crisis in Kyrgyzstan in The Guardian: "The return of Viktor Yanukovich as the duly elected president of Ukraine in February seemed to mark a reversal of the colour revolutions that started with Georgia's rose revolution in November 2003 and ended with Kyrgyzstan's tulip revolution in March 2005. Following a rigged election, Yanukovich was deposed by peaceful demonstrations in Kiev in the country's orange revolution in December 2004.

After the successful tulip revolution in the mountainous central Asia republic of Kyrgyzstan, which resulted in the flight of President Askar Akayev, the opposition leader, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, promised to curtail presidential powers and eradicate corruption and nepotism. He won 89% of the ballots in an election with a voter turnout of 53%, a refreshingly true figure.

But once in office Bakiyev reneged. The long-running tug-of-war between the parliament and president on the division of power resumed. By introducing a new electoral law and founding his own party, Ak Zhol (bright path), he gained control of the legislature in the 2007 parliamentary poll. Despite his enhanced powers, Bakiyev failed to tackle the rise of the black economy, persistent corruption, and the general weakness of the economy. It was estimated that as much as 52% of the Kyrgyz economy was black or related to smuggling. Another problem was the growing influence of organised crime related mainly to the smuggling of drugs from Afghanistan via Tajikistan on their way to Russia and beyond.

Having failed to learn a lesson from the past, Bakiyev and his close aides resorted to fraud in the presidential poll in July 2009. Protesting against widespread malpractice on polling day, the leading opposition challenger, Almazbek Atambayev, withdrew his candidacy. This dashed any lingering prospect that this small republic of 5 million people would turn into a beacon of democracy in central Asia.

Armed with a fresh mandate, Bakiyev intensified his persecution of opposition leaders and independent journalists with a series of arrests and physical assaults by government agents, who authorities described as "criminals" but failed to apprehend. The long-simmering popular disaffection began crystallising around the steep rise in fuel and water and gas charges that the Bakiyev government decreed. This provided a platform on which the fractious opposition groups could unite. They did. The condemnation of Bakiyev's curtailing of democratic rights by the visiting United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, on 3 April led to the united opposition to name 7 April as the day of national protest.

To the surprise of opposition figures and the authorities, the protest escalated into a national uprising, with demonstrators occupying official buildings and state-run TV stations all over the country, including the capital, Bishkek. The bloody reprisals by the security forces left between 40 and 100 people dead. Bakiyev took off in his presidential plane to an unknown destination.

Roza Utunbayeva, the opposition heavyweight, claimed that the government had fallen and that the interim authority she planned to lead would draft a new constitution and call a fresh presidential election. Other reports said that opposition leaders were to meet the prime minister, Daniyar Usenov, to resolve the crisis. However, Bakiyev's fate is sealed. He is set to follow Akayev into exile, signalling the beginning of the tulip revolution, mark II."

Dilip Hiro's INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA Reviewed in International Affairs

Dilip Hiro's Inside Central Asia is reviewed in the March issue of International Affairs: "Few people know Central Asia better than Dilip Hiro does. His Between Marx and Muhammad: The Changing Face of Central Asia represented one of the most accurate analyses of the region published in the early post-Soviet era and, at the beginning of 2010, remains an important source for scholars and the wider public interested in Central Asian affairs. In his new work, Inside Central Asia, Hiro widens his focus and his objectives become more ambitious. The specialized reader would be impressed by Hiro’s ability to enrich his account with hard-to-find elements….. In conclusion, Inside Central Asia is a major contribution to the study of post-Soviet Central Asia, interesting for both specialized and non-specialized readers for its solid analytical framework, the author’s engaging style and the remarkable amount of information provided in the volume."

Dilip Hiro's INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA Named One of the Best Books of the Year by Financial Times

Inside Central Asia, Dilip Hiro's sweeping survey of the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, has been selected by the Financial Times as one of the Best Books of 2009: ""For those who still get their “-stans” mixed up, Hiro’s book provides a detailed and nuanced overview of the region of central Asia. He explains the ethnic tensions, religious intolerance and struggle for political identity in the lands caught between two behemoths – the splintered Soviet empire and the rising Chinese one."

Dilip Hiro's INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA Reviewed in Financial Times

David Pilling of the Financial Times surveys a crop of new books on Asia and calls Dilip Hiro's Inside Central Asia "a detailed and nuanced overview. The book is thorough and diligent, but the country chapters – as opposed to the thematic introduction and conclusion – plod chronologically. Still, it is the most comprehensive of the four and most deliberately brings out themes of ethnic tensions, religious intolerance and struggle for political identity. For many, these lands at the crossroads of the Eurasian continent, between the splintered Soviet empire and the rising Chinese one, remain a mystery. These books, Hiro’s particularly, help put that right. They reveal what we should have already known: that the grand themes and tragedies of the lands Marco Polo explored and Genghis Khan conquered so long ago are mirror images of our own."

Dilip Hiro's INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA Reviewed in The Economist

Dilip Hiro's Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran is reviewed in the current issue of The Economist: "The Central Asian “stans”, as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are known by the Western diplomats and oilmen who frequent them, conjure images of megalomaniac rulers, exotic nomads and mineral riches beyond compare. There is some truth in the caricature, as Dilip Hiro makes clear in this new study (which also includes sections on Turkey and Iran), but it is not the whole truth. In addition there is the overwhelming influence of foreign ideologies—Islamism, socialism and, most recently, capitalism—and their promoters. The heirs to Genghis Khan they may be, but ever since the decline of the silk route in the 16th century, the five nations that lie in a vast swathe between China and the Caspian have been at the receiving end of foreign trouble. And it is Russia’s shadow that has fallen longest, and most balefully.

Central Asia was subjugated over the 18th and 19th centuries: it furnished tsarist Lebensraum, cotton and a buffer against the British. After the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin urged the “Muslim toilers” of the east to “organise your national life freely and without hindrance.” But things turned out differently. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, and the five republics, themselves Soviet inventions, achieved independence, they had been shaped by Communist planning and Russian assaults on their local cultures (mostly a hybrid of Islam and steppe shamanism).
When former Communists took control of the newly independent republics, they found themselves grappling with existential crises. One Uzbek teacher told Mr Hiro that her colleagues had grown up “citing Lenin every five minutes. Now they have lost the very centre of their thinking. They don’t know how to fill that big hole.”

The story of this endeavour is the subject of Mr. Hiro’s book. The favoured political model, authoritarian state capitalism, has not worked and the efforts of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to exploit hydrocarbons have been slowed by corruption. Islam Karimov, the veteran leader of Uzbekistan, the most populous of the five, has kept his country secular and relatively stable at the cost of shocking human-rights violations. The attacks on America in September 2001 were timely for the region’s strongmen. Uzbekistan provided airbases and help in extraordinary renditions, in return for which America turned a blind eye to atrocities and increased its military and economic aid. This, too, was the pattern in other republics which also have land borders with Afghanistan. Since then, however, some of the stans have been wooed back into Russia’s embrace.

For a region that came to nationalism relatively late—until recently, millions of Central Asians defined themselves primarily as Muslims—ethnic conflict has been widespread. One reason is the proliferation of manufactured nationalisms. From Tajikistan’s President Imomali Rakhmonov, with his celebration of Tajikistan’s Aryan, pre-Islamic past, to Uzbekistan’s adoption of Tamerlane as the nation’s founder (even though he was not an Uzbek), these efforts have proved divisive. In the case of Turkmenistan, the search became a consuming malaise. In 2000 its late president, Saparmurat Niyazov, who liked to call himself “Father of the Turkmens”, changed the names of the months, calling April after his mother. He also replaced cinemas with puppet theatres, which apparently are more authentically Turkmen. Niyazov attached such importance to his own epic account of the Turkmen nation that questions on the text appeared in the national driving test. Readers acquainted with Mr. Hiro’s prolific writing about Asia and the Islamic world will be unsurprised to learn that “Inside Central Asia” is a conscientious guide to the region, full of dependable history-telling and analysis."

Foreign Policy Magazine on Dilip Hiro's INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA

Elina Galperin of Foreign Policy offers a critique of Dilip Hiro's Inside Central Asia: "Hiro succeeds in presenting colorful anecdotes along with facts and how historical contingencies have created the present. Central Asia is simply one of the most fascinating places in the world, and even as an academic, I learned many little details that academic historians typically excise in order to appear more serious . . . He is sympathetic towards the region's people, who have lost so much in the 20th century, and yet he paints a fair portrait of the gains as well . . . The chapters devoted to current politics are strong. He is detailed and deftly illustrates his points with his personal experiences.”

Dilip Hiro's INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA in N+1

Isaac Scarborough takes a long look at Dilip Hiro's Inside Central Asia in the current issue of N+1: "Hiro’s account provides a fast-moving and well-sourced genealogy of the Central Asian republics’ political and economic trajectories, focusing on the post-Stalinist period up to the present day. It is unlikely that more comprehensive analysis of this period in Central Asia has been written, and it serves as a valuable update to Hiro’s earlier Between Marx and Muhammad: the Changing Face of Central Asia). It quickly becomes clear moreover, that much as in his previous work, Hiro rejects the supposed choice between the Turkish and Iranian models—especially given the ascendancy of the openly Islamic, if not Islamist, Justice and Development Party in Turkey and the elevation of Abdullah Gul to the presidency, which, Hiro says, broke “the secular establishment’s eighty-four year grip on power.” If there is a choice facing Central Asia, it may be which of two histories to return to: pre-Soviet Islam or the authoritarianism bequeathed to the republics by the Soviets, and under which they lived for the greater part of a century."

Dilip Hiro's INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA in Literary Review

Jason Burke takes a long look at Dilip Hiro’s Inside Central Asia in the August issue of Literary Review: “Hiro is a prolific author and sometimes disappoints readers by deploying his obvious powers of analysis sparingly. Happily his fine latest work, Inside Central Asia, is littered with perceptive points. . . .This is a useful, well-researched, detailed and intelligent book.” Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran is available in bookstores everywhere.

More Praise for Dilip Hiro's INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA

Author and historian Dilip Hiro's new book, Inside Central Asia, offers an invaluable overview of some of the most interesting, and misunderstood, countries in the world: Uzbekistan, Turkemenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkey, and Iran.

Dow Jones Newswire notes: "The nations of Central Asia are often referred to as "the Stans," a shorthand term that implies obscurity and exoticism at the same time. The region falls through the cracks between the Middle East, Russia and South Asia; there are few well-known"Central Asian studies" programs in Western and Asian universities; and "Kazakh" and "Uzbek" are words that sound more like punchlines than actual languages and cultures with long, fascinating histories. When a newsworthy event from the region happens, experts hurry to the cable-news networks, and then the region sinks back into oblivion. Dilip Hiro's new book is an attempt to remedy that situation. An update to his 1995 volume Between Marx and Muhammad, Mr. Hiro's Inside Central Asia chronicles the 20th-century history of the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, and brackets them with chapters on Turkey and Iran for context. A newcomer to Central Asia will find Mr. Hiro's book an approachable introduction that is free of both academic jargon and cultural stereotypes. . Mr. Hiro provides good coverage to all the issues, as well as to the political history of the period just before the breakup of the Soviet Union, which is crucial for understanding how the region ended up the way it did."