Opinions - The Times Of Central Asia

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Regional Security

Opinion: Kazakhstan’s Demining Expertise Could Provide Boost to Afghanistan

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Afghanistan remains one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. During the first five months of 2026 alone, 175 people were killed or injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance, with children accounting for approximately 75% of the victims. Behind these figures lies a daily reality of fear: farmers cannot safely cultivate their fields, children cannot walk to school without risk, and road construction equipment cannot reach critical transport routes. In practice, this continues to hinder the development of the entire region. Mine-contaminated land prevents the recovery of agriculture, blocks the construction of roads, complicates the return of displaced populations, and significantly increases the cost of infrastructure projects. According to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, Afghanistan ranks among the world’s most heavily mined territories, alongside Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iraq, and Ukraine. A Barrier to Central and South Asian Integration For Kazakhstan and the other countries of Central Asia, this issue also carries strategic significance. Without stability in Afghanistan, the implementation of Eurasian transport projects and the expansion of trade links with South Asia become increasingly difficult. Globally, humanitarian demining is no longer viewed simply as a charitable activity. Today, it represents the starting point of any major infrastructure project. Railways cannot be laid, nor can high-voltage transmission lines be built, where the ground itself remains hostile to human activity. Virtually every prospective transport corridor connecting Central Asia with ports on the Indian Ocean passes through Afghan territory, including major projects such as the development of the Trans-Afghan Corridor and the CASA-1000 project electricity project. International experience demonstrates that humanitarian demining in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Azerbaijan created the conditions for economic recovery, the return of displaced populations, and the attraction of foreign investment. From Kazbat’s Experience to a New Humanitarian Mission Unlike most countries in the region, Kazakhstan possesses substantial practical experience in conducting mine-clearance operations. Between 2003 and 2008, Kazakhstan’s military engineering unit, Kazbat, participated in the international mission in Iraq, destroying approximately 4.5 million explosive devices. Initially, Kazakh sappers cleared residential neighborhoods and agricultural land of unexploded ordnance. Later, they expanded their operations to locating and destroying underground and above-ground weapons depots abandoned after the conflict. These operations prevented millions of rounds of ammunition from falling into the hands of terrorist organizations. The mission came at a cost. In January 2005, 29-year-old Captain Kairat Kudabayev was killed when munitions detonated during preparations for disposal, while several other Kazakh servicemen were injured. Kazakh specialists also supplied local communities with purified drinking water and provided medical assistance, demonstrating a comprehensive approach to post-conflict recovery. More than 5,000 Iraqi civilians received medical treatment, while approximately 7,000 cubic meters of drinking water were purified. The expertise Kazakhstan accumulated could now evolve into a civilian-focused mission centered on protecting civilian populations and supporting Afghanistan’s long-term economic recovery. How a New Regional Platform Could Operate Kazakhstan’s international development agency, KazAID, could serve as the national...

Census

Opinion: Uzbekistan Census – When the Village Reappears in the City

Uzbekistan's first census in 37 years did more than revise the country's population upward. It changed the map of where pressure is accumulating. The preliminary results put the population at 39,047,321 – 810,617 above the official estimate. That alone resets a planning baseline. Schools, clinics, housing, labor forecasts, and regional budgets all depend on knowing how many people a state is governing. The deeper story lies in the distribution. The largest correction was in Tashkent Region. Its population had been estimated at roughly 3.2 million. The census put it at nearly 3.8 million, moving it from seventh to third among Uzbekistan's regions. Five regions, Namangan, Jizzakh, Kashkadarya, Surkhandarya, and Bukhara, came in below estimate. This suggests that demographic pressure is more concentrated in and around Tashkent than the planning baseline assumed. The central question is now absorption: whether the state can integrate people whom a narrowing rural economy, growing water stress, tighter access to Russia's labor market, and rising expectations are all pushing toward its cities. The Arithmetic of Absorption More than 600,000 young people enter Uzbekistan's job market each year. The administration has said that by 2030, the annual figure will reach one million. Official unemployment fell to 4.9% in the third quarter of 2025, but 760,000 people were nevertheless registered as job seekers. Moreover the International Labour Organization estimates that informal employment accounts for about 40% of the workforce. Those figures complicate the headline rate. Much of the intake is still not finding stable, formal, better-paid work. This is the arithmetic driving everything else. The gap between the number entering the labor market and the number the formal economy can absorb has not disappeared, rather it has relocated. Some of this pressure has moved abroad, while the rest remains in villages as underemployment or has shifted to regional towns. But the census shows that much of it is shifting toward Tashkent and the region around it, where jobs, construction sites, universities, and expectations are concentrated. This does not mean every young person is leaving the countryside, or that rural life is collapsing. Uzbekistan's village economy remains large and socially central. Yet it can no longer absorb pressure as it once did, while older outlets are narrowing. How Water Multiplies the Pressure Water stress is one force among several. People leave when rural livelihoods become less secure, farm income less reliable, and the city starts to look like the only route into cash, education, and mobility. The rural economy was already changing before the latest water shocks. Agriculture, forestry, and fisheries accounted for 17.3% of GDP in 2025, down from 18.5% a year earlier. That is not necessarily a sign of failure. It is part of economic transformation. The problem begins when the transition outpaces the state's capacity to absorb people who lose their foothold in the old economy. Water rarely drives rural migration by itself. It erodes the remaining foothold of those still holding on. In vulnerable agricultural regions, especially along the Amu Darya, shortages sharpen an already...

Silk Road

Karakabak Silk Road Finds Reveal Ancient Trade Links

In 568, the Sogdian diplomat Maniakh led an embassy from the Turkic Khagan Istemi to the court of Byzantine Emperor Justin II. The mission sought to negotiate direct silk trade with the Byzantines and an alliance against Sasanian Iran, which controlled the principal overland routes between Central Asia and Byzantium. Historians have traditionally associated this diplomatic mission with the development of direct commercial and diplomatic links along the northern routes of the Silk Road. However, archaeological research conducted over the past decade in Mangystau, western Kazakhstan, has opened new perspectives on the study of ancient trade networks and offers a fresh interpretation of this long-held assumption. One of the most significant recent discoveries is the ancient settlement of Karakabak, located on the shore of Kochak Bay along the northeastern coast of the Caspian Sea. Preliminary evidence suggests that the settlement existed from the first century CE until the middle of the sixth century. The settlement likely emerged alongside the development of local mineral resources, including the extraction and processing of copper, iron, lead, and bitumen. Craftsmen at Karakabak produced jewelry, ceremonial and everyday belt fittings, clothing, weapons, horse harnesses, and saddles. Silver, gold, garnets, amber, lapis lazuli, carnelian, red coral, and pearls were imported for jewelry making and processed at the site. [caption id="attachment_51864" align="aligncenter" width="602"] Image: Andrey Astafyev[/caption] The settlement also produced a wide range of ceramic vessels, some of which were distributed well beyond the region. Glass beads and cullet were imported from across the Caspian Sea to support local glassworking. This provides compelling evidence that Karakabak was integrated into international economic networks during antiquity. Glass found at the site included material originating in both the Roman Empire and Iran. Taken together, the archaeological evidence allows Karakabak to be interpreted as a major manufacturing and processing center that participated in extensive interregional exchange networks serving the nomadic world. Archaeologists have recovered a substantial collection of more than 150 coins dating from the first century through the first half of the sixth century CE. The collection includes coins from Parthia, Ancient Khorezm, Bukhara Sogdiana, Sasanian Iran, the Kushano-Sasanian Kingdom, the Byzantine Empire, and China. [caption id="attachment_51866" align="aligncenter" width="1379"] Image: Andrey Astafyev[/caption] Research has established that Karakabak maintained commercial ties with the Zhetyasar culture in the lower Syr Darya region of present-day Kyzylorda Region, the Kerder culture in the Amu Darya delta, Sasanian Iran, Caucasian Albania, the North Caucasus, the Azov region, the Lower and Middle Volga, and the Southern Urals. This demonstrates the settlement’s high commercial and economic status. In terms of its role within international trade networks, Karakabak may be compared to the modern Port of Aktau on the Caspian Sea. The discovery of an entire enclave-type archaeological complex centered on Karakabak represents a unique archaeological phenomenon in southwestern Kazakhstan. It also requires a reassessment of the site’s place and role within the transport infrastructure of the Great Silk Road. Evidence of economic ties with the Zhetyasar culture, together with the discovery of Parthian coins, suggests that alongside...

Religion

Opinion: Christian Missions in Central Asia: Religious Freedom and Social Tensions

Central Asia has long been a crossroads of civilizations, cultures, and religions. For more than two millennia, the region has connected East and West, with Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and indigenous belief systems coexisting, interacting, and, at times, competing. Christianity flourished here centuries ago through Nestorian and other Eastern Christian communities, while Russian Orthodoxy endured throughout the Soviet period. Under Soviet rule, religion was heavily suppressed, yet Christianity survived among Russians, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and other communities that had been deported or resettled across the region. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, decades of official atheism gave way to a religious revival, creating space for a new wave of missionary activity. The principles of Christian missionary work are similar across denominations, with preaching, charity, education, medical assistance, and moral renewal at their core. In practice, however, missionary efforts in the newly independent Central Asian states evolved far beyond religious services. Amid the economic hardship that followed the collapse of the Soviet system, many churches combined evangelism with humanitarian assistance, language courses, youth programs, computer training, sports clubs, and cultural activities. These initiatives proved particularly attractive to young people, students, socially vulnerable groups, and urban residents seeking new educational and social opportunities. Among the five Central Asian republics, Kazakhstan emerged as one of the most favorable environments for Christian missions. During the 1990s, its relatively liberal religious climate, large urban centers, multiethnic society, sizeable Korean diaspora, Russian-speaking environment, and comparatively open legal framework enabled numerous foreign churches to establish seminaries, schools, charitable foundations, and places of worship. South Korean Protestant organizations became especially active. Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal churches initially found a natural base within the Koryo-saram community, but their activities gradually expanded well beyond ethnic Koreans. It is at this point that a more sensitive issue emerges. Missionary churches generally regard religious conversion as a legitimate expression of freedom of conscience. Many Muslim families, however, particularly in rural and traditionally conservative communities, view the conversion of their children as a rupture with family heritage, ancestral traditions, and communal identity. Across much of Central Asia, religion is not merely a matter of personal belief. It is closely intertwined with kinship, ethnic identity, marriage, burial customs, and family authority. As a result, active proselytizing among indigenous youth can provoke strong opposition from relatives and local Muslim communities. The issue reflects the interaction between missionary strategies and social pressures such as limited interfaith dialogue, economic hardship, youth vulnerability, foreign funding, government suspicion, and concerns over cultural continuity. When religious conversion becomes associated with financial assistance, educational opportunities, foreign sponsorship, or improved social mobility, critics may portray it as an attempt to “buy souls,” even when churches describe such activities as humanitarian or charitable work. One of the most serious examples occurred in Tajikistan on October 1, 2000, when bombs exploded during a Sunday service at Sonmin Grace Church, a Korean Protestant church in Dushanbe associated with South Korean missionaries. The congregation had attracted local converts. Several people were killed and dozens...

Political Memory

Opinion: The Specter Is Back – A Kazakh Warning to America

I was educated and began my career under Soviet communism in Kazakhstan. For many Americans, communism may sound like a policy argument. For us, it is also family memory — famine, confiscation, repression, camps and fear, all justified in the language of equality and justice. When communism returns to the American political debate, people from Kazakhstan listen carefully. “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism.” That is how The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels began in 1848. Nearly two centuries later, the specter has not disappeared. It has changed its vocabulary, its political costumes and its geography. But the old temptation remains. It promises justice by concentrating power. In late June, U.S. President Donald Trump warned that communism was the greatest threat to the United States, greater, he said, than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or September 11. His language was characteristically blunt. Critics were right to say that democratic socialism is not the same thing as Soviet communism, and that the word “communist” should not be used carelessly in ordinary partisan debate. Still, the historical concern behind the warning should not be dismissed. Not every welfare program is communism. Not every democratic socialist is a Bolshevik. Every modern state helps its citizens in some form. The real question is when help becomes control. When does compassion become coercion? When does the state begin claiming the right to decide prices, property, production, speech and moral legitimacy in the name of “the people”? People who lived under communism know the danger. Why a Kazakh Voice Belongs in This Debate For an outside observer, it may seem strange that socialism and communism are again being debated in the United States, the stronghold of advanced capitalism, as Soviet theorists once described it. Yet the explanation is not mysterious. Congressional elections are approaching. Recent primary victories by candidates who identify with democratic socialism have brought these questions back into mainstream American politics. Of course, this does not mean the United States is on the eve of a Bolshevik revolution. America has elections, courts, private property, constitutional limits, and a free press. The Soviet Union had none of these in any meaningful sense. That distinction should be kept clear. But the first words of any political movement should be taken seriously. The early promises are usually humane. They speak of fairness, dignity, affordability, workers, tenants, food, and peace. Only later does society discover how much power must be handed to the state to make those promises real. The Democratic Socialists of America describes itself as the largest socialist organization in the United States and says working people should run “both the economy and society democratically” to meet human needs rather than profits. To many Americans, that may sound compassionate. To those of us trained in Marxist-Leninist doctrine, it also sounds familiar. I am not a political scientist or a specialist in party-building. I am simply a person who, because of my age, studied under the communists and...

Labor Migration

Opinion: Russia’s Migration Crackdown Tests Central Asia’s Labor Alternatives

Russia is no longer the unquestioned labor destination it once was for Central Asian workers. That shift is real, but it is easy to overstate. The Times of Central Asia recently reported that labor migration from the region is becoming more diverse. Workers are looking not only to Russia, but also to South Korea, the Gulf states, the United Kingdom, Poland, Belarus, and other destinations. The old Russia-centered model is weakening, even if it has not collapsed. The question is scale. It now intersects with two other filters: legal status and banking access. Alternative labor markets can absorb some Central Asian workers, but they cannot yet replace the Russian labor outlet. Russia did not function as an ordinary destination. For years, it acted as the region's largest external labor valve: geographically close, linguistically familiar, legally accessible for some, and large enough to absorb millions of workers across construction, services, logistics, agriculture, and municipal labor. South Korea, the UK, Poland, and the Gulf can offer higher wages and more formal recruitment channels. They can also reduce overdependence on Moscow. But they are more selective, more bureaucratic, and much smaller in immediate absorption capacity. That leaves a more important question: can new destinations expand fast enough to offset a narrowing Russian market? For now, the answer is probably no. Diversification Is Real, but Not Replacement The difference between diversification and replacement is crucial. A worker from Kyrgyzstan leaving for seasonal work in the UK, or a worker from Uzbekistan entering an organized recruitment program in South Korea, represents a genuine shift. These routes can be safer, better paid, and less exposed to the social hostility now facing many Central Asian migrants in Russia. But they cannot absorb workers on the same scale. Russia's labor market absorbed Central Asian workers in very large numbers because it had a combination few other destinations can match: proximity, low entry costs, dense migrant networks, Russian-language familiarity, and long-standing informal labor channels. Even as those channels become more restrictive, they remain embedded in household economies across the region. This is why diversification should be read as a partial adaptation, not a full exit. For governments in Tashkent, Bishkek, and Dushanbe, the search for new labor markets is necessary. It reduces exposure to Russian policy shocks. It gives workers more choices. It also helps governments negotiate better legal recruitment schemes. Yet the structural problem remains. If Russia closes the door faster than alternatives can open, pressure does not disappear. It returns home through unemployment, lower remittances, and frustrated expectations. The EAEU Line Russia's migration crackdown does not affect Central Asia evenly. The most important dividing line is not geography. It is legal status. Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which allows the free movement of labor among member states. In practical terms, citizens of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have a different legal status in Russia than citizens of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They do not face the same work-permit and labor-patent system. That does not...