CIAO DATE: 02/2011
February 2011
Quietly but steadily Central Asia’s basic human and physical infrastructure – the roads, power plants, hospitals and schools and the last generation of Soviet-trained specialists who have kept this all running – is disappearing. The equipment is wearing out, the personnel retiring or dying. Post-independence regimes made little effort to maintain or replace either, and funds allocated for this purpose have largely been eaten up by corruption. This collapse has already sparked protests and contributed to the overthrow of a government. All countries in the region are to some degree affected, but the two poorest, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are already in dire straits. Their own specialists say that in the next few years, they will have no teachers for their children and no doctors to treat their sick. Power cuts in Tajikistan each winter – twelve hours a day in the countryside, if not more – are already a tradition. Power failures in Kyrgyzstan are becoming increasingly common. Experts in both countries are haunted by the increasingly likely prospect of catastrophic systemic collapse, especially in the energy sector. Barring a turnaround in policies, they face a future of decaying roads, schools and medical institutions staffed by pensioners, or a new generation of teachers, doctors or engineers whose qualifications were purchased rather than earned. These problems will be exacerbated by other deep political vulnerabilities in both countries – the gradual increase of an insurgency and an aging autocrat in Tajikistan, and a dangerously weakened Kyrgyz state.
Resource link: Central Asia: Decay and Decline [PDF] - 2.0M