Rubio’s Uzbekistan trip underlines Central Asia’s hunt for diverse partners

Can the United States reassert influence with pragmatic, transactional approach to Central Asia as C5+1 summit gets under way? Save Share United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio is arriving in Samarkand, the fabled Silk Road city in what is now central Uzbekistan, for talks with key regional ministers on Saturday. The C5+1 – Central Asia plus the US – summit to be held from Saturday to Tuesday heralds Washington’s new approach to the ex-Soviet region – pragmatic, purely transactional and devoid of speeches about democratisation and human rights. At the dawn of Central Asia’s independence, Americans used to show up in the mostly Muslim region strategically stretched between Russia, China and Iran, bearing gifts – and giving lectures. After the 1991 Soviet collapse, amid the region’s economic degradation, joblessness and poverty, US and European diplomats and businessmen were seen as ambassadors of the brave new world of capitalist prosperity. They wanted reforms – and not just the economic ones. Western diplomats made sure that former Communist apparatchiks-turned-new regional leaders understood that they’d get investments, technologies and international recognition only in exchange for abandoning the Soviet-era totalitarian ways of governing and building the economy. The West held forums and workshops on human rights, democracy and decentralisation of governance, and sent thousands of students and officials to Western schools. And the West accused regional leaders of losing their moral compass and threatened sanctions when they began to amend their nation’s constitutions to extend their presidential terms, appoint their family members and friends to key government jobs and help them create business empires that often competed with Western investors. “When the West began moralising, teaching them about democracy, human rights, they immediately turned towards China or Russia,” Galiya Ibragimova, Uzbekistan-born, Moldova-based regional expert, told Al Jazeera. Uzbekistan, the region’s most populous nation of 37 million, offers a perfect example. Its iron-fisted President Islam Karimov was the first ex-Soviet leader to allow a US military base on its soil in 2001. But four years later, he kicked it out after Washington lambasted hisbrutal suppressionof a popular revolt in the eastern city of Andijan that killed hundreds of unarmed civilians....