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JAPAN: Making Overtures in Central Asia

John Feffer

WASHINGTON, May 2 2007 (IPS) - Japan was slow to realise the strategic importance of Central Asia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it took Tokyo three years to open embassies in the region. Several more years passed before prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto inaugurated a new “Silk Road” diplomacy.

Today, however, Japan has engaged all five countries of Central Asia both bilaterally and multilaterally. Former Japanese ambassador to Uzbekistan Akio Kawato, speaking at a seminar sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, late April, argued that Tokyo now occupies a critical balancing role in the region. To demonstrate that they are not too dependent on either Washington or Moscow, the countries of Central Asia have turned to Tokyo. “Our influence is not so small,” Kawato said, “and our international status is not so low.”

Japan’s focus on the region received an upgrade in 2004 when Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi visited Central Asia and declared that Japan was committed to helping the region become “much greater than the sum of its members.” The then Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi followed up in 2006 with visits to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

“Koizumi’s visit was greeted with a certain degree of scepticism, if not outright opposition, in some quarters outside of Central Asia,” remarked C. Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, the event’s co-sponsor. “It struck me at the time that this was an inappropriate reaction. There has been no country that has been more generous in providing humanitarian assistance to Central Asia. More recently, Japan has organised a consultative group involving all the countries of the region called Japan plus Central Asia.”

“We are living at a time when almost everyone seems to be interested in Central Asia,” concurred Evan Feigenbaum, deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs. Japan, he continued, has a full complement of interests in the region: strategic, political, commercial, financial, and humanitarian.

Japan’s economic assistance to the region falls into two categories: roughly 2 billion dollars in long-term loans and 600 million dollars in grants. With this assistance, Kawato explained, Japan has helped build 60 vocational schools in Uzbekistan, modernised railways and airports, and constructed roads and optical fibre lines.

The funds from Japan to Central Asia do not always flow smoothly however. “When I was ambassador in Uzbekistan,” Kawato recalled, “I worked hard to realise a project to construct a railway. But it took two years before we could sign the agreement. There were four or five delegations and missions for research into feasibility. The Uzbek government was forced to provide information on how many passengers the railroad would handle 20 years later, how many goods would pass on the line 30 years later. It was all a fiction.”

Kawato attributed these delays to criticisms of Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) for wasting money. “The majority of Japanese non-profit organisations want to get as much ODA as possible,” he maintained, “so they criticise the official use in order to get more ODA for themselves.”

Japanese businesses have also been slow to become involved in the region. There is some limited Japanese investment in Kazakh oil fields, but “the transportation cost is very large,” Kawato said, “and Japanese companies complain that they don’t see much transparency on the Kazakh side.”

A major potential for increased commercial ties is in Kazakh uranium. However, Kawato noted, the uranium needs to be processed and enriched before being imported to Japan. “Usually this processing is done in Russia,” he continued. “That is why we are going to conclude a cooperation agreement in the nuclear field with Russia by the end of the year.”

Kawato identified several key principles guiding Japan’s relations with Central Asia. This approach is characterised by “open coordination,” which he contrasted with the “rather closed” Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Japan also respects the diversity of the region, the differences among the five countries.

And Japan supports human rights and democratisation. “We strongly criticised the vested interests that hamper reforms in Central Asia,” he noted. “The countries in Central Asia are rooted in thousands of years of tradition. But it is important to distinguish between what is rooted in tradition and what is a vested interest handed down from the past.”

At the same, Kawato urged caution on the human rights issue: “If you get too hasty in achieving human rights in Central Asian countries it might work against your political interest.”

“Uzbekistan has had 16 years of independence. I don’t know how much more time these officials would give the Uzbek government to stop silencing any kind of dissent, to stop suppressing freedom of speech, to stop mowing down hundreds of unarmed citizens as they did in Andijan in May 2005,” countered Veronika Szente Goldston, advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia for Human Rights Watch. “This is just a convenient excuse to justify inaction. We are not calling for the creation of an idyllic democracy in Uzbekistan. We are calling for short-term, very achievable benchmarks, such as releasing 15 imprisoned human rights defenders and allowing human rights monitors. This would not require another 16 years for the Uzbek government to fulfill.”

Kawato located the difficulties of democratisation in the political culture in Central Asia. “The people in Central Asia have become accustomed to authoritarian practices over hundreds of years,” he said. “If you’re not authoritarian enough, you will be taken as a weak leader and you won’t be respected. You cannot easily change the national mentality.” Goldston of Human Rights Watch disagreed: “This kind of approach does a disservice to the people of Uzbek who are suffering extreme repression from their government.”

Looking toward the future Kawato recommended greater cooperation among the five Central Asian countries. “Despite all the mutual jealousies, we hope that they will form a kind of loose regional entity,” he said. “Each country is too small to be regarded as a sizable market. A loose consolidation is the only way to promote and preserve independence and economic prosperity.” Kawato looked to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe as a model that could confirm territorial borders, reinforce the status quo, and assure the countries of the region that the big powers were no longer interested in playing a “great game” in the region.

But most important, Kawato concluded, was respect. “I sometimes have observed a kind of negligence and ignorance and even contempt from Westerners toward Central Asian countries,” he said. “But these countries are even older than we are. They are one of the origins of our civilisations. We should have more respect for them as independent entities.”