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A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

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chapter twenty<br />

Independent Central Asian Republics<br />

We have chronicled the rush to independence that in the final stage of<br />

Gorbachev’s perestroika seized all the Union republics, a torrent that ultimately<br />

carried the five Central Asian republics along.The dam really<br />

burst with the collapse of the attempted coup against the reforms and<br />

their proponent, but there had been two daring trailblazers: Lithuania<br />

on 11 March 1990, and Georgia on 9 April of that year.The rest took<br />

the plunge only after the August 1991 coup: Estonia and Latvia on the<br />

20th (thus still while the drama was being played out in Moscow),<br />

Armenia on the 23rd, Ukraine and Belarus on the 24th, Moldova on the<br />

27th, Azerbaijan on the 30th.The Central Asians were the last to jump<br />

on the bandwagon.<br />

Thus on 31 August the Uzbek parliament proclaimed the existence of<br />

an independent Republic of Uzbekistan; the declaration was submitted<br />

to a popular vote which confirmed it in December of the same year, and<br />

which also elected Islam Karimov as the republic’s president.Similar<br />

steps were taken in the other four republics.Meanwhile, those former<br />

Soviet public figures who had survived the upheavals, or who had surged<br />

forward to seize the leadership from the “old guard,” succeeded in<br />

forging a special sequel to the USSR, the CIS (Commonwealth of<br />

Independent States, Soyuz Nezavisimykh Gosudarstv in Russian, Mustaqil<br />

Davlatlar Hamdostligi in Uzbek).Representatives of the participating<br />

members met on 21 December 1991 in the Kazakh capital Almaty to<br />

sign a treaty establishing the commonwealth.<br />

The new commonwealth resembles the former Soviet Union no more<br />

than the British Commonwealth of Nations did the former British<br />

empire or the Union Française did the French one.This time the<br />

member states became truly independent, and their membership in the<br />

commonwealth resulted from a decision made by the indigenous leaders<br />

in Central Asia, not the Russian ones in Moscow.The difference<br />

between the old and new order is fundamental, and derives from the fact<br />

275

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