Welcome to this podcast from the International Crisis Group. What does that mean? It means that in most of these countries the level of functional government is at an absolute minimum. In most cases, this is because of corruption, which has made the regime incompetent, inefficient, unwilling to share resources with its population, with a result that somewhere like Tajikistan, for example, people are basically subsisting with very little assistance from a government which nonetheless lives itself extremely well.
So describe what the social services are. What does exist? What is the infrastructure? Take electricity in Tajikistan. Electricity, heating and light in the winter goes down to one hour, half an hour a day in villages and smaller towns. Education, health systems are essentially viewed as being near total collapse. Teachers will leave schools early in the school year to go to Russia to work as migrant laborers, in some cases, because they cannot make due on their own salaries. Most people who are employed are not living in Tajikistan.
They are doing very menial, low-paid work in Russia, which for them is an immense improvement of anything they can get in their own country. What does this vacuum of any sort of governmental services mean for these countries?
Where are they headed? But they have reached the point that they have very little resilience left. We are not just talking about weak social structures, we are talking about weak control of the countryside by a central government in Tajikistan, for example, or Kyrgyzstan. In both places, we are seeing hunks of the country no longer really paying attention to the central government.
We are seeing regimes that have very few security forces who could be used to protect the country in the event of any external challenges. What security forces they have there are usually kept on hand in case popular unrest needs to be handled. Tell me a little bit about the forces that you are seeing cropping up in the countryside. Who are they and what do they want?
