Ramadhan Ibn Wati

Seen by more than 20 million people, the new temple in Bukhara — a city with a population of nearly 110,000 — is well known to U.S. policymakers, diplomats, translators, and negotiators. Yet at an event in March 2005, five years after Russian forces took control of the area, the U.S. State Department named it “the latest victim of Russian aggression in eastern Kazakhstan.”

The “Russian aggression against Bukhara" reference was a reference to the area now called Turkmenistan, which occupies a strip of northwestern Russia along the Kazakh-Turkmen border and lies to the east of the Kazakhstan border. In 2010, a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan estimated that the province was home to “more than a quarter of the population of Turkmenistan itself,” with Russian and Islamic separatist forces pursuing a decidedly more lethal version of their respective ambitions in each other’s land.

Since the late 1980s, Kazakhstan has had several skirmishes with Russia over close by Turkmenistan. For example, between 1991 and 1994, the Russians launched the war in Turkmenistan that produced Kazakhstan’s famous “Tulaj in Turkmenistan” line, when an alliance of forces from Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan waged war against a country called Turkmenistan.

President Nursultan Nazarbaev has been attempting to hold together an alliance of countries in the region, and the Turkmenistan issue is certainly one of them. In 2010, a former political analyst named Joe SBY, then with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a widely read column explaining why Kazakhstan was unlikely to declare independence, while explaining why the Russian-organized Turkmenistan threat only seemed to focus on the volatile southeastern province. (SBU)

Bukhara could also become an issue if things went awry in the Turkmen region.

In his 1989 Senate testimony, General Zaur Abdullaev, Kazakh Prime Minister until his defeat in 1990, began by noting that Uzbekistan was now a very close ally and protector of Kazakhstan’s rule of over a million people, and he also correctly forewarned that the Islamic republic would begin a secessionist movement following an exodus of the republic’s local Turkmen population.