Last week I introduced you to some of the geo- and petropolitical aspects of Turkey's position as "energy bridge" between Europe and Asia. Based on population and geography, certain groups end up as custodians of oil, diamonds, coal, etc. But over generations clans and kin move, giving us far-flung folk like the Turkic language family, now scattered throughout Eurasia.
copyright by Jost Gippert
Take a look at the above map, which illustrates the geographic distribution of the Turkic language family and its speakers. From Siberia in the north and east to Turkey in the west and China in the south, this original clan has spread by chance to some of the world's richest underground deposit sites.
In December 2004 a small town one-fourth the size of Philadelphia became ground zero for the largest oil discovery in 50 years.
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The diamond mines of Yakutia, in Siberia's arctic reaches, yield what many consider to be the world's clearest gemstones. The region accounts for 99% of Russia's diamond production, as well as 24% of its gold, and 33% of its silver output. Yakutia also holds massive underground deposits of coal, antimony, nickel, manganese, lead, cobalt, tungsten, molybdenum, bauxite, sulfur and asbestos. Its native inhabitants are the Yakuts, a Turkic-speaking people.
In linguistics, my major course of study, I was involved in projects relating to the Salar and Uyghur ethnic minorities of China, both of which are Turkic groups. These groups are among China's several dozen nationally recognized minorities, and like most of their cousins outside the Middle Kingdom, they practice Islam.
Population Dilution
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in China's far northwest, bears high strategic value. It borders on Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, the disputed region of Kashmir, and China's Tibetan Autonomous Region.
Xinjiang, which means "New Frontier" in Chinese, is preferably referred to as East Turkestan by its natives, who constitute a majority in their home area though China's "Go West" campaign has flooded the area with Han (ethnic Chinese) from the country's east. The political importance of this region not only hinges on its contiguity with many regional resource powers (and 4 of China's 5 Shanghai Cooperation Organization partners), but also because Xinjiang itself is heavily endowed with mineral and hydrocarbon wealth.
Xinjiang holds 38% of China's coal reserves, and 25% of the country's total oil and gas (30 billion tons). Reconsider the fading Uyghur majority in the region after considering those numbers, and Beijing's desire to transfer easterners to the area makes a lot more sense.
And the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's tripartite aim of combating "terrorism, extremism, and separatism" is readily applied to Xinjiang, especially as Party leaders can point to the American detention of Uyghurs at Guantanamo Bay after they were detained in Afghanistan.
After 9/11, China began to switch nomenclature from "separatism" to the more evocative "terrorism" when referring to the occasionally violent indigenous attitude towards Han Chinese rule.
The five Uyghurs at Gitmo were recently released, causing a stir in everybody's favorite Central Asian strategic alliance.
The SCO's Regional Antiterrorism Structure, based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, called on the US and Albania, where the former prisoners have requested asylum, to extradite the five men back to China.
One must point out here the major tension between Uzbekistan, the land of the Turkic Uzbeks, and their Uyghur cousins who almost certainly face torture or execution if returned to China.
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Distant Cousins
Uzbekistan's strong ties to China, along with fellow Turkic speakers in Kyrgyzstan (whose language I have also studied), Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, point to the essential leverage that ethnic groups have based on their attachment to polities as majority populations.
In China, the Uyghurs have but a dwindling regional majority. In the -stans, entire countries are ruled by Turkic-speaking peoples, making the areas within those boundaries true nation-states.
But even in resource brokerage among Turkic nation-states, there is occasional hostility. As the US-led effort to harness the oil and gas resources of Central Asia has moved speedily forward in recent years, a dispute between the Turkic Azeris and Turkmen has continually simmered, though not yet boiled over.
A recent column in the Azeri newspaper Ekho reports that Turkmenistan's putative neutrality in military matters is not matched by that country's actions. Military exercises conducted near the Caspian Sea and escalating arms purchases by the government are unsettling, and according to an expert in Azerbaijan's army, his country should take "adequate steps." The source of this acrimony is also the source of wealth: gas and oil traps under the middle of the Caspian Sea, whose bounty is claimed both by Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, which straddle the body of water to the west and east, respectively.
There are no fewer than 30 Turkic ethnic groups within the larger family, whose origins are thought to center around Mongolia and southern Siberia, whence the original concentration dispersed between the first and tenth centuries, CE.
Today, the branches of this family tree have split far from the trunk, and some limbs are stronger than others. In many cases, though, Turkic nomads unintentionally pitched their tents atop some of Earth's most fruitful chunks of crust. Some parts of the clan are cashing in on that lot, and others are paying instead.
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