At World Crossroads in Central Asia, Identity Is Submerged
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Subject: At World Crossroads in Central Asia, Identity Is Submerged
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At World Crossroads in Central Asia, Identity Is Submerged
At World Crossroads in Central Asia, Identity Is Submerged
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1998 JOC
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1998/11/06/fpcon-intl.shtml
For Uighurs, Koreans, Kazaks, and others, ethnicity comes second to
making ends meet
Lucian Kim Special to The Christian Science Monitor
On a Saturday night on a collective farm in eastern Uzbekistan, the
village disco booms the latest Western dance tracks into the still
night air. Several streets away, a Uighur Muslim family and friends
celebrate the ritual circumcision of three young boys.
Whether by force or volition, different peoples and cultures have been
intermingling for centuries here at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.
And at Kim Pen Hva, named for the ethnic Korean who ran this kolkhoz,
or collective farm, during Communist times, decades of Soviet social
engineering have produced a surprising cosmopolitanism for such a
seeming backwater.
The reality of life makes ethnic identity secondary to the main task
of getting by. The average monthly wage on the cotton farm is less
than $20, and many villagers look back wistfully to the days before
the collapse of the Soviet Union, when founder Chairman Kim made the
kolkhoz rich and famous, by Soviet standards.
Yet despite the homogenization and relative racial harmony, Central
Asia's ethnic groups still cling to their identities, however
tenuously. Of the village's 9,000 inhabitants, only about 50 percent
are ethnic Uzbeks, with Koreans, Kazakhs, Uighurs, and Russians making
up the other half. They live side by side in low one-story houses
hidden from the main road by high, overgrown fences.
Korean teenagers, chatting in Russian, assemble outside the disco
while, on the other side of the village, Uighurs and Uzbeks dance to
traditional tunes. there is no segregation here, and the village's
ethnic groups mix easily. "We have never had any conflicts," says Ella
Kim, a kindergarten teacher who during the summer sells vegetables at
the sparse kolkhoz bazaar. "We all live peacefully together, work
together, drink tea together," she says. An ethnic Korean, Ms. Kim
married an Uzbek. "At first, my parents were against the marriage,"
she says. "But then they got used to him. They understood that the
most important thing was not his nationality, but his personality."
Surprisingly, Kim concedes that if her own two children had wanted to
marry Uzbeks, she would have been opposed.
Forced migration
Ethnic Koreans are especially rootless here, speaking Russian as their
first language and giving their children Russian names. Fearing that
ethnic Koreans in the Soviet Far East would collaborate with the
Japanese, Joseph Stalin had more than 70,000 moved to Central Asia in
1937. More than a dozen other ethnic groups received similar treatment
from the suspicious Soviet leader. Today some 230,000 of descendants
of the Korean exiles live in Uzbekistan, which has the largest Korean
minority of any country in the former Soviet Union.
'Daewooistan'
The ethnic ties have had a benefit: In the past five years, South
Korea has become Uzbekistan's biggest foreign investor, pouring more
than $1 billion into the country. Some businesspeople jokingly refer
to it as "Daewooistan," after the South Korean conglomerate. The
legacy of the multiethnic USSR has left now-independent Uzbekistan
with an easygoing tolerance. Even at the Kim Pen Hva kolkhoz, it
appears that most villagers are bilingual. "I know three languages:
Uzbek, Uighur, and Russian," says Abdushkur Kasimov, an ethnic Uighur
boy living on the farm. "And in school we're starting to learn
German."
While the signs around the kolkhoz are all written in Uzbek, Russian
remains the lingua franca of the community, as it does throughout most
of Central Asia. In the kolkhoz's main office, it's a matter of
practicality, since the manager is Uzbek, his assistant Uighur, and
the head accountant Korean. "We're all one family," says one office
worker, a Kazak.
Few mixed marriages
Although the inhabitants of the kolkhoz seem genuinely to disregard
ethnic differences, there are few mixed marriages. "It's rare, that's
true," says Shakura Yakubova, the Uighur assistant to the manager.
"Religion is the main reason." Uighurs, Uzbeks, and Kazaks tend to be
Muslim, Koreans are usually Buddhist or Christian, and Russians
Orthodox Christian. Yet Ms. Yakubova, who is unmarried, says ethnicity
would not play a role should the time come for her to wed. "The most
important thing is that he love me," she says. "But, still, the
majority of people don't think that way." Muyassar Yudasheva, her
Uzbek secretary, agrees. "For my parents, it's important that I marry
an Uzbek. But nowadays, they can't go against our will."
Akmal Atamkulov, an ethnic Kazak farmer on the kolkhoz, sees a
connection between the USSR's ethnic diversity and an easier life.
"Before, when we had the Soviet Union, all the republics were
together," he says clasping his hands. "Now they're all on their own.
Until recently, we lived like brothers - of course it was better to
live together like that," he says.
--
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