OSCE Launches Minority Language Scheme

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, is launching an education project in Central Asia aimed at integrating ethnic minorities into wider society. NBCentralAsia observers say the initiative will only break down barriers if the respective governments give it their sincere backing.



During a visit to Dushanbe on May 14, the OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities, Rolf Ekeus, said the new education project will help ethnic minorities integrate into society and political life, thereby strengthening regional cooperation in Central Asia.



The project aims to teach both minority and majority groups in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan about the value of multilingual education by working both with state agencies and at local level with the general population. The OSCE hopes that learning about other languages and cultures in one’s own country and in the wider region will encourage better integration.



Nurgul Asylbekova, coordinator for ethnic development at the Soros Foundation in Kyrgyzstan, has submitted recommendations for the project and says it will help form a sense of not only regional but also civic identity, if all the countries involved take it seriously.



The project hopes to highlight the cultural and historical similarities between different groups of people across Central Asia and Asylbekova believes it will help prevent both domestic and regional disputes from arising.



At the moment, dominant ethnic groups stifle the cultural and linguistic values of many minorities, she says.



There is a high proportion of ethnic minorities right across the region. Up to 16 per cent of the populations of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are ethnic Uzbeks, the number of Tajiks in Uzbekistan is put anywhere between seven and 26 per cent, while a third of those living in Kazakstan are Russian.



Tajik political scientist Parviz Mullojanov agrees the project could help local communities to start recognising the cultural and linguistic similarities they share with other groups in the same country, but he doubts it will encourage integration on a wider regional scale.



“Its success will be constrained by a number of political problems,” he said, explaining that the fraught relationship between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan prevents ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks as minorities in the other country from getting fully involved in social and political life.



Kazakstan-based analyst Eduard Poletaev is even less optimistic, predicting that the programme will fall flat because there is little political and economic integration among Central Asian states.



“This project won’t really work because problems of a more conceptual nature, such as economic and political ambitions, have yet to be resolved. The Central Asian countries compete with one another both economically and politically,” he said.



Poletaev warned that dominant ethnic groups and governments may pit themselves against the project.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)