The Myth of the 'Clan'

October's unsuccessful uprising in Azerbaijan, which was led by a group of close friends and relatives of former Azeri Prime Minister Suret Huseinov, has once again ignited talk about a "clan renaissance" in the central Asian regions of the former Soviet empire. It seems that "clan" has become one of the most trendy terms among journalists and politicians discussing this region. Whenever some unexpected turn of events takes place in these countries that cannot be accounted for by ordinary political or ethnic explanations, the conversation immediately turns to "clan structures" and the conflicts between them.


However, the term is rarely meaningfully defined: It simply seems to stand for some social organization that arose in the Middle Ages or even earlier and has somehow managed to survive since then underneath all the subsequently formed ethnic, religious and political layers in these societies.


And indeed, many of the facts of recent political history in the post-Soviet world strongly tempt analysts to adopt the methodology of "the clan approach" as a universal explanation -- much as Soviet analysts once turned to "the class struggle" to explain every development.


How else can we explain the civil war in Tajikistan, in which Tajiks from different regions are pitted against one another? Why does the population of the northern regions of Chechnya struggle so fiercely against Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev, while in Kyrgyzstan it is the population of the south that resists the rule of President Askar Akayev? And how are we to understand the strange tendency of the ancient Azeri capital of Gyandzha to rise up once or twice a year against the present capital Baku, seemingly without irrespective of who is in power? Analysts have tried to explain all these questions and others like them with a single response: Within states and ethnic groups there are a number of traditional clans which are in conflict, and in recent years this conflict has come to the surface of the political life of the region.


The Soviet government, these analysts say, with its forced industrial modernization and its relentless totalitarian ideology, destroyed the weak beginnings of national self-consciousness among most of the nations of the southeastern colonies of the Soviet empire. Many of these peoples have never had their own states, having been transferred from one foreign control to another for centuries. Their status as "autonomous" or "union" republics under the Soviet regime was a mere fiction, and all educational, economic and political systems were aimed at creating an "integrated Soviet nation" by undermining the ethnic identities of these peoples.


As a result, of the 15 officially recognized countries that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, only five or six can really be considered consolidated nation-states. The rest are more like arbitrarily carved-out territories whose populations share no common identity, despite desperate efforts by newly elected leaders to awaken some patriotic feeling in their people. This, then, is the ideological vacuum which this slumbering, archaic social-structure, the clan, is said to fill.


Certainly, this theory has a degree of truth, but one is naturally suspicious of any theory that is so complex and uses such vague terms. The groups that our analysts have been calling clans usually turn out to be more easily understood by referring to the use of ethnic or family ties for political support -- a phenomenon that has always existed everywhere, but which is even more strongly felt in countries without democratic traditions.


In systems in which the political struggle is conducted by means of intrigues within the power hierarchy and personnel changes are made by forcing rivals out of that hierarchy, it is extremely important for politicians to be able to rely on people with whom they share ties of friendship or, better still, blood. This provides the best hope of avoiding being stabbed in the back. There is nothing surprising in the fact that all provincial leaders develop their own network of reliable people, who control all the reins of power and all means -- legal and illegal -- of accumulating wealth. Whether one wants to call this network a "clan" is a matter of terminology, but clearly it has nothing to do with tribalism or social structures surviving since the Middle Ages.


Such "clans" are an indispensible part of the political struggle in these systems, since they are the main vehicle by which regional leaders influence the local population -- presenting their corporate interests as if they were the general interests of the entire region. This, in turn, allows them to develop sympathy and support for their struggles against the central authorities.


Such propaganda campaigns, for example, have led the residents of several developed regions of Russia to see themselves as "financial donors" subsidizing backward regions. They feel frustrated with this situation and local leaders have used these feelings to further their own political agendas vis ? vis the central government. Such a scenario was recently played out when the local legislature in Perm renounced President Boris Yeltsin's Agreement on Civil Accord in protest against Moscow's "unjust" policies on subsidies.


Of course, in this case the conflict has not moved on to declarations of independence and armed conflict. Central authority in Russia is still capable of maintaining administrative and financial control over the regions. However, in countries where the economic and political structures have not managed to solidify themselves, this "clan" struggle inevitably leads to "clan" separatism. And it is absolutely unnecessary to delve into the study of medieval history in order to understand what is going in central Asia today.


Arkady Popov is an expert at the Inter-Ethnic Relations Department of the Presidential Analytical Center and the editor of the government bulletin "Politics in the Conflict Zones." He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.