Interview with United Nations Resident Coordinator

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, five new nations were born in Central Asia. The United Nations has been active in Kazakhstan, the largest country in the region, for nearly a decade, but which, despite its oil and gas wealth, remains desperately poor with one-third of its population living on less than a dollar a day. IRIN spoke to Fikret Akcura, the UN Resident Coordinator in Kazakhstan, about what had been achieved since independence and the importance of donor engagement with the country and the region. QUESTION: What are the main areas the United Nations is involved in here in Kazakhstan? ANSWER: The first area we are concerned with is social protection and poverty, then helping with economic and governance transition and, thirdly, helping solve the huge environmental problems that Kazakhstan inherited from the Soviet Union. Q: Has renewed international interest in Central Asia led to an increase in resources for the UN's work in Kazakhstan? A: Almost all the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] countries have received allocations from the UN based on the inflated economic performance figures from the Soviet period. As a result, from the word go, all of our countries here have received allocations which are much less than the needs. Based on the enormous needs that these transition countries face, we can do with more resources in almost all areas. Following the dissolution of the Soviet empire - those which are in Europe - have gained funding from the European Union, but the Central Asian countries, they really have been neglected until after the post-September crisis. We have got much more attention now, but still the resource flows have been anything but adequate. The European Union did have an assistance programme here - they cut it by 50 percent, but have reversed this and have now doubled their assistance since September. USAID also has increased its assistance here. We do not see a similar increase in UN resources devoted to Central Asia unfortunately. Q: Why has this new international commitment to the region not translated into more money for the UN's work? A: Many of the donors could quickly make changes to their bilateral allocations, but in the UN system we are locked in much more rigidly, we are not flexible enough, so a lot of our standard funding channels have been spoken for and we could not switch them. I do not know how our own individual efforts to raise money through trust funds will help us. In Kazakhstan we have developed a preventative development strategy through an American think-tank - the Hudson Institute - and for Kazakhstan we would hope to develop programmes out of that and approach the major donors for funding. Q: What are you doing to attract more resources here? A: We have quarterly meetings with donors so they are briefed on the needs, and to avoid duplication. We have recently signed an agreement with the Asian Development Bank [ADB], the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development [EBRD], the World Bank and UNDP [UN Development Programme] so we share resources, intellectual resources, and then we coordinate our actions more. These countries are quite far removed from the attention of the donor community and the UN. We have witnessed this lately when a number of thematic trust funds were set up in UNDP, and for which we competed. We see that the regular attention towards Africa has captured most of this funding. I need to emphasise the CIS description hides a lot of differences. Central Asian countries are very much comparable to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries] in Africa as a far as socioeconomic development goes. The AIDS situation in these countries is exploding, it has the potential to be as bad as Africa. The drug abuse problem is coming up in a major way. There is a disingenuous comparison between Central Asian countries and ex-Soviet states in east and central Europe. Central Asia was colonised by the Soviets, and the people here had very much a nomadic existence. Therefore these countries have to cover much more ground, and that way they deserve much more assistance. Q: How important is it for the UN to be supporting governance transition in a country like Kazakhstan? A: It's very important that we are here as the UN, because we bring globally agreed standards, and we are seen as a neutral party. Even though we have less resources than many of the bilateral donors, we have the special attention [of] and a very different relationship with the government than those who command much more resources. In the case of Kazakhstan, there is the perception that because it has oil and gas and inmpressive GDP growth, that it perhaps does not need so much assistance. This is very much dysfunctional thinking. When you look at Kazakhstan, there are tremendous distribution problems. It's a very young country - 10 years old. The parliament only really started functioning since 1999. Yes, the macroeconomic figures are very admirable, the per capita GDP is US $1,200, [but] most people live with resources well below that. According to our estimates around 30 percent of the people are living on below US $1 per day. There are tremendous variations in this huge country in the employment and poverty situation. This country is 2.7 million sq km - it's almost as big as western Europe itself, and the democratisation process needs a lot of help from us. Some of our colleagues are frustrated, because things are not moving fast enough. However, one has to move slowly, but in a more digestive manner, so we have sustainability here. Ten years coming from the opposite side of the spectrum is too short a period for democracy to be established. We have to see that a lot of people at the senior level, all their education and experience is from the Soviet period. Also, a lot of the electorate are still rooted very much in their mindset to the Soviet period. So you have to establish both at the supply and demand side the democratic principles. Just holding elections does not make Kazakhstan a democracy, so the UN system, along with many others is helping to establish democratic principles, both at the demand side - among civil society as well as at the parliament, administration and in government. This work requires a dedicated effort over a long stretch of time. If we look at Europe, many of these high standards we aspire to only came into being in the sixties - before that two world wars, a lot of conflict - so I think it would be harsh to judge these countries and abandon them. Along with this, market reforms need to take place too. Q: The UN has only been operating in the region for about a decade. What are you doing to encourage more agencies to set up in Kazakhstan? A: We want to encourage the UN community to leverage the presence of the bilateral donors and the multilateral donors in Almaty. Many of the embassies cover Central Asia from here [Almaty], so there is much synergy to be had - we already have 12 UN agencies here. Many cover Central Asia; in the case of UNIFEM [UN Development Fund for Women], they even cover the Caucasus. Q: We've seen the regional consequences of the international community's lack of engagement in Afghanistan. Could that kind of situation develop in fragile new nations like Kazakhstan? A: I think many of the donors only focus funding and their human resources when they face raging fires. Perhaps this is because resources are limited, but as time passes it is very difficult and much more costly to reverse the causes. Together with the UN's department of political affairs, we have started this preventative development study here in Kazakhstan and, as you can see for yourself, we are quite far removed from any immediate crisis situation. But I think what we are doing should be an example and a pilot for the UN system, that we identify the possible causes of conflict far away and then start addressing the root causes so that the crisis never comes. This is more cost effective, not only in human suffering but also in our resources. In many ways Kazakhstan is the last buffer between the European Union, Russia and the Asian continent. If Kazakhstan has any instability, it will transmit itself in refugee flows. There will be also, I guess, a freer flow of narcotics, which currently originate in Afghanistan and transit through Central Asia and Russia into Europe, and in Kazakhstan the European Union and the USA have made enormous investments to extract oil and gas, most of which ends up in Europe and the US. So any interruption in this flow of energy will have consequences for the economies of these countries. So the major donors have more of a stake in ensuring Kazakhstan's stability than many other countries. [ENDS]