For at least the last seven or eight years, the Prokudin-Gorskii collection of color photos of the Russian empire taken in the early 20th century, gets noticed and reported by journalists, history buffs, and photography enthusiasts. Less well known is that the Turkestan Album, a series of volumes on the people, architecture, history, and economy of Russian Turkestan commissioned by General von Kaufman, the Empire’s first Governor-General in Turkestan, was also digitized by the Library of Congress and made available several years ago. (Many thanks to Fergana News for writing about this, which reminded me that I had a draft post on this from 2007.)

The bulk of the photos in the collection were taken in 1871 and 1872, while some images in the historical volume date back to 1853. The collection contains well over 1,000 photos and is a phenomenal resource not only for a glimpse into Central Asia of the mid- to late-19th century, but also into how the Russian Empire viewed the people of these territories.

(P.S. — Fergana News also recently posted some interesting photos of clay structures in Uzbekistan taken between 1974 and 1989.)

RFE/RL carries an interesting story about Kubanychbek Tezekbaev, an advocate of Tengrism who is on trial for inciting religious and ethnic hatred for saying in an interview last June that many mullahs in Kyrgyzstan are “former alcoholics and murderers” who are trying to paper over their pasts. Tezekbaev, who could be sentenced to five years in prison if found guilty, says he is being punished for his beliefs.

Tengrism has played an interesting, if obscure, role in the competition to define national identities, religion, and ideologies of Turkic peoples throughout the former Soviet Union. (For more on this, see Laruelle’s 2007 Central Asian Survey article, from which most of the following information is derived, or her shorter 2006 article on Tengrism.) Dastan Sarygulov claims to lead Kyrgyzstan’s Tengrist movement. A former Soviet official, post-independence governor of Talas, and head of Kyrgyzaltyn (where he is alleged to have illegally trafficked state gold reserves), managed to maneuver himself to the position of Secretary of State under Bakiev in 2005. In this position, he led a commission to establish a national ideology that, ultimately, only resulted in debate over Tengrism and concern that it would receive the blessings of the state. Kyrgyzstan’s Muslim Spiritual Board complained specifically that promotion of Tengrism “rehabilitates” anti-Muslim sentiment.

Tezekbaev says in the RFE/RL article that Tengrism is not incompatible with Islam and that many in Kyrgyzstan are followers of both Tengrism and Islam. Religious syncretism can be found all over the world, and Central Asia is abundant with examples of Islam incorporating pre-Islamic beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, the cleric quoted in the story as saying one can either be Muslim or not Muslim lays out a fairly mainstream position. Tengrists like Sarygulov try to dodge this by saying the Tengrism is not a religion, but a perspective on the world and a lifestyle. At the same time, Kyrgyzstan’s Tengrists cast Islam as a religion foreign to the Kyrgyz, and Sarygulov has in the past proposed “cleansing” the country of foreign influences.

As this Diesel thread shows, Tengrism remains very controversial. Even if it is not a religion, it challenges the centrality of Islam to Kyrgyz identity and fundamentally questions what it means to be Kyrgyz. As a movement though, it is small, and presents no real challenge to Islam among the Kyrgyz. And really, Tezekbaev’s comment was fairly tame comment to be facing a five year sentence. Official sensitivity to the statements of minority ethnic and religious groups obviously runs high in Kyrgyzstan though, and this is important to keep in mind when judging the ways in which post-Bakiev Kyrgyzstan has and has not liberalized.

UPDATE: There’s a bit more background about this dispute in this Russian language article at Azattyk. Tezekbaev says that he is being punished by the Islamic establishment for loving Manas too damned much (more or less). To charges that Tai-Tebish encourages idolatry and that Manas is not part of Islam, he says that the spirit of Manas is in the Kyrgyz, and that those who do not know him are not true Kyrgyz. [Edited to correct earlier, poor translation.] Parliamentary Deputy Tursunbek Bakir Uluu offers up the counterpoint that Manas absolutely was a “clean” Muslim. Which means that if this debate is all about the man whose name will eventually become the only word used in the Kyrgyz language (at some point after all the streets and towns are renamed for him), this whole thing is high-stakes nuts. And of course, Alibi has to go an confirm that by calling Tezekbaev a “patriotic Kyrgyz horseman.”

Please Kyrgyzstan, take it from an American. Going overboard on nationalist myth-making and patriotic symbolism walks a fine line between ridiculous and awesome.

Last week, the US Helsinki Commission held a hearing on Kazakhstan’s stability, looking at the violence in Zhanaozen and the recent parliamentary elections and questioning whether or not Kazakhstan is as stable as its government claims. The testimony, which can be found here is interesting and worth taking a look at. Included with the expert testimony are also statements from Kazakhstan’s embassy and from the Alga People’s Party and People’s Front.

Sean Roberts identifies in his testimony several changes in Kazakhstan’s economy and society to which the government has been poorly prepared to respond and which increase the possibility that recent violence in Kazakhstan is the beginning of a longer period of less stability. They are:

1. The rapid growth of Islam’s popularity in Kazakhstan’s society, an process going on since the early ’90s has recently become more apparent in public. This public religiosity, which does not suggest the threat of terrorism or a near term move toward political Islam, is poorly understood by the government and the country’s secular middle class.
2. The growth of ethnic Kazakh nationalism, also ongoing since the early ’90s, but recently taking on new characteristics that heighten tensions.
3. Rising and unmet economic expectations.

I’m paraphrasing, but on the first two items, Dr. Roberts argues that the thoroughly Soviet education and background of Kazakhstan’s leadership leaves it out of touch and unable to adequately respond to the public. The government’s response to labor strikes, including the violence in Zhanaozen, he says, show that the government was not prepared to deal with dissatisfaction over unmet economic expectations. Dr. Roberts says that these challenges are not extreme nor likely to cause widespread unrest in the near term, but that the stagnancy of the political system means that the government lacks mechanisms to deal with large socio-economic changes. [Note: Alima wrote about the crisis of unmet expectations at length recently.]

This is good, succinct analysis of the situation that puts risks to Kazakhstan’s stability in good context. The risks are there, the government is ill-prepared to deal with them at present, but it’s unlikely that it will be overwhelmed by them soon.

These risks, however, aren’t present only in Kazakhstan. They exist in similar forms and combinations throughout Central Asia. Growing segments of society throughout the region are bringing (or attempting to…) Islam into the public square, where it is responded to with shock and terror by secular officials. National economies are failing to meet the expectations, and in many areas, even the basic needs, of the public. And though nationalism is not so clearly a problem the way it is Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in the rest of Central Asia, there are small signs that society is challenging the state’s monopoly on defining what it means to be Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz, etc.

In talking about risks to stability, there is often a tendency to focus on presidential succession, the specter of fundamentalism and political Islam, and a more recent tendency to talk about replication of the Arab Spring. Recent history should make it abundantly clear though, that analysts, experts, and observers are taken by surprise in the region. Game-planning what happens after Karimov dies or a resurgence of the IMU activity in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan might be worthless because they assume state and society lack the mechanisms to respond to and manage succession or terrorist groups.

The greatest risks to stability throughout the region are medium- to long-term risks arising from the three aforementioned factors and the oppositional relationship between state and society. Devising a list of indicators and warnings based on the three factors Dr. Roberts identifies — rising public religiosity, increasing nationalism, and under-performance in the economy — are more likely not only to lead to better anticipation of the trajectory of stability in Central Asia but also to provide a better idea of when serious risks to stability are likely to arise.

Photo by Tiina Oikarinen

Last month Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center of Internet and Society, gave a lecture on how his “cute cats” theory of the internet applies to the Arab Spring. For those of you unfamiliar with the theory, Cory Doctorow sums it up in an rapturous review of the talk in the Guardian:

Zuckerman’s argument is this: while YouTube, Twitter, Facebook (and other popular social services) aren’t good at protecting dissidents, they are nevertheless the best place for this sort of activity to start, for several reasons.

First, because when YouTube is taken off your nation’s internet, everyone notices, not just dissidents. So if a state shuts down a site dedicated to exposing official brutality, only the people who care about that sort of thing already are likely to notice.

But when YouTube goes dark, all the people who want to look at cute cats discover that their favourite site is gone, and they start to ask their neighbours why, and they come to learn that there exists video evidence of official brutality so heinous and awful that the government has shut out all of YouTube in case the people see it.

Doctorow goes on to claim that the everyday use of social media technology leads to a sort of inadvertent activism. Accustomed to sharing apolitical content online, citizens use the same technology to post evidence of state atrocities:

The first thing that comes to mind after you capture a mobile phone video of the police murdering a family member isn’t “Let’s see, I wonder if there’s a purpose-built activist tool that I can use for distributing this clip?” Rather, the first thing that comes to mind is, “I’d better post this on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter so that everyone can see it.”

In Zuckerman’s view, the rote relay of controversial content enables revolution, as it provides a way for citizens to air their grievances (before the state censors them) and inflames their curiosity and rage (after). Zuckerman is careful to refrain from labeling the internet as some sort of miracle medium, instead inscribing its power to its very banality: it is a social platform, but one that turns political as revelations of state crimes enter the social sphere. He claims that this is what happened during the Arab Spring.

Zuckerman’s theory is a refreshing alternative to the common caricature of internet users in authoritarian states as revolutionaries in waiting. But it suffers from a fallacy that plagues much of internet scholarship: studies of the effectiveness of the internet in fomenting revolution are usually limited to where the internet was effective, because those successes, by definition, are the ones we know. The “failures” – the many countries where the circulation of evidence of state crimes through social media prompts no change in state practices, and in some cases, dissuades citizens from joining activist causes – tend to go unmentioned. They are, I suspect, more the norm than the exception, and they have proven the rule in former Soviet authoritarian states.

Why has online activism in Central Asia failed to inspire the kind of public support we see in the Arab world? That is a big question, one that would benefit from the sort of long-term ethnographic examination that is sorely lacking in study of the internet, as fellow Berkman researcher Jonathan Zittrain has noted. I suspect the answer lies less with problems unique to the former Soviet Union than it does with a central assumption of the “cute cats” theory: that the exposure of wrongdoings inspires people to make things right. In authoritarian states, the circulation of state crimes often serves to confirm tacit suspicions, and in some cases, to reaffirm the futility of the fight. Fear, apathy, cynicism and distrust as are as common reactions to these quasi-revelations as are outrage and a desire for change.

This is not to say that the internet is not important. In many states, it is the only medium through which state brutality can be exposed. But the reception to online media varies as to the political culture of the people involved. The following cases speak to greater problems of trust, fear and apathy in post-Soviet political culture – problems that the internet does not solve, but often exacerbates.

The “donkey bloggers” of Azerbaijan. In 2009, activists Emin Milli and Adnan Hajizada were arrested after posting a satirical video of government corruption and wastefulness on YouTube. The case attracted international outcry as well as intense attention among the frequent social media users with whom Milli and Hajizada socialized online. Yet in the aftermath of the case – both activists were released in November 2010 – support for political protest decreased among frequent internet users, as a forthcoming article I co-wrote with Katy Pearce for the Journal of Communication makes clear. Why did this happen? At the time of the case, Azerbaijan, unlike many other former Soviet states, had an open internet, all the better with which to publicize the horrifying repercussions of using the internet for political purposes. The online publicity surrounding Milli and Hajizada’s plight did not inspire citizens to rise up, but to rethink the risks of participating in online activism.

The Osh events. The June 2010 violence in southern Kyrgyzstan was documented online from the moment it occurred: witnesses posted updates on Twitter and Facebook; observers uploaded their photos and videos to LiveJournal and YouTube; and Kyrgyz websites were awash in commentary – much of it speculative, accusatory, and inflammatory. As I noted in 2010, online coverage of the events constituted “a catalogue of sins, searchable and accessible, impervious to the human desire to move on”. The circulation of state and citizen atrocities through social media networks like Facebook and Twitter heightened a sense of futility surrounding the government’s capacity to intervene, and the population’s ability – and desire – to forgive.

Zhanaozen. “Kazakh Spring” is the “fetch” of Central Asia: try as you might, it’s just not going to happen. This is not to say the bloodshed in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan isn’t horrifying or important: it absolutely is. But there is no indication that the intense online discussion of the events, and circulation of videos showing police brutality, is going to lead to Arab Spring-style unrest. Instead, Zhanaozen reveals the extent that Kazakhstan’s authorities will go to make those who document the state its next target. It also highlights the diversity and contentiousness of online media among both Kazakhstani and Western audiences. Much as Zuckerman predicted, the videos from Zhanaozen have been widely circulated through social media, but their reception is far from uniform. As in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, news reports are viewed with skepticism, the motives of those both involved in the issue and reporting it are relentlessly scrutinized, and the risks to those who engage in political pursuits (even pursuits as banal as posting a video online) are all too clear.

Effective use of social media in authoritarian states is not only a matter of circumventing government censorship, but of securing and sustaining citizen trust. Both Zuckerman and Doctorow have spoken at length about the need to create tools that are safe and effective for activists, and their efforts are admirable. But the development of tools through which corruption and brutality can be exposed leads to an uncomfortable question: and then what?

My think tank, the American Security Project, has teamed up with The Atlantic to run a 12-article series I edited about U.S. foreign policy 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, which happens on Christmas. There have been some really interesting essays in there that aren’t directly relevant to what we write about here, such as the fate of the U.S. defense industry under austerity conditions, how today is actually the most peaceful period in recent history, and even about the global scramble for energy. Former Senator Gary Hart, the chairman of ASP’s board, wrote a fascinating rumination on U.S.-Russian relations over the last two decades that’s worth sharing.

Alexis de Toqueville’s famous prediction in 1835 that America and Russia, two great continental powers, would someday play leading roles in the world was predated by Russian exploration of the Western American continent as far south as today’s California and thereafter qualified by the landing of a small U.S. expeditionary force in Siberia during the Russian Revolution. But throughout the Cold War, de Toqueville seemed prescient indeed.

The shared global leadership between America and Russia ended two decades ago. The 74 year Russian detour into communism can be viewed only as if rapidly retreating in a rear-view mirror. But the end of the Cold War revealed a curious anomaly in U.S. foreign policy thought. Much to the surprise of Russians and many Americans, including myself, instead of rushing to embrace Russia and drawing it closely into Western economic, political, and security circles, we have resorted to reliance on personal relationships between American and Russian presidents as the basis for our bilateral relationships. And we continue to hold Russia suspiciously at arm’s length.

There has been little, if any, explanation of this suspicion toward Russia and its roots in the American mind, or at least in the minds of certain foreign policy experts. Arguably, we have better relations with China than Russia and spend a great deal more effort in tending to that relationship. In gauging how close or how distant to remain regarding another nation or power, the measure ought to be whether there are more interests in common than in opposition. By that measure, our relationship to Russia ought to be among our closest.

And yet. I hinted in the previous post that I’d have some more about what we can think of in reaction to Kazakhstan’s two decades of independence. Soon my contribution to this collection will be out, which will chart the U.S.’s fraught policy in the region over the last 20 years, and wonders where it’s really going in the future (and if that matters). But for now, I’ll draw your attention to the great work our contributors here at Registan.net did in discussing such an important milestone about specific countries.

• “Kyrgyzstan at 20: What Now?” — Noah Tucker
• “Happy Birthday, Uzbekistan” — Sarah Kendzior
• “Kazakhstan — 20 Years After Independence” — Michael Hancock
• “Tajikistan At 20” — Christian Bleuer

Read those to get a sense of what sort of issues we’re dealing with.

I gave an interview to WBEZ’s Worldview yesterday about issues going on in Kyrgyzstan.

Full audio is here.

There is a general assumption in most pop-studies of Central Asia based on the assumption that the region rarely has any agency of its own and is only to be understood as a pawn of the powerful countries on its periphery. The purest distillation of this trend is Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game, which more or less reduced the region to a battleground for the British and Russian Empires (a less readable, but more historical tome of a similar bent is Shareen Blair Brysac’s Tournament of Shadows).

This assumption that Central Asia is understood only as a playground for outside powers is underneath almost all Western writing about the region—and is probably the best reason so many modern books adopt the language of the Great Game to try to describe regional politics. This can take the rather conventional form of replacing the British with Americans and calling it a New Great Game, or in more recent times trying to describe the region as a series of “Great Games.” Either way, the locus of understanding the region lies in its value to outsiders, and most authors discount local preferences, plans, or strategies in the belief that wealthier, more powerful outsiders can essentially force outcomes on the local governments.

The most recent newcomer to this trend is China. In a provocative article for The Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief, Rafaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen argue that China is slowly “surging” in Kyrgyzstan. Their evidence is a bit curious—China was not, by their own description, even mentioned in the recent election, but there are lot of Chinese goods available at the largest bazaars in the largest cities. Nevertheless, the authors argue that Kyrgyzstan’s economic dependence on China, which is undeniable, has larger implications.

One of the big pieces of evidence the authors muster is the development of Confucius Institutes at local universities, which teach Chinese language and culture to Kyrgyz students. There are 4,000 students at these institutes—a number that “pales in comparison to the number of young Kyrgyz able to speak Russian or English,” yet is nevertheless a “large and growing figure” that indicates Kyrgyz see China as an opportunity for income and growth. (Paradoxically, when I spoke with teachers at the American University of Central Asia and the OSCE Academy in October, they expressed concern that too many Kyrgyz were trying to learn English and not enough were getting good at Russian, which is the region’s lingua franca.)

But beyond a few thousand college students, some infrastructure development, and the gifting of some television receivers, the evidence for China’s growing domination in the region is scant. The existence of the China-controlled Shanghai Cooperation Organization seems about as relevant to Kyrgyz strategic decision-making as the Russia-controlled Collective Security Treaty Organization. Most of Kyrgyzstan’s elites were raised in a Russian education system and can speak Russian fluently; few ever learned Chinese.

For all the world, the current hoopla over China in Central Asia sounds like the hoopla over Turkey in Central Asia in the 1990s. In the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, Turkey found itself geopolitically displaced—it lost the USSR as the main eastern threat solidifying its membership in NATO, the Middle East was growing more turbulent, and while it remained obsessed with Greece and Syria the Turkish security sector grew more concerned with the Kurds, organized crime, and narco-human-arms trafficking.

According to Paula Sandrin (pdf), Turkey’s foreign policy in the 1990s was dominated by an obsession with security, and the rise in popularity of a doctrine called Neo-Ottomanism, which focused on the development of ties between Turkey and the former components of the Ottoman Empire. Turgut Ozal wanted to grow Turkey into the regional economic and security hub for the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia.

On the street in Bishkek, you can find tons of goods proudly manufactured in Turkey.

The push into Central Asia seemed to make sense for the Turks: the speak a related language, they’re Muslim (unlike Russia, the U.S., or China), they have a growing economy that could offer a great deal to the local governments, and they were willing to fund enormous cultural centers and universities years before any of the other outside powers. In Kyrgyzstan, you can find in 2011 evidence of an extensive economic relationship with Turkey—shopping malls built by Turkish construction firms have stores that are filled with products proudly labeled “Made in Turkey;” the largest and most functional bank, DemirBank, is Turkish; the largest foreign university is the Turkish university; and so on.

But, despite a good twenty years of effort, no one thinks Turkey is going to be an ascendant power in Central Asia anymore—not even Turkey. Despite a huge diplomatic, economic, and even security push, the Turkish “surge” into Central Asia fizzled out. The Turks are happy to import and export things to Central Asia, but beyond that the relationship hasn’t gone anywhere especially interesting.

No matter China’s plans, or its economic influence, the politics of Kyrgyzstan still tilt overwhelmingly toward Russia. Despite the probable harm to its China-fueled economy, Kyrgyzstan was warm to the idea of joining the Eurasian Union with Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus—a move that would ruin its current WTO-fueled favorable trading status with China. “Even those of us most concerned about the danger to sovereignty and national independence, we see that we need to integrate,” said Edil Baisalov, a prominent democracy activist and a former aide to the current president, in a recent interview with the New York Times. “We had better chain our car to the train of Russia and Kazakhstan.”

This makes sense. When Kyrgyzstani citizens run into trouble—say, when Uzbek citizens need to flee from ethnic persecution—they don’t flee to China. They flee to Russia. When Osh spasmed with violence last year, Kyrgyzstan reached out to Russia for help, not China.

There’s no doubt that China offers a great economic opportunity for the Kyrgyz, and the Kyrgyz businessmen who have figured that out have prospered. But there is very little evidence that this economic opportunity has translated into increasing political and social ties between Bishkek and Beijing. Rather, it looks like China is going to become another Turkey—a strong trading partner, and a source of goods and services… but not a controlling cultural influence. d

Joshua Kucera flags an interesting article by Columbia professor Lincoln Mitchell:

The situation today is different. Atanbaev’s [sic] position does not appear to be a case of simply trying to line his pockets with more American money, but has expressed his view based on his country’s geographical and strategic proximity to Russia and a fear that having a U.S. air force base just outside of his country’s capital could create security concerns for Kyrgyzstan. While this position is not what the U.S. wants to hear, it is also reasonable and can plausibly said to be representing the interests of the Kyrgyz people…

The U.S. is in a difficult, but not impossible, position of having to find a way to, at least in the short term, to continue access to Manas while avoiding undermining the vulnerable democratic aspirations and exprssions [sic] of the Kyrgyz people which Atanbaev [sic] represents. The U.S. must work with Atanbaev [sic] respectfully, avoiding threats and avoiding overpaying for access. Of course, if the Obama administration is serious about winding down the war in Afghanistan this task will be easier. A solution that allows both sides to claim some kind of victory, through a timeline or other similar commitments, and which offers some assistance to Kyrgyzstan is a plausible outcome to this conundrum.

I’m not really sure why he spelled Atambayev’s name with an N, but whatever. The meat of his argument is, basically, that Atambayev’s public opposition to the U.S. base at Manas is not only “representing the interests of the Kyrgyz people,” but that it is a statement of intent to be taken seriously and not, as I argue, routine political messaging with very little teeth (In his piece, Kucera reads a bit too much into what I wrote at that post—I don’t discount that some Kyrgyz dislike the base, I was merely noting that American policymakers try to assuage that dislike through extra payments).

So, is Atambayev’s threat to close down Manas to be taken seriously? Is it a ploy? Is it truly representative of the wishes of the Kyrgyz public? Or is it just empty talk? There is a lot that goes into such a consideration. As Kucera put it:

It’s safe to say that Atambayev, who hasn’t been shy about his affinity for Russia, does not depend on the U.S. for political power. It would be too much to say that the outgoing president, Roza Otunbayeva, “depended” on the U.S., but she was about the most pro-American politician that Washington could hope for in Central Asia. And while she complained about the base, in particular the murky fuel supply arrangement, she focused on getting that agreement changed, not on getting the base removed altogether. But if Cooley’s hypothesis holds, the more Russia-oriented Atambayev will be less conciliatory. And Manas’s days really may be numbered.

This doesn’t quite play well with Kucera’s own hypothesis that American withdrawal from Afghanistan—and subsequent supposed abandonment of Manas—would actually ratchet up tensions with Russia. For Moscow, Kucera argued recently for the Atlantic, “Cooperation on Afghanistan has been win-win, and its importance has cooled heads on both sides.” So the fact of Atambayev being pro-Russia does not necessarily mean very much.

There’s another angle to consider. Under the 2010 constitution, the President of Kyrgyzstan does not have much power over foreign policy. Article 28, section 5 of the new constitution (rough translation here) gives the Kyrgyz Parliament the power to decide matters of foreign policy, the use of force, and so on. Article 37 gives the Prime Minister, Atambayev’s old job, the power to negotiate and sign treaties—like the one governing the American use of the Manas airbase.

So, I’m not really sure Atambayev can do anything by himself to affect the U.S. basing agreement at Manas. He can build a coalition in the Parliament and appeal to the Prime Minister to alter the terms of the U.S.-Kyrgyz treaty governing the base. But I don’t think that’s very likely in anything like the short run. As Kyrgyzstan’s first permanent President under the new constitution, Atambayev will have his hands full handling all the fallout from their only sort of kind of free election.

Over the next six months or so, Atambayev will probably be butting heads with the southern bloc in the Parliament over a number of issues, and no one is really sure just how workable the permanent structure of this constitution is. These things take time. And the substantial irregularities of the vote make me wonder if it’s correct to use Alexander Cooley’s framework of a democratic transition, as Kucera does. Atambayev is the undisputed President, but that doesn’t mean he was elected in a manner we’d consider democratic.

The Parliament, which has actual control over these kinds of decisions, does not have a clear bent one way or the other about the base. The new Prime Minister, who has the power to negotiate future terms (not Atambayev), has said he thinks the CSTO should have a say in whether the U.S. stays or goes. It is Babanov, and whomever replaces him, that should dominate any speculation on Manas. Not Atambayev.

At my day job with the American Security Project, I recorded a podcast with Adjunct Fellow Nick Lockwood, expert on stabilization operations, population engagement and strategic communications. He travels routinely to Afghanistan, and more recently to places like Libya. The topic was primarily about my current research on the economics of southwest Kyrgyzstan, and why that matters for more than just Kyrgyzstan:

American Security Project podcast

The end of that podcast focused on the travails of Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, who was fired last week for his intemperate remarks. I think his firing was the only good thing to have come out of it, and I explained why in much more detail for The Atlantic:

The problem with defending Fuller’s remarks, however, is two-fold: they were not only an inaccurate description and analysis of the politics of Afghanistan, but they actively undermined the U.S. mission and strategy. Far from being a “truth-teller,” Gen. Allen made a serious error of judgment, both in how he understood Afghanistan and how he chose to express that understanding.

And even from a basic understanding of politics, Gen. Fuller’s remarks were counterproductive. Gen. Fuller’s remarks that Afghans are not grateful enough for the money the U.S. has spent on their army is deeply insulting. No matter the political system, having a foreign general berate an entire political class for their ingratitude is counterproductive and possibly even poisonous for future collaboration — the most guaranteed way to undermine the mission. Basic human empathy can elucidate this very simple fact. Politics is as much as not speaking unpleasant truths as it is speaking pleasant untruths. It is universal to all political systems.

The U.S. strategy is based on supporting and building up the Afghan government. Publicly insulting them undermines that strategy is reason enough to fire Gen. Fuller, regardless of the anything else.

Anyway, there’s a lot here to discuss, I think. Fire away!

When I was in Osh, Kyrgyzstan last month, I was overwhelmed by the depth of not just the despair, but the desperation that was evident with every single Uzbek I spoke to (save one). RFERL über-reporter Daisy Sindelair, who helped me wrap my head around some of the basic issues before I flew over, wrote of how anger and desperation were cresting:

The result, she says, is like slow starvation. With no jobs and no money, life has become a fight for survival for many in the mahalla, whose streets are lined with men, many of them former cooks in the city’s once-bustling Uzbek restaurant trade, now sitting idle. More than a year after the violence, city police — all but a handful of whom are Kyrgyz — still stage regular raids on the neighborhood, rounding up men on what neighbors and human rights groups both say are spurious charges and subjecting them to vicious beatings or shakedowns or both. (Umida’s father-in-law points to a visiting neighbor, a shy young man with a pronounced stutter, saying he was forced to pay $3,000 to secure his release after being arrested, and suffered a black eye and broken ribs in the process.) Human Rights Watch, in a report earlier this year, warned that the deeply corrupted delivery of justice “undermine[s] efforts to promote reconciliation and fuel[s] tensions that might one day lead to renewed violence.”

Today, the Michael Swirtz of the NY Times joined the fray:

“Persecution against Uzbeks has become systemic,” said Khusanbai Saliyev, a lawyer with the rights group Citizens Against Corruption in Osh, which has represented about 80 Uzbeks in cases of wrongful arrest and abuse. “To imprison someone for a long prison term, it is only sufficient to have his confession. And you know how they get those confessions: torture is the main instrument for solving a case. This is the main tool they use today.”

His reporting, too, is extensive and deserves to be read in full.

So all of this has me scratching my head: what do we do about this? There is incontrovertible, overwhelming evidence that the Kyrgyz government in Osh is systematically abusing the Uzbeks who live there, and there is a widespread sense that patience is at an all time low (one Uzbek man, an out of work taxi driver, told me darkly that he felt the IMU was maybe onto something, but I thought he was clearly just griping about his situation).

I noticed another problem, too, which wasn’t immediately clear: many of the IGOs, like the OSCE, UNHCR, and the UNDP, who are active in the region employ mainly Kyrgyz. There are simple reasons for this, like how the previous twenty years of displacing all other ethnicities in the local and national governments with Kyrgyz workers have left Kyrgyz as the largest and easiest-to-hire group of competent workers.

The problem, as one Uzbek business owner explained to me, is that this ethnic imbalance on the part of the international community can create challenges. “If I want to report a Kyrgyz harassing me, or trying to use raidership” — the process by which Kyrgyz demand a 51% share in ownership and revenues from Uzbek businesses — “I don’t know if I can report that to the Kyrgyz staff of an NGO. Where else can I go?”

Given the fairly angry debate over U.S. engagement in Uzbekistan, I’m curious what options we have for countering this sort of abuse. I interviewed a civil society leaders in Bishkek about the Uzbek plight in Osh, and she got tears in her eyes. “The leaders in Bishkek, they don’t have the political capital to deal with this problem,” she told me. They’re too busy trying to make the central government work to worry about a tiny minority most of them don’t like anyway.

So what do we do? The U.S. has a much closer relationship to the Kyrgyz government, which is accused of complicity in the torture of innocent Uzbeks. The International Community has a strong presence in Bishkek, and a less strong but still highly visible presence in Osh. They’re not hurting for access. But, despite 18 months of focus on “reconciliation” (which has taken some bizarre forms, like having elders who weren’t involved in the June Events gather for tea and demand people chill out), the situation in Osh is worse than ever. Uzbeks are harassed so much the men rarely leave their mahallahs for fear of imprisonment. Several business organizations in Osh complained to me last month that an overwhelming majority of reconstruction aid — something like 90%, though I’m working to confirm that number — has gone to Kyrgyz, who were at best a small minority of those who suffered from the violence and property destruction.

UNHCR has been effective at helping to bring people shelter and prevent starvation. But pivoting from that basic level of disaster relief has proven an enormous challenge for the international community, including the government run aid groups like DfID and USAID. I don’t have any answers here — I don’t know what else could be done differently to change the situation. It’s easy to say “we need justice,” or “apply leverage.” Everyone wants to do those thing. But what leverage does the international community have to actually do that? What shape does it take on the ground? How do you force a thuggish Mayor to stop persecuting an entire people-group?

This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of human rights advocacy in Central Asia. No matter the level of engagement, we do not have a consistent policy or method of operation that will alter the conditions of abuse. We can alleviate some of the manifestations of abuse for a while, and with any luck convince a democratic government like Kyrgyzstan’s to eventually take notice and respond to its citizens.

Beyond the simple fact of having access, I’m not sure what can be done. Pressuring autocratic governments works only so much; they’re not responsive to an electorate (the way, say, apartheid South Africa was) so there’s only so much pressure that will have a change. Having access and publishing abuses is a great start, since even in Central Asia exposure has led to a mild, temporary curtailment of abuses in some cases. But what, really, can we do? What’s the roadmap for improving conditions?

Very few people or groups have a solid answer, and even fewer have any successes to draw from. And this is where I scratch my head, and it’s where I get lost in the debate.

Pic: A burned out store front in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, taken by me on October 20, 2011.