"There is an ongoing debate in foreign policy circles regarding what role, if any, the Internet can play in democratisation. On one extreme you have people who think that, especially after the "Arab Spring", if you throw enough web apps and censorship circumvention tools at the Internet users of authoritarian states, they'll link up through Facebook and Twitter, find all their government's dirty laundry through Wikileaks, and work around government censorship through tools like Tor. Let them tweet, and they will tweet their way to freedom, because the information libertarians of the world will eventually win out over the information authoritarians. I'd like to keep this relatively short, but not only is the situation in the Middle East far from over, but I would also argue that the case of Egypt makes it too easy to overlook the ways in which dictators can use the Internet to better spread propaganda, monitor their citizens, and even co-opt the opposition. Everything I've learned over the past few years tells me that, despite what Justin Timberlake's character in The Social Network said, while we used to live on farms and then cities, we can never "live on the Internet". The Internet lives on us, and the ways in which pro-democracy activists in authoritarian states and the governments that oppress them can use this technology is far more influenced by the local political/social/cultural/religious context than I think most policy makers, pundits and tech gurus are aware of. I want to finish up here at UMass not just with the technical expertise to write useful software in this field, but with enough understanding of the political realities of the more authoritarian parts of the former Soviet Union to know what makes sense politically as well as technically."
It's with this viewpoint that I'm going to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan for the Central Asian Studies program at SRAS. All of this said, I have a confession to make: In the three years that I've been following this part of the world, I have paid less attention to Kyrgyzstan than, say, Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan because, well, the country doesn't have any oil and he who controls the spice does control the universe. However, after some catch-up, I figured I should talk a little about the recent political developments in Kyrgyzstan (WARNING: The following is a paper for a Political Science class masquerading as a blog post. You may get very bored. Peter would like to make up for this with a funny video.)
I just recently finished reading the Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission's report on the riots in Osh and Jalalabad last June, which I encourage everyone to at least skim, and I'll summarise it here. The best place to start is probably to describe the status of the Uzbek minority in southern Kyrgyzstan and its place in Kyrgyzstani politics. After similar riots in Osh in 1990, "concessions to the Uzbek communities were made. One of them was the creation of the Uzbek National Cultural Centre (UNCC) at the national level, with branches in all significant areas of Uzbek settlement. The centres became the main outlet for Uzbek political participation and the expression of minority demands" (KIC par. 81). However, throughout the Akayev (1990-2005) and Bakiyev (2005-2010) administrations, there was at least some informal discrimination against Uzbeks. For example, "There are limited numbers of Uzbek officers in the police force, the army and the national security service. Uzbek numbers are even lower in the judicial and prosecution services. Of the 110 judges in the 28 courts of southern Kyrgyzstan, only one is Uzbek. In December 2010, only one Uzbek investigator held a position at the national security agency" (KIC par. 87). After Bakiyev was ousted in early April 2010, not only did a new group of Uzbek community leaders (notably businessman and former deputy Kadyrjan Batyrov) emerge and begin to demand a greater role in Kyrgyzstan public life, but a new group of Kyrgyzstani leaders opposed to Interim President Rosa Otunbayeva's Provisional Government emerged in southern Kyrgyzstan, some of whom were former Bakiyev supporters. In the days after the Bakiyev clan definitively lost its power base in the south (when Uzbek AND Kyrgyzstani supporters of the Provisional Government retook the administration building in Jalalabad on May 14), relations between the Uzbeks and the southern Kyrygzstanis began to deteriorate. When a crowd of Uzbeks and Kyrgyz marched on the Bakiyev's home village of Teyit, "While some information suggested that Batyrov led the march to Teyit and gave orders to loot and burn the houses, he denied it...According to Batyrov and other Uzbek witnesses, known criminals were present and Bakiyev‟s house was already on fire when they arrived. Subsequent accounts suggested that the national flag of Kyrgyzstan had been burned and trampled upon, but the KIC has no evidence to that effect" (KIC par. 64). The situation was exacerbated when held a rally at the all-too-ironically-named University of People's Friendship calling for Uzbeks to become more politically active. His statements were misread by the southern Kyrgyzstani community as a call for autonomy and "an act of aggression against Kyrgyzstan and the statehood of Kyrgyzstan" (KIC par. 66). This led to counter-demonstrations by the southern Kyrgyzstanis, and by the beginning of June southern Kyrgyzstan had become an ethnic powder keg. Add in some significant crisis mismanagement by Provisional Government authorities and you have the riots in Osh and Jalalabad of April 2010.
Most of the violence was in Osh, and while the Uzbeks certainly committed some crimes, the Kyrgyzstanis were better-armed and far more systematic. Some college kids relax and play Modern Warfare 2 over the summer. I read through about a dozen cases of the same pattern: "First, the removal of the barricade, usually
with an APC*. This phase was often accompanied by “sniper” gunfire from a lone gunman (or woman) on a multi-storeyed building nearby. Second, an advance into the mahalla [Uzbek neighborhood] by armed men and the APC. Third, the looting and burning of houses. The looting was sometimes co-ordinated by groups of women. Looted goods were often removed en masse in dedicated vehicles. Many Uzbeks were beaten and/or killed in their houses, or as they attempted to extinguish fires or flee. Some Uzbek women and girls were subjected to particularly violent sexual assault. Witnesses consistently stated that some of the attackers wore camouflage clothing while others wore civilian clothing, irrespective of whether they were traveling in a military vehicle or walking" (KIC par. 148). By the Kyrgyzstani government's own numbers (KIC par. 205), 426 people were killed, 105 were Kyrgyzstani, and 276 were Uzbek, and the UNHCR puts the number of displaced persons at close to 300,000 (KIC par. 314). In spite of all this, Uzbeks make up the majority of those prosecuted for crimes related to the riots. Of the 5,162 investigations related to the riots launched by December 2010, 79% of the accused were Uzbek, and 18% were Kyrgyzstani (KIC par. 202).
As for what I think of the situation almost a year later, the KIC report mentions two factors that contributed to the violence that I think are key to the current situation in Kyrgyzstan. First, during Bakiyev's last years in power, "increasing global energy and food prices had rendered purchasing power stagnant. The financial crisis slowed economic growth and remittances received from Kyrgyzstani workers employed in Russia and other foreign destinations dropped" (KIC par. 53). If you think the economy is tough у нас в Aмерике, try to imagine 20% inflation. Second, Kyrgyzstanis and Uzbeks don't seem to be getting along any better than they were last year. Not only are some formerly Uzbek businesses in Osh now magically operating under new Kyrgyzstani ownership, but there is a serious problem of land distribution in the province that has already begun to take on an ethnic dimension. Furthermore, the newly free press environment in Kyrgyzstan, while a nice change from the Akayev/Bakiyev era, has also led to a proliferation of xenophobic "journalism", and Osh TV, the formerly Uzbek-language network, now broadcasts in Kyrgyz. It's going to be interesting to see the media coverage (well, what I can translate from Russian or find in English) leading up to the presidential elections this fall. Finally, a lot of people who were in the Provisional Government last year and either didn't see the shit on its way to the fan or were more concerned with removing the Bakiyev clan from power are still in the Provisional Government. When all of these factors are taken together, I am, as usual, not optimistic about the near-term outlook for this country.
Since I've talked so much about Turkish Internet censorship in previous posts, and it has been almost a year, I'd like to follow-up on my discussion of the subject from last summer. Oh boy, first the government unblocked and then re-blocked Youtube (oh Deniz Baykal sex tape, why must you be so scandalicious?), and then they proposed a far more comprehensive filtering system with an interesting choice of banned words (more on that later). Maybe I'm missing something here, but I really don't think this would have led to protests that were significantly larger than what we saw last year if the BTK wasn't trying to close the DNS loopholes that (including, not too long ago, Prime Minister Erdogan, also, thank you CHP for taking the right stance on this issue) have been using for some time. This almost goes without saying, but I think these protests will increase in direct proportion to how much the AKP (and perhaps the ultra-nationalist MHP) presses the issue. Let's hope that, as Yusuf Kanli said in a recent op-ed, "depending on the outcome of the June 12 polls the climate in Turkey will improve as well and some of the oddities of advanced democracy will be corrected with some regular applications of a regular democratic mindset".
Ok, this post has been serious for way too long. It's time to make this site 9 kinds of illegal in Turkey using the banned words listed on Eurasianet: You can't beat 31 homemade glasses of lemonade on a hot June day for free, even if there's some stupid teen pop music playing in the background and you have to escort those lousy kids off your property. Justin Bieber is so gay and anal.
Feel free to try this in the comments.
*This was not, as I imagined when I first read the report, something like a Hummer or a large Jeep. The two models mentioned were the BTR-80 and the BMP-1. The KIC report points out that these were too expertly driven to have been operated by civilians.
