Monday, August 15, 2011

6-14-11: Send Uzbeks, Guns, and Money

(Author's note: Even though I revised this after I got back to the U.S., I still don't like how this post turned out. Still, I'm uploading it because it introduces a lot of the themes that I would have more interesting things to say about later in the trip. It was only in the second week of an 8-week stay in the country.)

Wow, Istanbul did somewhat prepare me for Bishkek, but I certainly didn’t expect some things in my first week here. While there was no Internet at my host family’s place, I’m not disturbed by that. What has been difficult is the on again, off again power and electricity. I couldn’t shower at night since that is when everyone waters their gardens. The fact that local food is at least 5 times oilier than anything you can find in America is a problem too. Also, anyone who has been to Bishkek probably knows about or has been in a маршрутка. These are large vans used as minibuses and there is no such thing as personal space on those things. Insert your favorite statement about how we take so much for granted back in the США here.

White whining aside, I’d like to acknowledge two derps I made in the last post. Derp #1: The adjective is “Kyrgyz”, not “Kyrgyzstani” (or is it? we’ll talk about this in the next post). The source I got “Kyrgyzstani” from was pretty legitimate, but everyone (including people in Kyrgyzstan) says Kyrgyz. Derp #2: I think I, and perhaps the KIC report, overemphasized the ethnic component of the June 2010 riots. There are a few common narratives into which it is all too easy to unwittingly pigeonhole complex political developments that we Americans often know little about. It’s as easy to read what happened last year and the current nationalist rhetoric in Kyrgyz politics as “Ethnic Group A hates Ethnic Group B” as it is to read the “Arab Spring” and the “Green Revolution” as “Youngsters fighting Crotchety Old Dictators with their Youtubes and their Facebooks and their Tweety-Twitters”. In reality, all factors need to be considered to fully understand the “sexy” headlines the media throws onto our TVs and web browsers every minute, and I hope to better explain here what is going on in Kyrgyzstan and where this country might be headed.

In my first week here, there was a guest lecture by Orozbek Moldaliev, who at the time worked with (I might have the name wrong) the President’s Department of Strategic Analysis, which seems to be close to our White House Chief of Staff. The lecture mainly focused on explaining last year’s riots, and overall it was a very good talk. I’d like to walk through my recollection of Moldaliev’s talk and comment on a few points. Keep in mind that my Russian was not yet good enough to listen directly to Moldaliev, and I can only talk about what the translator said.

Most explanations of the June ’10 riots have blamed a shady coalition of Uzbek separatists, drug smugglers, and the Bakiyevs for triggering the violence, and I can see some decent evidence for the second factor. It’s a well-known fact that tons of opium travel through Kyrgyzstan from Afghanistan and Tajikistan on their way to Russia and Western Europe, and there’s some evidence (e.g. the fact that Bakiyev disbanded Kyrgyzstan's Drug Control Agency (DCA)) that the Bakiyevs cultivated ties with the drug mafia. Once they were gone, there was no one left to pocket the drug money, and a rearranging of the proverbial chairs was inevitable. This was one point that was briefly discussed in the KIC report, and I think it needed some attention in this post. What has made me seriously reconsider how I think about Kyrgyz politics is his discussion of the real and perceived situation of the Uzbek community. Moldaliev claimed that, while the Uzbeks may have believed they were being discriminated against by the Kyrgyz, in reality the whole system is corrupt. If you're an Uzbek businessman in Osh, and there are Kyrgyz criminals collecting protection money, corrupt Kyrgyz tax officials collecting fines (read bribes), and a corrupt court system (dominated by ethnic Kyrgyz) that does not provide a place to appeal, then you might think that this thoroughly corrupt system is out to cheat Uzbeks. This, of course, raises the question of why there are so few Uzbeks in government. Moldaliev claims that most Uzbeks studied in the Uzbek language schools set up in the 90s that were mentioned in the KIC report, and as a result most Uzbeks are not fluent in Kyrgyz or Russian, the two languages in which all governing bodies conduct their business. Thus Uzbeks have not been purposefully shut out of their government. It's “just the way things are”. Why not make Uzbek and official language? Moldaliev also discussed this. The fact is that only Uzbeks, who make up 14% of the population, speak Uzbek. If people from post-Soviet countries who came to America wanted to make Russian an official language, how popular would that be here in the U.S.? I added in my notes that there's already no shortage of debate over the user of English and Spanish here in the U.S., and our Latino community is at least as large as the Uzbek community in Kyrgyzstan.

Overall, I liked Moldaliev's lecture, even though he was likely giving us talking points put together in the Kyrgyz White House. He was a lot fairer than what many people would say about last year, he didn't repeat the claim that the Uzbeks wanted autonomy last year, and he did state that most of the cafés and restaurants there were destroyed in the riots were Uzbek. What I'm still uncertain about is his point, repeated several times, that Uzbeks were not shut out on purpose, but that “that's just how things were”. I'm going to go out on a limb here and chalk that up to a poor translation. The fact that at least Akayev's government did take some steps to promote Uzbek language schools and culture as mentioned in the KIC report probably rules out a full-blown unofficial government policy of discrimination. However, if there was no problem of inter-ethnic relation in Kyrgyzstan before riots, there certainly is one year later. An article on RFE/RL paints a fairly dire picture of Osh one year after the riots. While the Kyrgyz have a generally negative opinion of these folks who is from away and vice versa, they haven't reached the point where they're willing to take up arms against their neighbors...yet. If a nationalist like Jyldyz “Sarah Palin on Steroids and Armed with Tactical Nukes” Joldosheva wins the presidential elections and takes Kyrgyzstan in a more authoritarian direction, expect a lot more ugliness in the next few years. I'll have more on this later in the post, but right now I think I'm missing something. Oh yeah, this blog is supposed to be about politics AND TECHNOLOGY in the former Soviet Union.

One of the first ads I saw coming out of the baggage area at Manas International Airport was an ad for Beeline KG, one of the phone companies in Kyrgyzstan and a few other Central Asian countries. To give you an idea of what kind of phones people use here, the sign read (in English and Russian) “Experience new 3G technologies!” I looked into what kind of service Beeline offers (given my one year of Russian), and it brought up something I hadn't thought of regarding circumvention technology: while the Tor Project, for example, has done some good work to port its software to smart phones, there has been nothing that I can find about work on the lower-end models that are, unfortunately, ubiquitous in some states that are more inclined to censor the web. I plan to discuss this in more depth as part of a research paper I have to write in my Central Asian Studies class, and I plan to post said paper in this blog.

I've been reading on Eurasianet about arms proliferation in Kyrgyzstan, the brawl in parliament two months ago, and on how the country is increasingly falling under “the law of the crowd”...


Nope, nope, nope, stop the post. At this point in the writeup, I made an ivy-tower argument drawing from Plato's Republic that Kyrgyzstan's experiment with parliamentary democracy is failing rapidly, and it won't be long before an authoritarian strongman of a radically different character from the two oligarchs who used to rule the country takes over. I still agree with this assessment, but I have loads of material in later posts that talks about it, and what's left in this post just isn't of a high enough quality for this blog. Stay tuned for “Kalashnikovs and Kumys” a two-parter on Kyrgyzstan's foreign and domestic policy where I come face to face with some native authoritarians in their natural habitat.

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