Clinton speaking at a town hall in Dushanbe, November 2011
The debate about whether or not an Arab Spring is possible (or advisable) for Central Asia deserves to be robustly debated. Intellectual inquiry about it should not be cut off by the creation of taboos, and the invocations of racism and imperialism in a "reverse Orientalism" implied merely for participating in this global discourse.
There needs to be a debate among an array of viewpoints on these questions precisely because nobody really does know what will happen in a closed, authoritarian society like Uzbekistan. Just because cab drivers are angry over new taxi laws or people have to scavenge for firewood because the gas is turned off in Andijan homes does not mean there will be massive Tahrir-Square-like reactions. But if you keep repeating "it can't happen here" as a mantra because you hope it is true (and you're even protective of these regimes), then when unrest does grow, you miss some obvious early warning signs such as these.
With her thesis of "reverse orientalism," Sarah Kendzior inevitably minimizes the possibilities that Karimov's regime may topple ; that social movements could reach the boiling point; that social media may help this. That's because she believes strongly that social movements and social media cannot get started in these authoritarian settings and the news of repression only has a chilling effect. Yet while this may be the case today, she is then unprepared for change and then filtering the signals of it when it comes to fit her thesis. Example: She keeps strenuously denying that the Facebook page about Shavkat Mirziyoyev is authentic -- a factology -- but she don't want to think about what it means when there are forces that exist that keep the page up anyway even it isn't official; already within the walls of the government palace there is a succession struggle with Karimov aging but she doesn't have a plan.
The fact is, the discussion of the Arab Spring itself becomes a kind of catalyst, and it is certainly an inspiration for other resistance movements. The Occupied Wall Street kids face nothing more than desk appearance tickets for their uncivil disobedience blocking the Brooklyn Bridge or downtown traffic or drumming all night; their experience even with a pepper-spraying is nothing remotely like the police beatings and killings Egyptians have suffered and the horrible torture devout Muslims have experienced in Uzbekistan. The drivers for dissent were different (bread price hikes versus heavy student loans). Yet that won't stop OWS from feeling a kind of solidarity that is as effective for their organizing as it is for Egyptians.
The question ultimately isn't "whether" the Arab Spring (which isn't even the cliche it is taken for) is coming to Central Asia, but whether *this discourse about it* will be useful to -- and increasingly utilized by -- social movements seeking change there or by tyrants and regime supporters to crack down on any form of dissent. Or, more to the point, whether Western governments will find this discourse justifiably useful in settings like the UN Human Rights Council -- or whether they'll be blasted as racists and imperialists if they do.
A blogger at the Streit Council, Griffin W. Huschke makes this qualified analysis:
While the brains in the strategic planning departments of the transatlantic community may be drawing up their color-coded schemes for intervention in Central Asia, I wouldn’t hold my breath. The Arab Spring is a unique event, and Central Asian countries are a lot different in a number of different ways. What the transatlantic community can do, however, is remind our allies in Central Asia of Honsi Mubarak’s fate after he was disposed, and hypothesize that some political reforms may go a ways towards satiating a population hungry for political rights. Uprisings in Central Asia might not be imminent, but we should still try to use their specter to push our friends in the region on a straighter path to democracy.
Western transatlantic planners may not need to invoke the specter; maybe the tyrants block news for their people but they can see it themselves and draw their own conclusions. This is, after all, a state that prevented its people from getting the news of 9/11 for some time, and delayed and dosed the reporting of the killing of Osama bin Ladn. Even so, what Huschke is talking about is a conscious policy of invoking this analogy everywhere ("watch out with that oppression, you may be next") -- and that's the exact act that Sarah Kendzior's theory of a new racism and imperialism is designed to stop.
Others are going to go on disagreeing -- or have already disagreed implicitly -- and point out that the real racism is the belief that the Uzbek people aren't fit for democracy.
At a hearing of the Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation last May, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) had this to say:
Central Asian leaders often claim that their citizens are not ready for democracy because of their history and culture. This is insulting, bigoted, unacceptable and absolutely untrue. It is also sadly familiar: Many Middle Eastern tyrants said the same thing about their peoples, but the recent events in the Middle East show once again that it is not democracies that are unstable, but dictatorships.
The conventional wisdom is that similar protest – popular protest movements are unlikely in Central Asia. Yet a few months ago, that was the accepted wisdom for the Middle East as well. It is time that we rethink and we need to challenge our conclusions on both regions; gross and systematic human rights violations have surely created a just sense of popular grievance in Central Asia. And Tunisia showed that it is impossible to predict when a people will decide what that a situation is, indeed, intolerable.
Paul Goble, former State Department official and RFE/RL editor, and author of Windows on Eurasia, also testified at this hearing:
Nowhere in the world has the Arab Spring given greater promise of real political change for democracy and freedom than in the authoritarian states of post-Soviet Central Asia. The reasons for that are clear, but not always clearly understood. It is not because these countries are also uslim-majority states, and it is not because they too are ruled by brutal authoritarian regimes.
There are Muslim-majority states where the Arab Spring has not had an impact, and is unlikely to. And there are authoritarian regimes which either by brutality or accident have blocked the spread of the ideas of the Arab spring.
Rather, it is because the events in the Arab world have dispelled the myth promoted by the governments of the region that fundamental change is impossible or dangerous, and that the populations there must put up with the status quo because the regimes that rule over them enjoy international support as bulwarks against Islamic fundamentalism and supporters of the international effort against terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere. (emphasis added)
It is important to understand that this development is not something that is going to lead to immediate change, or to demonstrations in the street, and overthrow governments in weeks or months. But it is a fundamental change in mental attitudes, which matters a great deal.
The argument that the governments in Central Asia are using did not save the authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, and they will not save the authoritarian regimes in post-Soviet Central Asia, although it is entirely possible that the support they’ve received from abroad and will continue to receive from abroad, as well as their own repression, will keep
them in office for some time. But when a people changes its views of what is possible, that is the beginning of the change in the societies and the polities on the ground.
In answering a question, Goble then talked about how the Uzbek regime learned to present its opponents as Islamists during the Andijan event and that worked to discredit them to Europeans and Americans.
But all of these things, all these things taken together, have the effect of meaning that those who will continue to oppose the regime will be the people we say we most don’t want to see in power. And that the people that we would like to be able to see come to power will be less likely to take action. But I really think that we’re, as much as these governments move to control the media and the Internet, the amount of a success they have in that direction should not be overstated.
The splash effect from a small number of people, who have access to information to spread it in society, is rather larger than we suspect. And if you look at the way in which revolutionary information or transformational information has spread, you don’t need all that many people to be the primary nodes; then it becomes spread elsewhere. And I think we make a mistake if we simply measure the number of people who have an Internet account and say that’s the measure of the impact of the Internet on that society.
We also make a mistake if we think the top story is that the rate of Facebook growth is slowing, and not that 100,000 people joined in a year in a surge of growth, and a growth that is still continuing.
