Perhaps it is fitting that on the day the geeks are blacking out websites to fight SOPA (and apparently with at least some tacit Soros support), I would find myself locked out for good from a Soros-funded website where I had been working as an independent contractor, posting at will for nearly two years, EurasiaNet.
I write long posts that many find tl;dr -- I hope you will at least skim this one to the end. There are many grave concerns expressed here about intellectual freedom, workplace democracy and freedom of expression, social media freedoms, online bullying and of course the Great Game.
In a nutshell, I am forced into dismissal from a job I cared deeply about, and into losing my livelihood as a single mother with two children and little other means of support, because I criticized a group of defense-related think-tankers, academics, government officials and mysterious anonymous people who take pro-regime positions -- and stood up to their unconscionable attack on the human rights movement at home and in Central Asia.
In the kinds of Orwellian arguments people disingenuously raise in cases like this, they will say that I "brought it on myself" because I "went too far" although they will be hard put to really point anywhere to any somehow "illegitimate" speech. Anyone outside the circuit will find it hard to understand what is really objectionable about my Twitter feed; if they are sincere believers in intellectual freedom they will ultimately be profoundly troubled by what is happening to me.
My thoughts here are expressed calmly, not in rash haste or anger, and not in any drama. They just have to be said, for the sake of my freedoms and yours.
This lock-out came without warning, but not as a complete surprise. About a month ago, during the Christmas holidays, I got a late-night alarmed email from the EurasiaNet editor. I was "entitled to my opinion," he said but in his view I was "going too far". Earlier that evening, I had written a memo to the main program director, noting a disturbing onslaught of attacks from Joshua Foust of the American Security Project and Registan.net, and other writers at Registan. For months as we had all seen, Foust and several others at Registan had been relentlessly and viciously and strangely attacking every major human rights advocate in the region on Twitter and Registan, and many EurasiaNet writers critical of human rights and the US military role in the region. These pieces were outrageous assaults and so peculiar -- while Foust, a former defense contractor still working in the security field, would understandably have realpolitik sort of views, the viciousness and obsessiveness with which he attacked human rights activists and actions like the picketing of Gulnara Karimova's fashion show was odd. Later I found out there were some back stories to account for some of this, but not fully. It was so relentless; it persisted and persisted and widened. I ignored him for weeks of his screaming about the Karimova picketing; finally I addressed some of the concerns and I thought that was the end of it.
BOILING PRISONERS AND SHOOTING WORKERS
Then one day I wrote about prisoners who had been both boiled and frozen, and Foust tweeted me that I was "lying" and "inciting anger". He was mad at my citation of a Freedom House blog and misrepresented it; it was typical of the twisted and obviously tendentious way in which he took on so many of his targets. I had watched many times while he skewered my fellow EurasiaNet authors; some fought back publicly, some privately, some not at all -- it was all so wild and weird. Foust had clearly developed a strategy of "divide and conquer"; later I was to find that even as he was denouncing and banning me, he had invited another EurasiaNet author to make a guest post and was bantering with still others.
It was clear there were "good" EurasiaNet writers and "bad" EurasiaNet writers and he and others were going to decide which and behave accordingly. His assault on EurasiaNet seemed largely to revolve around the site's critical reporting and opinion writing on the Northern Distribution Network, the route through the former Soviet Union to deliver non-lethal military equipment to NATO troops in Afghanistan. Foust also took up every other major issue related to any criticism of the Central Asian regimes so vital to the NDN cooperation.
After the shooting of striking workers in Kazakhstan in December, there was a fierce debate about whether the Nazarbayev regime would weather the challenge before elections or face more unrest. In my view, Foust had minimized the tragedy in a glib article on the Atlantic site and I had responded in detail in the comments where he couldn't be as savage as he would be on Registan. I also wrote several responses on Registan.net itself. Foust blasted the Carnegie scholar Martha Brill Olcott, ridiculing a piece she had prepared for publication before the shootings saying "no major unrest" had occurred in Kazakhstan. I pointed out that Foust had essentially said the same thing himself in the Atlantic piece I criticized, saying there was only "localized labor unrest" and pointed out the discrepancy. He made an acidic reply, and I tackled again his minimizing of the incident and his obvious distortions of another writer who spoke of response to Zhanaozen by an Islamic extremist group.
Next, I found myself banned from Registan, and denounced in a creepy manifesto from Nathan Hamm, one of the owners and moderators of the site. Surprised, several people came to speak up in my defense. There was nothing untoward in my challenging of Foust; his response and the banning were wrong. A man who appeared to be a State Department official came and spoke up readily in my defense -- but Hamm deleted his response. I managed to get a screenshot and wrote a post in my own defense. It was eerie.
'SUICIDE GIRL'
Earlier, there had been another long series of exchanges arguing about the validity and then the meaning of the "suicide girl hoax". From the beginning, I had felt the story was fake, based on signs of long-standing KGB-style "active measures," but a number of people in the field, including Sarah Kendzior, an expert on social media and Central Asia had taken it very seriously, as had other colleagues, and I was also pressured to write about it internally at OSI. I wanted to explain how I thought it was a secret police caper, but I thought I'd appear churlish if I did, so I wrote just a short account of the allegations.
To my shock, the next morning when I woke up, I found another pseudonymous EurasiaNet author had posted a story repudiating my story, linking to it, and citing a notoriously unreliable Uzbek government-related website, uzmetronom.com, calling its findings "credible," where the reporter claimed to have received confirmation from both the Uzbek police and German border guards in record time that there was no such person. This pseudonymous author, in his piece, called Elena Urlaeva, the human rights advocate, "outspoken" and "naive", although she was concerned enough to respond to a plea for help ; the opposition was suspected of being behind it and to have "tarnished" its reputation. I was stunned that this kind of piece could appear on our site; everyone following Uzbekistan knew how notorious the pro-Karimov uzmetronom.com was for police and intelligence leaks; if another author was going to directly counter something I wrote, why not give me a heads up?
That's not the system at EurasiaNet -- a group of regular bloggers post at will, although some are edited by others. So it was every man for himself; one of the vexing and often demotivating conditions of work are that you never know if someone is going to cover the same story as you are working on, and possibly from a completely different angle. Even so, for something like an essential debunking of another's story and a direct challenge of them and their sources -- and a celebration of an odious source -- it would have been nice. Naturally, Registan picked up this discrepancy between two different EurasiaNet and the arguments continued.
On this thread, I made a number of interventions, sometimes lengthy, debating regulars like Kendzior, and the pseudonymous "Will" who made numerous hostile comments, challenging the reliability of Urlaeva, snidely implying she merely did critical human rights work for money, dumping on the opposition, refusing to accept the challenges to uzmetronom.com. At some point Hamm came in to chide me nastily for posts that were too long, although they had in fact cleared his comment system's 5,000 character limit. As the record shows in my defense, I called him childish for being petty, and told him his system should cut people off with a box limitation or have a notification. Ultimately, the "suicide girl" story was proved a hoax, and Sarah Kendzior wrote a story about it for The Atlantic, but she didn't mention key aspects of the story or the strong likelihood that it was an intelligence operation.
After I was banned, @Registan_net wrote a series of nasty posts about me on Twitter. I was "so full of shit no fertilizer was needed in my area" etc. I was described as a terrible person -- and the posts were all directed @Eurasianet. I wrote to the top manager that Foust was playing writers off against each other and he should adopt a policy of asking everyone to cease responding to him. I also pointed out that the Registan gang were lobbying tweets with "@eurasianet" deliberately in them disparaging me for no reason, merely because I debated Foust and called out his hypocrisy, so that they not only became part of the news stream, but landed in the "social chatter" box right on the front page in the prime view. I was called a terrible person who shouldn't be at EurasiaNet -- it was the cheapest form of online bullying, trying to get your employer alarmed. Here's what they wrote: "the awfulness with which @catfitz conducts herself is a tremendous black mark for @EurasiaNet."
That was December 24. My "awfulness" at that time consisted of...standing up for Martha Brill Olcott on a matter of principle, calling out Foust's hypocrisy in knocking her even as he minimized the shootings in Kazakhstan and standing up to his bullying, all in this thread. Read it for yourself, and you'll see there is absolutely nothing improper in my speech, nor was there anything before that but legitimate critical discourse. Indeed, as the State Department man said, Registan's behaviour was the problem.
On the front page then at Registan, Nathan Hamm published a completely false report of me, claiming falsely that I had used obscenities, or that I verged on libel, and had a "black thumb" as a poster. None of this was true as I explained in a post later and as can be seen from the first and second threads. But that's what fell into the view. Someone -- I'm not sure -- began to write to bosses also on email to complain that I was "attacking EurasiaNet writers" although no such attack had taken place whatsoever and never took place and to this day I have no idea what this really references.
The reason I wrote to this particular top manager was because some days early, at 1:00 am, he had written in alarm whether I knew who was on the @EurasiaNet Twitter account because someone was unleashing snarky tweets at Foust. It wasn't me; I had no access to that corporate account. Later he found out who it was and ordered that person to cease replying to Foust's attacks completely. That was the context for my email: on December 26, I urged the bosses to make a uniform policy for all EurasiaNet bloggers not to reply to Foust, instead of having a situation where some were allowed to reply and some not, with me even banned.
That boss never answered me; instead the editor called me the next day to dress me down for 45 minutes. He was angry at a comment on Twitter I made in a debate with Foust that got cc'd to reporters, noting that on an official trip to Zhanaozen, information was controlled by the government and there could be more. My statement was true; the thin-skinned reaction I got was strange. The editor seemed to be upset about other blog posts I had made, but he didn't identify them. He began to berate me for being "too self-righteous" and urging me to "do the Christian thing and turn the other cheek" when others attacked me unfairly. Furthermore, I was to "move to the center" in my posts on EurasiaNet, but it wasn't clear which ones there were "extreme".
Most disconcertingly, henceforth, I was to clear all my posts through him and the Central Asian editor, and I was to cease commenting at all on the Central Asian region on Twitter or other blogs.
As a freelancer, single mother with two children and little other source of income, getting a call at home two days after Christmas, my first instinct was to be afraid and comply with the orders. I confided in a colleague who thought I shouldn't accept a gag on Twitter as that would undermine us all as freelancers but I looked at the cold weather outside and the electric heater and my kids, and I decided I better go along to get along.
So for the next weeks, I began to queue up my stories, refraining from any other comments anywhere else on Twitter or my own blogs, and tried to cooperate. But soon I faced another demand. My stories were too long; they were 550-650 words. They had to be cut to be shorter. I cut them to 400-500 and continued to submit them. But then another obstacle was placed. Yes, they were shorter, but they had to be more succinct. A story that was some 500 words was sent back cut to 322, and it was mysterious what the real difference was between them or why it was necessary. I looked at the front page, and saw author after author with 500, 600, 700 or more words. I kept chiseling and trying to make them even shorter.
Last week, I sent a story of some 350 words then, and then found it was edited down to 285 -- and key details were either blurred or made inaccurate and key facts left out. I was digesting a report from Urlaeva that used the phrase "massive discontent" about cab drivers' rebelling against a new law with requirements for cabs, and that phrase was removed and other edges softened.
I began to get a series of memos from the editor that felt completely contrived. Repeatedly, I was told to engage in "impulse control" -- as if I fired off quick blasts on the site, although I always spent several hours to prepare material, and was now spending four hours to research and write and polish them and think 10 times about them under the new rules. When I kept trying to send even further-edited and shorter stories, now I was told once again they were still not "succinct" and didn't have "polish and texture". Again and again, I was admonished to practice "impulse control" and to "ask myself: do I want to be a better writer" and such.
I kept noting that *new requirements* were being made on me that had never been articulated in two years; the answer came back that new guidelines would be prepared just for me. "But I worry that new rules or arrangements would not have the desired effect, if there is not an inner drive on your part to make your posts as polished and textured as possible," said the editor. "I get the impression from reading your last message that you seek to maintain the status quo writingwise within an altered framework, producing the same stuff in a different, smaller package. That, as I see it, is not viable over the long-term. I need to see an openness to philosophical change from you."
I had never had anything remotely like that sent to me in five years of working at OSI CEP. I put down my keyboard. I walked away slowly. Was this a cult?
All of these locutions were so odd for business correspondence, given that -- again -- I had worked for a total of five years, and for nearly two years at EurasiaNet, I had posted freely at will without editorial preview, with only a comment once a year ago that I should shorten up my longer posts -- which I did. No one had ever complained about my submissions before, ever. They were reprinted in other publications; board members praised them; colleagues wrote me fan letters; they were retweeted. It made no sense.
I tried to tackle the problem then at the root in several memos. For one, I felt the basic issue was an discomfort level between writers in the field reporting the news, and digests from the exile and independent press. There were other structural and programmatic issues. I also felt there was a shift happening in the company line (which I will write about later), in part due to the pressure they are under from different quarters, including Registan. Finally, I said it wasn't necessary to suddenly start putting me through vetting and writing tests and creepy lectures about self-improvement after all this time (I have been writing newsletters for OSI for the last five years); the editors could say they simply couldn't use me any more.
TWITTER GAG ORDER
As I watched a number of EurasiaNet writers continue to spar with Foust and post on Registan and anywhere else they felt like posting, and write articles that sometimes troubled me for their views (again, more another time), I had to wonder why I alone was under a gag order. Again, at this point in time, looking at my posts here, here, and my very Twitter stream, there was no good reason for me to be on a Twitter gag order. In fact, when I happened to run into an OSI board member on January 6, that person commented to me how surprised he was at my banning at Registan; he said I had done nothing wrong and it was disgraceful what Foust was doing. Other colleagues had echoed this to me.
I thought about it and decided that I couldn't abide by this restriction, not when there was nothing in my contract (and couldn't be for a freelancer, who would be expected of course to be writing for a variety of publications or web sites), and all the others could have Twitfights to their heart's content. The next day on Russian Orthodox Christmas, I started this new blog "Different Stans," thinking that the best thing to do when told you couldn't blog on the region was to start a blog on the region. I had actually started drafting it even weeks before, but "wrote for the desk drawer" and didn't put it live. I began to publish my posts -- in criticism of Foust on Zhanaozen and then other topics of interest.
Some days earlier, my editor had sent me a link to an awful and malicious takedown of Foust on The Exiled. He said it might bring a smile to my face. It didn't. On January 7, I drafted a reply to him explaining that I didn't think that was at all the way to challenge Foust, that he should be debated on the merits of his ideas, not anything to do with his background. I said I could no longer follow orders not to comment on social media because to do so would imply that there was something politically incorrect about my ideas or outrageous about the delivery of them. There was not. He didn't reply. I continued to post, but in the following days got more and more of the niggling and contrived "editing".
PSEUDO-SCIENCE
On January 10, I posted a story, chiseled to perfection and cleared by two editors, about the surge of membership on Facebook. The story accurately cited for that date (it's changed since then) a known industry analyst on the numbers; but it qualified the story by saying Uzbekistan was barely about Chad in Internet penetration. Immediately I began to be attacked by Registan regulars. I was guilty of "sloppy statistics" said Kendzior. At that time I was also accused of "poor analytical thought" because I legitimately criticized a joint paper by Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce. There was nothing in my comments that disparaged them; it criticized their troubling thesis that publicizing police brutality on social networks made people use the Internet less, not more, and that caused social movements for change not to advance. I felt this played into the hands of the regimes and was only a partial story about what is happening in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
These two self-important academics relentlessly banged on me on Twitter over my simple little post that Facebook had more users in Uzbekistan. It was uncanny and weird. It had the contrived feeling that everything else has had since my first encounters with Registan over the "suicide girl" story and the pseudonymous EurasiaNet author who quoted a known government sympathizer leading to a chain of events that was putting me through preposterous editing sessions and psychological sessions that felt like GlavLit and threatening my livelihood. I couldn't help feeling that the Uzbek secret police who had started what I was convinced was an active measure must have been overjoyed: it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
REGISTAN SAVAGES YET ANOTHER HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST
I watched, then as Registan savaged yet another human rights advocate at CPJ -- following months and months of their antagonism to ICG, HRW, FH and others, and of course EurasiaNet writers. It was really uncalled for and nasty and unreasonable. I wrote a lengthy rebuttal. Along the way, I called Sarah Kendzior "Registan's office wife". This old term from the 1930s seemed completely appropriate for what she was doing: currying favour with Foust by gushing about his every post and never challenging his outrageous attacks on others or posts that seemed protective of Central Asian regimes; when faced with a challenge of him by others, she declined to pick sides. I suspect that when Hamm referred to some "kind-hearted person" who normally was lenient about moderation, but insisted in my case that I be banned, that it was she. Note the post using what seemed merely a sarcastic slight was on January 15 -- following days and days of her attacks on me, first over legitimate criticism of her journal thesis, then over my Facebook article. She and her cronies on Twitter, like Foust, would deliberately write @Eurasianet in every post to make sure that it got into the stream and in the social chatter box on the front page -- they were like griefers.
I kept replying that my article was accurate, but they kept pestering me, and I saw others retweeting over and over that I was guilty of "sloppy statistics". There was truly nothing sloppy about the simple act of reporting Facebook's surge in membership from Uzbekistan -- they were contriving this and trying to lob it at my bosses in order to harass me and to somehow get me silenced. It was eerie.
Then yesterday, Pearce continued to ask numerous questions that were completely out of proportion with the story -- a simple story on a blog stating a simple fact. What was the methodology and sample? This was a commercial company, she said, implying it was unreliable. I kept explaining that they were essentially being pseudo-scientific (although I didn't use that term; that about sums up what they were doing). Not seeing the forest for the trees. I wrote a post in defense of my thinking on this and cited their strange nit-picking claims. Next Pearce, Kendzior and Foust began screaming that I had called Kendzior an "office wife" and Foust in particular said this was "very very very very misogynist" and made sure to wield the @eurasianet sign to get it into the view on the front page of EurasiaNet.
I used this term not in anger or in a sense of vindictiveness; and I also did a one-line post, Elephant in the Room in which I alluded to Foust's role as a bully, as someone himself who had been bullied. I wrote these things not impulsively or in anger, but to fight back against people who had been attacking me for weeks, banned me from their site, disparaged me for no reason, and heckled me trying to silence me, and worse of all, trying to take away my livelihood. They were actively trying to complain to my bosses, continually repeating that I was a disgrace to EurasiaNet. I wasn't. They were, in their use of this disgusting means to try to win arguments. The worse thing was, it was working; my bosses were telling me to shut up on Twitter and blogs, although my criticism was legitimate and normal.
The next day, first I found a story about people scavenging for firewood just wasn't getting posted for days (on Andijan). Why? I asked why, and then in the course of trying to set up the next story, found I was locked out.
CLOSED SOCIETY
Within an hour, two bosses were calling me. They piously told me that they were locking me out after "long and careful consideration" (in fact, half a day) because there were complaints about my behaviour from "a full professor" and a "grantee". For the few weeks remaining in my contract, I must cease posting on any social networks whatsoever about Central Asia and knuckle under to even further editorial restrictions.
I pointed out that both Katy Pearce (the professor) and Sarah Kendzior (the grantee) had been heckling me for days because I legitimately criticized in this post their disturbing thesis; they were falsely accusing me of "sloppy statistics" over an obvious and normal Socialbakers reference; they were lobbing these tweets deliberately into the stream and front page and getting their cronies to retweet them. Somehow, this context didn't matter, and the overall problem of Foust and other Registan writers outrageous attacks on the human rights movement didn't matter, either. My comments "tarnished EurasiaNet" said the editor; a comment like "office wife" was unacceptable; referencing Foust's bullied past as well. That these pretty mild slights were made in self-defense after weeks and weeks of being harassed and bullied by these people; that they banned me for nothing as a board member had even said, didn't matter.
Astoundingly, the editor countered that I was the only one banned on Registan -- as if this was some kind of proof of verbal crime (!). Even more bizarrely, he demanded to know if I was banned on any other sites. I repeatedly said I wasn't; he repeatedly questioned me in disbelief. But I am most certainly not banned from any site in this field to my knowledge; if I'm banned from a Second Life fan site, that's nothing; I'm not banned from the official Second Life site.
I don't believe that my comments are the outrages imagined, and I stand by them. When you are harassed online by people who attack your reputation and your livelihood, you have little recourse, and I believe you have to fight back. That's all. I fight back. More people should be doing that. There should be more collegial solidarity.
SOCIAL MEDIA POLICIES
I suggested that if management would have a policy uniform for all writers that they must not respond to Foust attacks or post on Registan, I would comply with it. But in a situation where some authors could post there and spar with them and others were banned and now I was banned from even speaking at all about the region to keep my job, it was unfair.
Incredibly, the editor said that when Joshua Kucera or others posted or even argued vigorously with Foust, it was "different". It was ok for him to do so. I kept pressing him to explain how; he never did. He noted vaguely that he had urged "restraint," but he would not make a policy. New guidelines were being drafted just for me for editing the stories; and this social media gag would also just apply to me.
I said there was nothing in my contract that forbid me to comment on Twitter or my own blog or any other site. The editor then reminded me that there were clauses that would allow an interpretation that involved not disparaging the company. I'm not sure that there are. But I had to realize where I'd heard wording like that before: in the warnings to Uzbek journalists. It's the kind of Soviet phrase still alive throughout the region -- "denigrating" or "defaming" or "disparaging" the country or institution or people.
Nathan Hamm on @Registan_net wrote way back in December -- long before any "insults" were made about "office wives" and "bullies" that "the awfulness with which @catfitz conducts herself is a tremendous black mark for @EurasiaNet" merely because I argued against Foust in a thread that a board member told me had nothing wrong with it.
People yammer pompously about the need to have "social media policies for the workplace" and endlessly argue about its impact on the workplace, and there are even parody videos on this subject. This story isn't about making a social media policy because I frankly don't think they should ever be made for freelancers.
I take a very liberal view about Twitter, noting that even the Taliban shouldn't be removed from Twitter, unless you can show incitement to imminent violent action. My solution to any problem that anyone has on Twitter whatsoever is to not follow me. Don't like what I say? I won't be writing that "my views are not those of my employers" or "my views are my own, not yours" or "my views are mine, maybe yours, too," I say: don't follow me if you don't like what I say.
The problem, of course, is when you have a group of concerted persecutors like Foust and other Registan commenters who wield the @ as a weapon, who deliberately try to put into a track or a website stream their harassment. But as an early adapter on Twitter in 2007, I fought battles with the tech gurus like Steve Gillmor and the Twitter devs like Ev to *keep track open* and not create tools that would enable people doing vanity searches of their own @name, or running streams on sites, to be able to mute people who would use their @ sign to try to talk to them. I think it's fundamental to keeping these spaces open for free intellectual inquiry and political discourse that the Silicon Valley influencers and other tribal leaders on Twitter with hundreds of thousands of followers not get to easily turn these multi-directional social media platforms into broadcast media where they mute people they don't like even from appearing in their stream visible to others. I feel it's a recipe for silos and death of freedom.
I didn't do anything wrong. My blog posts are all normal, legitimate criticisms that should be -- must be -- tolerated in a free debate. They contain no obscenities; they contain no adhominem attacks.
Of course no employer is required to hire you if he doesn't like your speech. But this employer is devoted to the ideals of an open society, and furthermore, has no evenhanded social media universal policy for all freelancers.
Worst of all is the substance of this story: EurasiaNet is enabling Registan to decide the level of criticism it will tolerate for its outrageous attacks on the human rights movement and even EurasiaNet writers themselves. That's appalling.
When scholars and analysts in the Central Asian field challenged Nathan Hamm for his ban of me, he haughtily said that I had "the rest of the Internet" to comment on even if he banned me from his site. Indeed, he has no requirement to accommodate my views on his site, but if he effectively gets a ban imposed on me by my employer from commenting anywhere on social media about this field by having his attack dogs convince my employers they must silence me, he's achieved a blanket ban. That's scary.
Two scholars in this field, Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce -- studying social media in Central Asia, of all things -- were actively involved in harassing me merely because I legitimately disagreed with their theses. More frighteningly, they complained to my bosses in an effort to get me silenced, and fired.
It's especially Orwellian on a day when Foust himself and other Registan regulars are arguing about a professor who came in to berate a colleague that she felt was "out of line" in the Zhanaozen post.
WHEN THE BEAR ASKS FOR YOUR LUNCH, GIVE IT TO HIM
So what next? By publicizing these issues, I don't expect to have my contract renewed. At the end of the denunciation today, astounding, I was asked to continue working. Surprised that anyone who so distrusted me could imagine I could go on working in those conditions, I said I couldn't see what they had in mind. I was to be demoted to the level of any contributor, not a trusted editor, and I could send my work in by email and shut up. I was ordered to cease commenting on social media because this dragged in EurasiaNet and "tarnished" it. I thought about it for the rest of the day; I decided that the only thing that tarnishes EurasiaNet really is their finding anything wrong with what I posted on Registan, and essentially assisting Registan in banning me from all of social media discussion on this region. This is the argument we make to authoritarian governments; I have to make it here to this employer as well.
I will finish it out for a few weeks by submitting the required materials via email, now I'm locked out not only from direct posting but even from going into a queue on the website.
I also expect zero solidarity from my fellow EurasiaNet writers. Why? Because I had zero solidarity from them when I was banned from Registan for no legitimate reason (as a board member himself noted). In fact, I challenged one of them in a private email and DM, telling him I thought Foust was grooming him and dividing and conquering us by letting him post comments and not me. He had nothing to say except that he disagreed with Foust. Later I was told by the editor in his lock-out speech that this writer ran and complained that I was attacking him (!). That seemed odd and when I checked it, it turned out it wasn't true (and I believe him) .
Of course, all EurasiaNet writers -- even all grantees -- should all realize that what happened to me could happen to them at any time.
As for the Registan gang, they will gloat and victory-dance that they have removed an author who was too critical of them -- and of the regimes of Central Asia, too -- out of their field and even got them gagged under threat of dismissal -- and then essentially fired. They ought to pause and wonder if that too-great power might be their downfall one day, of course, but I don't expect that to happen any time soon.
THE DRONE'S EYE VIEW
For I see the top-down drone's eye view of this situation in a particular way: on December 15, 2011, the human rights movement lost the fight to keep sanctions in place again Uzbekistan for its poor human rights practices. A waiver was passed as part of the defense authorization budget in Congress and now military aid can go to Tashkent. The view expressed by Joshua Kucera in The New York Times seems to indicate a new consensus even among critics of the Administration: that human rights will be characterized as having technically improved -- a kind of backdating of the grim situation from the exigency of having to route around the delivery route closed off in Pakistan. Worse, silence on human rights is counseled -- it's futile, and exposes the US to charges of hypocrisy. Nobody challenged this; nobody said anything; the debate on it at Registan had the usual ghastly bad faith and accomodationism to both the Uzbek regime and the Pentagon.
While I don't see any concrete manifestations of connections, I feel as if those in the defense community -- a dark penumbra that includes contractors and coopted academics and think-tankers and corporations -- are saying to the human rights community -- "You lost the battle, now shut up. If you keep risking our delivery -- and withdrawal! -- routes, you're really messing things up for us. The stans have us kettled. Keep it to yourself."
Oh, sure, allow a modicum of criticism of the obvious; make it look like you care about victims of pogroms; seem to shake your head sadly with wordly-wise resignation. But within boundaries.
The area of Central Asia is going to become a greater battle ground than it already is for many competing state and non-state actors; it feels to me like Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. There is a struggle, then, for power and influence and elbowing aside people who challenge those in power in any fashion; a competing for narratives and who gets to amplify them.
I do hope I can continue this little blog just to sound my particular note freely and to make criticism freely of these more powerful news sites and blogs. Hit the tip jar! I am going to be poor and lonely.
