Different Stans

Is Any of #Turkmenistan's Railroad Construction Activity Going to Benefit the NDN?

Photo by Turkmenistan Ministry of Railways

Turkmenistan is busy building various railways. Is any of this going to be of use to NATO's NDN plans?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: No. But there are some intriguing indications that it's at least in the US policy and planning folder, and Turkmenistan is at least building out to the Afghan border.

Turkmenistan has been in a bit of a frenzy of rail-constructing activity in the last year or two. Turkmen officials were off to the UK last week to buy rail equipment and Berdymukhamedov has been talking up the rail construction projects at government meetings.

The allegedly dubious and pro-Kazakh government Universal News Wires writes on one of the Turkmen plans:

The 52-mile railroad will link with Central Asia’s regional transport network and boost the export potential of the troubled country.

The line which begins at the Afghan town of Akina-Andhoi, some 400 miles northwest of Kabul, will end at Afghanistan’s northern border with Turkmenistan and the Turkmen town of Atamyrat-Ymamnazar.

I don't see any reason to distrust that report. The Times of Central Asia also reports this rail activity (and both probably mined the official press) and it's consistent with past reports of rail construction plans, so I think Turkmenistan is trying to ramp up its rails:

“We will continue to build railroads in different directions,” said the Turkmen leader noting that the Atamyrat-Imamnazar railway, the Gazachak-Shasenem-Dashoguz railway, a railway bridge across the Amu Darya River and a high-speed railway between Turkmenbashi in Balkan Velayat and Turkmenabat in Lebap Velayat would be built in the near future.

This is partly about improvement of commerce and transport domestically, and also about connecting to other countries in the region to ship everything from LNG to melons.

The railroad enthusiast Andrew Grantham has a great map of some of these plans which he has put together. He notes the scarcity of information about Turkmenistan's railroads (a hangover from Soviet secrecy and characteristic of the authoritarian regime since then) and wonders if there is even a web site for the official ministry of railroads because he couldn't find it. There is (you have to Google in Russian), but it seems to exist only in Russian and hasn't been updated in months -- and doesn't have a lot of information on it. (I've always wondered what the back story was regarding the railroad official's assassination a few years ago of the MNB official who was investigating his alleged corruption. What was that all about?).

What's interesting about Turkmenistan's projects (and which makes it be about more than just melons) is that it is doing them with key countries in the Islamic world, starting of course with its neighbour, Iran, whose leader never behaves as crazily when he has talks with Berdymukhamedov about concrete projects like this as he does at the UN when he's trying to wipe Israel from the map.

Then there's also Jordan, which is consulting, and Qatar, which is helping. Meetings with Afghanistan construction and economic officials undoubtedly had this on the table and it's been mentioned in Berdymukhamecov's talks with Karzai.

So is the US making any headway in trying to get Turkmenistan signed up for the NDN?

A Wikileaks-revealed cable dated December 2, 2008, that I don't think has been covered tells the tale:

First, a visit from General McNab, summarized as follows:

Charge Miles raised the issue of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) with Turkmen Foreign Minister Meredov. Meredov listened carefully to Charge,s points but then re-played the well-known Turkmen (negative) position on the issue. Charge emphasized that the issue was important and would not go away. Charge left a non-paper which, presumably, the Minister will share with President Berdimuhamedov.

Then McNab's talking points:

- The importance of utilizing alternate routes besides going through Pakistan.

- The limitation to commercial, non-military cargo necessary for the re-building of Afghanistan's infrastructure.

- Shipping was in the hands of various commercial shippers; in that required this cargo was no different than any other commercial cargo transported through Turkmenistan.

- The Russian Government and other regional governments had no problem with such shipments.

This was 2008, and Pakistan was already a problem, and only a year into Berdymukhamedov's term, there was still hope that the lure of commerce might get Turkmenistan out of its "neutrality" mantra.

It didn't. Says the cable writer:

The Minister listened attentively and then said, "You know our position." (Comment: Indeed, we do. End comment.) He then described in some detail the transit arrangements which the Turkmen Government was allowing the United States - some of which, he emphasized, were unique to the United States. The Charge said that we did appreciate the arrangements very much. (Comment: Neither the Minister nor the Charge mentioned the on-going fuel shipments. It was implicit in the Minister's remarks, but even in this one-on-one conversation, it was apparently better left unsaid. End comment.)

What was also left unsaid was that the US paid for that privilege, as Deirdre Tynan of EurasiaNet has reported, although it said it wasn't going to.

But you know, it's not just guns:

The Minister even brought up the old chestnut of the wine shipment - labeled provisions - which, if memory serves, was destined for the use of the Italian contingent in Afghanistan. "How would it look," he exclaimed, "if it were known that Turkmenistan - a Muslim country - allowed a shipment of alcohol to Afghanistan - another Muslim country?" (Comment: The Charge refrained from commenting on what he had observed so far of Turkmen drinking habits. End comment.)

Ok, so that's that, but there's a more fresh indication of the failure of the US to get the NDN line through, which comes recently from Sanjar Umarov, the Uzbek businessman and former political prisoner who now lives in the US.

One of Umarov's business propositions has been to offer logistics services to the US military.

When relations with Pakistan deteriorated and that route was shut off completely, Umarov suggested an alternative NDN route through the Black Sea: Georgia-Azerbaijan-Turkmenistan-Afghanistan. This route left out Uzbekistan (in case anybody wanted to do that).

Using the magic of the Central Asian edition of the LinkedIn game (about which I've written before), Umarov contacted what he deemed to be the appropriate person to put this proposal to regarding the Turkmen route for the NDN.

On this round of the game, in response to his routing proposal, using the inmail system which is for premium accounts only, however, he got this answer:

This InMail was rated: Appropriate.

The request was appropriate for the recipient, but not at this time.

I think this answer came because Turkmenistan just doesn't want to do NDN stuff on its railroads now. But if you're going to level up at LI, I think you have to try to beat more bosses on this.

 

 

 

Mother of Uzbek Terrorist Suspect in US Now Under Pressure from Uzbek Security Police

Whether or not Jamshid Muhtorov turns out to be guilty of the charges the US has levelled against him of supporting the Islamic Jihad Union, the Uzbek authorities have already made up their mind to harass his mother.

Uznews.net reports that Uzbek authorities are preventing Muhtorov's mother from reaching the US Embassy or local human rights groups.

On February 9, the Tashkent city prosecutor's office interrogated -- and threatened -- Robiya Muhtorova, Muhtorov's mother,  for six hours, says uznews.net

The reason Robiya was detained was that she tried to appeal for help to Elena Urlaeva, leader of the Human Rights Alliance in Tashkent.

Muhtorova also tried to travel from Jizzakh to the US consulate in Tashkent to get a visa to go and support her son. She turned to Urlaeva for advice in how to do this and how to help her son's case. As the two women left Urlaeva's home, Robiya was detained and taken for "interrogation with prejudice," as uznews.net put it.

"They yelled at me for the fact that I went to Urlaeva. And they behaved very crudely, indulging in insults including obscenities," Muhtorova told uznews.net.

That evening Robiya was let go about 7 pm, but then sent back to Jizzakh, where she was summoned for more interrogation at the police department, until after midnight.  She insited that her son was innocent.

Muhtorov's mother believes she is being prevented from visiting human rights activists in Uzbekistan or applying for the US visa. Urlaeva believes that Muhtorova may be shadowed now by security agents.

"Bed Bugs Made Him Do It" -- But Supporting Terrorist Groups Isn't Merely a "Thought Crime"

A hearing has been held in the case of Jamshid Muhtorov, the Uzbek activist about whom I've written a fair amount who is now suspected of aiding the terrorist group Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) in Turkey.

During this hearing, Muhtorov acknowledged that he knew the nature of the IJU:

A prosecutor told a federal judge this morning that Uzbek refugee Jamshid Muhtorov admitted he knew the Islamic Jihad Union was a combat organization that fights NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

It's funny that it should take this Uzbek suspect, trying to deny that he did anything wrong, to confirm something that Registan and other terrorism-minimizers kept denying themselves: the existence of the IJU as a real organization that really fights NATO. They keep telling us it doesn't exist.

The FBI found him with $2,800 in cash, two i-phones and a GPS device, the Denver Post reports.  By itself, these items are indeed standard fare especially for immigrants trying to make a dollar and operate in the black economy, which is a survival technique, not necessarily related to terrorism. Yet the prosecutor will show how it is related to intent to commit a crime.

Muhtorov denies that he was supporting terrorism and that given he could barely support his family, he wasn't engaged in any attempt to support the IJU. But his quitting of his job, withdrawal of cash, and goodbyes to his family (he said he would see his daughter in heaven) and his telephone calls to IJU operatives of course legitimately cast doubt on his claims.

The prosecutor says he has a witness who will describe Muhtorov's

In a statement that seems to draw on everything we have ever heard about desperation and violence from centuries of Russian literature, the prosecutor says:

"He is an educated man and the only jobs he could get were manual labor jobs and his wife had to work to help support the family," Holloway said. "He was living in a crappy apartment and having to move because of bed bugs.You can see an escalation of frustration and communication of that frustration in the (documents)."

The FBI has said their witnesses are classified and the lawyer has been denied a request to get more information.

So all that has prompted Joshua Foust to declare this case as a "thought crime" based on flimsy anti-terrorism legislation put into effect since 9/11.

Sure, we have to look out if all the feds have is some pious Muslims who seemed to talk to some other pious Muslims about stuff that may or may not rise to the level of "incitement of imminent violence" under the Supreme Court precedent rulings.

But Foust seems not to realize that the law on criminal conspiracy doesn't  exempt you merely because you didn't commit the act, or only seemed to plan it and not get anywhere. And on this question, and how much Muhtorov's actions rise to the test of possible crime, I wouldn't believe what Foust would say, as he is dismissive of the whole idea that there are terrorists and isn't a legal expert; I also wouldn't believe left-wing anti-government lawyers like Glenn Greenwald, because they would be pre-disposed to exonerate anyone accused of terrorism for their own reasons of opposition to the Obama Administration from the left. But I would like to hear a credible mainstream human rights lawyer on this question -- although there's still a lot we don't know.

The judge in the case seemed to mull whether he might even release Muhtorov with a GPS locator but then said he was concerned about his potential for flight, given that he was just willing to leave his wife and two small children with a one-way ticket to Turkey. And ultimately in the latest update from the Denver Post, we learn that the judge denied the bond release.

This may be about not terrorist conspiracy or even selling i-phones illegally or something, but just this (one of my favourite quotations) statement from Tom Wolfe:

Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals--male humiliation?

We also learn from the Denver Post something we couldn't find from dredging uznews.net and such -- his sister, accused at the age of 19 apparently falsely of murder, is still in jail.

That -- and the jailing (still?) of his father after he fled to Kyrgyzstan with his family might are obviously a galling factor, but what else? Was it really the bed bugs and the long hauls?

ABC News ran a story about the FBI's drilling of the digital mine in Muhtorov's case, a reminder of what remains after you think you've deleted data.

"The analysis could directly implicate or eliminate the suspect based on the information recovered, or serve as corroboration or contradiction to a suspect or witnesses statement," said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Sean O'Brien, director of the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Lab in Centennial, Colorado.

This sort of deep dive is what enabled prosecutors to send another suspect to jail:

The Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Lab played a key role during the 2009 investigation of Najibullah Zazi, who later pleaded guilty in a plot to trigger bombs on New York City subway trains. Analysts searched for evidence on several computers, helped execute search warrants, and examined surveillance video that showed Zazi buying bomb making ingredients at a beauty supply store.

For some reason the Center for Democracy and Technology and their campaign for digital privacy is referenced and the need to insist on judges' warrants, but in fact the FBI got a warrant to confiscate Muhtorov's computer and phones.

In one of the more bizarre Internet phenomena surrounding Muhtorov's long career, a Christian group has now "adopted" him in their "adopt a terrorist for prayer" project taking literally Jesus' admonition to "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you".

I personally would like to wait until there is a trial and conviction before I decide that Muhtorov is a terrorist and therefore an enemy

An Internet forum has come up with Muhtorov's last post on Facebook (allegedly -- I never found anything resembling a FB page for him):

Ilm o'rganish -Allohdan qo'rqish, uni talab qilish -ibodat, izlash - jihod, bilmaganga o'rgatish -sadaqa, uni o'z ahliga o'rgatish -Allohga qurbatdir. Ilm - tanholikda hamroh, hilvatda -do'st, to'g'ri yo'l ko'rsatuvchi - dalil, begonlar oldida - eng sodiq do'st, Jannat yo'lining minorasidir. Hazrati Umar

Any translators out there? You can read up about Hazrati Umar on the Internets of course.

Why Don't US Academics and Think-Tank Fellows Protest Central Asian Government Attacks on Exchanges?

Not surprisingly, Registan_net (I believe that Twitter account is manned by Nathan Hamm, a defense analyst) furiously countered my critique of their handling of the claims of two students that they were interrogated, intimidated and recruited by the Uzbek SNB (the successor to the KGB).

Just to rehearse the links:

Registan reports the harassment of two Jizzakh activists who took part in US exchanges.

I question why they are essentially accomplishing the regime's work for it by enabling the news of that repression to intimidate others, but without any pushback from their side.

Sarah Kendzior then appears with her meta-discussion about how fear and paranoia about the SNB permeates the discourse, and fails to concede that the SNB may actually in fact execute such hoaxes and disinformation campaigns.

I call her on her virtualization of the problem to such an extent that she doesn't concede the real problem nor push back on it --  and fails to condemn the regime enablers in the comments who savage the two students.

I basically think they did three things wrong at Registan_net on this story:

1. They haven't subjected these stories to any basic questioning or fact-checking or construction of alternate hypotheses which they should do as academics, and which any human rights investigator would insist on doing. There are basic questions to ask about two people claiming repression -- why are they publicizing this claim now if they have relatives who may be harmed in Uzbekistan? if they decided to go ahead anyway, are they applying for political asylum? Is their statement credible? (It appears to be). What US authorities have they approached? Is the State Department going to protest this?

2. Instead, these academics and defense contractors and think-tankers are trying to achieve a kind of "rough justice by blogging" -- letting these people tell their story for the use of academics in their dissertations, but not doing any human rights defense of them. Note: the thesis of Kendzior and Pearce is that activists' telling of their tales of repression on the Internet reduce Internet use and delay even incremental reform.

Sarah Kendzior is claiming that the student himself feels he has been given a voice denied him in Uzbekistan (and I dare say in State Department programs!) via the outlet of Registan. Is she going to do more than exploit the story for her dissertation, enjoy the traffic hits on Registan, acquire the reputational points and the Atlantic magazine reprints by using this story? Or will she really speak up for these people?

3. In publicizing this incident (which I'm all for doing) there are two very bad-faith frames to the act:

a) they let regime sympathizers go unchallenged -- who even deny they function as such regime enablers -- so that they can repeatedly and savagely attack these students and accuse them of merely cooking up asylum claims opportunistically or worse; b) they essentially willy-nilly let the regime accomplish its mission of intimidating the Internet by leaving the Uzbek regime and State Department unchallenged. They lurch on to the next sensation.

There is something else they could do, and something that academics do all the time, and something that even some of them do on certain pet causes like opposing SOPA/PIPA (a Google-inspired campaign which they're happy to teach in their classes with Silicon Valley-generated Infographics).

And that "something" is mounting a petition to the Uzbek government and to the State Department, condemning the questioning and intimidation of these two students and insisting that the US promote freedom of academic and citizen exchange and defend participants in it.

If they aren't willing to do this publicly, they could at least write to State Department officials quietly -- after all, don't they all have a stake in keeping exchange with Central Asia free and open?!

It occurred to me that a key reason we have had such an awful several years of demoralizing and diminishing academic and civic exchange with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and others is because these regimes are able to get away with murder and nobody ever publicly protests what they do.

Turkmenistan in particular has decimated the number of Peace Corps volunteers, they've kicked out international NGOs or forced them to leave like Doctors without Borders and Counterparts; they've stopped professional medical exchanges literally at the airport; they denied hundreds of students ready to board planes and kept them languishing in bureaucratic limbo for years.

And all this happened without a public peep from our academic or US-funded exchange communities. Of course, some of these US-funded organizations literally have 50 years of accommodationist history with these Soviet and post-Soviet regimes to keep their visas and programs intact, although since the collapse of the USSR, they have become significantly more free and challenged the authoritarian governments.

But these two hard cases of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have seen serious encroachments into exchange with not a single public protest from their participants. That's understandable in these countries; it's unforgiveable in the US.

Why is it in an era of Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring and marches in Moscow, that academics on Registan, and the NGOs related to these two students in Uzbekistan, and other NGOs and US-funded agencies curtailed in their work, whether FLEX or Peace Corps or whatever, aren't going to change.org and publicizing a petition? Why aren't the ambassadors in these countries or the State Department making vocal protests?

The answer is simple: they fear worse retaliation, so they keep the silence they've kept for years in the hopes it will get better.  But any victim of these countries' regimes who has been told to "be quiet and it will go better for them" can surely explain to them that the claim doesn't work -- cases and issues are virtually never resolved in these countries by quiet diplomacy. Where quiet diplomacy has been used to good effect, it's always because outside the negotiation room, there are people willing to picket and make sacrifices to publicly protest. That's an incredibly important ingredient that the quiet diplomats need to remember.

FLEX has gotten a beat-down now from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in a public way, as  chrono-tm.org, my blog, and Registan have publicized intimidation of FLEX students. I'm confident it's only the tip of the iceberg in terms of incidents of repression which we've all heard about.

So the State Department should be now a) researching these cases to see if the facts are correct and correctly interpreted [I'm not 100% sure that they are] and b) protesting this publicly, as quiet diplomacy at this part on exchange just isn't working. Hundreds of people were affected with Turkmenistan recently; when Uzbekistan kicked out all the international NGOs hundreds were affected then.

Isn't it time to do a little more about this?

I think it is. If you have reached the point with FLEX that Turkmen officials deliberately sabotage applicants by staging alternative competitions on the very day of the FLEX exams and also interrogate teachers about why they let their students try out for FLEX; if students in Uzbekistan are intimidated taking part in FLEX or other NGO activities with what surely amounts to legitimate and even mild speech about human rights, then maybe if the Uzbek regime won't stop harassing people, it's time to close FLEX?

The regime has to understand that not only their own children and the golden youth serving the regime who get to be in these programs -- others a bit less loyal will end up in them too. If they aren't going to tolerate the modicum of freedom involved in academic and NGO civic exchange -- exchange that hardly threatens to turn these countries into Arab Spring repeats! -- then they shouldn't get to go on basking in the legitimacy that such exchanges give them in the international arena.

Again, I really do think it's time to go public with the protest about this. What Registan has done is gone public with the recount of the intimidation but without the condemntation and protest. They aren't calling on the Uzbek government or State to do anything about it. That's what I feel is wrong. Nathan Hamm may feel he shouldn't be required to join a protest about academic and citizen exchange freedom and  he "does what he can." I think I'm right to go on challenging him and his colleagues to do the right thing here, because otherwise, they leave Registan open as an open-source active measure, available for the regime's use or anyone else's opportunistic use at any time to intimidate people.

 

 

@JoshuaFoust Tries to Control the Internet -- on RFE/RL, the SNB, and My Blog

More creepy activity from Registan_net -- and what can you do? You have to push back. "

I noticed on Twitter that Joshua Foust was complaining that Radio Ozodlik, the Uzbek Service of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, had linked to my blog about this affair of the two Uzbek students interrogated by the SNB (National Security Service) of Uzbekistan over their discussion of human rights topics in an NGO program.

He yelped that I was "knowingly printing falsehoods" (does he consciously imitate the wording of Art. 190-1?) and claims my blog contains "lies" and that I was "attacking his friend Sarah Kendzior" and that I am a "troll" (sigh), and therefore ordered RFE/RL to remove the link to my blog.

I can't see where in fact they did link -- I know a previous article about the terrorist suspect Jamshid Muhtorov linked to both my blog with translations of old press about him, as well as to Registan, as I've seen the hits on this blog. I don't know if there are other stories in Uzbek that have links -- I don't see them on ozodlik.org but it may dynamically change (i.e. they have a Twitter feed and it could be there, for example, or versions of the story are updated).

It occurs to me that as professional and balanced as Radio Ozodlik has always seemed to me, they might feel they have to remove the link (Washington establishmentarianism). I've always defended Ozodlik in fact from the Registan readers' nasty detractions and claims that it is biased because it is funded by the US Congress -- but maybe they could feel restrained by that larger-than-life presence that the Kerry-for-Secretary-of-State in Obama II American Security Project seems to project with Joshua Foust on Twitter (or the shadow of the Department of Defense, or whatever it is that gives him his mana).

I got a rather testy reply from @RFE/RL as you can see:

Interactions

joshuafoust @joshuafoust

@CADialog @ozodlik @sarahkendzior @rferl I'd rather not feed the troll by naming it. They know which one I mean.

In reply to Central Asian Dialog Hide conversation

12 Feb joshuafoust @joshuafoust

Hey @ozodlik, why do you keep linking to a blog that knowingly prints false allegations about my colleague @sarahkendzior? @RFERL

13 Feb RFE/RL @RFERL

@joshuafoust @CADialog @sarahkendzior Yes, we know who the blog belongs to. I have passed on your concern to the head of our Uzbek Svc

13 Feb joshuafoust @joshuafoust

@RFERL @sarahkendzior Thanks. The link to the post accusing her of supporting the SNB was way beyond acceptable & could be dangerous.

1h CatherineFitzpatrick @catfitz

@RFERL @sarahkendzior @joshuafoust It's hugely scary that you'd let these people tell you what to link to on the Internet!

26m RFE/RL @RFERL

@catfitz We did not (and will not) let @sarahkendzior & @joshuafoust "tell us what to publish." They are free, as are you, to voice concerns

In reply to CatherineFitzpatrick Hide conversation

• 1 Retweet
• 

Well, the proof is in the pudding. If there is a link and it is still there and they didn't remove it, good!  But that first interaction sounds like RFE/RL is convinced -- "we know who the blog belongs to" (er, it's not a secret as it is contains my name and biography) and "passing it on" makes it sound like they accepted that there should be "concerns". I'll have to follow up and see where all this might stand.

Some avenues I think this story needs for inquiry:

o why isn't the State Department making a statement?

o again, isn't there concern about the relatives? Have they been questioned?

o will the State Department now direct exchange programs to remove human rights or face interrogations?

Meanwhile, once again to refute Foust's incendiary claims that are merely meant to smear me, and are the usual tactics of this bully, who always makes it seem as if every legitimate criticism of him and Registan is tantamount to red-baiting or McCarthyism.

1. I don't accuse Sarah Kendzior of "supporting the SNB". I accuse her of not sufficiently criticizing the SNB when it merits criticism, pulling her punches, and of allowing Registan commenters tto walk all over victims of the regime with only pleas for tolerance and balance -- instead of the condemnation they deserve. It's about poor judgement and lack of good politics -- not about a claim of some sordid agent status. Yeah, I get it that academics don't see themselves as in the human rights business, but you know, there is such a thing as human decency.

Nathan Hamm, operating the registan_net account was hysterically claiming as well that I was accusing Registan of freelancing for the SNB. Again, if you are going to make statements that tend to support the regime and justify its supporters, and if you are repeatedly going to provide a forum for obvious regime supporters in the comments, you can't honestly get away with bitching when people call you out on that. You have to explain yourself. That explanation isn't a crass "we're paid $50 per post". But whatever nuanced realpolitik thing it is, it's ok to demand it without being smeared with charges of McCarthyism.  Can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen sort of thing.

2. I point out once again that in telling the story of the suicide girl, Kendzior floats the hypothesis that this could be "someone with an agenda" trying to discredit the emigres or human rights groups, but she implies once again that it's just one emigre group squabbling with another. She does not say forthright that one of the very likely hypotheses is that the SNB concocted the whole thing from start to finish not only to discredit groups but scare people off the Internet.

3. I point out that this story of the two students is awfully similar to the suicide girl story -- interrogation by the SNB, and then panic, and then the entire community of Uzbekistan-watchers all abuzz about the Dangers of Talking About Human Rights Especially On the Internet.

4. As I noted, the story of the two students is more than likely to be true, although questions have to be asked about it (i.e. why they did not fear for their relatives in publicizing this, and why there is no US government protest about this story now that it is public). My concerns are *the uses to which* Kendzior and others are putting this story, it is not about questioning the students.

5. And what are those uses? Registan is highly selective in the human rights stories they pick up. When, after the exposure of the suicide hoax, another hoax happened with Ablutov involving a student arrested for leaflets, they were silent, and Sarah left the implication open in her rendition of the suicide story once again that it's one emigre with an agenda against another. So the uses of Registan here are multiple:

A. To highlight the danger of human rights discussions on the Internet, to prove the academic theory that talk of repression reduces Internet use (like Prof. Peter Ludlow, who would make the news of griefing in order to study it). More and more, with social media, academics don't like to just study from a distance and wait for the picture to unfold, consciously or not, they want to accelerate the premises with the use of social media -- hence Registan as a project.

B. To send and then applaud the signal that people should be more careful and these programs should pull in their horns (in support of the status quo). It's my sincere belief that what the SNB hoped to achieve with this was a megaphone use of Registan to bruit about the dangers of talking about human rights -- mission accomplished.

C. To enable the anklebiters to come out and support the regime and trash the two students.

Of course, C) is particularly disturbing, and the reason for allowing that kind of bad faith, so common on Registan, has to do with not only the agendas of A) and B), but projecting a sense of "balance" and "academic impartiality". Most normal, decent people see creeps like Metin or Will harassing a victim of Uzbek injustice or second-guessing activists as something that a moderator on a moderated blog should moderate. They are hateful and nasty. I don't believe in moderating comments that don't incite actual damages, but since they moderate all the time (banning, deleting, reprimanding), the fact that they let those two and other regime sympathizers strike again and again is creepy.

The game that both Metin and Will play is that they aren't regime sympathizers, even, and certainly aren't in the pay of the regime or any supportive Western government, but just happen to have those pro-state views naturally. Okay, but then, we still get to criticize them as they are reprehensible.

Why does Sarah Kendzior write these convoluted posts where she stops shy of direct confrontation with the regime or direct calling out of SNB tactics, and gets embroiled in these long academic twists and turns claiming the real corrosive problem of the Internet isn't the actual SNB, but the projected SNB about which people are paranoid and distrustful?

Well, for one, virtualized paranoia is easier to study than the secretive SNB, although it's not true what Sarah keeps saying about it -- that we "can't know" or "we know nothing". We just had two fairly credible reports from some students about how they were interrogated! And we get stories of such things daily (read Urlaeva's email and fergananews.com not to mention ozodlik.org).

But I also think -- again -- that it has to do with being a sort of "smart Fred Starr in training." That is, like the establishment figures Martha Brill Olcott or Frederick Starr and others, who can range from "understanding" to "apologetic" for the Central Asian governments, Kendzior wants to make sure she isn't burning any bridges to the country where her main theses reside, and to which she needs to get visas. The problem of Sovietology has always been access and the ability of your object of study to deprive you of access to itself, so it's always been dysfunctional that way.

In that sense, Kendzior is like scores of academics before her in this field who always strive to be "balanced" or "academic" or "impartial" or "open-minded" or simply "quiet" (normally good and useful qualities) to make sure they get in. That's how the game works -- it's her right to do so, and believe that she is really all those things; it's my right to call it out as fundamentally fake.

She may do this instinctively after years of studying in or around Uzbekistan and may not see it as any kind of conscious moral decision. I do. And that's ok.

Registan's game is always and everywhere to squeal like stuck pigs that somebody is baiting them as SNB agents if they criticize them. This is "dishonest" and "mendacious" and "all lies" and all the rest of the screeching we hear from Foust.

No. If you can't tell the story of Gulsumoy without admitting as one of the options that it was likely all the SNB, you are not intellectually honest -- speaking of honest. You are suppressing inquiry and legitimate hypotheses. It's not that you must -- as I have -- hew to the opinion that it is most likely the SNB -- but if you simply don't even mention that it could be, that's just not right.

By repeatedly invoking the notion of the SNB as "being everywhere" -- even quoting Arendt -- I submit that Kendzior is in fact helping to shore up a notion that it is "nowhere". It is only in our paranoid imaginations. And I think that does a grave disservice to the facts. Thousands and thousands of people have gone through the SNB's clutches and there are huge numbers of eyewitnesses and documented reports like Human Rights Watch. So to say that it's overstated or exaggerated or the operative social factor is only distrust/paranoia and not actuality is an act of bad faith.

I realize that Kendzior's whole academic treatise hangs on this notion of the virtualized SNB as a social factor that outweights the real SNB. But it's tripe. The real SNB is really bad. The virtualized SNB is understandable and for people to mention and people to discuss. Registan tries to make it happen so that you can never, never suspect or discuss the role of intelligence manipulation of the public discourse -- or risk being discredited.

Perhaps some of them have some legitimate concern about a discussion that "goes nowhere" or "is beyond the pale" or "goes too far" or some other gentlemanly establishment notion. But the reality is, we all can and should go on questioning those who keep carrying water for the regimes at Registan, regardless of how they came to be carrying that water. It's not taboo or off limits to do so, and smearing people who question others' support of the regime and attacks on its victims (like those two students) as McCarthyites is really what should be unacceptable.

 

 

 

Registan_Net Successfully Censors EurasiaNet

I knew things were bad with EurasiaNet caving to Registan_net -- I see Joshua Foust is even going to appear on a radio show with Eurasianet editor Justin Burke to discuss human rights in Uzbekistan (!)-- although Foust of course has trashed EurasiaNet writers up and down and forced me to leave, but perhaps those were the sacrifices made that could lead to this "reconciliation" lol.

And I knew that Faust and Registan put a LOT of pressure on EurasiaNet writers by critiquing their every blog post critical of the Central Asian regimes in detail on Registan, where they can only selectively fight back (they risk being banned like me or deleted on Registan, like those who came to my defense -- or worse, they risk being muzzled by management at EurasiaNet as I was).

But I didn't know that it was this bad, where Foust would take offense at a remark that seemed just too anti-Uzbek regime, would loudly denounce it on Twitter, and soon the offending lines would be removed (!).

"After a good post, a really obnoxious final paragraph that basically ruins everything for all time," tweeted @joshuafoust yesterday.

Fortunately, we have Registan itself unwittingly revealing all this by the fact that Nathan Hamm, in trouncing and berating a post by EurasiaNet Central Asia editor David Trilling (the Twitter denunciation by Foust wasn't enough!), they quote from the entire paragraph, as follows:

So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders? Could it be, since governments around the region already maintain a monopoly on people’s voices, they also expect control over their hearts? Without more than empty “national values” on offer, they’re unlikely to succeed.

Following the link back to EurasiaNet, however, we see the last two lines have simply been deleted. (and replaced with a different point that pokes fun at some local TV station's lack of knowledge of Uzbek culture.)

The notion expressed in the now-deleted lines is a common cliche in fact for this region. It's believed that Soviet ideology "left a vacuum" and that dictators struggle to fill it with concocted belief systems, whether Ruhnama, Saparmurat Niyazov's cult book in Turkmenistan, or anti-Russian ersatz spiritualized Uzbek nationalism, a la Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan.

The story is more complicated, however, because the Soviet ideology was already corrupted and crumbling years -- decades -- ago. Aleksandr Podrabinek had a post on Facebook yesterday about how his samizdat information from the 1960s was already talking about the disintegration and faction-fighting and corruption in the various power ministries including in the KGB. The state ideology shifted -- remember how Stalin got everybody to get religion (Russian Orthodoxy) when he needed to fight World War II?

And the nationalism that the stans devise in response to their broken Soviet past and Russian hegemony isn't always the worst thing. That is, just because they fashion their national idea in rather dysfunctional circumstances doesn't mean they have to be secular worlders that ditch every vestige of sovereignty and tradition in the name of "the consent of the networked".

Authoritarian governments are really evil and oppressive and intrusive, but do they really mean to get into people's private romantic lives by dissing Valentine's Day? I think that's probably a silly exaggeration, and that the hate is more about the entire anti-Western and anti-individualist doctrines that these regimes purvey. But if you write something on a blog, you should let it stay. It's not like a factual mistake. It's food for discussion, because ultimately you do have to ask whether Karimov means to get inside of people's actual relationships, if they enjoyed buying chocolates and flowers and having Valentine's Day celebrations in a light-hearted manner, without having the entire weight of Emperor Babur now to replace it.

So there we have it -- the Emperor Claudius contrived to pave over pagan practices of their un-Christian activities by installing St. Valentine's Day over the pagan holiday; Karimov tries to undo St. Valentine's Day by invoking Babur, whose birthday was also Feb. 14 -- and Registan can tell EurasiaNet what they can say and can't say. Nice!

 

 

What Do Modern #Kyrgyzstan Women Think of This Conservative Singer (and Why Couldn't Some Have Been Interviewed?)

Tata Ulan cracks the whip in this "innovative" Kyrgyz nationalist video promoting Muslim tradition.

Nate Schenkkan has a fascinating piece posted at EurasiaNet on Tata Ulan, whom he calls "one of Kyrgyzstan's most innovative – and provocative – performers."

I'll say. This fellow, dressed in the garb of the ancient epic hero Manas, reminiscent of a falconer, expresses a conservative -- even fundamentalist -- Muslim imperative to have the Westernized women of Kyrgyzstan take off their mini-skirts and makeup and clothe themselves more modestly and behave more traditionally in keeping with what are purported to be their ancient traditions.

Nate's the best writer at EurasiaNet because he actually reports -- he goes out and talks to people and gets all the texture and nuances and fascinating details that you could ask for.

But while he somewhat anticipates for us the harshness of the video to come by deploying words like "hector" and "provocative," nothing prepares us for the scenes of traditionally-clad man behind a podium, like a cross between a preacher and a Communist Party apparatchik, declaming loudly and fiercely, and holding up a book and at one point even cracking a whip.

Ouch. I'd like a second opinion about all this. Schenkkan interviews Bermet Imanalieva , editor of the culture website Limon.kg, his chief source for this story, but she is completely uncritical of (and rather enraptured by) this conservative singer, warbling that he is "unique" and "topical":

“Our country loves opposition, people who stand against something,” said Imanalieva. “Some may criticize him, but the common people understand and respect him.”

There is something to that love of the underdog in these parts, but I wonder if the take on the "common people" is entirely accurate.

Why couldn't a modern woman in a short skirt have been interviewed for this piece? Imanalieva strikes me as a fan, and rather uncritical of the genre Schenkkan describes here:

The dominant message in his songs, he says, is spiritual. An adherent of the Muslim revivalist movement Tablighi Jamaat, he has gone on seven proselytizing missions.
Based on his interpretation of Islam, Ulan takes positions many regard as reactionary and misogynistic. He is passionately in favor of headscarves for women, a highly sensitive issue in contemporary Kyrgyzstan. In the video for "Ne Kerek," Ulan holds up two female dolls, one wearing a hijab, the other a miniskirt and tank-top, and says: "One Kyrgyz girl guards the honor of the Kyrgyz / One Kyrgyz girl brings shame to our people."

In another early song, the Russian-language “Brother Muslims," he denounces “the pervert Europe” that “defends the rights of sexual minorities/increasing the mass of abnormal communities.”

Whew. How much of a following does this "absolutely original" fellow actually have? I would love to know. And is it that "many regard"...or "which in fact is..."? Why the reticence? Yes, yes, I realize we can never judge in EurasiaNet circles...

I've written about the schools of thought that tend to deny any problem with an upsurge in Islamic religious fervour and cultural conservatism in Central Asia, or discount any threat of terrorism that may be linked to extremist thought, in the name of "progressive" Western values.

Instead, in this sort of "enemy of my enemy is my friend," the "progressives" tend to work overtime to be sensitive, nuanced, ambivalent, balanced. The style is gingerly, but then at times lurches to frank admiration for the sheer exoticism and "otherness" of it all.

But... is this what urban professional women in Bishkek, or for that matter, peasant women in the provinces, really want in their lives? And if they do, are they willing to use sanctions and even force on those who don't?

I recall a Kyrgyz diplomat at the UN some years ago when Kyrgyzstan first became independent, who proudly pointed out to me his wife in a  short skirt, and pointed to his own glass of wine at a reception -- he was proud that he had the freedom to be modern and Westernized, and yet also spoke of his country's traditions appreciatively as well. Countless times Kyrgyz women and their Western feminist interpreters (and this is why I want to ask about this) have told us that with Kyrgyzstan's nomadic past, women were more equal to men than in other parts of the world with other lifestyles, because they shared in the work. Be that as it may, competing traditions from neighbours and Soviet secularism are all at play here, and I don't know what the result is.

Ne Kerek, Tata Ulan's fire-and-brimstone song, has more than 20,000 viewers. Do they like what they hear? What's their feeling about it? (The comments in Russian, at least, all seem to be a nasty squabble about whether the Kyrgyz "stole" songs from the Uzbeks.)

Schenkkan describes Tata Ulan's elaborate pose of always appearing in his ancient mask, ostensibly so he won't become recognizable and praise won't go to his head. The loveable hectorer then admits that the mask shtick is a bit of a PR gimmick -- yet we wonder if maybe he's just insecure about his acne scars (which Schenkkan references).

The rather didactic purpose of a lot of the "costumes and colourful objects" pieces at EurasiaNet seems to be to guide us to "appreciation" of non-Western cultures and the traditions of a country where we have an American base (for a lot of people, now the word "Manas" is associated with the base, not the name of the epic hero). And all that's good as far as it goes.

But why can't something like this be debated? It's possible to appreciate the textured nuances *and* debate. After all, Ulan believers fervently in his own right to debate Western culture -- strenuously. Reading along about his past, I couldn't help thinking that the motivation for his particular brand of Kyrgyz nationalism is rooted in the fact that as a young child, Russian was his first language in this Sovietized country and he was also educated in Moscow at a theatrical institute. That background and that evident humiliation and sense of inferiority regarding one's own heritage no doubt impelled this particular hero to become more nationalist than thou as a result. Does everybody feel this way?

As for women's rights, the picture is decidedly mixed in Kyrgyzstan, although it is still much better than neighbouring Central Asian countries.  Stories of bride kidnappings surface now and then. A PBS story quotes a man discussing his kidnapped bride calmly when queried by a reporter: "We're happy," he says. "Keep visiting and we'll be happier."

Another video documentary by the Brooklyn-based independent media company VICE features that same deliberate ambiguity about the practice of bride kidnapping that Schenkkan displays with this piece about this authoritarian bard/rap singer (and see the Facebook comments for more of that American liberal defensiveness). Schenkkan meets Ulan and describes him as "innovative" and speaks of his "insistence on addressing sensitive issues" rather than characterizing him in any way as a reactionary -- as he might if he were covering Rick Santorum or Rush Limbaugh. The attractive exoticism of the other!

Ever the careful journalist -- and he really is good -- Schenkkan refrains from judgement and cautiously frames his subject:

He is now a fierce advocate of the language. "If you grew up in the city and don't speak Kyrgyz, you're a myrk," he says in "Ne Kerek," inverting the insult native Bishkek residents use for non-Russian speakers who move to the city. It is statements like this that prompt accusations of nationalism.

Accusations? Or accurate descriptions?

A good journalist lets the reader decide for himself -- and I have. Nonetheless, I'd like to hear from Kyrgyz women before I accept this final statement from Nate:

For now, the question is whether Tata Ulan and those like him – pious and taking pride in Kyrgyz culture – will be able to find common ground with the rest of the country.

That sounds like "the rest of the country" may not be ready for Ulan, even if they admire dissidents of this sort (who aren't going to be tolerant of dissent if they get into power). The one million plus Uzbeks in the south probably aren't terribly thrilled with this particular manifestation of nationalism, although it may not be the worst.

I remember an Ingush woman with whom I used to work on documenting the terrible atrocities of the second Chechen war. There came a time when some of the Chechen rebels began to become more fundamentalist and began to go around demanding that women don headscarves and stay out of public places -- which had not been their custom.

"Well, now, isn't this a matter of culture?" I asked hesitantly, ever the good Western liberal.

"It's not culture. It's absence of culture," my friend said, capturing the coercion involved in this imposition of a code on conduct and dress on women.

People with cultures broken by Russian imperialist aggression in these countries -- imperialism that neither the Western left nor the elite national intelligentsia ever want to call out -- understandably reach for their own heritages.

I see nothing wrong with challenging their selectivity and coercion in doing so, and asking whether it is culture, or absence of culture.

Energy Shortage Leads to Gas Explosion in Andijan

Many people have cautioned about just this sort of terrible accident -- with the cold weather and energy shortages in Andijan, an explosion has occurred in an apartment building, fergananews.com reports. At least two people have been killed and there have been more injuries, along with the destruction of several multi-storey dwellings.

Precisely because there have been constant electricity blackouts, gas turn-offs, and shortage of fuel, people have been bringing gas balloni (cannisters) into their homes to cook (which you can see for sale or wanted on sites like torg.uz).

Fergananews.com has been warning that because of the gas shortage and low pressure in the gas system, people have been resorting to all sorts of dangerous makeshift methods to keep warm and cook their food. The fuel crisis and the risky behaviour both have led to tragedies -- a newborn died in a hospital from doctors' neglect where the lights were shut off; a  7-month infant froze to death in his cradle at night in a home without heat or light; a 17-year-old died of gas poisoning.

The reasons for this shortage are complex, and have to do with everything from antequated systems and equipment to theft and siphoning off of resources, to resale of gas abroad for foreign currency.

 

 

Why Does the #Uzbekistan Government Hate St. Valentine's Day?

Photo by CoCreatr.

Nothing sounds grumpier than the annual blast against St. Valentine's Day we get from Uzbekistan and some of the other stans, and for that matter, Russia. It's not just about Muslim clerics seeking to eradicate dubious Christian cultural traditions that undermine their authority; it's about the Russian Orthodox Church also seeing something particularly loathsome about this particular Western Christian feast-day -- a holiday that is just about shorn of all its religious connotation in the West, as it has been absolutely commercialized and monetarized.  (And it's a good thing, too, or recession-hounded merchants would have nothing to bring in revenue between Black Friday, which has now spawned even Black Thursday Night at Thanksgiving time, Christmas of course, and Easter -- another chocolatified monetarized bonanza).

So what bothers the Uzbek government so much about this particular holiday? If you read the supposed history of this holiday, it was a pagan festival to start with on the (pre?)-Roman holiday of Lupercalia, which the Catholic Church worked overtime to convert because of its undesirable activities -- described sedately by that source as young men picking the names of young women randomly out of an urn for sexual couplings, but explained in Wikipedia as being more about wolves and sacrificing goats and dogs, then running around naked and beating with thongs any women willingly coming out to meet them.

I'm having trouble believing the claim that Emperor Claudius II completely outlawed marriage in the 3rd century (!) on the grounds that single men made better soldiers than married men, helping St. Valentine to get his start, because he then secretly wed young lovers. I can't help thinking there would never even have been a 4th century if Emperor Claudius II was even slightly successful with this venture, but whatever the origins, St. Valentine himself, associated with lovers and love himself (falling in love despite being destined for sainthood) was used to overlay a precious culture's undesirable features.

So here we all are now with the holiday largely serving as a retail stimulus, mainly for chocolate, cards and flowers, and yet the Uzbek government (not the spiritual authorities, although they may have been pressed into service) getting all mad at this. Why?

Perhaps it symbolizes all the worst features of Christian holidays -- promotion of the individual's romantic love for no particular purpose, in defiance of state plans; promotion of love despite the emperor's tendency to throw people in jail they don't like; promotion of the couple's desires in defiance of the state's military imperatives.

None of these features may be particularly "Christian" in their notion but certainly are Western (and since "Rome" is part of the West, it would be interesting to follow how we got, by way of St. Valentine, from a world in which the Emperor could even stop human pro-creation supposedly in the name of military exigency to a world in which people could have a great excuse to buy -- and eat -- lots of boxes of chocolate.

I couldn't help wondering if what the Russian, Uzbek and other post-Soviet governments hate about St. Valentin's Day is that it so glibly popularizes and monetarizes a religious holiday. Everybody remembers the "saint' part of it and that this saint had something vaguely to do with love, but they don't really recall the religious context and the Catholic Church or other Christian churches don't promote any special St. Valentine's Day masses or festivals.

I recall the Uzbek government and spiritual authorities were particularly exercised in recent years about what they saw as the commercialization of Ramadan, or at least, the ostentatious celebration of the nightly breaking of fast in lavish public dinners where people treated their friends. That seems awfully surly, given that such social occasions loosely based around a religious custom seem to be the heart of the community -- and this year, the Uzbek government relented on discouraging the feast day altogether, and limited themselves simply to cautioning the faithful to refrain from excesses.

Interestingly, now Uzbek authorities aren't going to stop at just banning St. Valentine and his dubious romantic, individualist, anti-state threats, they are going to substitute him -- much like the Church authorities of another century did with Valentine himself -- with Moghul Emperor Babur, as the BBC reports. Fortunately for them, Babur's birthday was on February 14, which is why he has come in so handy.

I turned to Flickr to see what visuals were available for Emperor Babur, and of course found that he had built some delightful gardens in Kabul. And among the delightful photo streams comes one from the US Embassy in Kabul, which contrived to put on this interesting cultural exchange in October 2011:

Thousands of Kabul school children will have the opportunity to learn about the history of Babur's Garden, Babur's tomb, and the Queen's Palace through an education initiative funded by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and conducted by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. The students receive printed materials about these cultural heritage sites, school supplies, and snacks as part of the tour. More than 10,000 local school children have received tours as part of this initiative. (Department of State)

I wonder if there are any chocolates in those goody bags.

US Embassy Kabul

 UPDATE:  On cue, David Trilling has a piece on EurasiaNet in which he decides the anti-Valentine's Day spasm in Central Asia is all about Muslims:

So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders?

A menace of the heart must grip Registan.net's Nathan Hamm, who then grumps about Trilling and the Western media obsessing about this hate on Valentine's Day for weeks. In doing so, he reveals something funny -- somebody -- David himself or Justin Burke, the managing editor, trimmed Trilling's fulmination (bold added):

So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders? Could it be, since governments around the region already maintain a monopoly on people’s voices, they also expect control over their hearts? Without more than empty “national values” on offer, they’re unlikely to succeed.

Good Lord, that's hilarious, not the first, and not the last such perlustration to occur on EurasiaNet!

Actually, both Trilling and Hamm are wrong, because it's not about Muslims, it's about Soviet state culture persisting and taking this form to this day.

A Russian mayor of a region, Belgorod, neither of which is distinguished by being Muslim, also banned the holiday -- and in the past, going all the way back to the Soviet era, this was always a holiday the commissars discouraged.

But don't let those sorts of facts get in the way of having a good hate on "ignorant Westerners" who once again are saying something unfair about the "Mooooslims" as Jillian York would put it.

I think it's fine that the Western press obsessed about it, because it helps the mass public think about what these societies are about and how they respond to the West, which is something you have to understand.

Hamm sounds as fussy and controlling as the authorities in these Eurasian countries, scolding us for caring about this story:

Yes, the way that not only Uzbekistan’s government, but also others in the region, attacks rock music, modern incarnations of western holidays like Valentine’s Day or Halloween, etc. make them look silly. It’s not even clear if the constituencies that are generally in support of the amorphous collection of culturally conservative linguistic nationalist beliefs that are the content of “national values” even care about things like Valentine’s Day all that much. (If Tata Ulan or the self-described intellectual quoted in the BBC story are any indication, there are in fact such constituencies — the governments are not entirely out of touch with the public.) But the explanation for the attacks, which sadly was lacking in most of the western coverage, needn’t be overblown.

Well, it's Valentine's Day, and the story is fairly light-weight, so no need to write a treatise about every single holiday and every sort of prescriptive morals code the Uzbeks or other Central Asians come up with to control culture. What it's all about is not only alient cultures but commerce, and it's commerce that helped propel the cultural memes throughout the world

It's Not My Party But I'll Cry If I Want To

Careless Kate.

Recently I visited Washington, DC and had a chance to contemplate once again how incredibly rigid the foreign policy establishment is, what a tight, incestuous world this is, and how fearful people are of giving offense and losing face or even losing their jobs. We saw this play out in the think-tank wars around the issue of Israel and anti-semitism and the Center for American Progress and AIPAC -- there was a "take-no-prisoners attitude" and two staffers "had to die," each on each side of the dispute, before peace was restored. (And naturally Glenn Greenwald had the last world, insisting that now CAP had suffered a "chilling effect" on its speech because of all those pesky people who can't distinguisn between "legitimate criticism" of Israel and antisemitism.)

Something like that happened to me because I dared to take on Joshua Foust, Sarah Kendzior, Katy Pearce and others at Registan -- on my own blog or theirs, not even on the company site, which ultimately forced me to leave a good job. I've explained the outrageous thing that happened there, but today I had occasion to wonder about this again when I read this story about David Seagram, a pro-SOPA freelancer and zealot invading the comments section of other news stories and getting dismissed (temporarily) because he was out of line -- and the wild protests stirred up that forced management to take him back.

Frankly, I think management was correct in their original action -- although a reprimand rather than a dismissal might have been in order precisely because he was out of line (the reason he can seem "right" is because there's a certain fan base that is anti-SOPA and loves to stick it to the man). Seagram wasn't on his own blog or his own column, he was invading other NBC stories demanding mindshare just because he felt NBC wasn't covering his pet cause. It was really annoying and obnoxious, but the partisan bunch that read Business Insider did what all geeks on the Internet do these days -- they threatened and bullied. If BI didn't immediately restore their hero, they would never read it again. They'd boycott it and is advertisers. The implication was -- they might even sic Anonymous hackers on it! Boo!

So the freaks got their way, and a partisan crusader is back to do more damage spreading the anti-SOPA mindshare. It was an interesting episode in that it made me ask: how come no EurasiaNet readers did that for me? I didn't crayon outside the lines like that fellow -- I wrote on my own blog or Twitter or in Registan comments, not on the company blog, and what I wrote elsewhere was not objectionable -- except for ideological reasons to the Registanis. Why did no one stick up for me? Where's intellectual freedom and solidarity?

Oh, let me answer: because I'm not as important as a Business Insider writer (they're very popular and have very rabid fan bases).

Oh, and because everyone is dependent on Soros in one way or another in this field.

Oh, and because nobody understands intellectual freedom in this way anymore. If they ever did.

But let me concede on my own behalf:  the reason a lot of readers didn't come to my defense is that most people didn't know, and there no comments open on EurasiaNet such as to have a community of people who could make their voice heard (the Facebook group for EurasiaNet occasionally has a comment or two from readers, but dissent is so harshly discouraged there any differences moderated away that it's not really a community, either).

And there's something to be said for not having to deal with comments, and something also to be said for not having to deal with wild rebelllious readers that tell you who to hire or not hire.

Oh, except in reality, that's what happened: EurasiaNet caved to Registan.

I wrote about the problem with Registanon my other blog, and on this blog wrote about the creepy suppresison of intellectual freedom -- but my blogs have only a fraction of the readership of EurasiaNet (although a story on the individual EurasiaNet blog pages, as distinct from the front page, actually gets *far less* traffic than my blog -- it's a mechanical factor in part dictated by Google reader and other RSS readers and SEO).

But more to the point: people are afraid. They might think what happened to me when I crossed Foust was wrong (and some who came to defense found their remarks were deleted!); they might think I should never have been locked out over a witch hunt started by the creepy Registan.net people, but they aren't going to say anything. A few might. Most won't. They want to keep things as they are.

So here's what happened when this issue was unfortunately -- and accidently -- put to the test. Someone going to a party asked me to come along but asked the host first -- I was then told not to come because Joshua Foust would be there.

Fair enough -- but still, I found it personally pretty offensive, actually, that somebody would actually ask me *not* come to a large party of people in the Eurasian field merely because Joshua Foust was coming to the same party. That is, sure, duh, I do get it that hosts of a party get to do what they want (like web site owners)!  Especially if they aren't my friends and only distant acquaintances. And they surely get to avoid unpleasant situations where they think people might raise their voices or someone might make an Ottoman Slap. I do indeed get all that.

But still...what they really should do is admit that Joshua Foust is wrong to do what he does, and they should stop fearing him and/or wishing to accommodate him just to keep the establishment going. That's wrong.

I haven't done anything wrong; Joshua Foust has. It's important to remember that.  While I realize there are social niceties at stake here, not inviting me to a party that Foust is at because you think I'm going to confront him is cowardice. Indeed it is. That has to be said. Yes, I get it that Foust, if not a friend, is an important figure to other people that likely they simply fear crossing. They fear crossing him because they think he has some kind of power, or following, or stature or they just think he's smart and interesting and certainly not worth dissing. And I get it that most people just like to avoid conflict. But it's wrong.

It shouldn't be me who is shunned for standing up to this bully; it should be Foust and his enablers like Kendzior and Pearce who are, for their outrageous behaviour. That they won't be is the way of the world and I get all that. Even so, I'm going to call it out. Maybe there will be only one person who gets it -- that's enough.

One thing I found interesting in this episode was that there wasn't a basic sense that I wasn't to blame for this story, confronting Foust. There wasn't a basic acceptance that Foust was outrageous (that some people do have, of course, especially the many who have been targeted by him).

And in addition to all the other regions that he paralyzes people from doing the right thing, there's this:  a FALSE accusation was made that I spread a rumour or made a contention about Registan.net, to the effect that it is funded by Gulnara Karimova (hence explaining the rabid hysterical criticism of the Gulnara picket last year).

That's a lie, as I've never written or spoken any such claim. If you look at the post I made after I was banned from Registan, you will see I never make any such claim. I said that his accusation against Olcott for supposedly carrying water for the regime (!) -- which was ridiculous and somehow "ok" for him to make -- sure sounded hypocritical when he himself minimized the significance of the workers' shootings in Kazakhstan, and his awful attacks on the human rights movement accomplished the same thing.

Oh, to be sure, I'm very well aware that there is a rumour going around the community about Gulnara and Registan because I've heard it from several sources; it is a claim made by some; they even put in exact dollar amounts; they even explain, when anyone objects that such support would be counterproductive and too obvious, that in fact it is done through cutaways, and so on and so forth. They even say, if you object, "But Foust denies this," that "Oh, but Foust is likely lying about this." I get all that. Truly I do.

Even so, I think it's fake, it's not my contention, and I insist again and again, to everyone playing the game of trying to figure out who funds or backs Foust -- and there are LOTS who play this game, so it's really unfair to pin it on me! -- that he must be argued on the merits. That it doesn't matter if any of the individual writers of Registan are supported/funded/abetted/incited by any government or secret police or corporation -- or if their anonymous readers are. What matters is that they get a pushback on awful views that sound as if they are supported by governments. That's all. It's very simple.

I think there's really only one thing to do with situations like this: subject them to glasnost and more glasnost. And so I do. I realize that will make some people mad or uncomfortable. But again, what's really wrong here isn't that people spread rumours or develop suspicions or don't like confrontations in social situations; what's wrong is that there is a website that bans and deletes critics and that a group of think-tank fellows and academics could hound someone out of an intellectual discussion for their dissent and that they should try thus to maintain a status quo for establishments and their enablers. That's hugely creepy, and that has to be said again and again. What's wrong is that Foust shouldn't be told to behave, and that I shouldn't be welcome.