Dink! My i-phone is telling me it's Michael Anderson again, posting directly on my wall about his new film on Uzbekistan -- not content to just let his feed about himself come into my view as it may. I find that an annoying practice, posting on somebody's wall like that, don't you? Especially repeatedly, nudgingly, to demand that you "write something".
Indeed, I've been waiting to write about his much-discussed (well, at least in some small circles around Central Asia) film about Andijan until I could see the whole 80-minute work. But since I'd have to pay something like $25 to buy it online in a set-up that I'm not sure takes dollars (since the price is in euros), I'm going to give my opinion of it now -- and wait to see if some organization holds a showing of it.
First of all, let me say that making a film about the massacre in Andijan in May 2005 is an extremely important task. Not enough people seem to know about this massacre of Muslims in a post-Soviet country and to be factoring it into their thinking about Central Asia in particular and about the war in Afghanistan and broader regional issues. The small circle of human rights activists know about it -- few others do. In our world, preoccupation with the Israel-Palestine conflict, which hasn't produced as many civilians killed or imprisoned in one such incident in a long time, or preoccupation with more popular causes like Darfur and Sudan and then "NATO's wars" which the left frets about seem to overshadow the awfulness of Uzbekistan. Anything having to do with the former Soviet Union never seems to become popular, because popular social movements on the left have always had an ambiguous if not supportive attitude toward the anti-Western governments, starting with the Kremlin.
So in that sense, Michael Anderson's venture is to be widely welcomed -- except that the sad thing is, he replicates all that anti-Westernism all over again on the way to telling the story, and distorts it terribly. It's emblematic of the infantile preoccupation with "blame America first" on the left, particularly the European left, and it's part of why the causes of justice in this region just never get far behind local groups and specialized international researchers -- because they aren't credible in telling the story and leave so many questions unanswered.
And the main problem they suffer from, very common on the left these days, is an inability to be honest about the violence of Islamism and about the movements antithetical to universal human rights.
This is a problem that Meredith Tax explains much better than I could in an excellent piece in Dissent (which was always brave enough to criticize the Soviet Union in its day while remaining on the respectable left, and now isn't afraid to publish a piece taking on the human rights establishment over their coddling of Islamists). She accounts for this problem among "progressives" by their confusion around the nature of Islamism -- categorizing it with national-liberation movements or decolonization, when in fact the nature of these violent theocratic oppressive groups is anything but liberating. I'd go farther than she, in calling out the national-liberation movements themselves based on Marxist theologies also antithetical to human rights and violent, so that the problem isn't just that the Islamic jihadists aren't good enough Marxists like Che Guevara, you know?
In any event, the problem isn't just the refusal to look the bad aspects of the persons victimized by the Uzbek regime in the eye squarely, the problem is the obsession with America or the Anglo-American Club or the West as somehow unprincipled and hypocritical if they are not perfect, and to blame for the violent persecution of the authoritarian states of Central Asia. This is absurd and distorted, as the nature of these regimes stems from the Soviet Union -- and Russian dominance -- and isn't the West's fault, whether they collude or not with the bad governments there. A really solid understanding of that essential nature of these regimes is missing in Anderson and many of his colleagues in this niche of researchers on Central Asia.
Like so many human rights groups addressing the appalling behavior of the Uzbek regime, in telling the story of Andijan, Anderson doesn't mention that FIRST a group of 23 business men were arrested and their friends committed a jailbreak, killing several policemen, and then took officials as hostages and human shields as they attempted to demand concessions from the government. Only after those horrible events unfurled, and the government attempted to negotiate with the hostage-takers, did the massacre ensue: people came out on the square in the mistaken belief that Karimov himself was going to come and hear their complaints of injustice, and government forces mowed them down.
Yet those profound acts of violence that started the Andijan events are simply ommitted. They are simply left out. They are simply not mentioned. In fact, I wonder if they are mentioned at all in the 80 minutes of Anderson's fil, and/or whitewashed there. But they certainly aren't mentioned in the trailer.
In the trailer, within 60 seconds of hearing about the cruel killing of innocent civilians who came to the square seeking justice *after* the jail-break and hostage-taking and murders that aren't mentioned -- we get a scene with George Bush sitting down with Karimov and doing business with him.
Er, George Bush or America is to blame for Uzbek troops gunning down civilians after a jailbreak and hostage-taking and murders of policemen? No. Not at all. That's just shrill, ideological manipulation by the left -- and in fact stops real progress. Because when the infantile left imagines that America can be different or "better" if it doesn't have "George Bush" and somehow is able to "stop" or influence the better these regimes (how? by force? By, uh, persuasion?) -- all the while maintaining any military or trade distance and disengagement -- they in fact prescribe a hegemonic and in fact neo-neo colonialist role for America. They goad America to be different and yet get involved righting wrongs everywhere, without explaining how they will do that without force.
But in fact it isn't America's "fault," nor should America "fix" things, and these leftists, if they are sincere and credible, should turn their laser-gaze always pointed one way to Washington over to Moscow and Beijing. They have much more investment and influence on these regimes these days, and the much-discussed Northern Distribution Network ferrying in military supplies to a dwindling war really can't be blamed for the nature of these regimes -- even if it doesn't help, even if more can and should be done around it to try to gain leverage with these tyrants.
I know some people who considered showing this film because they believe in the cause of justice for Andijan, but seeing this tawdry tabloid-like anti-American opening to the trailer showing bloodshed and immediately blaming America, they simply re-thought their initial intention. And that's a shame.
Um, no, I don't believe that somehow my country should be exempt from criticism. But that isn't the problem in the world, yanno? What's really the problem is -- as I keep saying -- this infantile preoccupation with the US as somehow to blame for everything in a "unipolar world" -- when in fact that world is long since multi-polar, and one of those poles -- Moscow -- with its $1 billion in armaments! -- is presiding over and abetting the worst massacre in our time in Syria, where at least 20,000 have already been murdered!
Anderson wrongly portrays the US as not only to blame, but as somehow not even condemning the massacre. What a distortion of history! In fact, the whole reason the US lost its military bases there, leased after the terrorist attack in 9/11 to aid the Afghan war effort, is because they *did* denounce the massacre, and Karimov hated that, and then expelled them. That's amply on the record and reported accurately by even the human rights groups that tend to glide over the opposition's violence at the beginning.
Yet in the trailer, Anderson skips right to Craig Murray, an ambassador of conscience who did a lot to expose the complicity the West did have with this regime, but who in recent years in my view has become less credible as he has become wackier in the telling of the tale. In describing the infamous practices like boiling alive a prisoner, Murray claims in the film that "Western leaders looked the other way" and that "The West is responsible because it covered up the abuses." Well, I'm sorry, but that's just a patent lie. They didn't look the other way; they condemned the massacre and lost their bases. They didn't "cover up" the abuses but instead -- to their credit -- kept calling for an investigation. Not doing enough isn't the same thing as "looking the other way" or "covering up abuses" -- and that's why Murray just isn't credible when he spouts nonsense like that. It does the cause a disservice.
"The West had sanctions, but soon dropped them," he says. His country, and the European Union, in fact kept them in place for a number of years. I'll be the first to point out that in fact trade seemed to go up in those years of sanctions for peculiar reasons and the EU didn't seem very serious. A scene in the Anderson's movie with a self-justifying Pierre Morel, the former EU Central Asian representative, is indicative of that weakness. But neither Anderson nor any other human rightsnik has an answer to Morel's wishy-washy whine: how did these sanctions bring justice to the victims? They didn't; sanctions never do, and they aren't perhaps the best method, but at least they prevent further collusion. In theory, they can break the back of the dictator, and we've seen them work, for example, on Lukashenka.
The problem is that the eternal European -- and it's mainly Anderson's *Europe* that has this problem, *not* America -- debate around this makes the work against dictators ineffective. It's Anderson's own continent and its political structures that can't make up their mind whether to really break off from the authoritarian regimes of Putin and the rest and try to sanction their bad behavior -- and that's been their problem, frankly, throughout history. They have a terrible myopia about their enabling and abetting of the Bolsheviks and all the subsequent bad regimes, unlike the US. That's maybe what drives them to obsess about America, to deflect from themselves. Indeed, Michael, why don't the countries of Europe have laws that at least sanction Uzbekistan and then stoop to waivers -- at least the US does that much!
And a reason the West wasn't as full-throated as Anderson liked is contained right in the problem of Islamist violence -- a problem he dodges, at least in the trailer and all the propaganda around the film.
Richard Boucher, the White House spokesman, said at the time, as we learn from Wikipedia:
"It's becoming increasingly clear that very large numbers of civilians were killed by the indiscriminate use of force by Uzbek forces. There needs to be a credible and a transparent accounting to establish the facts of the matter of what occurred in Andijon. At the same time I think it is clear that the episode began by an armed attack on the prison and on other government facilities. There are reports of hostage-taking and other claims that should be investigated. Nothing justified such acts of violence."[58] Craig Murray, the ambassador of the United Kingdom to Uzbekistan, criticized the US government's position, calling it a "sickening response."
Er, sickening, Craig? Really? Why isn't the violence involved in a prison break, murders, and hostage-taking as sickening to you?!
This is the central issue that I will keep pounding on every time this topic is raised. Because it is absolutely shameful for the left and the international human rights movement in particular to shy away from or even whitewash this.
I find this problem shockingly deep-rooted. I found a senior official at the Open Society Institute when I was there tell me sanctimoniously that I shouldn't raise any qualms about the violence used by the opposition around the Andijan events because the American revolution was bloody as well. Imagine! We are justify violence by harkening back more than two centuries to how a war of liberation against colonialism was fought, and not hold to modern standards of human rights?! We're to invert Thomas Jefferson's famous quote, often misused by Palestinians to justify terrorism, "The Tree of Liberty must be nourished by the blood of patriots" -- as if it has to be nourished by murdered policeman and townspeople killed because troops were provoked by hostage-taking and human-shielding with officials! I find that morally reprehensible, and I'll keep denouncing it.
It is possible to do both -- we can reject the violence used by this opposition group and we can reject the violence of the murderous Karimov regime in responding to the calls for justice of ordinary demonstrators. In fact, we really must do this if we want the outcome in Uzbekistan ever to be better and not become the cycle of violence that we see again with the Arab Spring and with revolutions in other countries. There really is no Tree of Liberty nourished by bloodshed, but only delayed and made dysfunctional in our time.
The businessmen who got into the dispute with local potentates aren't exactly freedom-fighters. They're the kind of power grouping that forms in the conditions of these unfree countries so antithetical to free enterprise and a free marketplace, without the rule of law. Businessmen making networks of people that they provide services and goods for in a kind of patronage system aren't exactly the open and free and fair society we'd really want to fight for and see come into being, is it? They appear because they live under the remnants of the Soviet totalitarian state. Some explanations of the backdrop of the Andijan event ascribe this to clan warfare and turf fighting over trade networks. No doubt that was part of it; it always is in these countries (think of the pogroms in Kyrgyzstan). Even so, there is nothing wrong with forming an Islamic businessmen's society and doing for their fellow Muslims -- it's the way everything is run everywhere in the world. The reasons for it and the rights to it are understandable -- but violence isn't justified, ever.
Strangely, revisionist researchers on these events like Sarah Kendzior, who has written a much-admired essay claiming that the businessman's association (Akromiya) doesn't exist, can't seem to square their notions with the accounts of emgires that say it did exist -- but was innocent, i.e. not an extremist much less a terrorist organization. It's as if Kendzior can't hypothesize an Islamic religious business organization -- a self-help network -- that might be prone to criticism for extremism, and has to say it was all made up by frenzied "war on terrorism" bureaucrats.
No, Boucher got it right. Nothing justifies such acts of violence, i.e. prison-breaks, killing of guards, hostage-taking. Absolutely. And that's why the left and the international human rights movement is never, ever credible on Andijan when they cannot concede that this isn't just a side problem, this isn't just "understandable," this isn't just a "trigger" for events that others without arms got dragged into, it's the essential problem for the opposition.
It's not a problem cleared by Muhamed Salih and other opposition leaders shown in the film, because they don't grasp the nettle of either violence or fundamentalism Islam as possible negative trends for this regime. It's not politically correct, and doesn't play to their fawning lefty audiences, such as they are.
But if we are ever to deal with this country and others in Central Asia honestly and effectively, with the elites as they are, and not as we wish them to be, and the opposition as it is, and not as we wish it to be, we have to squarely reject violence and tell all of them that we won't support them in it. In fact doing so, we can maybe open up a world of other possibilities. Fanatical Islam is rejected by the secularists of Uzbekistan and that includes those propping up the regime. They don't see it as an alternative. To be sure, Karimov makes up all kinds of things and calls people extremist who are merely devout, and tortues all of them which is absolutely unacceptable.
But we as liberals need a plan for these 5,000 or 10,000 tortured and mistreated Muslims in Karimov's dungeons and their angry and suffering families -- and we don't have one when we only see them as victims and not as future perpetrators of human rights violations of others. We can't make a solid case to the regime when we do that. Yet the movement only has silence on the question of violence and Islamic business, and an unwillingness to concede the White House spokesman's just words on these events.
That plan has to be calling for unconditional release for these people and justice for the victims of Andijan, but it can't be by embracing jihadism. It's just like the issue of Guantanamo, and the human rights wrongs there, and the Cageprisoners, who are all about advocating the violation of other people's rights. Celebrating victimhood status is not enough -- we need to stake out the territory of what we would support in a free society -- and it can't be violence and extremism.
Very few alternative figures in Uzbekistan do that. Galima Bukharbaeva, an eyewitness to the horror of Andijan is one of them. She is featured in the film -- but not her critique of violence and Islamic fundamentalism which she has continued since those days, at great personal risk and to constant pressure from other opposition figures.
In Wikipedia's account of Andijan, she is quoted:
Galima Bukharbaeva, a journalist for IWPR, witnessed a "mass of dead and wounded. At first, one group of armoured-personnel carriers approached the [city] square, and then another group appeared. They opened fire without mercy on everyone indiscriminately, including women and children. The crowd began to run in all directions. We dove into a ditch and lay there for a while. I saw at least five bloody corpses next to me. The rebels who are holding the provincial administration opened fire in response. They intend to stand to the end! When we got out of the ditch, we ran along the streets into the neighbourhood and now we're looking for a place where there's no shooting. But shots can be heard everywhere..."[26] The Uzbek government disputes this and states that only terrorists were killed.[11]
She reports accurately that the rebels opened fire and intended to stand to the end. This was not just troops gunning down unarmed citizens. This was a firefight, a gun battle. All the many people who champion the cause of Andijan need to restore these unattractive facts to the narrative and condemn them, too. They should call on the West to do more to confront this tyrant, but cease their infantile blaming of foreign leaders for what the opposition caused, and which the authoritarian government is responsible for.
Yes, caused. Because they didn't have to use an armed jailbreak or other violent measures to press their actually just cause -- the right to freedom of association, belief, expression. They became unjust and not our friends when they did that -- and we need to make that clear, just like we need to have a plan to press for the release and rehabilitation of thousands of Muslim prisoners even as we say that we reject any extremism and armed jihad, should they chose that route. These things have to go together. They never do.
Did Karimov really negotiate with these people?
The armed men, including the 23 defendants, also took over the regional administration building in Andijan, and took at least twenty law enforcement and government officials hostage, including the Head of the Prosecutors Office and the Chief of the Tax Inspection Authority. The militants unsuccessfully tried to seize the National Security Service (SNB) headquarters in the city.[20] They demanded the resignation of President Islam Karimov.[21] Karimov's press office said that "intensive negotiations" proved fruitless. "The militants, taking cover behind women and children, are refusing any compromise," the statement said
How loathsome is the National Security Service, torturing people, and how loathsome Karimov! But nothing ever justifies taking cover behind women and children. That's all there is to it. Michael Anderson and every other do-gooder has to be called out on this.
More pragmatic students of Andijan highlight the business and local conflict nature of the story:
Melissa Hooper, a US lawyer in Tashkent who worked with the defense in the trial, said on 14 May, "This is more about [the businessmen] acquiring economic clout, and perhaps refusing to pay off the local authorities, than about any religious beliefs." Andrei Grozin, head of the Central Asia and Kazakhstan Department of the Institute of CIS Countries, said in an interview conducted by Rossiiskaya gazeta that authorities used the trial to "take away the business of several entrepreneurs under a clearly trumped-up pretext."[17]
But Anderson can't let go of his anti-American fairy-tale. He even conceives of this film with a structural morality-tale featuring America, as an interview with RFE/RL tells us:
Andersen likens the events in Andijon -- and the Western world’s dealings with the Karimov government -- to a literary work. The events in Andijon are where things start, Western sanctions ostensibly related to the violence are the middle, and the rapprochement of the last few years -- mainly related to Uzbekistan’s rail link to Afghanistan -- serve as the “bittersweet end.”
So, the fairy-tale is supposed to work like this: since our engagement "caused Andijan," why, we should only now put in sanctions, deal with Pakistan or Kazakhstan or Russia instead, or just leave the equipment behind instead of worrying how to get it out by the NDN, and everything will be fine?
Really, Michael?
I'm all for trying to wrest more out of Karimov and confronting the US to do more. But we can't have illusions that if we didn't deal with Karimov he would auto-magically change into a peacenik overnight. Come on, people, get a grip here. We are not at the center of the universe. And they are at the center of their own universe.
The Uzbeks will have to deal with their own internal contradictions and conflicts and we should bolster the forces for peaceful change and affirmation of universality and human rights against those who would justify taking hostages and killing even the henchmen of a murderous regime.
In the interview with Anderson by EurasiaNet -- which also refrained from addressing the initial violence at Andijan and the problem of Islamism in any form, Ken Roth's quote from the film is mentioned:
“If I were an Uzbek citizen, I would feel abandoned by the West, as if my fate didn’t matter to the West.” It cannot be put better than that. And I am not in doubt – I know from thousands of conversations with Uzbeks – that they increasingly feel that way. I am sure I would. And some of these people will lose all hope in this “Western” idea of democracy. They will also lose hope that we are with them and not with their brutal ruler.
OK, rightly so. But you know something? Thousands of Uzbeks don't want to live under bands of armed men who take the law into their own hands and take live hostages, either. Do you think they transform into democrats and change their ways overnight? Not abandoning Uzbeks also involves condemning the violence of their opposition leaders and urging that the peaceful forces for change and human rights be strengthened -- and helping them. The moral clarity has to resound here. That is the Western idea of democracy.
And this idea of blackmail -- if the West doesn't help them, they get to be terrorists? Sorry, that's for the birds. You don't get to use terrorism, whether the West helps or not. And it will never really stand behind you if you do. So don't. That's how best to make the moral case to this imperfect West, which at the end of the day, only helps -- it isn't the essential force for these societies, who must make their way on their own.
Says Michael Anderson:
We should ask ourselves: “Whose side are we on? The dictator’s or the people’s?” Ten years of Western cooperation with the Karimov regime leaves you with a very bad taste in the mouth – the taste of shame.?
No. The bad taste I have in my mouth is from the cowardly response to violence and extremism coming from the left and the human rights defenders who should have better principles and articulate them. I don't think the choice is as stark as "the dictator" or "armed men who kill policemen and take human shields." I won't make it that stark. The "people" is a Marxist abstraction. I'm for the rights of individual people, and achieving them peacefully, not through revolutionary violence.
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