1907 Solar Eclipse Expedition by Sergei Prokhudi-Gorskii, Russian Photographer in Central Asia.
This is my little newsletter on Tajikistan that comes out once a
week on Saturdays. If you want to see past issues, look to the column on
the right down below for the key word "Tajikistan". If you want to get this in
your email or you have comments or contributions, write
[email protected]
As I've seen New Realist Eurasia Foundation Young Pro, Kerry think-tanker and long-time defense analyst Joshua Foust of Registan trash Zenn before when he reported factually on terrorists in Kazakhstan, I take it all with a grain of salt. I have no separate information. I have only questions. Zenn says:
The Southeast Asian militants who returned to their home countries after
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan carried out or trained others to
carry out terrorist attacks, which killed hundreds of people, but, they
proved much less effective at generating change than the mass social
movements in the Arab World in 2011. As long as the populations of
Central Asian countries remain vigilant to the threat posed by these
militant groups, the fighters returning from Afghanistan will likely be
able to only carry out sporadic attacks but gain no traction in society.
However, crises like the ethnic riots in Urumqi in 2009, the ethnic
clashes in Osh in 2010, the deadly Zhanaozen protests in 2011, and the
instability in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakshan in 2012, all have the
potential to erode government legitimacy, while increasing support for
alternatives to the present leadership. Most alternatives come in the
form of opposition parties, but some of those who have been aggrieved
may turn toward groups like the TIP, Jund al-Khilafah and the IMU
instead.
Everything about this statement seems prudent; it doesn't overstate the case -- if anything it points out that the last time this happened after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, it didn't amount to much. Of course, that was before the Internet.
Defense consultant Nathan Hamm is scornful:
Whether or not terror groups are likely to be more active in Central
Asia after NATO withdraws from Afghanistan is a useful thing to think
about, but it is vital not to overhype the risks. The governments of the
region are phenomenally imaginative at devising and hyping threats to
justify not only repressive domestic policies but to extract concessions
from Western governments in the forms of financial assistance and
tempered criticism of their human rights abuses. Assessments of the risk
of terrorism need to capture the scale and timeline for the risk. Zenn
is correct that there is a risk of the “return” of Central Asian terror
groups at some unspecified point in the future. However, Central Asian
security services have shown more than sufficient capability to monitor
and disrupt terror groups. Furthermore, as grim as it is to point out,
Afghanistan and Pakistan will continue to be much more permissible and
target-rich environments for all of these groups.
Both of them seem to think these governments will remain strong, although they face rattling as Karimov in Uzbekistan is going to have a succession and Rahmon in Tajikistan will have "elections" and there could always be another toppling in Kyrgyzstan.
In any event, for the purposes of this newsletter, the Tajik situation might not be so much "returning warriors" as opportunistic kinsmen or brotherly fighters seeing an opening. We don't know how it's going to turn out. Sure, Afghanistan and Pakistan will always be worse; maybe even Pakistan more than Afghanistan. But that doesn't mean the post-Soviet stans will be quiet. What would be more advantageous, staying in a place where the Taliban and related allies no longer need you and you have no unifying factor with them to fight NATO/the US? Or returning to your own country or travelling to neighbouring kin in order to use your acquired battle skills?
Nate Schenkken said on Twitter that Islamist terror from returning warriors should be on the list of concerns, but only under something like drug lords; he blames them for the pogroms in Kyrgyzstan. There's nothing to say that the two things can't coexist in one gang, however.
* Ten Tajiks Killed in Moscow Blaze, Exposes Poor Working Conditions
A fire ripped through a new Moscow building’s underground parking lot
on Saturday, killing 10 migrant workers and injuring 13 others who had
been working and living there, city police said.
All those who died were citizens of Tajikistan, Moscow police
said in a statement. It said they were killed after a garbage heap on
the floor they were working on caught fire, but the cause of the blaze
itself was under investigation.
The impoverished Central Asian state of Tajikistan said Monday that it
had been cut off from natural gas shipments by its neighbour and sole
energy supplier Uzbekistan.
The IMF in its report of last year wrote that around US $3.5 billion from Tajikistan was deposited in offshore accounts. Zafar Abdulloev, a Tajik journalist researching economic issues, claims that the entities from Tajikistan with offshore accounts are: Talco, the aluminum factory; Innovative Road Solutions or IRS, and companies belong to the Tajik businessman Hasan Asadullozoda, brother-in-law of President Emomali Rahmon.
Ali Ironpour,
a member of the agriculture committee of the Iranian parliament, says that
Tehran can solve the problems of drought in eastern Iran by purchasing some one
billion cubic meters of water from neighboring Tajikistan, a step he says the
two governments agreed to in May 2012.
Russia and Tajikistan have come to an agreement on one of the sticking points
in their deal to extend the lease of Russia's largest military base in
Central Asia, reports Tajikistan's minister of energy and industry Gul
Sherali. As part of that deal, Russia agreed to duty-free fuel shipments
to Tajikistan, but wanted a guarantee that the discounted fuel wouldn't
be reexported. Tajikistan had objected, but now has agreed to Moscow's terms.
And...Russian troops and Tajik border guards are really, really going to be able to check on 1m tonnes of oil products and make sure they never, ever get re-sold anywhere else, Scout's honour?
Moscow insists on the clause because of the high level of fuel smuggling
in south Central Asia and the risk of fuel delivered to Tajikistan
being sold on to third countries such as Afghanistan. Dushanbe had
previously objected to the clause, with Tajik officials saying they
would be unable to guarantee that gasoline from Russia will not be
re-exported.
Trilling thinks Tajikistan has no leverage. True enough, but it has something else -- continued non-compliance and pleading the inability to monitor all those mountain roads not even demarcated. This is an regular ritual...
Tajikistan’s ever-more-ridiculous elections
exercise will end predictably, as we all wonder how far Emomali Rakhmon
can push his authority over economic and political life of the
ostensibly conflict-averse population. Who among us has not thought that
this was the year that the country would implode, divide into ungovernable de facto criminal states, and drag the whole region in. He’s gone ‘too far’ with the IRPT, HT, Pamiri clans, Turajonzoda’s clan, or myriad other rivals to maintain his power base. But, it has not happened yet, somehow, so we stop predicting it.
I agree. We were endlessly hearing how that overcrowded teeming Ferghana Valley was going to explode, too, but then the state managed to sterilize the women and suppress the demonstrations and keep the lights dim...
A recent discussion in the country's blogosphere offers a rare
glimpse into what it means to be gay in Tajikistan and how the country's
people view members of the LGBT community.
‘It means PAIN…'
... It was decided that the [gay] should be taught a lesson. About eight of
our classmates beat him up in the bathroom. They beat him up badly;
there was a lot of blood on his face and clothes…
Tajikistan is a transit point for one of the most lucrative drugs routes
in the world. Illegal drugs from neighbouring Afghanistan flood into
the country on their way to Russia and Western Europe.
Rustam Qobil travels to remote border villages in Tajikistan to find out how communities are being affected by the drugs trade.
INL’s “Sport Against Drugs” campaign, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, February 19, 2012. International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement (INL) section of the U.S. Embassy and local partner NGO
National Olympic Academy (NOA) organized an anti-drug dance competition
titled “Jam Master” at the Spartak Youth Center in Dushanbe on February
19, 2012.
***
Check out my Pinterest -- I want someone to bring me this in the cold of New York City right now like in the cold of these Tajik mountains.
Michael Hancock-Parmer strikes again. When we last heard from him, he was trashing the Russian journalist who covered the Zhanaozen massacre critically in an appalling post that earned a reprimand from his former professor, who was then "disciplined" by Registan dominatrix Sarah Kendzior into apologizing and admitting she had a lot to learn about becoming a better human being (!). Some people withdraw from conflicts with Registan because the price is very high -- in academia, there is great fear of losing scarce positions, and the Registanis are horribly vindictive and will complain to people's bosses if they don't like their criticism.
I got into a side convio with H-P in email which he begged me not to publish, so I won't, but needless to say, he proved himself to be an ass.
I'm giving this the "Batyr" award, for the poor "talking elephant" that "died from an overdose of soporifics" (like reading too much Registan!). Everyone convinced themselves that the elephant could really talk because he mastered a few memes and gestures on cue and was rewarded. It was convincing!
But telling them not to use Latin and instead, to use Arabic, for pseudo-scholarly reasons has got to be even worse -- and it reminds me of the Batyr story because by mimicking humans on demand, Batyr in fact was isolated from other real elephants -- and the humans were fooled.
Batyr, whose name is a Turkic word meaning Dashing Equestrian, Man of Courage or Athlete,
was first alleged to speak just before New Year's Day in the winter of
1977 when he was eight years old. Zoo employees were the first to notice
his "speech", but he soon delighted zoo-goers at large by appearing to
ask his attendants for water and regularly praising or (infrequently)
chastising himself.
Language is a natural and organic thing, and people pretty much speak it as they wish, except for the French who police anglicisms. Chastising people into speaking language a certain way -- awful!
Kazakhstan of course has a long and troubled history with the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union and has a large Russian-speaking minority. So putting their Kazakh language into Cyrrilic script made a certain amount of sense but it was obviously coerced. What would the Kazakh language be if there had never been a Russia, or a kinder, gentler Russia? Well, there wasn't, so it is what it is...
But when Kazakhstan got its independence from the Soviet Union -- or more importantly, from Russia -- it gradually began to de-Russify and began to join the rest of the world and try to modernize. I don't buy the state's own propaganda about this at all, and it's a very rocky road.
Yet I do follow Kazakhstan sufficiently, including the various independent and state tweeters, to know that if they have to chose something besides Cyrrilic, it will be Latin, not Arabic letters. That's because the language of the Internet, like it or not, is English, and a lot of the computer and Internet terms borrowed in other languages come from English. God knows, for example, why Russians talk about "follovat'" on Twitter instead of "sledit'" which has less characters, but they do because it "feels right" to them as they'll tell you.
Kazakhstan is a secular Muslim nation where the regime controls religious expression brutally, and gets its hand on the Muslim communities in particular. So that means a turn to the Arabic world might not be for them.
But more to the point, just because they are Muslim doesn't mean they feel the need to turn toward Arabic. In doing so, they would isolate themselves further from Eurasia, Europe and the Internet lingua franca and I don't see any evidence that they want to do that.
Young people simply reply naturally that they use Latin because that's what English uses and they want to learn and use English.
This kind of prudish, controlling prescriptiveness for people's language has just got to go.
Only a fussy little Registani nerd like Michael Hancock-Parmer could have "concerns" about another nation writing their alphabet as they please (!):
The Too Long; Didn’t Read analysis of what I’m about to write is
simple: I am not as excited for Latinization as I used to be. I am not
forecasting doom or anything like it. Nor am I saying that this is all
part of some conspiracy or weird power grab on the part of Nazarbaev.
No. I am rather trying to share some concerns that might interest
Registan’s readers.
I have reservations that it will adversely affect Kazakhstan’s citizens
in their efforts to better understand their past and the formation of
the their current situation.
I'm the first to say that Russian is still a lingua-franca more than English is in this region; it's the poor man's lingua-franca because not everyone can get a Soros grant and go to a Western course or conference and perfect their conversational English. There is that large minority as well. If anything, we should be concerned about these people being forced to leave their comfort level to use Latin -- but then, they're being asked to do that for the Kazakh language, not the Russian language.
What this terrible affectation about Kazakhs needing to "better understand their past" isn't really about "richness of literature" in the Soviet era (?!) but about the fetishization of Islam that is common among the New Realists in Washington and New York in general and the Registanis in particular. There's an entire mindset and contrived narrative they have acquired which goes like this:
o There is this "they" out there who exaggerate the threat of Islam and hate Muslims -- be they neo-cons or traditional conservatives or Blue Dog Democrats or whatever -- and "we" have to counter them;
o We are the smart people surrounded by idiots, so we will embrace the vibrancy and diversity of Islam and show "them" up to be bigots and haters
o In fact, if we don't stop this criticism of Islamic countries (which we believe to be hatred) then we are actually harming our nation's security because the US will "bomb Iran" and we will be in WWIII;
o The enemy of our enemy is our friend -- conservatives and parts of the Obama Administration we don't like are too distrustful of theocratic states, so we'll be nice to them to show how cool we are.
I find this all very unscholarly, and I find that when there is this mindset, you can't get new facts and impressions to go through -- it's like trying to get the miniature golf ball through the rotating blades of the windmill -- very hard.
Sure, Latinization is contrived, like the very capital of Astana itself and lots of Nazarbayev state-building projects. Yet if people don't want to use it and want to stick with Cyrrilic, they will, and it will be hard to stop them.
There's another project lurking under Michael Hannover-Parmer's tender ministrations here -- it's sort of like pan-Turkism. He wants to prove how close the Central Asian peoples are to each other:
In essence, “Arabic-script Kazakh” is nearly a contradiction in terms.
When written in Arabic script, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, and Karakalpak
appear much more identical then then do in the current Cyrillic
alphabets. Moreover, their close relationship with Uzbek, Uyghur,
Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Ottoman-Turkish was far more apparent. Though much
ink has been spilled attacking the awkwardness of Arabic at correctly
carrying Turkic language, the longevity of the alphabet must be
re-considered rather than seen as a sign of backwardness or Oriental
decadence. Rather, the very limitations of the Arabic script (i.e.
writing of the various Turkic vowels) might be considered as its
strength.
H-P tries to justify his own diktat in deciding what is "best" for a people and trying to back it up with tld;r "scholarship" by pointing out that Stalin was the one to manipulate languages and alphabets and narratives. Yes, we get all that. Yes, they are contrived. Yes, people will work their way out of it. But hardly with Arabic script. And...who says "integrationist processes" are really naturally occuring? They don't naturally occur in the EU, either...
H-P also has a touching concern for the "treasury of work written during the Soviet Union". Well, sure. No people should burn their books, even from discredited communist pasts. But, well, if there isn't a demand for them, there isn't. We don't all demand that even the classics be transcripted into the English of Beowulf or Shakespeare. Language is a dynamic and living thing, even if tyrants monkey with it.
Fortunately, nobody anywhere is likely to pay the slightest attention to this fussy fellow -- read the reply in the comments from a young man who simply points out that QWERTY is what is there to use, and that's what he is using. Oh, and there's this:
Uzbekistan moved from Arabic alphabet to Latin in 1920′s because
Uzbekistan because a secular country and wanted to break with Islam.
That move made most of the religious literature instantly inaccessible
that helped to establish a secular society.
Whatever you want to say about Sovietization -- and I'm happy to criticize it all day long -- there's something to be said for secularism even of the Vladimir Posner/Soviet sort as compared to radical Islam. People shouldn't be cut off from their national religious literature, but there's no need to artificially crowbar it back into place, either.
But as I said, the fetishizing of Islam that this crowd indulges in brings them to this sort of untenable position.
I'd like Kazakhstan -- if it is getting all national and independent -- to a) come to a true independence which would mean independence of Nazarbayevism and even batyrism; and b) be tolerant of Russians and Russian-speakers in its own land even if it wants to distance itself from Moscow, generally a good thing. I think this process of Latinization might take so long that it is unlikely to harm the Russian population, but it bears watching.
I knew that when I was trying to find a picture to illustrate the Turkmen dictator's New Year's "clean-up," Pinterest -- where I found this lovely old lady above -- wouldn't disappoint. But regrettably, there is no photo credit -- and paging through numerous re-links and even using Google image finder, I couldn't locate it, so if it belongs to someone, let me know.
With the long holidays over, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is now sweeping out his ministries once again -- and terrorizing everyone into likely not doing their jobs very well, setting up the next round of sweeps.
EurasiaNet has the story about dozens of officials from the cotton industry to the Emergencies Ministry getting shuffled on or out in the Turkmen hierarchy
And gundogar.org reports (scroll down): Byashimmurad Khojamamedov, minister of the economy and development is "released" from his duties and transferred -- to an unspecified other position. His deputy Babamurad Taganov is appointed in his place. The minister of public utilities Arslan Yagshimamedov is fired over "shortcomings" (maybe electricity shut-offs in this power-rich country?) and replaced by the hyakim (governor) of Balkan velayat (province). Meylis Mutdikov, chairman of the State Service for Sea and River Transport, is fired after the prosecutor uncovered "facts of gross violations of the law", failure to fulfill contracts and laxness. And a half dozen others.
But for some reason, EurasiaNet didn't cover the largest figure in the gas and oil shakeup: Yagshigeldy Kakayev.
Also shuffled is Turkmengas and the Ministry of Oil and Gas and Natural Resources.
Very little is known about Mukhammednur Khalilov (or you could spell it with his shorter name Muhhamet Halilov or probably about ten other ways), who has now been put in charge of Ministry of Oil and Gas, after his predecessor, Kakageldy Abdullaev, who was acting minister, was moved to Turkmengaz -- when the head of Turkmengaz, Sakhatmurad Mamedov, was fired. I tried all the spellings in English and Russian for Khalilov/Halilov and found he had virtually no Google footprint. Yet. Poor fellow.
After digging around I am told by a very reliable source that he is a smart petroleum geologist who has spent his life in the state's Institute of Oil and Gas, then apparently later moved to the Institute of Geology where he was in the higher ranks, possibly the director.
He is said to be smart, honest, not from the big city although from a village near Ashgabat, and religious -- and that he was tapped for this job and likely told to serve, i.e. he didn't evidently seek it. Apparently that happens a lot in Turkmenistan, and with heads CONSTANTLY rolling, people don't get a choice. So they are rushed to the capital and pushed into jobs where they don't have experience and networks precisely because the Protector (as the dictator is now known) constantly wants to break up networks and experience that he thinks might work against HIM.
Halilov is probably temporary although he wasn't designated as "acting".
In the Turkmen hierarchy, I've always been taught by people from Turkmenistan, that it works like this:
o State Agency for Management and Use of Hydrocarbons
o Ministry of Oil and Gas and Natural Resources
o Turkmengaz
Turkmengaz is a state-owned company and in another world, even in Russia, where Gazprom produced the president of the country, you might think of it as having a lot of its own power. But in Turkmenistan's top-down vertikal, it is very much subject to those other entities of the state. It's just the gas company, not a fulcrum of political power in the country and not a private company of course.
You would also think that an agency would be subordinate to a ministry, right? But in Turkmenistan. *that* agency has super-powers and is higher in the power chain than the ministry. However, I don't know exactly how their reporting chains work, and that may be something that Berdy disrupts and changes, too.
The "strict reprimand" notice for Kakayev has to be the longest one I've ever seen in the Turkmen media: "for improper performance of his official duties and violation of labour discipline, shortcomings permitted in work".
Usually, when "strict reprimands" are issued -- and they're issued by the basketful constantly, every week or month -- there is just a terse announcement: "in connection with shortcomings in their work" or something "severe shortcomings". Sometimes, there is an additional warning that they have 30 days to shape up. They might as well not bother writing that, as it is understood in the Turkmen ministries: if you have received a "strict reprimand," then you are likely to be fired or demoted in 30-60 days.
But here we've gotten considerably more -- that there was improper performance or literally "inappropriate execution" of his job duties and also "violations (literally "non-compliance") with labour discipline".
So that means he exceeded the power of office, or disobeyed orders, or improvised in ways that his boss, the president didn't like. The definition of an innovative Soviet apparatchik was always someone who knew how to invent more ways to please their boss slavishly -- so it can be easy to go off script, even at these towering heights.
I don't know what article of the labour code or internal labour discipline code that Kakayev might have "not complied with," but he may not even know himself.
Kakayev has held on since 2008. He is the person who has been at all the Oil and Gas Conferences Turkmenistan sponsors at home or takes part in abroad, and he is the person -- after Berdy himself, of course --who actually negotiates with foreigners.
What on earth did poor Kakayev do to get this slam in the media -- public humiliation and threat of dismissal?
Of course, nothing is said, and I haven't heard any rumours. When we last tuned in to some of the people who were in these jobs, they would be rumoured to be dismissed because they either told the real situation to foreigners, i.e. that maybe there weren't as large gas reserves as claimed, or didn't get foreigners sufficiently on board to invest in the promises of His Wonderfulness.
These post-Soviet countries still have enormous reservoirs of fear and hatred of foreigners and therefore obsequiousness and flattery as a tactic to deal with them.
You wonder what the scene was with this incredibly powerful official who had his hands on the pulse of billions of oil and gas dollars flowing into Turkmenistan and...not really accounted for much.
Was he seen drinking a beer with a foreigner late at night in a hotel bar, and therefore reported as "suspect" in this conservative country? Or, on the contrary, did he leave work on time to go to a Friday prayer service at the mosque because he was religious -- in a country where you are not to be *too* religious or you will also be suspect? Or did he just come back from London or Singapore without a check in his pocket?
We can only speculate, but I'm going to take a wild-assed guess and say that Mamedov was fired and Kakayev was disciplined because they failed to get investors in TAPI after the roadshow.
This is a conclusion I draw from certain math: a) there was a roadshow b) there were no investors c) therefore someone is to blame.
Of course, what seems to be to blame, as we know from the Indian and Pakistani press, is more about Turkmenistan failing to pony up a piece of the gas fields to foreigners -- cutting them into the gas deal seriously. Foreign companies want that kind of upstream ownership if they get involved in downstream construction, logistics, headaches.
And so far, in Turkmenistan, these production-sharing agreements have never been given to European, let along American companies, and only given to China, and I think the Malaysian company, Petronas. If you see RWE or other Western companies drilling, maybe they have a permit for exploration, or maybe they sell equipment for exploration, but they don't own a piece of the result.
In the Protector's world, you have to invest somehow in Turkmenistan before you can expect to harvest any profits from the gas. The Chinese understood this and laid out at least $8 billion, and probably more, to get the 30 billion cubic meters -- now to be 50 -- out of the ground and into their country ("the Great Chinese Take-out," as the late Roman Kupchinsky called it in a book by that name).
Petronas has just sponsored a new gas and oil institute for Turkmenistan, where the Turkmens, with Malaysian help, are going to educate their own people instead of having to export them to the Russian Gubkov Institute and have to deal with Russians which they don't want to do. They simply feel more comfortable building up that "multi-vector" foreign policy and trade with another smaller Muslim Asian state than Russia which has been historically nasty to them and even is suspected of blowing up their pipeline when it couldn't get the price deal it wanted.
This thorough shakeup and all the other "grandiose" reform efforts (that's actually literally the word the Turkmen state press uses) all seem like "enterprises of great pith and moment" but likely they, too, their "currents turn awry" and will "loose the name of action," as Hamlet put it.
Supposedly, Turkmenistan is now selling off state assets -- which means likely some agencies controlled by the vertikal will simply have closer responsibility for them and still enrich the presidency; this sell-off does not include anything in the oil and gas industry, which is why my hierarchy above with Turkmengaz as the last point in the chain is likely to remain accurate for some time to come.
I have known and worked with Vitaly for years, and he is one of the most solid and dedicated researchers on human rights and humanitarian issues for Central Asia. Memorial Society is the leading Russian human rights organization devoted to keeping the memory of the victims of the crimes of Stalin and also preventing and responding to their legacy, the human rights violations of today under the Putin regime. Russians tend to be preoccupied with the human rights problems in their own country, of which there are no shortage, but it has been the hallmark of Memorial that they try to care about what is happening outside of Moscow, especially in places where the Russian government can be part of the problem.
Ponomaryov was particularly noted recently in 2010 when he did difficult, in-depth and dangerous reporting about the pogroms in the south of Kyrgyzstan.
Ponomaryov is a modest fellow who will not go around trying to get press attention, so it's up to his friends to spread the word and speak to their governments and ask them to intercede with Uzbek and Russian authorities so that they investigate these threats. These incidents are in a context of increasing threats to Russian human rights defenders such as Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch in Moscow and takes place in a climate of crackdown by both Russian and Uzbek authorities on human rights groups.
I saw Sanjar Umarov, the former Uzbek political prisoner, instantly responded on Twitter when he heard the news and linked to BBC Uzbek Service which carried a report.
Investigate threats against Memorial Central Asia staff
The Norwegian Helsinki Committee
was distressed to learn of serious, anonymous threats made against the
Central Asia Program
Director of Human Rights Center Memorial,
Vitaliy Ponomarev, on 12 January 2012 and urges Russian and Uzbekistani
authorities
to open an investigation.
Mr. Ponomarev is a prominent human rights
defender and researcher based in Moscow, who has led Memorial’s
important work in
Central Asia since 1999. On 12 January, he
received several e-mails from different internet addresses, containing
disturbing
death threats against himself and members
of his family.
While the threats were made anonymously, they
were sent from the same IP-address, found to be located in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan.
The emails themselves were made to appear
to be from ethnic Uzbeks residing in the south of Kyrgyzstan. However,
Memorial
reported that linguistic analysis
indicates the use of an Uzbek dialect used in Tashkent rather than in
Kyrgyzstan.
Human Rights Center Memorial has reported
the threats to the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB) and the
Prosecutor General’s
office, requesting that an investigation
into the threats be carried out.
- Unfortunately, threats against human
rights defenders have become commonplace in the CIS. The reason for such
threats can
often be hard to pinpoint, said Secretary
General of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, Bjørn Engesland. - In Mr.
Ponomarev’s
case, the threats would seem to come from
persons who are concerned at the unusually high quality of his work to
expose human
rights violations.
Here's an interview in English with Ponomaryov by the NewsBriefing Central Asia, which explains an important thesis: that the thousands of people the Uzbek authorities have arrested and tortured on vague grounds of "religious extremism" in fact leads to instability, not stability.
USAID provides a gift of microscopes to Turkmen medical personnel. Photo US Embassy in Ashgbat
So when I heard that Robert Blake, Assistant Secretary of State for Central and South Asia, was going to "meet with civil society representatives" on his day-long trip to Turkmenistan last week, naturally I took out my microscope here, like these Turkmen medical workers took out these handy gifts from USAID.
Not to say anything bad about people fighting the good fight and all, but...civil society? Turkmenistan? Really, guys?
I was really, really curious what they would come up with.
It's true that there are a very tiny handful of human rights defenders in Turkmenistan, or intellectuals who question the regime modestly, and such, and perhaps that's whom they met? But there's no transcript of the meeting or even a press release -- there's only a round table with journalists which is separate.
UPDATE: I've now found out about Blake's meeting, although not from his office, and as I suspected, it
was a very tiny number of people who are very beleaguered, so I won't
mention their names, so as not to put them further in the spotlight and targeted for repression. Although I do hope that this meeting with the somewhat influential United States will guarantee them in fact some modicum of protection.
I've
also been hearing more from various human rights groups about the press law,
and found it is quite fake: you must be accredited by the state to be
called "a journalist," so that freelancers and bloggers do not count and
are not protected. Remember the old American adage: the best press law
is no press law. That's why it says "Congress shall make no law..." in
the First Amendment.
There are many issues that should have been
discussed by Blake in his meetings with officials, but we don't know
what they were because they're secret (except for the answers to the
press at the round table, which were not very complete, despite his
protestations).
There are the appalling conditions in the prisons;
the long sentences to political prisoners who are missing or who don't
get visits for very long periods.
There's the entire issue of
Russian migration/citizenship which has been handled horribly by both
Russia and Turkmenistan, forcing people either to give up their jobs and homes and
flee to Russia in uncertainty, or stay in Turkmenistan but unable to
leave and live as second-class citizens.
One of the reasons I
insisted on keeping Jackson-Vanik on the books is because Turkmenistan
remains as essentially a non-market economy which restricts emigration
-- it keeps a black list of people not allowed out of -- or into --the
country.
***
So...did they mean that they were going to meet with the Galkynysh Galkynysh Galkynysh imenno Galkynysha? ("Galkynysh" is a Turkmen word that means "renewal" or "revival," and the state makes very heavy use of it for just about everything -- they renamed their gas fields by this word, and it's also the name of a fake government-organized civic movement that in fact actually got disbanded and folded into something else recently, I think. Galkynysh is also the name of Berdymukhamedov's yacht.
If you look down below at the recommended articles, you will see one BBC story, "Turkmen FM Missing for 10 Years". He likely was outright executed in the prison system or died of mistreatment. I've always been astounded that an actual foreign minister -- a man who met with all kinds of foreigners and was known around the world because of the role this gas-rich state played in the region -- could actually go missing and no one would really seem to ask for him anymore. Does anymore? There's your answer about civil society: that. When they find him -- or confess to what they have done with him, that's the day that maybe civil society might begin...
Right before Blake's plane touched down, the Turkmens churned out a new "liberal" media law. I'm sure it will be implemented in practice *cough*. As usual, with his latest house-cleaning, Berdy has kicked the latest TV director to the curb. Who would ever agree to take that job?!
Now, I'm the first to say that civil society doesn't have to exist in registered NGOs, let alone USAID or Soros grantees. If anything, the more a social movement can exist without those confines, which can be deadly in their own way, the better. Civil society can take lots of forms. In this part of the world, you can't be horribly picky. You work with what there is. If all you can do is GONGO work, you do that, just because it's better than a stick in your eye.
But when you do this sort of fake stuff, you have to keep pinching yourself and reminding yourself it's fake -- and I don't think enough people do that these days, especially younger people. They come to believe the fiction that USAID is helping "the community" when they do this or that in a place like Turkmenistan. In fact, they are helping strengthening the autocratic government. It's like the questions I asked about the Navy Seabees, God bless them, when they go help the Stroibat in Tajikistan. This has its blessings, but it's good to ask what at the end of the day it is reinforcing, an abusive coercive army that is displacing what could be a viable private sector in construction or...
No doubt some bureaucrats somewhere are trying to tease out the tendrils of this new press law and call it some sort of "improvement"...
To be sure, various things go on in Turkmenistan that are touching or quaint or that provide people with a sense of "humanity" that gives them hope that "maybe" civil society is possible. Of course, if civil society means the ability to go to a Western film show, then we've lowered our standards and we're not thinking of institutions anymore, but just semblances.
Turkmens were moved as any one would be of the horrific massacre of school children in Newtown, Massachusetts, and they left out flowers and stuffed animals just like people around the world.
US Embassy Ashgabat 2012.
And Turkmens learn "California Dreamin' to sing for a foreign guest".
But while endearing and human, it's humanity, not civil society, which is what enables societies to be humane as well as human.
I was looking at some photos of North Korean scenes the other day and I saw one that showed a couple and their child having a picnic in a park. The father was bouncing the child up and down. Sure, North Koreans have picnics, even in their totalitarian horror. Even so, it reminded me of Erik Bulatov's painting DANGER with the picnic. The borders loom...
The US had toned down the human rights/democracy/civil society rhetoric quite a bit in dealing with Turkmenistan in the earlier years of Berdymukhamedov's reign. I think they wanted to make sure they didn't queer any gas deals.
But now that those deals have remained elusive for some 6 years now, and all those promised blocs for Chevron and ConocoPhilips and such aren't materializing, the US has gotten a little bit more forward-leaning on the human rights portfolio.
So now someone like Blake will actually weave these words into his speeches but of course in an entirely anodyne fashion:
As I said earlier, we had a good discussion on human rights issues, some
of the new laws that have been passed here in Turkmenistan, as well as
on educational and exchange programs that are of great importance.
This was an opportunity to say something a tad more critical about that press law with the paint not even dry on it, but, alas...
By the way, some information came out about how [Blake] would meet with representatives of civil society, and talk about human rights. I think such a conversation in Turkmenistan will be extremely uninteresting, especially given the background of America's vested interested in the region.
It's just interesting to see their approaches: in some parts of the world, they trumpet about their principled and uncompromising adherence to the struggle for human rights even to the point of hysteria, and in others -- they simply don't notice obvious things in places where it is profitable for them.
Ouch. Well, no angel he, as Russia's appalling support of the most murderous regime on the planet now after the North Koreans -- Assad in Syria -- just trumps anything any Russian wants to natter on about human rights.
But he doesn't say anything any different than US human rights activists who complain about the selectivity with which the US bashes Belarus -- because it can -- and is mute on Russia and Central Asia.
Turkmenistan does not let us send trucks or trains through their land, but they allow overflights of "non-lethal" materials and they have a "gas-and-go" arrangement at their airport -- and are building a new airport.
Question: You last visited Turkmenistan in 2011 as part of a
regional tour of Central Asia as well as Azerbaijan. During your last
visit you criticized the very slow speed and tempo of reform and
democratization in the region, and in Turkmenistan in particular. So
what has changed?
Assistant Secretary Blake: Well, in all of my meetings today I
just expressed the view of the United States that political development
needs to keep pace with economic development, and that it’s very
important for any society to have a vigorous civil society to help
ensure popular support for the programs of the government.
So we talked about the new law on mass media as well as the law on
national security agencies and, again, I urged progress on all the
fundamental freedoms, not only because those are important in their own
right, but because those will help to ensure a stable, democratic, and
prosperous future for Turkmenistan.
Question: Can you provide more specifics?
Assistant Secretary Blake: I think I’ve been pretty specific.
I've followed up with a query to him on Twitter on who these people were in "civil society"; I think it will "go nowhere".
Well, one wonders if in the conversations, Blake asks things like "Say, where's your foreign minister? He's been missing for a decade. Did you find him yet?" Or "Say, how are those young people who put up Youtube videos of that explosion in Abadan? Are they out of jail?"
I suspect the conversation doesn't go that way. And it's hard to make it go that way when the real hysterics and trumpeters are people like the regime representatives, not only about how wonderful they are, with their iodine in the water and safe baby zones and everything like that, but how awful the rest of the world is by contrast.
What you have to do with a situation like this, as I said, however, is work with what you can. Yes, it's good to have the visiting inspectors and firemen raise the tough cases. Those who have to work there have to try to do the benign things like windmills or anti-AIDS programs that they can get passed.
They have to try to find their "counterparts" in the professions and try to break their isolation. Of course, all the people allowed to meet with foreigners are groomed and cleared and you end up talking to the same ones over and over again at the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights WITH the President, in meetings where the Protector, as he is called, beams over you from a portrait. No matter, you keep trying, especially to get Turkmens to travel outside their country where they can have some new experiences.
No doubt Amb. Robert Patterson does all of these things, with his considerable experience from Leningrad to Somalia; he speaks Russian, and probably tries every little thing you can try there to try to create normalcy. But it is hard, and you can't do it alone. It would help if the US could get the EU more on the same page so that things like German doctors agreeing to preside while Berdymukhamedov, trained as a dentist, operates on a hapless Turkmen patient, don't happen and therefore don't add lustre to this lunatic.
It's about damage control, and pushing the envelope, and not conferring legitimacy on them. And hoping for a better day...
Meanwhile, in a place like Turkmenistan, it's best not to organize something called "a meeting with civil society" when it most certainly doesn't exist even in the tattered form it does in say, Uzbekistan.
This is my little blog about Tajikistan that comes out on Saturdays. I had a three-week hiatus during the region's holidays, which I call "The Land of the Eternal Yolka," and my own holidays, which were actually a chance to get some big work projects done. If you want to read past issues, click on "Tajikistan" under the categories. If you have comments leave them here or write me at [email protected] where you can also get on the list to get this newsletter via email.
COMMENTS
Here we go again with the on-again, off-again social media website closures in Tajikistan which have been going on for months and which I've reported on in all my past issues.
What is the purpose of these shenanigans? Not really to shut down the sites, which likely make money for somebody, and likely related to the president and his family somewhere. It's just to let them know that "they can if they want," and they are in charge here. Post your LolCats if you will, people, but we can pull them on you at any time, for no any reason, or no reason. (Actually, they are a lot like the TOS of most of these services in that respect, because they can ban you arbitrarily at will for any reason or no reason, too!)
What's more important than whether or not these Western sites get blocked -- although they are still significant and an important outlet for some -- is how the internal sites like Asia Plus fare, and what the government or its proxies are doing to control the domestic media.
Despite the foreign minister's claim that he would get 80% of the population on the Internet, the government is going slow and keeping a tight rein on the web. And the Muslim authorities are also letting journalists know they are watching. The Council of Ulems, which is basically an arm of the state as Forum 18's Igor Rotar has explained, recently issued a statement saying that fatwahs were not to be recognized if issued from various unofficial groups. Well, at first that might seem like welcome news, if the official Islamic Council tells people that fatwahs are not going to be recognized. But all they mean is that they themselves get to be the only ones in the fatwah business.
The journalists' community is not sitting back on their hands when they hear this sort of thing; Nuriddin Karshibayev, head of the National Association of Independent Media of Tajikistan said this was a mere "recommendation" and that in any event, a fatwah "is not a lawful demand, and looks like interference in the professional activity of a journalist , which is an act punishable under criminal law". Well, good luck with that, as a state-approved and state-controlled entity like the Council of Ulems may be viewed as making "lawful demands" by the regime when it tells TV and radio "not to corrupt youth" and so on. It's obviously a tug of war. I don't know why Karshibayev said, "If the Council of Ulems believes our journalist do not know how to write materials on religious themes, please, let us organize trainings and teach them". Good Lord, that's giving them too much, as you don't want this state religious council in the business of "training" journalists. That must be merely a rhetorial device to call them out (I hope).
Here's a good article from 2010 which explains why people even turn to Islamic authorities and want to get their fatwahs in the first place: they want some authority to deal with problems that the state can't or won't address, and they want in particular a moral leader to resolve their problems like divorce and division of property. These are people's customs and heritage and they want to turn to them as the secular Soviet and post-Soviet governments aren't helpful. The question is whether these customs, as they become more enhanced, and as the government also exploits people's need for them, become either a toehold for extremism or another conveyor belt for state control or both simultaneously. Certainly the effort to close down two stores that had build informal mosques on their premises lets us know that the state doesn't like freelancing on religion and is ready to invoke both building codes and religious law to accomplish this task.
The US military is in Tajikistan. What do they do all day, as they wait for the seams to burst on their handiwork in Afghanistan next door after 2014? Well, they are trying to make "infrastructure" in keeping with the Obama Administration's notion, developed under Hillary Clinton and likely to be continued under John Kerry, of a "New Silk Road" that will replace the ground lines of communication (G-LOC) in the Northern Distribution Network with arteries for business and trade.
In Tajikistan, the Seabees are helping the Stroibat. Oh, the Stroibat! Remember them from the Soviet era? That was the division of the Soviet Red Army where a lot of hapless recruits were put to work building roads -- and still are. As I'm getting the impression from some history, it seems the tsar, then the commissars would tend to put Central Asians into the stroibat instead of combat units because they weren't sure they'd stay loyal to the cause.
Perhaps you didn't realize that Seabees despite its spelling comes from
CB, which is American for "stroibat" -- Construction Battallion. As we can learn helpfully from the US ambassador in Cambodia, now that there's much social media out there:
Since World War II, the Seabees have been building roads, airstrips, and buildings in various locales all over the world, sometimes in support of a specific military objective, as during World War II, but other times to help improve the infrastructure of a developing country.
So the American stroibat, if you will, is very much central to the notion of the New Silk Road.
In Tajkistan, as you can read below, and see all the pictures, the work has involved training their "counterparts". Except, like a lot of things in this business, they aren't really counterparts. The Navy Seabees are voluntary recruits, and they come from a country where there is a rich and developed private sector in construction, and other competing branches even of civilian construction for disasters like FEMA, not to mention the Army Corps of Engineers. And even if you look at things like the Roosevelt era and the WPA and the roads and national parks construction, the American state hasn't used the metaphor of "building socialism" in the same way as the Soviet and post-Soviet states have, literally mobilizing workers forcefully into the army, or on volunteer subbotniks and such, to get large construction projects done.
On balance, it's probably a good thing that these mid-Western kids in the US Navy are teaching the Tajik Stroibat things like how to put in shims on cross-beams.
But are they displacing what in fact could be better established in the private sector or civilian sector, rather than strengthening the Soviet-style Stroibat? I wonder. To be sure, our Seabees are going to great lengths to "strengthen the local economy," as they put it, buying their construction materials in nearby markets. Those markets might depend on the good will of some state or even religious potentate in that area; there really isn't a "free market" in the American sense.
Of such mismatches of seeming counterparts, history is made. Will the New Silk Road get built with a series of these kinds of shims, stuck into whatever seeming counterpart they can find hastily before 2015? Look down at the end to see how much money we spend on Tajikistan: a pittance -- $45 million for this last year for the non-military projects. So, maybe it's a good thing that building is getting done out of the military budget?
The military gets in where private business may still fear to tread. Maplecroft cautions against investment in these corrupt and unstable countries. Okay, well I do wonder this: how is that Tajik engineer who headed up the British gold company Oxus' efforts in Uzbekistan, who got jailed when the Uzbek government seized their assets? Eventually, this company stopped complaining publicly. Maybe they made a settlement. What happened to the engineer, Said Ashurov? It seems he is still serving a 12-year sentence for "espionage" while those with foreign passports headed for the exits.
* Tajik Government Still Messing Around with Social Media Sites
* Religious Council: No Fatwahs! Or Rather, Just Our Fatwahs, Please!
* American Stroibat Helps Tajik Stroibat - and So the New Silk Road...
The Tajik government's Communications Service chief says the Facebook
social network and the website of RFE/RL's Tajik Service will be
accessible again in two or three days.
Beg Zuhurov told journalists on January 18 that "access to some websites was disrupted because of technical problems."
The Facebook social network and RFE/RL's website in Tajik are inaccessible in Tajikistan again.
Asomuddin Atoev, the chairman of Tajikistan's Association of Internet
Service Providers, told RFE/RL that Tajikistan's leading Internet
service providers received SMS instructions from the government's
Communications Service requesting the sites be blocked.
However, the service's chief, Beg Zuhurov, told RFE/RL that his service had not given any instructions to block the sites.
Something strange happened in Tajikistan over a late December
weekend. On a Friday evening, the government’s communications agency
ordered Internet service providers (ISPs) to block 131 websites for
“technical” reasons. Then suddenly, a few days later, the ISPs were
told, in effect; ‘never mind.’
* * *
“Instead of creating a favorable environment for further development of
Tajik IT enterprises, and ensuring their access to foreign markets, the
regulator creates preposterous impediments,” said Asomiddin Atoev, the
chairman of the Association of Internet Providers. “Tajikistan recently joined the World Trade Organization.
The authorities simply do not realize the responsibility imposed by
many WTO provisions. In particular, these include the creation of a
favorable business environment, including in the IT sector, the creative
industry, and [protection of] intellectual property,” Atoev added.
(Summary translation) Theologians at the Islamic Center of Tajikistan recommend media leaders and officials of the government's Committee on Religious Affairs to refrain from giving out fatwahs (in Islam, this is an explanation of a certain problem of a religious and legal nature, and also an answer to a question of a religious nature, which a competent person provides).
"A fatwah can be giving exclusively by the ulems of the Islamic Center and our doors are open to all citizens of the country," says the appeal, which was passed at a meeting of the Council of Ulems [Theologians] of the Islamic Center of Tajikistan and distributed January 19."
"A democratic state gives the right to all people to express their opinion but in all developed countries, democracy is limited by the frameworks of the law. It is hard to imagine what would happen with our society if individual groupings, for the sake of their own interests, would interpret the canons of shariah in their own way," says the statement.
Nuriddin Karshibayev, head of the National Association of Independent Media of Tajikistan, has told Asia Plus that the ulems announcment is only a "recommendation" because the Constitution prohibits censorship.
"If the Council of Ulems believes our journalist do not know how to write materials on religious themes, please, let us organize trainings and teach them. But getting a fatwah, forgive me, that's not a lawful demand, and looks like interference in the professional activity of a journalist , which is an act punished under criminal law."
Muminabad has a population of 13,000 with 4 mosques; there are a total of 51 in the whole region.
In the village of Muminabad (see some good pictures here), in the administrative center of Muminabad district of the Khatlon region, the owners of two private stores unlawfully tried to adapt them as mosques.
Sharif Abdylkhamidov, head of the Qulyab regional department of religious affairs, said authorities blocked the store owner on Tursunzade Street in Muminabad who had put in a separate entrance and turned the second floor of the store into a mosque.
The Tajik foreign minister has officially asked Russian authorities to
provide Dushanbe with historical documents related to borders between
former Soviet republics in Central Asia.
Hamrohon Zarifi told journalists on January 17 that the documents are
needed to clarify Tajikistan's borders with neighboring Uzbekistan and
Kyrgyzstan in order to prevent problems like those experienced in
Uzbekistan's Sokh district.
The presidents of Tajikistan and Russia signed an agreement
in October to extend the presence of the Russian military base in
Tajikistan for another 30 years. But Tajikistan is dragging its feet on
the ratification of the deal, waiting first for Russia to carry out its
part of the deal, to supply duty-free petroleum products and to loosen
restrictions on labor migrants, according to a report
in the Russian newspaper Kommersant. The Kremlin wanted all of these
issues to be dealt with all at the same time, and Russian foreign
minister Sergey Lavrov just finished a visit to Dushanbe, where he attempted to iron out these issues.
Investors operating in three post-Soviet Central Asian republics face
an “extreme risk” of having their businesses expropriated, according to
a survey released last week in the UK.
Maplecroft, a Bath-based political risk consultancy, said on January 9
that it had found plenty of reasons to be wary of the business climate
in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan after “evaluating the risk to
business from discriminatory acts by the government that reduces
ownership, control or rights of private investments either gradually or
as a result of a single action.” Recent fits of resource nationalism in
Kyrgyzstan -- where the Kumtor gold mine,
operated by Toronto-based Centerra Gold, accounted for 12 percent of
GDP in 2011 and more than half the country’s industrial output – and
rampant authoritarianism in places like Tajikistan and Turkmenistan have
led Maplecroft to rank these countries among the most risky in the
world.
Ever since Rustam Emomali (the eldest son of the president of Tajikistan) began working at the Customs Agency, this service has obtained good results. This was stated today at a press conference by Nemat Rahmatov, first deputy of the Customs Service of the government of Tajikistan.
"Only in the course of the last year, 88 million somoni were sent to the country's budget by preventing contrabrand of goods. We are proud that the son of the head of state works in our agency, and we hope Rustam Emomali will continue his activity in the customs service," said Rahmatov.
Seabees assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133 work with
the Tajik Army to rebuild, restore and remodel various buildings on
Shamsi Military Base in Tajikistan. NMCB 133 is deployed with Commander,
Task Group 56.2, promoting maritime security operations and theater
security cooperation efforts in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of
responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd
Class Derek R. Sanchez/Released)
Builder Constructionman Taylor Mendonca, assigned to Naval Mobile
Construction Battalion 133, teaches a Tajik soldier how to shim cross
slats while building a roof during an international relations project
with the Tajik Army. NMCB 133 is deployed with Commander, Task Group
56.2, promoting maritime security operations and theater security
cooperation efforts in the US. 5th Fleet area of responsibility. (U.S.
Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Derek R.
Sanchez/Released)
U.S. Navy Seabees assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (NMCB)
133 deployed to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in November as part of a Global
Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), the first Seabee mission in
Tajikistan.
In support of the Office of Military Cooperation (OMC) and Tajikistan
Ministry of Defense (MOD), the Seabee crew began construction alongside
the MOD's construction force, the Stroibat, on phase one of a $1 million
project at the Peace Support Operation Training Center (PSOTC) at
Shamsi Base, funded by GPOI.
To help boost the local economy and establish lasting relationships with
contractors and vendors, the building materials were procured in nearby
street vendor markets by Utilitiesman 1st Class Justin Walker, the
Seabee project supervisor, and Air Force contracting officer, 1st Lt.
Sunset Lo. The vendors delivered the materials in a timely manner,
enabling the project to move forward on schedule.
A car with US Embassy license plates (004 D 055) in Dushanbe was involved in a hit-in-run accident which killed Loik Sharali on December 29, 2012, Asia Plus reports. Police are investigating, and the US Embassy says they are cooperating.
Lots of "Yankee Go Home" in the comments there, and recollections of how the US disregarded diplomatic immunity for a Georgian diplomat who killed a girl in an accident in the US.
The 15 coaches including a restaurant car were ordered from Ukrainian
manufacturer Kriukov Car Building Works. Similar to vehicles previously
supplied to Kazakhstan, they are designed for use in temperatures
between -45°C and 40°C and are to be deployed on Dushanbe - Moscow
services.
From Congressional Research Service by Jim Nichols.
The United States has been Tajikistan's largest bilateral donor, budgeting $988.57 million of aid for Tajikistan (FREEDOM support Act and agency budgets) over the period from fiscal year 1992 through fiscal year 2010, mainly for food and other hunmanitarian needs. Budgeted assistance for FY2011 was $44.48 million, and estimated assistance for FY2012 was $45.02 million. The Administration requested $37.41 million in foreign assistance for Tajikistan in FY2013 (these FY2011-FY2013 figures exclude most Defense and Energy Department programs).
API Will Hold a Conference on Human Rights Violations, Forced Child Labor and Potential Regime Change in Uzbekistan, January 19th 2013 at Seattle University, Boeing Room 10 a.m. Admission is FREE
Our Impressive Speakers List Includes: Sanjar Umarov, Founder of Sunshine Coalition Nathan Hamm, Founder of Registan.net Sarah Kendzior, Writer at Al Jazeera Ruslan Nurullaev, Projects Coordinator at API Bahodir Choriyev, Founder of the Birdamlik Movement Aziz Yuldashev, Executive Director of API Dmitriy Nurullayev, Founder of API
If you saw their October conference, it was about stability, not regime change. Stability is what the New Realists want in these regions, with American help.
Why do I call them the New Realists and not just "realists"? Because I think if they are a new generation and a new school of thought you have to call them "New"; realists of the past, like the liberal realists who challenged the radical Marxists in the Vietnam era were not the same thing. Robert S. McNamara, the longest serving Secretary of Defense, may have opposed the Vietnam war, and later been friendly to the Soviets in the perestroika era at the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity, but he both respected the Domino Theory in the beginning and also wouldn't defend drones if he were alive today. That's why he isn't exactly the political godfather of Joshua Foust.
I think it doesn't hurt if they echo the 1960s Nouveau Realism because they are also contrived and artistic in their presentation of the story. I may think up a better term as I go along but this will do for now.
Nathan Hamm works for a defense consulting company; Joshua Foust used to work for defense contractors and now works at a defense policy think-tank with John Kerry on the board called American Security Project. The other academics they have gathered around them might be more or less slavish to the Registani line, but they are joined by their "realism" about this region -- which can mean different things on different days -- and in my view, is itself a construct than can rival the construct of the "Neo-Cons" and leaves them without a backup plan when changes occur without them.
Foust is infamous for launching a series of vicious and vitriolic attacks on various high-profile human rights advocates and nonprofit journalists at EurasiaNet.org He spent more than a year trashing them for their critique of Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the dictator, and for any of their critical reporting on Uzbekistan and invocation of the Northern Distribution Network as a development that was making the US become craven to dictators and forego human rights advocacy, or so the theory goes.
Stop talking about civil society! She orders. This is like Katy Pearce telling people to shut up and use the hashtag she thinks they should on Twitter. Maybe she will talk some about civil society at this conference, but no one except the in-group will hear.
Sarah often does a strange little dance on Twitter. Foust will make some outrageous comment. She will respond with some little statement of fact or different opinion that tends to mitigate what Foust just said. One can almost hear the dulcet tones of June Cleaver. Foust never, ever answers her. She then never pushes with her obvious factual point or slightly contrary opinion to continue to argue with his outrageousness. She lets him go time and again and he never feels he has to answer her. That way she's on the record "in the community" as having said the factual thing everyone thought when they saw Foust's little outrage; he gets to save face, however, by never really truly being challenged by his fellow School of Thought member. Nice work if you can get it -- and they did get that work.
I don't know who/what gave them a new infusion of cash, but that's how they were able to have their October "stability" conference.
So what's up here with "regime change"?
I'll cut to the chase and I think that the Pentagon/defense contractors/defense think-tank world that these people move in are now getting to the point where they are willing to think about shedding Karimov.
Karimov is useful to them until 2014. After 2014, he is not useful. They need to get people and armaments and equipment out of Afghanistan because it's expensive, the budget-crunched US military needs it, and they don't want it to "fall into the wrong hands". While they are always dancing around giving the Central Asian tyrants more military aid, it stops short of lethal aid of the actual helicopter/tank sort because they are not authorized even in the current language of their exceptions, in light of Leahy, and because they don't have an objective need apparently to arm up these folks.
It may also be the case that if they rattle the sabers, so to speak, and invoke their possible power to help with regime change (which I actually doubt they have), they can get what they want in the End Game before 2014.
Registani types are all around these defense contractors, but what aboutAwareness Projectsand Sanjar Umarov?
I have a lot of respect for Umarov, who is a determined opposition leader and former political prisoner who endured enormous suffering and has survived to tell the tale.
I have some differences from him, namely his claim, made in a New York Times interview, that only lower-level Interior Ministry officials are involved in torture, and that it is not sanctioned from the very top, and that we can convince them to stop.
While this or that individual police investigator may make decisions to torture in this or that case, and maybe pressure could get them to stop, I think it is sanctioned from the highest level. I believe the Andijan massacre was sanctioned by Karimov and all overall directions of the use of torture are sanctioned by him. That's how these societies work, with incredible top-down vertikal management; to try to cordon off the top leadership and pretend they might become better if we just reform the lower or middle levels is a strategy that might buy someone longer life, but I think it's misguided and possibly deliberately misleading, I don't know.
Umarov headed the Sunshine Party which seems one of the more credible non-violent and non-extreme opposition groups, but I am happy to hear other opinions. I'm not an expert on Uzbekistan; I speak Russian but not Uzbek. I'm just somebody who has taken an interest in the country, blogged about it for years for EurasiaNet and also worked for the Cotton Campaign. I care about human rights there and have worked on cases there in various ways. I've never been to Uzbekistan and I don't plan to go any time soon. I'm not so different than the Registanis in that respect, however, because they don't go there, either.
Umarov has run a logistics and transport business and evidently came in to contact with the US and the NDN practitioners in that capacity. We don't know publicly what the rest of that relationship might mean but there is private speculation about it. It doesn't matter to me if Umarov helped the US and now they helped him get out of the country and support, ideologically or even financially, his opposition work: that's exactly what they *should* be doing and it is *legitimate*.
Awareness Projects don't say who they get their funding from, although they have a button that anyone can click on and make donations on the Internet. It isn't any wealthy group; it appears to be run by Uzbek students forced to remain in this country and some professors and religious leaders. It's exactly the kind of group we need more of for this region, even if I don't agree with everything they do or say.
The mission statement of Awareness Projects (which isn't just limited to Uzbekistan) gives you a sense that they might have a "realist" and "incremental" approach to the problems presented by authoritarianism in Central Asia:
Our mission is to empower communities to face global challenges through small-scale, sustainable, educational projects. Our areas of focus include: promoting healthcare awareness, human rights initiatives, and climate change consciousness. API empowers communities to address these issues using localized programs and resources. We take an innovative, micro focused approach while maintaining a global perspective.
I don't like the word "empower". I don't believe anybody in the country or abroad "empowers" anything. They have to find their own sources of power or they are doomed. I say that not as a New Realistic, but as a classic liberal student of civil society, that is very hard to manufacture abroad.
Like USAID, API has figured out that the milder issues of AIDS prevention or "climate change" environmental work may "pass" more easily with these regimes and with their timid subjects -- "micro" is always better to gain reassurance that you don't mean to topple the regime, so the thinking goes (I don't buy that approach myself although if somebody wants to try it, let them, as long as they don't keep bashing sturdier and more confrontational human rights projects -- which is what these types often do.)
So why are they yapping about regime change with an old dictator who has probably already cunningly locked up his succession to make sure it's just a clone of him and his policies?
Perhaps they really think Karimov is about to topple, either keel over from death or incapacitation from sickness, or they'd like him to think they think that.
Registan adopted Dmitriy Nurullayev when he decided to remain here rather than returning to Uzbekistan after claiming that he faced a threat of imprisonment. These kinds of threats are common and the story is credible, but I did ask questions about it.
I don't know why the organizers left out groups like Human Rights Watch (Steve Swerdlow) and International Crisis Group (Andrew Strohlein, who is actually moving to HRW now, regrettably depriving the landscape of some diversity and competition). Maybe those groups wouldn't come to something with Registan leaders in it because of how nasty they were in the past to them. Maybe the organizers themselves think micro-projects rather than in-your-face human rights work is the way to go -- I just don't know. I ask questions.
To be sure, topics include forced child labour in the cotton fields -- a topic the regime accepts in principle and says it is "working on" and has signed the appropriate international treaties banning it. So maybe this area will be covered in full, although they really aren't the center of gravity for Registan.
The conference also features Birdamlik leader Bahodir Choriyev. Birdamlik is an opposition group that tries bravely to demonstrate against the regime. Bahodir often invites me to join his groups or pages. I don't simply because I'm not interested in becoming a member of an Uzbek opposition group, I'm not in the Uzbek opposition even though obviously I oppose Karimov and company. They need to make their own opposition inside the country, with help from abroad, as best they can, but it's not my area of expertise. Actually, I even turned down a request to join a Russian opposition group in exile recently, where at least I speak the language and have years of working in the country and following the issues. I think it was because they were going to make me to a lot of work, and I already have enough volunteer activities.
I have to say that Choriyev seemed rather naive, or perhaps simply overly determined, when he returned to Uzbekistan -- naturally the goons got to him eventually. But I suppose that had the added benefit of convincing all those USAID types that "realism" is in order regarding this regime.
I'm all for protests against this regime, it's important to keep visible here in the US and Europe especially when the regime officials visit. I'm all for 1,000 flowers blooming, but I'm certain we're not seeing a big range of flowers at the Awareness conference with only Registani speakers. I look forward to a much wider range of organizations, such as NED, Freedom House, etc. to hold conferences about whither the regime and Uzbekistan in 2015.
The site has a poll: With the new elected president in 2015, the situation will be better, worse, the same.
I voted "the same," but found that most people believe it will be "better". Why they think this president will be "elected" in some kind of authentic way within only two years from now is beyond me, but one lives in hope.
Evidently this conference is under "Chatham House Rules" (which, if people were less pretentious, they could call "Council on Foreign Relations" rules), i.e. no papers or transcripts will be published -- as they weren't with the October conference. So if you aren't in Seattle or didn't get your way paid there, you're out of luck.
The other day a colleague sent me a link to a social graph that he said was "fascinating" -- it was about the protests in Azerbaijan.
It turned out to be made by anthropologist Katy Pearce but I couldn't see her name in my view of the screen -- it was only visible later when I returned for a closer look and scrolled down -- but of course, visible to anyone who clicked on the link and took an interest.
Here's what it said (go to the link and keep reading for the full jargon-laden experience):
The graph represents a network of up to 1500 Twitter users whose recent
tweets contained "#protestbaku". The network was obtained on Monday, 14
January 2013 at 23:01 UTC. There is an edge for each follows
relationship. There is an edge for each "replies-to" relationship in a
tweet. There is an edge for each "mentions" relationship in a tweet.
There is a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not a "replies-to" or
"mentions". The tweets were made over the 2-day, 6-hour, 37-minute
period from Saturday, 12 January 2013 at 15:36 UTC to Monday, 14 January
2013 at 22:13 UTC.
What, you didn't get the wind-chill factor or the latitude and longitude on Google maps? This report is the sort of high-falutin essential nonsense that passes for scholarship in our day, and I'm going to be ruthless with it. I've decided to call this field of study "machinopology" instead of "anthropology" because I think that not only have these social scientists ceased to study real human beings; when they study their spoor left on the Internet -- not a good substitute -- they become fierce apologists for this decidedly inaccurate and misleading means of studying people and you can't speak sense to them.
THE "SCIENCE" OF HASHTAG DIKTAT
In gathering this data, Pearce was heedless about what has been called the Niels Bohr effect -- that the scientist himself intrudes on his data by the very act of study and is studying his study, so to speak. Pearce first goosed her contacts on Twitter to come up with a hashtag, then pushed them toward used of a standardized one, #protestbaku -- policing with fierce hostility anyone who didn't keep to the meaning of the hashtag as she saw it (typical of the Twitter hashtag Nazis). There may have been very rich and rewarding conversations on Twitter on January 14; but if they didn't have Katy Pearce's hashtag, they are like a tree falling in the proverbial forrest...
In fact, Pearce was such a "scientist," that she even got into an epic Twit fight and started to mouth off to some of the people who appeared to be "pro-government" tweeters -- who maybe just didn't seem to agree with Katy and her source-friends. She even yells at this woman to "stay off their hashtag" -- not just because she cared about the integrity of meaning, but because it would have screwed up her results if the meaning wasn't uniform. (If you don't understand the meaning of hashtags, email me, I've been on Twitter since 2007).
Imagine, pretending you are an impartial anthropologist, and telling anybody in the field -- even a regime tool (which we can't be sure this person really is, simply because they disagree with the way the soldier's death should have been handled) -- to "go home, turn off your phone/computer, watch a movie, and leave these people alone". Does she think she's talking to her toddler here?! This is just outrageous stuff -- but it passes as "cool" because it's machinopology and not anthropology -- and anything goes.
BACK STORY
Anyway, I use Twitter as a kind of "Delicious" if "Delicio.us" had ever been functional and useful. That is, I park links for myself there to catch up on later and figure I can also share them at the same time if anyone else has anything to say about them. I often go back to my own stream to find things -- for me, re-tweet often does mean endorsement and I don't shirk from that association, but it also can merely mean "parked here to read later, looks interesting" or "read this, want to file it". I wrote on my tweet about the social graph an "h/t" to this colleague because that's what you do when someone else tells you something you didn't know -- you acknowledge their reference. No big deal -- but then I saw a rare response from Katy Pearce, the anthropologist who feels she owns this field of Internet studies in the Caucasus.
Her remark was puzzling to me because she said "thank you" -- although I'm an enemy to her (she denounced me a year ago to my then-boss!) and then said she helped with a blog post. Not realizing what she was going on about, I called he out for her unsavoury role in joining up with Sarah Kendzior after I challenged the Registan diktat last year, and going to denounce me as somehow "unfit" to my editor at EurasiaNet because I...dared to stand up to Joshua Foust in a completely legitimate and much-needed manner, and because I refused to be bullied by these gals online.
I was particularly appalled at Pearce at the time -- I published a perfectly ordinary and fine little blurb about the surge of Facebook membership in Uzbekistan, citing Socialbakers; I cautioned that it had to be seen in relative terms due to the harassment there, but she blasted me as using shoddy research. It was insane -- over a blog blurb, and on Twitter. She herself later was found using Socialbakers, which is perfectly fine. She was doing this just to troll, as they say -- it was sinister.
So ever since stumbling on these academics and defense contractors on Registan, I've challenged them as a group that is a funny amalgam of seeming criticism of the US yet reverence for US policies such as on drones, and seeming criticism of the regimes of Central Asia -- but always within limits and always with disparaging the opposition, particularly in exile, and the human rights movements along the way.
It turned out Pearce was kvetching at me because she believed that "h/t"
should go not to the person who tipped me off to the link, but to her,
as designer of this graph. I simply didn't know it was made by her at
first, and no "impropriety" was intended; that she had to cross the
Internet to police this and make a snide comment lets you know how
HUGELY controlling she is -- so much so that those who once criticized
her or Kendzior publicly are now beaten into silence -- it's a scary
thing to watch. Academe is a frightful place. In a world where
attribution is one click away when you link, it's hard to posit ill will
or damage.
REALISM UBER ALLES
Thus, while I'm not in academia myself and not an Internet or official regional expert, I've had a long period of closely reading what Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior produce for the academic world, and have grown to be a very stringent critic as you can see in past entries of this blog under the topic "Registan": their thesis is designed to minimize and disparage dissenters; celebrate those who are more cerebral and incremental and less active; caution against publishing too much negative human rights material on the Internet so it doesn't scare off lolcat posters; and then essentially do the government's work for it -- making sure that the Internet is something that grows on the conditions and timetables and in the manner that these New Realist academics wish instead of people who use it for protest and not only communications. If you think this is a caricature of their studies, go and read them and judge for yourself. I think you will come away very disturbed if you care about democracy and human rights. They are part of the New Realists school of Joshua Foust, Nathan Hamm and others at Registan and they work overtime to belittle, discourage, disparage, intimidate and bully people in the human rights movement who disagree with their RealPolitik regarding the post-Soviet countries.
Time and again, in article or op-ed or longer monograph or journal piece, I've seen their theses "prove" the same points: a) the governments of Central Asia are all-powerful and will never change; b) no Arab Spring will ever occur here; c) there is no civil society here and only 2 1/2 old Soviet-style dissidents who have no following; d) people inform on each other and hate each other and are spiteful so it is not a milieu in which a social movement can get started; e) repression is very severe and even deadly.
It's not as if any of these things are untrue in a sense, but it's their culmination and their vectors that lead you to wonder what on earth they are up to here: they seem to see it as their job to discourage any challenge to these governments by using the homeopathic method -- only they get to challenge them -- a little, in the way they wish, but not too much.
That's actually why it's so strange Registan is having a conference this week to discuss the passing of Karimov -- it must be that they either feel this is a "safe" topic now or the defense contracting circles in which they travel find it useful to do a little scarifying of Karimov now. I've called Registan the "small game" before and that about sizes it up -- it's about some sort of power trip, but it's just not clear whose, entirely.
SHINY NEW COOL INTERNET THING -- WHICH WE HAD 12 YEARS AGO
The social graph that at first so fascinated me and others is a case in point for the kind of study of the post-Soviet countries that I simply find suspect -- suspect because it leads to conclusions and influences policy in such a way as to get those in power in our government or wealthy foundations or universities to stop taking the opposition seriously and to discount human rights work as marginal. Any objection to their New Realism is met with withering scorn that you are a Neo-Con and hopelessly mired with Commentary and Jennifer Rubin. There's no in-between for these people. ANY criticism gets the "Neo-Con" slur.
So...At first glance the social graph seems really cool! Who wouldn't like a cool Internet thing like this! As it happens, I first saw a social graph like this in The Sims Online in the year 2000, made by Will Wright. He had developed a program to capture in that simulated virtual world a way of showing relationships to people -- every time you gave a balloon to someone as an avatar, or even just interacted with them, that person would become your "friend"; if you slapped them, they would become your "enemy", and these "balloons" would then show as green or red in an elaborate graph accessible above every avatar's head on his profile. People spent hours pouring over these balloon graphs -- they were fascinating. You could acquire a "balloon" merely by going to a simulator or a place on the server and being in proximity to other people -- many a sim-hubbie would catch his sim-wifey cheating by reading her balloons. You could also see who wasn't letting their relationships "stay green" -- the more interactions you had with a person, the higher and brighter your relationship would show. The capturing of relationships by machine was something that fascinated Will Wright, maker of the Sims and now on the board of Linden Lab, maker of Second Life.
People don't take these virtual worlds seriously, thinking them as pathetic sexting chat rooms and furry enclaves, but I have followed them for their interesting sociology for more than a decade because I see them as petri dishes, simulators and testing grounds for the means and methods of social media and social networks on the wider Internet. Time and again, I have seen things prototyped, or played out in Second Life, that then appear in the real world, almost as if it had uncanny predictive powers -- events like WikiLeaks or the Instagram scandal -- all these have played out in these worlds first.
Another thing that Will Wright did was show -- because he could, possessing control of a virtual world in which every person's speech and actions could be captured by the machine -- what people were doing or saying. So he could take snapshots or make dynamic pictures -- X percent were kissing or X percent were going to the toilet as you can do in the Sims -- and X percent were saying the words "love".
So it's not surprising to me that now people use Twitter -- and all the gestures, as they are called ("likes", links, comments, replies, retweets, etc. etc. ) -- to track social relationship.
MACHINES ARE NOT PEOPLE
The problems is that machines are far from perfect in replicating organic human relationships -- replicating their ways and means online in social networks can be disastrous -- and the scientists studying this and pretending that it enhances anthropology don't seem to take into account the fundamental fallacies of their science, making it a pseudo-science.
I realize just how cool it is to have charts and graphs and fancy jargonistic words like edges and vertices. We have seen this in Second Life for years and it's old news for some of us. But it has to be thoroughly questioned, as it is laying now -- in its still-primitive state -- the grounds for the totalitarian Wired State, and it has to be challenged before our freedoms are eradicated. It's not just study; it's study with an aim to control society by letting certain elites drill and analyze the data and then use it to shape online experience -- where we all increasingly live. The most obvious exploitation of this data was in the recent elections, where sociologists were put to work for the Obama Truth Team to manipulate stories to attract voters.
THREE FALLACIES OF MACHINOPOLOGY
But there are deep fallacies in these machine-readings of people, and they need to be called out
Here are three main fallacies right off the bat in this artifact:
1. We can't be sure that retweets equal political affiliation. We are told ad nauseum especially by the Registani types on Twitter that "retweet ≠ endorsement" -- they love using the geeky ≠ which means "does not equal" but which isn't always instantly recognizeable as such to the average person. Of course, people usually lie when they say this, and are merely covering their asses, especially at jobs. Of course their retweets are endorsement. Especially when they retweet each other and bolster their friends. They're just saying that but we know better.
The assumption of Katy Pearce's graph here is indeed that retweet DOES mean endosement because she uses it to group people into political affiliation. She even says that pro-government forces are known for using certain words like "yolo". Of course, "yolo" is what the kids say on Tumblr or Facebook, "you only live once". It's very popular now among teens here in New York, especially Hispanic teens although it isn't a Hispanic word, it just sounds like one. There may be an insider's piece of esoteric knowledge here, where pro-government forces in Azerbaijan have already been established as always saying "yolo" like hipsters in New York, but I am out of the loop so I'll have to say that it needs questioning.
We can't be sure that every person who retweets dissenters' links or retweets government links are on the same page as those forces. Maybe they are only bookmarking. Maybe they are making a cover story but disagree. The fact is, you can't have it both ways. You can't, as academics CYAing on Twitter yourself and telling us "≠" on all retweets, yet in your shiny social graph studying a country's demonstration, suddenly then group everybody's tweets in a certain political framework as if retweets *do* equal endorsement. Which is it? Or at least admit that it's sometimes one, and sometimes the other, and you don't have a basis for grouping people rigidly in this fashion.
2. Many accounts, especially pro-government accounts, could be fake or bots. As one of the Azerbaijani tweeters noted, there are a lot of fake accounts made by the government. For all we know, there's a few guys sitting in the basement of the secret police and manufacturing all these personas. Or maybe some loyalists who spontaneously on their own do this, although the former scenario is more likely. There could be hundreds -- thousands of them -- and they could be set up by scripts or bots to behave even realistically.
The Anonymous types always grouse about the US military and its "persona" projects, which is used only overseas to do things like debate on Al Qaeda's web pages; they are not supposed to engage in propaganda at home, which is known as "blowback". But Anonymous itself wrote the book on persona craft, and do it themselves all over, everywhere, in spades, and were the first to cause destruction everywhere with it, corrupting the entire online environment. And the descendents of the Bolsheviks and the KGB, who were masters at making doubles and disguises, have no problem in moving this skill online. Again: they can sound very realistic but could be fake or even bots. The Flatter Bots in Second Life that go around appearing as suave men and women and flatter people's outfits and then eventually get them to give them money have had amazing success earning the bot wrangler tens of thousands of real dollars. Artificial intelligence and online persona work is really getting good. Turing would be proud.
3. Relationship lines may not mean anything. One of the first things we discovered with Will Wright's experiments 10-12 years ago, and then Philip Rosedale's experiments in Second Life in the last 5-7 years, is that when machines grab and aggregate and render relationship lines from chat and various other social gestures, they can be woefully inaccurate or outright wrong. I already mentioned the "balloons" in the Sims that caused couples to break up -- someone could teleport to a sim by accident, or due to a spam invitation; they would acquire a seeming "relationship" by appearing in proximity to someone, but it would mean nothing. In Second Life, when someone invented two-way wrist watches (hmmm) to show who was near you and beam that information up to a webpage for display, people howled and screamed because they felt it was an invasion of privacy.
It was. Unscrupulous and unethical hackers said it was open data so they could get to scrape it and use it. Technically it was, although no one who had chosen to make a public profile with their static data linked to their name and their list of favourite places or comments had ALSO granted permission for real-time display of their proximity data.
GIRLS NEAR ME DO NOT WANT TO BE NEAR YOU
It's like what happened then five years later -- just last year -- with Girls Near Me. That app was widely popular with boys -- they grabbed open FB data about girls with geolocation and used it to stalk them for dates. The girls did not like this because they hadn't put up FB pages to be accessed by creepy guys in bars with smart phones; maybe they didn't know how to fix their privacy sliders. This is a case where users screaming enough finally overwhelmed geekitude, and the ap was removed. People HATE HATE HATE having proximity data even if "open" displayed to the web; they HATE HATE HATE others -- scientists and marketers -- making judgements about it. Anthropologists are not supposed to do experiments or gather information on people without their consent. Did the people in the graph given their consent to be shown this way? Of course not.
But it's not only about privacy; it's about ridicularity. As one woman put it very aptly about the newfangled search thing that Facebook put up the other day: "Hey, is this thing going to make it so that FB stops offering my husband's ex-wife as a friend?"
Bingo. That's proximity data handled by machines in Machinopology which is a very poor substitute for anthropology -- which itself isn't always in ethical and skilled hands online or in real life these days.
I find that FB is uncanny in chosing just those people who are sworn enemies and serving them up to me over and over again as "friend" prospects; Linked-in is the absolute worst at this. It really is annoying and drives you away from the service. Of course "it can't know" and you wouldn't want "it" to know -- and it is supposed to "get smarter" by having you X out the offer. But you don'to want it to get THAT smart...do you?
MY FAVOURITE LINK TO HATE
So if I answer somebody's tweet; if I retweet them, if I even favourite them, it means nothing. One of the most common gestures I see online is when Anonymous "favourites" something critical I've said about them -- they don't mean that they like this; in fact, they hate it. They've favourited it merely to keep it parked and accessible so they can organize attacks on me among their contacts. I've seen this played out with others as well. Most things are not what they seem online; much of the time, they are just the opposite.
How many of those using #protestbaku were secret policemen; how many were hipsters; how many wanted to prove to Western grant-giving foundations that they were active? We may never know.
HOW SAFE ARE SOCIAL GRAPHS?
This brings me to the issue of privacy and the usage of these graphs. This first thing I noticed when I clicked on this thing -- after the initial "ooh, ahh, shiny" that anyone will make at seeing all the protesters of Azerbaijan laid out in a nice "map" -- was that the people in this nexus might not like being shown this way. Somebody casually firing off a tweet on their iPhone may not realize that a social scientist has now captured them and fixed them like a fly in amber as talking to a notorious opposition leader; now through a sinewy wire on a jpeg that is easily copied, they are forever not alone.
And that must be why you can't see this picture clearly. No matter how much you click or resize, the names actually don't show up. Only Katy Pearce and her fellow "scientists' can see this information.
This could be a function of my browser (Firefox); of the need to register for the site (I didn't) or some other artifact, but the fact is: I cannot click on it on various computers and on the iPhone and see anything, and others likely have that experience to.
So this Internet shiny dines out on being part of the "open" Internet and "accessible" and "free" but...you actually can't see it. If you *could* see it, you might start reality-testing it. You'd click on some of the big nodes -- people with larger and familiar pictures -- and see if those people linking in were really friends or enemies; casual or dedicated -- you might judge it.
But you can't do that: it is not clickable to a bigger size to really study. And I'm actually fine with that, given that this is Azerbaijan we're talking about -- that thing is an indictment! But there's something slimy about sending it all over the web to be gawked at, but not really seen. It's elitist and controlling. I think it's wrong. You could start from the premise that anyone with an open Twitter account in a sense "consents" to being seen and having their data known. But as we saw with Second Life and Girls Near Me, what people HATE HATE HATE is when their *proximity data* is shown. And that's what this does -- more than standing next to someone at a demonstration, it shows who was connected enough to share an idea, a link, etc. And that is risky. I think this has to be debated; it isn't being debated. Machinopologists -- the term I think is apt for people who have replaced the study of humans directly with the study of machine-gathered data about humans *and* are fierce apologists for this method -- think everything is up for grabs; they are greedy.
DISPARAGING THE DIASPORA
I also want to say something about the groupings. Katy Pearce, like Ethan Zuckerman before her, and others of like mind, seems to disparage the diaspora. This group is least interesting to her and if it is larger she discounts it. These are people not in the country, and almost then "disqualified" from study. There's a loathing of the diaspora among the New Realists because they tend not to be very realistic about their homelands; they are "in the way" of making that OstPolitik that the NRs want to achieve.
But I think this is hugely shortsighted. The diaspora is the living link to the closed society; it is the best thing we've got. Social media, the study of the social graph and the social gestures online are no substitute for these living human beings. Lots of people come and go from the diaspora, or receive family and friends as visitors who come and go. It's a rich milieu and it should never be discounted. If a few very vocal opposition leaders in exile seem to set the tone, well, look past that; there is a lot more there. Twitter, Facebook, Live Journal -- these are the living ways these connections are kept up these days, and the diaspora handling of them is vital -- it simply shouldn't be disparaged as somehow irrelevant or "not a Twitter revolution". The diaspora is what helps bring awareness to Western countries as well (and the rest of the world, for that matter, but the West cares the most).
LIKE BIRDS NOT ON A WIRE
So that leaves the core of the people actually in the country, using Twitter for logistics, and tweeting with a geolocation of Baku itself (and as we know from the time when everyone switched their Twitter to say they were in Iran to try to confuse the secret police, this could be misleading as well).
One of my most vivid memories in monitoring human rights in Eurasia in the last 35 years is a scene I saw in Baku in the early 2000s -- perhaps 10 years ago or so. There was a large street demonstration organized by opposition parties and groups. It was all men -- women were seldom seen on the street. They all had cell phones and used them to coordinate their movements and get information about police movements and arrests and the route of their march.
Suddenly, the government shut off all the cell phones -- they can do that in a country where the mobile companies are under their control. Everyone on the square suddenly got disconnected. None of them could talk to each other and they were all confused and worried now, and couldn't figure out what was going on. That's how the government wanted them. It was like a flock of birds, suddenly flying into some poisonous air or something. They all stopped or jerked around and began meandering off in odd directions.
I've seen the authorities do the same thing in Minsk.
So the social graph is fragile; it is risky to establish it, but it isn't *so* fragile and *so* risky that people don't make it and use it.
And of course opinions change, groups form and reform, affiliations break and rejoin -- and these kinds of graphs are ephemera and really of limited value. There is no substitute for talking to people live in real life.
WHY CAN'T YOU JUST INTERVIEW PEOPLE IN REAL LIFE?
One of the critiques I had of another study done by Pearce and Kendzior is that they outsourced their field world. That is, while no doubt they've done interviews in the field, and talk to people online or when they visit the US, and while they do go to these countries occasionally, they tend to write articles and studies without going there for significant periods of time. And they literally outsourced their questions on one survey about the Internet and attitudes towards risk and critical information to some USAID type entity that was making a survey *anyway* already in country, and simply tucked in a few questions on the subject of Pearce and Kendzior's study into their own large and baggy effort.
I found the redaction of the questions odd; I found the whole thing just unsound. Why can't you go there and do your own surveys, even with less samples? Maybe it's too hard to get a visa and function in the country? Well, then let's not pretend we're studying a closed society just because we have a newfangled "open Internet". The two don't necessarily mesh.
There's more that could be said about the personalities involved in Azerbaijan; about the issue itself; about the things that motivate people to demonstrate. There was a strange locution that Katy Pearce was happy to pick up and rebroadcast: "this isn't a political demonstration". Nonsense. of course it's political. Every demonstration is political. And there's nothing wrong with being political and demonstrating. It's as if the hipsters of Baku want to be post-political as some strategy to save their skin. This won't work. And it denegrates others who are demonstrably political. Again, it's okay to be political; just because a demonstration wasn't on the platform of a political party or with political party leaders speaking or whatever the criteria was, doesn't mean it isn't highly political -- which AGAIN is ok to be! You sense that for Pearce, it's wrong to be political because that means challenging the government in unrealistic ways....That won't do if you are a New Realist.
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