Turkmens performing in state-orchestrated parade on Flag Day in Ashgabat. Photo by Golden Age, State News Agency of Turkmenistan.
No.
At least, not right now, and probably not next week.
Oh, there might be another wave of pogroms as there was in Osh in Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 where hundreds of people were killed, mainly Uzbeks, and thousands displaced, but it might be in some other setting, not Kyrgyzstan's south, but who knows, maybe Tajikistan, as police shoot-outs of suspected terrorists have occurred regularly there since the civil war was over.
Or there might be another massacre of workers as there were in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan in 2011, but probably not that again, and not there.
That's just it -- whenever unrest does break out, whether in Andijan in 2005 in Uzbekistan, where hundreds were massacred or in Osh as I mentioned in 2010, the authorities make sure it is tamped down very well after that, making numerous arrests, silencing or jailing journalists and bloggers and citizen reporters. So that's that, we get it.
Except, we don't. Because unrest does occur, sometimes with large numbers of people, and it surprises those who aren't prepared. Like the overthrow of Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan in 2012, which shows signs of Russian engineering, but which couldn't have succeeded if there hadn't been underlying social disatisfaction with energy price hikes (induced by Russia) and other deeper and long-term economic and social malaise.
Nobody was ready when 20,000 or even 60,000 people came out on the main squares of Moscow and other Russian cities after Putin's orchestrated re-election, and nobody who got enthusiastic about the prospects then was ready for the severity of the crackdown that is now inevitably coming.
So yeah, unrest, but they tamp it down but then, they don't. So you have to be ready, and you have to have some theory about how society changes in these countries -- and that would not be "due to Internet penetration" or "development of the middle class" -- the mantras rehearsed by State Department officials and pundits worldwide. If only Internet saturation reaches X point that it reached in, oh, Iran or Azerbaijan (where unrest is reaching the thousands now in demonstration), why we might see those droids we're looking for.
But oh, remember This is What Can Happen To You, when Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior said about Azerbaijan that publicizing the news of the crackdown on Internet bloggers would chill the use of the Internet? Make people not want to go online or be very careful about their activities online? Remember how I was browbeaten to death for daring to suggest there was an Internet surge in Uzbekistan? But I countered this and said it was an Internet campaign that got the "donkey bloggers" released and I countered their theories of the efficacy of "networked authoritiarianism" (Rebeccah McKinnon's term) here and here (Is There an Arab Spring Bounce in Azerbaijan?) and then here for Central Asia. That is, I don't have ANY illusions that any Twitter revos are coming soon to these countries to utterly turn them over from head to foot, but I do ask: Why Can't We Say Azerbaijani Protest is Influenced by the Arab Spring and Social Media? Of course you can, and you don't need me to say this, you now have the released Emin Milli on the conference circuit to say it.
So last week, we were told at the OSCE Internet 2013 conference by Milli, the former political prisoner and blogger who just served 15 days in jail for his chronicling of demonstrations over the death of a soldier in the army, that there are one million sign-ups on Facebook. That's a lot of people for this small country. Socialbakers, the industry source on Facebook sign-ups, says there are more than a million now.
Says Socialbakers:
Our social networking statistics show that Facebook penetration in Azerbaijan is 12.20% compared to the country's population and 23.97% in relation to number of Internet users. The total number of FB users in Azerbaijan is reaching 1013080 and grew by more than 147280 in the last 6 months
Internet penetration was reported as 44% in 2010 by the ITU; then it was reported last year as 68% and is growing. So it's a lot, and people who say that Azeris are scared off the Internet by oppression were wrong, but people who say that such large percentages of Internet penetration will lead to revolution are also wrong, as the authorities are still very skillful in picking out people to coopt, intimidate or jail and torture as needed to keep the peace -- especially for those Western oil and gas companies coming in to develop the Shah Deniz II fields.
The number of people on the square in Azerbaijan isn't one million and isn't 28,000 but more like 2,000 or 200 sometimes, depending on the topic.
Now, Central Asia is much, much more "backward" or behind when it comes to the Internet, let alone Facebook, and has not had the kind of "Youtube protests" about local official corruption that then leads to street demonstrations -- although the phenomenon still can be found here and there even in these countries.
So you have to be ready, as these things can jump the synapse -- significant unrest/revolution/unheavals in Azerbaijan would obviously affect other neighbouring countries and so on.
Even so, we're been getting for years now articles that tell us not to worry, everything is boringly stable in Central Asia, and implying that anyone who crafts any other scenario is just hopelessly mired in Twitter mania and Jeff Jarvis-style over-romanticization of social media's power (that would not be me) or just not "getting it" about the Arab Spring, which didn't turn out to be "all that" in the end as we well know (and this article, Aftermath of a Revolution, in the International Herald Tribune really sums it up well).
Even so, along comes Sarah Kendzior to tell us that everything is boringly stable: The Curse of Stability. Kendzior, who, together with Katy Pearce, in an article they'd probably like to forget now, told us how cautious we must all be about Azerbaijan (and the big crackdown and big sleep could be still coming there anyway as well all know, but each time the concentric circles grow).
This article was kind of written already on Kendzior's political home base, Registan.net, by Myles Smith: Central Asia: What Not to Look For, datelined January 2013.
Kendzior doesn't link to her colleague but should have, as he put down the markers for the prediction businesss, and I couldn't disagree, although as I said, you really need to have better theories of change and a more hopeful expectation about the people in these countries and their need to have a better life than they do under their current dictatorships.
I could answer Kendzior in detail but then, I already have in the past, and did on another article exactly a year ago by another specialist, Scott, Radnitz, Waiting for Spring, who told us "not to hold our breaths" and compare Central Asia to the Arab Spring -- and it's a good thing we didn't, as we'd be as blue as a UN peacekeeper's helmet now.
Even so, I'll just cut and paste below the fold what I put in the comments to Radnitz's peace again, because it still applies. And keep in mind that what the Arab Spring had was Al Jazeera (not WikiLeaks or Anonymous, silly, that's just self-serving hacker twaddle). Central Asia doesn't have that; it has Russian TV. So, you get what you get, even if you add Facebook.
The problem with theorizing away all the reasons why Central Asians don't rebel is that when they do, then no one will be ready for them, as they weren't ready for Tunisia or Egypt.
There are more factors to suppress rebellion in Central Asia than in the Middle East, given the legacy of Soviet mass crimes against humanity and massive and thorough control of information, speech, and association. This legacy is not overcome and as you point out, the same people remain in power.
Even so, there are important displays of disatisfaction, even things like taxi cab drivers refusing to follow onerous new government regulations, forcing the government to climb down, or scores of people in Andijan demonstrating over the electricity shut-offs and fuel shortages. The outbreaks are small and when persistent, can be deadly, as they were for hundreds in Andijan in 2005 and officially, at least 17 in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan last December.
You don't have to reach to French history to find the system of government ranks for sale, and government offices fed by farms -- Tsarist Russia will do -- think of the long descriptions of how this worked in Anna Karenina if not Richard Pipe's history. So sure, it's hard to change the system when each level is beholden to the next rung for its subsistence, and yet, the systems do change even if slowly; school-children are still forced to work en masse in the fields by the state picking cotton (not by family farms) as are many municipal workers, and yet many people contrive to bribe their way out of the job or pay day workers to take their place. The greatest form of protest, of course, with all the Central Asian countries, is migrant labour to Russia and other neighbouring countries, and all the economies of all these countries to varying extents depend on this form of protest.
The transition in Turkmenistan was hardly smooth. First, it was preceded by a coup attempt in 2002 that dramatically failed -- various officials who had all defected abroad, and some who had remained inside dissenters were said to collaborate and dozens were arrested. The former foreign minister, Boris Shikhmuradov, was jailed and tortured and remains missing to this day, possibly murdered. Imagine a country where a foreign minister can go missing!
The former head of parliament who was the successor in the event of the president's death under the law was summarily arrested and jailed along with his wife on trumped-up charges and the law was overridden to put Berdymukhamedov, the trained dentist and former health minister in power. WikiLeaks has cables from the US embassy speculating that the siloviki or power ministers put him in power, and that they in turn were variously propped up by powers in Russia or Turkey.
But the problem with those theories is that all those officials who once flourished under Saparmurat Niyazov, the past dictator, were one by one removed, even the ones seemingly propped up by the seemingly more powerful Moscow or Ankara or whatever (Uzbeks were always suspected of being behind the coup and entire ethnic populations were forcibly moved from their homes by the border). Today, only one man remains from the Niyazov era, the current foreign minister, Rashid Meredov. God knows how he keeps his job, because other figures who seemed indispensable for dealing with foreigners, like Tachberdy Tagiev, who used to run all the oil and gas contacts, were for unknown reasons abruptly removed from their posts and thrown into obscurity. So many former officials -- and their relatives -- are thrown in jail.
In Uzbekistan, there have also been struggles for powers and officials arrested or put in disgrace -- these transitions are not smooth. That is, maybe they seem smooth by contrast to Egypt now, but they don't imply actual "stability" -- they're quite brittle.
I think it's very important to keep an open mind about how things will work in Central Asia. Nobody expected seeing a handful of dissidents last year demonstrating that today 50,000 or 100,000 would appear on the streets -- or that even that many will not be enough to forestall the return of Putin. Russia has a very large role to play in these countries, one that curiously the US intelligentsia keeps cynically downplaying either to promote US power or to denigrate it more. But expect more discontent and possibly more ferment.
