Different Stans

Tajik Opticon #9

1907 Solar Eclipse Expedition by Sergei Prokhudi-Gorskii, Russian Photographer in Central Asia.

This is my little blog on Tajikistan that comes out on Saturdays.  If you are unable to click on all the links, come to my blog Different Stans as these can be blocked by some mail systems. Write me at [email protected] with comments or requests to be added to the mailing list.

o Opposition Leader Missing Abroad...
o ...And Government Critic Missing at Home
o Russians Leaving Tajikistan in Droves...
o...and Tajik Migrants Returning from Russia in Coffins
o Everybody Worries About the Tajik Porous Border...
o...But at Least OSCE Tries to Do Something About It

o Earthquake...and Harlem Shakes...

COMMENT

People explain the missing opposition leader abroad and the missing region critic at home by the same factor: the forthcoming presidential election coming up in November of this year.  Why it's necessary to disappear people, when you're going to sail through to an overwhelming victory with the same dubious high percentage for the win as all your Central Asian neighbours is beyond me, but perhaps that one tug on the thread unravels the whole thing...

What I think people need to understand about disappearances is that you don't have to be an exemplary citizen or innocent of crime to claim the right to security and life that your state should not take away from you. In Belarus, the Lukashenka regime has been charged with disappearing mafia kingpins along with opposition leaders, using the same methods, and of course in Russia, some 400 people in missing in the North Caucasus even by official admission. So it's not good wherever it happens and the Tajik government needs to explain what's going on.

Paul Goble covers the exodus of Russians from Tajikistan, a process that has been going on steadily and in large numbers since the civil war. From far-away Brighton Beach, I can anecdotally report that for the first time talking to Russians who work as home attendants or have "khom-atten" that there are Tajiks now reported among the many former Soviets fleeing the region. When there is a Tajik restaurant in New York City, I guess we'll know there is more serious migration. Arkady Dubnov says that Russian language isn't declining because Tajik migrants need it to speak in the near abroad, starting with Russia, where they seek work. And some meet tragic ends, as we are reminded once again just how many return in coffins after being murdered in hate crimes or dying on unsafe construction sites.

Let us think of the most OSCE extreme sports -- the Afghan-Tajik border patrol training in the winter and...the Minsk Group meetings in the summer. OSCE tries the patience of the saints who persist with it. Everyone talks about the porous Tajik border, and a video of a precarious plane flight over it (see link below) lets you know that it's porous, but, well, not so navigable. Even so, there is expected to be trouble after US troops withdraw, and OSCE is at least trying to train some local people to address the challenges. It seems like training for a few dozen people can't make much of a difference, but as the saying goes, it matters to the starfish....

 

GOVERNMENT CRITIC MISSING FOR TWO WEEKS

From EurasiaNet.org:

Early on March 15, a 58-year-old man put on his tracksuit and left home in Qurghonteppa, a 90-minute drive south of Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital. Morning exercise was a regular part of his routine, says Amnesty International. But on this morning the man, a prominent critic of President Imomali Rakhmon, did not return.

Friends and political allies fear Salimboy Shamsiddinov was kidnapped for his political views, including his critique of Tajik-Uzbek relations. Shamsiddinov, head of the Society of Uzbeks of Khatlon Province, is no stranger to tough talk, often expressing himself freely on politics and interethnic relations in a country where questioning the official line is discouraged, especially in an election year.

Translation of RFE/RL Tajik Service from e-tajikistan, who believes authorities are "blaming the victim":

«We looked into this theory as well. No kidnapping has taken place. Shamsiddinov has, himself, left the house and disappeared. We’ve received neither information of him having been beaten or forcefully taken out of his home nor any sign of kidnapping and this case must not be interpreted as “political”,» added E. Jalilov.

Global Voices points out that while disappearance of Umarali Quvvatov in Dubai is discussed, nobody seems to care about disappearance of Shamsiddinov within the country:

Over the last ten days, journalists and internet users in Tajikistan have actively discussed the ‘disappearance’ of a Tajik opposition leader from a Dubai-based detention center. Meanwhile, they have largely ignored another recent disappearance of an outspoken critic of the regime within the country itself. Salim Shamsiddinov, 58, has been missing since he left his house in the southern city of Qurghonteppa early in the morning on March 15.

For GV, Quvvatov is tarnished by his association with the fuel business, but not for many Tajiks:

Despite commanding some support, Quvvatov, as a once-successful businessmen, also has his doubters in the country. Before appearing as an ardent opponent of Rahmon, Umarali Quvvatov was a successful entrepreneur, the head and founder of two private companies that transported oil products to Afghanistan through Tajikistan. Quvvatov claims that his share in these businesses was taken by force by Shamsullo Sohibov, the son-in-law of the president.

However, the majority of internet users in Tajikistan seem to support him. Quvvatov has also attracted some followers due to his religious views. In one of the interviews that he gave [ru] to RFE/RL's Tajik service, Quvvatov described himself as a “Sufi”, practicing the tradition that focuses on the “esoteric” dimension of Islam. In Tajikistan, Sufis are popularly known as “pure Muslims”, which partly explains the support for Quvvatov among some religious people.

TAJIKISTAN - WHERE THE RUSSIANS ARE A DISAPPEARING NATION

Paul Goble from Windows on Eurasia:

The ethnic Russian community in Tajikistan has declined in size from more than 400,000 in Gorbachev’s time to about 40,000 now, the smallest number of ethnic Russians in any CIS country except Armenia, a trend that has had a major impact on the internal life of that Central Asian country and on its relations with Moscow.

          But according to Arkady Dubnov, a Moscow commentator, the situation with regard to Russian language knowledge there is somewhat better, largely because of the continuing impact of Soviet-era patterns and the more than 700,000 Tajiks who have gone to work in the Russian Federation

LESS POVERTY IN TAJIKISTAN?        h/t @e-tajikistan

Well, according to the plan, anyway...From Asia-Plus:

The official poverty statistics show a noticeable decline in the poverty rate in Tajikistan.

According to Tajikistan’s Livelihood Improvement Strategy (LIS) for 2013-2015, the Tajik poverty rate is expected to decrease to 31.5 percent by 2015.  

***

The Tajik poverty rate reportedly decreased from 50 percent in 2008 to 46.7 percent in 2009, 45 percent in 2010, 41 percent in 2011 and 38.3 percent in 2012.

 MIGRANT LABORERS DYING TO WORK IN RUSSIA

From EurasiaNet.org:

 Each day an average of three Tajiks return from Russia in simple wooden coffins. They are the victims of racist attacks, police brutality, dangerous working conditions and unsafe housing.

They go for the money, earning up to four times more in Russia than they would at home – if they were lucky to find a job in in dirt-poor Tajikistan. “They are saving to get married and build a house,” said Rustam Tursunov, deputy mayor of the western town of Tursunzoda.

LIBEL SUIT EXPOSES DISGUST WITH TAJIKISTAN'S JUDICIARY

In 2010, Rustam Khukumov was sentenced to almost 10 years in a Russian prison, charged, along with three other Tajik nationals, with possessing nine kilos of heroin.

Khukumov is the son of the powerful head of Tajikistan’s railway boss, Amonullo Khukumov. The senior Khukumov is an ally and relative of the Tajik strongman, President Emomali Rakhmon (Khukumov is father-in-law to Rakhmon’s daughter). Could that have anything to do with why the Khukumov scion was released early, under murky circumstances, only a year into his jail term?

For asking that question, the weekly “Imruz News” now owes Khukumov over $10,500 in “moral damages,” a Dushanbe court ruled on February 25. The paper vows to appeal, which means more embarrassing attention on Khukumov.

TAJIKISTAN STOPPED BLOCKING FACEBOOK -- AGAIN

In case you care -- and it may not last:

After blocking the social network for about a week, Tajik authorities have gone back on the decision and opened up access to Facebook once again, AFP reports.

Last week, Facebook, along with three other websites, were blocked in Tajikistan, after authorities ordered ISPs to block access to them.

Facebook, along with several Russian news sites, namely zevzda.ru, centrasia.ru, tjk.news.com, and maxala.org, were blocked after several articles were published, criticizing the country’s president.

AFGHANS FAILING SECURITY TEST IN BADAKSHAN

As EurasiaNet.org's David Trilling (@dtrilling) about this situation, "Look what's just across the porous and poorly secured border from Tajikistan":

For years, Badakhshan Province enjoyed life away from the action, an island of stability as war engulfed the rest of Afghanistan. But as the broader conflict winds down, the northeastern province is offering a bleak view of the future.

That's because NATO last year handed over security duties in Badakhshan exclusively to the Afghan National Army (ANA) and National Police (ANP), but the transition has coincided with a spike in violence and increased militant activity.

Amb. Susan Elliott samples Tajik national cuisine March 2013. Photo by @AmbElliott

US AMBASSADOR CELEBRATES NOVRUZ IN TAJIKISTAN

Amb. Susan Elliott, our envoy in Dushanbe, is not dancing like our US ambassador to Uzbekistan, George Krol, last year -- she's more serious.

But does this picture, well...sort of say something about US-Tajik relations? It belongs to the Soviet genre of "bread and salt celebration" photos that are an iconic staple for the region's media. But this more impromptu Twitter version can't help evoking a little bit more beyond the rituals. There's that studied indifference to her menial task -- or glassy-eyed boredom? -- of the young woman in front, and the faint half-smile of the one toward the back; and the very faint frown from the ambassador herself, which could be a wince from having to taste some kumys sort of thing -- although that grass looks yummy...

Photo by Amb. Susan Elliott

WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS IN KHOROG

Lest you think women are only pressed into their bread-salt routine, here's a photo of women in Khorog described as "fantastic entrepreneurs" by our ambassador. Of course, it's the usual "women's work" of embroidery or sewing, from the looks of it, but that's a start...

 

TAJIKISTAN SHAKES, TOO

There was a moderate earthquake today in Turkmenistan, but it's not the only shake going on there.

Joining in the worldwide craze, Tajiks have turned in at least four Harlem Shakes: here, by the Tajik Debaters' Society, illustrating that without the props of the rich world, as in other Shakes around the world, the students have been ingenuous with tape and paper and bags; here, sort of a partial Harlem Shake in Tajik national dress; here, which may be the only Harlem Shake performed in chapans by menu.tj; and here, by crazy dudes, which may get the vote for "most minimalist Harlem shake, anywhere".

A village on the Afghan-Tajik border on the banks of the Amu Darya River, 16 October 2008. Photo by Kate Dixon for OSCE.

OSCE SUPPORTS AFGHAN, TAJIK EXPERTS ON WATER, ENVIRONMENT

The OSCE Office in Tajikistan hosted an extracurricular day for 30 Afghan and Tajik students from the faculties of Engineering and Natural Sciences at universities in Dushanbe. The event is part of an initiative to strengthen co-operation on hydrology and environment between Afghanistan and Tajikistan in the Upper Amu-Darya River basin.

A Tajik border guard on patrol. Photo by Carolyn Drake for OSCE.

OSCE TRAINS TAJIK BORDER GUARDS

Twenty-four officers from of the Tajik Border Troops, Customs Service and the Interior Ministry worked on evaluating context and potential risks, identification, analysis and classification of risks, and risk assessment at airport and land borders. The course was delivered by serving police and border police officers from Turkey and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

Afghan students and their instructors take part in a high-altitude training exercise in preparation for two weeks of winter training on survival, mountaineering, search and rescue, avalanche awareness, and snow analysis in Khoja Obigarm, 50 kilometers north of Dushanbe, 12 February 2013. Photo by Mansur Ziyoev

AFGHAN BORDER POLICE COMPLETE OSCE-SUPPORTED WINTER PATROL COURSE

This has got to be the most extreme OSCE activity, bar none. Those spotted coats make them look like snow leopards!

Afghan border police officers completed a two-week practical course on winter patrolling at the Tajik Border Troops Training Centre in Gissar today. The course was organized by the OSCE Office in Tajikistan.

Fifteen mid-rank and front-line officers from the Afghan Border Police attended the course, which was held as part of the OSCE Office’s Patrol Programming and Leadership project.

 

Photo by Eric  Haglund

GORGEOUS GORGES

Go and see all of Eric Haglund's photos -- and perhaps someone can explain to me how they get the water that particular shade of blue in Tajikistan. Is it some chemical property of the rocks? Or?

MORE LINKS

In case you missed the interview with me in CA-News, here's the English version -- there's a bit on Tajikistan.

The definitive from Blake and my take -- The US Will Not Use Tajikistan as Its Backyard on the Way out of Afghanistan

Electricity Governance in Tajikistan -- things can only go up, right?

On the one hand, the working group found that there are no formal barriers to obtaining key documents or to public access to policy and regulatory decision-making processes. At the same time, there is no legal framework to facilitate public scrutiny and involvement, nor practical mechanisms to place information in the public domain. In practice, the lack of formal procedures makes meaningful public debate or oversight of the sector all but impossible.

MORE PHOTO LINKS

o Pamir bicycle tour, part of a whole wonderful series on Central Asia

o Uncornered Market, another great Central Asia collection

o This has got to be the most incredible flight over the mountains of Tajikistan in what the authors describe as a "lunchbox with wings" -- must see

o Pamiri home -- which seems very simple until you read about all the symbolic elements of faith in it

o A Russian tortoise in Tajikistan.

 

Related articles

Tajik Authorities Deny Involvement In Disappearance

Tajik Opticon #8

Tajikistan: Opposition Leader Kidnapped?

Four Killed In Hostage-Taking Incident Along Tajik-Afghan Border

EurasiaNet's Trilling Does a Hatchet Job on His NGO Colleagues

A photo that is implied to be of Karimov on March 28, 2013 at his residence in Tashkent. Photo by gov.uz presidential news service.

A photo from the meeting he is said to have taken with the foreign minister of Kazakhstan, with different wallpaper. The news story says that Karimov received Idrisov. Photo by gov.uz.

David Trilling of EurasiaNet has a piece called "Anatomy of a Heart-Attack Rumor" that is supposed to impress us with the leet reporting skillz of "real journalists" who are able to cut through the fog of emigre and NGO obfuscation to get us "the real story" -- which is that rumours about the possible heart attack of Uzbek strong man Islam Karimov may be unfounded because most seem to trace to a single emigre source.

Indeed, the state media is reporting that Karimov met with the foreign minister of Kazakhstan on March 28 seeming to indicate that he is really just fine -- even if we need more proof, as we can trust fellow dictators to close ranks on a story like this. Although those nicely-sharpened pencils in the photo can't tell us whether they were sharpened on March 28 of this year or 10 years ago, the difference in the shades of wall paper between Karimov's picture and the picture of the minister could hold a clue to a more favourable presentation.

So yeah, we get it that news is so hard to get out of Uzbekistan that you study wallpaper in official state photos for clues. That's my point -- about how absurd it can get. And seemingly Trilling's -- you can't trust biased NGo critics of Karimov.

His blog post falls flat, however, because EurasiaNet is essentially yet another NGO, funded by Soros like all the other NGOs in this field, and as biased as they can be in its selectivity. That's why you have to ask why this hit job was so necessary.

Yeah, we get it that the emigres have an axe to grind, and NGOs like CPJ, even if very careful -- and they were, with this story! -- can report rumors without any facts behind them as they seek to make a larger advocacy point about the awful treatment of journalists in jail in Uzbekistan.

But hey, when it comes to an aging and not-so-healthy dictator in a closed society, that's okay to do, you know? Even Trilling admits that it's hard to get news out of this society.

Trilling also too hastily dismisses CPJ's all-important second piece of information from the Kazah opposition newspaper Republika that probably convinced them to run with the story -- that Karimov's daughter had rushed back home. To counter that perfectly legitimate take on the daughter's travel, Trilling makes it seem like as UNESCO's diplomat from Uzbekistan, that she would go home frequently and we shouldn't read meaning into every little trip. Huh? No, she wouldn't. She lives in Paris. And with good reason, because there is no more grand business for her or her more infamous sister, Gulnara, inside Uzbekistan as there once was.

And with the wonders of email and Skype, she can keep in touch with her minders -- such as they are -- in the government back home and of course her father and other relatives and doesn't need to physically return  home for instructions -- that in fact she'd get from the Uzbek ambassador in Paris in any event, most likely, if necessary (it's pretty much a ceremonial job).

There's also trouble enough in the Karimov empire even without heart attacks.

We all get it about Muhammad Solih. I have no relationship to him or any particular use from him, and have never even met him, as far as I recall. I think he's been sly at times in portraying him as opposition to Karimov without explaining the theocratic Islamist tendencies he represents in that opposition. (BTW, the "People's Movement of Uzbekistan' is a mainly collapsed and failed umbrella movement that he tried to start; he was originally known as the head of the opposition Erk or "Freedom" Party).

But this is par for the course with such regimes. The oppositions these regimes get are often as bad as, or worse, than the regimes themselves -- a fact that those regimes never tire of informing you -- and gleefully so. They like to keep things that way, in fact, and at times artificially incite it. They especially love to keep the groups quarelling with each other -- and for good measure, in the case of Uzbekistan, there seem to have been not only dirty tricks and discrediting and intimidation campaigns, but even assassinations of opposition figures abroad.

The Uzbek opposition isn't unmindful of the capacities for anonymous social media to do its work -- but hey, so is the MNB or secret police of Uzbekistan.

I instantly thought of another "anatomy of a rumour" that David Trilling in fact exploited to knock on the opposition and the human rights activists, instead of even conceding that there was just as much a chance that the intelligence agencies planted it as the opposition.

That was the story of the "suicide student" in Uzbekistan who existed only on Facebook, as it happens.  I took part in directly by reporting it skeptically and fully -- unlike Sarah Kendzior of Registan.net who reported it from her perch as fact -- and weeped for the woman who was killed by telling too much about herself on Facebook, supposedly.

I reported on the story as one that the human rights groups in Uzbekistan were researching in good faith -- after all it sounded serious -- a woman studying abroad is summoned for interrogation when she went home, and threatened, and then winds up committing suicide. Say, Registan not only reported that one faithfully and breathlessly, in ways they never report on human rights stories most of the time, just like they reported on the threats of the MNB against two students they adopted. When Kendzior did concede it was a hoax, both her post and the numerous nasty comments under it took the regime's perspective

When Trilling's "freelancer" (and you know who you are!) then turned in an astoundingly bad-faith piece on this hoax blaming soley the opposition -- and worse, claiming that a human rights activist, Elena Urlayeva, was "gullible," I sought to dispel this hit job. I was stunned at the curious willingness to believe a known intelligence-related publication uzmetronom.com as a source -- and creduously, as they claimed that instantly, they had accessed not only Uzbek authorities -- understandable, given their role as a tip sheet for such authorities -- but German border authorities, a stretch even for a government somewhat disposed to be friends with Uzbekistan for the sake of their military base in Termez.

I had to wonder about that -- but certainly there was never any reason to trash Urlayeva, who was just doing her job and who exhibited extraordinary persistence in researching this story on the ground, where it mattered (unlike all the other swaggering Western journos) and who herself ultimately pronounced it as a hoax -- as the story continued to live, through other odd permutations involving RFE/RL, BBC, and a strange couple bearing the tale -- with the woman finally denouncing her partner as an intelligence agent.

There, too, Registan rushed to tell us all it was the opposition, if not Salih, others, and never conceded that it could just as likely be intelligence operatives stirring up trouble -- the claim of the agent who is sent to assassinate someone and then turns to support him against the regime is an old, old meme in this region and in the KGB-style operations. We may never know. But there's no reason to impugn the opposition or the human rights activists in these stories, as there is no evidence that they concocted it, and in fact researched it and ran it to ground. Would the opposition be really stupid enough to make a fake FB page with a fake (and strange) occupation as working for their organization (!) and claiming the person was interrogated and killed themselves when there was no body and no evidence, and they'd only be shown up as fakers? Why would they deliberately do that to themselves?

In this story of the heart-attack, we may never know, but again, you have to ask: why would the opposition put out a story easily shown to be untrue if a) they really believed it to be true b) merely reported what sources they thought were reliable told them? Couldn't it just as likely be Karimov's rivals inside the regime in Tashkent, who surely exist? Trilling's implication here as with the suicide story was to imply that if all sources lead to Solih, he is "making up stuff". And maybe he is. But showing him as the source of a rumour hasn't achieved the "anatomy" that Trilling imagines. It just shows that exile leaders believe stories told them, or feel they need to publicize them. It's not like Karimov is young and in the pink of health.

Zakon.kz, an independent Kazakh website which Trilling tries to slam as yet another gullible purveyor of Solih-based rumours in fact ran a story (that Trilling links to!) with the headline "President's Daughter Denies Rumours of His Heart Attack; In Fact He's Dancing". Trilling did not speak Russian a year ago  -- he may have learned more of it in the last year. He should know enough, even using Google-translator (which is what all the non-Russian-speaking reporters at EurasiaNet do) to see that the headline is not about purveying a Solih rumor, but the opposite.  The story is in fact about a heated Twitter exchange that @realgoogoosha -- Karimova -- had with someone who questioned her about her father's status -- she said he was dancing at Novruz. To be sure, we don't seem to have the kind of lovely state TV footage of Karimov dancing that we had last year, that also showed our own Amb. George Krol dancing at the mass Novruz event.

Says Trilling:

That’s when the rumor really took off. Who went next isn’t clear, but it’s now all over dozens of Russian-language sites covering the former Soviet Union – mostly verbatim from Solih. Today Vechernii Bishkek cites Zakon.kz in its lede, noting that another source has come forward. But the Zakon.kz report cites Solih and Rosbalt (so Solih) and Newsru.com, which cites Solih. So Vechernii Bishkek's second source is via Solih.

Here's what else Zakon.kz says -- hardly sounding like the dupes Trilling implies:

Сведения об инфаркте Каримова распространил сайт «Народное движение Узбекистана». Информация была не раз опровергнута (в частности, информированным источником РИА «Новости»), однако один из главных политических оппонентов нынешнего президента настаивает на версии сердечного приступа.

The news about Karimov's heart attack was disseminated by the site "Popular Movement of Uzbekistan". The information has been repeatedly rebutted (including by the information source RIA Novosti); however, one of the main political opponents of the current president has insisted on the story of the heart attack.

CPJ merely took the opportunity to ask questions about media freedom in any event and clearly state that rumours were swirling. So why the hit job on them? Not for the first time from the Friends of Registan crowd either, as CPJ suffered a savaging by Joshua Foust merely for reporting on the way in which the US administration differentiates between Belarus and Uzbekistan in its advocacy.

In this case, Trilling could have called up his fellow Soros-funded NGO and asked for a comment and clarification before making it seem as if they are bad journalists. They aren't. They are reporting on what regional media is saying and making it clear that it is only that -- reports, allegations.

So this sort of snark from a swaggering non-profit reporter who himself isn't in Uzbekistan just doesn't seem merited, given in fact how CPJ and its sources, which Trilling mischaracterized, really told the story:

CPJ cites Kazakhstan’s Respublika, which cites, you guessed it, Solih. And Rosbalt. So Solih. Respublika adds that Karimov’s younger daughter (the one who sued a French newspaper for calling her a “dictator’s daughter”), Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, has rushed home in recent days. (As Uzbekistan’s permanent representative to UNESCO, Karimova-Tillyaeva presumably visits Uzbekistan from time to time.) CPJ also cites Lenta.ru, which cites Solih and Rosbalt. 

So, in other words, we have Solih – a Karimov rival who fled Uzbekistan almost 20 years ago – as the only source. Unfortunately, that's how we get a lot of our news out of tightly controlled Uzbekistan these days: from single sources who are often abroad.

When the word comes about Karimov's real illness or demise, it may be from these single sources who are most devoted to watching and most stand to benefit from transition -- so it's not somehow inappropriate to listen to them and report on what they say. And neither regional opposition newspapers or CPJ did anything wrong.

As for this Church Lady admonition at the end -- one has to marvel at that sort of strange chiding given the numerous pieces gleefully enjoying the dictator's daughter's demise and of course speculating on the succession -- including one I co-authored with an OSI program director at his behest more than a year ago.

Certainly, Karimov’s incapacitation or death would be big news, possibly ushering in a struggle for power. Until we see the man in person, there’s no sure-fire way to confirm that something isn’t up. But the sourcing on the heart-attack rumors is desperately thin. It’s almost like someone is wishing Karimov would have a heart attack.

Let me also point out that in Russian, as the language this might get reported in anywhere along the chain, "serdechny pristup" doesn't mean necessarily a heart attack as we understand it. Many's the Russian friend we've had who would tell us in the morning about their "heart spell" using this term, who might even call from a hospital, but by evening be available for hopping around bars or restaurants, smoking furiously. Karimov may have only felt faint if he danced at Novruz.

EurasiaNet turns out stuff like this so they can seem "balanced" and go on pretending they aren't an advocacy operation. I've never understood the need to do this, given that they are a nonprofit funded from a single source, and it's okay to be a "community journalist" or a page where a lot of "citizen journalists" have their say. If you want to be hard-nosed about the five Ws, you'd go to work for AFP or AP or Reuters, but Trilling prefers to have a safety Eurasianet.

I can just hear Justin Burke and the other EurasiaNet editors and managers grumping that they are a professional news operation and can't be expected to just cut and paste press releases from avid NGO colleagues who might be a little more eager than they are to report the demise of dictators (if Central Asia were just another region, George Soros would have no reason to support a nonprofit news agency about it, and indeed he may be expected, like other funders and the US government, to shift his focus from this region after US troops leave to China and the Middle East along with the other pivoters of the world.)

Yet they are selective in their exposes -- this gotcha was apparently too glee-producing to pass up, but EurasiaNet never criticizes Human Rights Watch, e.g. the months and months of silence they maintained as their office in Tashkent was put under pressure and finally expelled -- indeed, I was  asked to observe an embargo on this development. EurasiaNet writes about reports on itself or Soros operations abroad as funded by Soros, but they never write that HRW has a $100 million gift from Soros, and is Soros-funded like themselves for work in Central Asia.

In fact, if there were a disclaimer about every Soros-funded operation featured in EurasiaNet, the world might see it for what it is, a foundation newsletter about events in the field. And it's okay to be such a thing, and I myself was once proud to work for such an entity. Yet some of the swaggering journalists there have greater aspirations and can shore up their own flagging egos over the fact that they don't work in "real" commercial news operations by stepping on other NGOs.

The reporters at EurasiaNet are also not above merely conveying the official media as proof that the opposition and NGOs are "lying" -- even though we have far less grounds to believe them, knowing of their constant manipulations.

Scant Output On Human Rights in Uzbekistan after Foreign Minister's Washington Trip

US State Department. Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov and Secy State John Kerry, March 7, 2013.

As we know, before the Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov came to the US last week,  Sarah Kendzior did her best to convince us that it was pointless to raise human rights problems with him, and Human Rights Watch nevertheless came up with a whole concrete list of what they wanted Secretary of State John Kerry to raise.

Mike Posner, the outgoing Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, recently criticized his fellow NGOs, now that he had been on the other side of the table from them, as needing to become more concrete in their proposals and focused on policy to reduce abuses rather than merely documenting human rights violations.

I think the human rights industry would still do well to keep documenting because there really are wars over the facts, especially on strategic countries like Uzbekistan, and because the US government does really keep resisting doing even partially the right thing due to geopolitical constraints and exigencies. Especially when there's a system in place to give military aid or not depending on whether there are mass human rights abuses, you have to play the game of documenting, naming and shaming and not getting sucked into partial "solutions".

Why can't we document human rights, guys?

Oh, dear, I remember the CATO Institute essay of 1979 that spoke of "the endless chasing after human rights violations," i.e. the-then infant human rights monitoring industry that seemed to endlessly document, publicize, name and shame, but never effect the kind of systemic changes of democracy and free enterprise that CATO and others would see as pre-requisites for getting human rights results. Then, we had 30 years of democracy movements and colour revolutions and regime changes and Arab springs -- and then everybody went "off" democracy again because it didn't have enough rule of law, you know, human rights. As Democracy Lab's latest sour-on-democracy piece lets us know.

So Human Rights Watch does come up with a list of concrete proposals, but it is based on documentation. To be sure, some of it is the sort of "be good! right now!" stuff that always sounds so ridiculous, especially when it's selective. And when Melinda Haring and Michael Cecire essentially say, "Your democracies turned out crappy! You must have the rule of law right now! Stop, thief!" it also seems kind of, well, hortatory. Where are those concrete proposals that Mike Posner so desperately wanted?  In fairness, there are some in the Democracy Lab piece of the incremental USAID-style "rule-of-law" program variety, like "let's make Georgia's notion of plea-bargaining more like the West's" or "let's praise Georgia for amnestying officials with non-violent offenses from the previous government even if that's not quite the ROL per se". And...that's just it. The things to do in these countries still under Russia's shadow with creepy intelligence agencies from the Soviet era often amount only to those little incremental steps.

But having concrete proposals and the human rights rather than the democracy focus means you do have to keep documenting, and keep exposing, and keep saying "be good!" about things like child and adult forced labour in Uzbekistan, and it is absolutely perfectly fine to propose as a policy to the United States that it stop giving Tashkent a pass on this. After all, the US has laws -- it has the trafficking statutes that require the US not to do business with countries using slave labour. And it has a whole system where countries get automatically downgraded in their status if they don't follow the proposed reforms -- often easy things like at least sign laws or at least make task forces, the sort of anodyne stuff that multilaterals and governments come up with.

Yet the US doesn't do that with Uzbekistan, but gives it a pass for the simple reason that we need it due to the war in Afghanistan -- to get supplies in, and more to the point now, to get soldiers and expensive war equipment out. So here we all are, this won't last forever (past 2014?) and we need to just keep asking and not worry about the futility. Remember, "For us, there is only the trying/the rest is not our business?"

So what happened?

Well, there was a photo op, then secret talks. Then the noon day press briefing. And a query:

QUESTION: Can we get a readout on the Uzbek Foreign Minister meeting, specifically on any human rights issues that Secretary Kerry would have raised?

MS. NULAND: Well, as Secretary Kerry said himself in the spray before the meeting, we always raise our human rights concerns and our view with the Uzbeks that the more progress they can make in democratic rights, human rights in Uzbekistan, the more stable and prosperous and secure the country will be. I’m not going to get into details of the bilateral other than to say, as we always do, it came up this morning.

I checked with the US Embassy in Tashkent on Twitter, noting that this read-out was rather scant. Answer:

@usembtashkent

@catfitz not much to share at the moment. pls follow our website postings and/or tweets.

Share.

Okay.

Here's a piece making the arguments by Bennett Freeman and Mark Lagon; the former is part of the businesses, unions and NGOs forming the cotton campaign; the latter is a former US administration official responsible for trafficking issues.

Senior U.S. officials need to make clear to the Uzbek government that to avoid sanctions it must agree to allow the ILO to monitor the harvest this fall. The ILO is the most competent international body to determine the true scope of the problem and to begin working with Tashkent on a serious plan to address it.

It's good that a very clear call has gone out to make the condition for the prevention of a downgrading essentially the invitation to the ILO to inspect the harvest -- seriously, not as just some dialogue in the capital, but having experts go out to all the regions.

There's some faint notion this is gettable, because the Uzbek government already quietly works with UNICEF to allow UNICEF to do some sample monitoring and make some recommendations -- although this is very hushed up by UNICEF, Tashkent, and governments -- and in any event is not a substitute for serious labour conditions monitoring such as the ILO does.

But while it's great that the focus has finally been brought more forcibly to bear publicly on the Obama administration by these largely Obama-supporting groups, the US isn't the leading actor in this drama. Uzbekistan, Russia, India, China, Pakistan are. We need every single one of them for our other drama involved in getting the troops out, especially Russia

So I think NGOs and the Soros gang need to step up much more comprehensibly in a full-bore, comprehensive agenda on Russia-US relations, not just Uzbek-US relations.  More direct and international focus and coalition building is needed on the ILO. But since they tend to always fall back to doing American things more than any other, here's what they simply must do: They need to call on Obama not to go to the G20 meeting in St. Petersburg coming up -- and there is reason to do this because Putin dissed Obama by not coming to the US to the G8 meeting last year, but sending Medvedev instead.

It's a no-brainer, easy to do, costs nothing, and is an awareness campaign. Mr. President, don't go to Pitir because the human rights violations for which Russia is responsible abroad and at home are so great, that you should not lend them your luster as leader of the free world.

For extra credit, overcome the usual reluctance to rain on the sports parade and call to boycott the Sochi Olympics -- or call on Obama not to lend his presence to that jamboree, either. He need not go. He can send Kerry. This is how you build the Wall of Shame around Russia that needs to be built.

They need to make a coalition of groups -- cite Syria first and foremost because Russia is the greatest factor in supporting mass crimes of humanity there; they need to cite Russia's own abysmal record citing the Magnitsky List; and they need to cite the Caucasus crimes which are massive -- more than 400 disappearances even by the state's own admission; and then they need to cite things like Russia's purchase of Uzbek cotton; Russia's army bases in the region fraught with human rights violations such as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, etc.. The stakes are too high, the abuses too large to keep pulling punches, giving Russia a politically-correct or timid pass, and focusing with the avidity of safe surrogacy on the US. "Blame America First".

I've been critical at times of the Cotton Campaign, where I myself worked for two years, because it has tended to focus on reachable Western targets with fears of litigation or media negativity, like garment companies, and not focus on the actual buyers of most of the cotton, like Russia, India, and Pakistan -- or the international bodies where Russia and Uzbekistan are a member and need to be challenged in that context, like the ILO.I'm glad to see this call for more work at the ILO, but it still has the feeling of the "buddy approach" or "working with" Uzbekistan -- as if it had good will! as if it were going to do that! -- instead of pressuring it to change directly.

I've also felt that a campaign that always seems to focus on the #firstworldproblems of buying a dress at H&N or not (we can't really be sure if Uzbek cotton is or isn't in their supply chain) and evil corporations was more about the left's eternal fascination with undermining capitalism by seizing on its sins  than about human rights. There was also the lesser focus on the actual monitors in Uzbekistan, who, like the tiny cotton pickers, earned a fraction of the salary of Western campaigners, and the unjustifiable position of focusing only on children as being cuter -- although it's a problem for adults, too. I felt this campaign just wasn't really grasping the nettle.

To be sure, recently, now under new management, I saw this campaign do its first really successful media campaigns -- first around the evergreen of Gulnara Karimova's antics, which is low-hanging fruit, but also the harder nut -- getting mainstream network TV -- CNN in the US -- to finally pick up the story and do it right -- featuring the children, the monitors like Elena Urlaeva, the success of enlisting some corporations, and then need to get Uzbekistan itself to do more and for those countries buying to be part of the pressure on them. This is one of the best things ever done on the largest state-run forced labour program in the world

I don't say these campaigns are easy or that trying to move ILO resolutions isn't sometimes futile. I just think the problem of Uzbekistan is fundamentally not about Western corporations and their evils, even if they contributed, or about using "soft law" such as the OECD (I think that action was a flop because it silenced NGOs from their critique while reconciliation arrangements were made with corporations that weren't really that culpable).

I think the problem with Uzbekistan is fundamentally about the Soviet past, the dependency on Russia (for the first time now we see the remittances mainly from labor migrants in Russia are higher than the income from cotton, see?) and not about evil Western capitalism or venal Western governments. The eternally popular Western NGO focus on these actors means that it becomes "about itself". The lefty labour and cause groups that populate this campaign could never bite down hard and blame state socialism for Uzbekistan's problem and advocate a free market -- that goes against their religion. You always feel with this analysis that if Uzbekistan stopped using child labour, and paid the workers a living wage to hand-pick cotton in the fields, the left in the Western world would be happy to now buy the results of their labour for their infants' cloth diaper program, rather than worry that these toilers couldn't live a life of lattes and ipads such as they enjoy themselves -- and which they can enjoy more of if they go and work construction in Moscow.

Meanwhile, what's the real solution? Because even if a million girls don't buy their Gap shirts or whatever, it won't matter.

The labor migrants could be doing the work that children are performing for free or for pennies, but they can't make a living with such back-breaking work so they go abroad. The Uzbek government has wised up and put out less kids visibly in the fields and made their teachers, policemen, soldiers, factory workers etc. work for free -- which was always just as bad and the campaign always should have focused on that too, but opted for the cuter kid angle.

But what the real problem back of all this is, is communism and Soviet-style control of the market. Farmers cannot sell their cotton on an open market. They have quotas which they turn over to the government, and the government sells it. They get loans for seeds and supplies -- but they can't meet the payments or even get the loans. They are in a double bind, can't meet quotas or meet loan payments and use child or day labour as a result. If you suddenly mechanized this industry more, the way USAID is busy trying to do, you exacerbate the situation by depriving some families of that teenage labour and soldier labour that they really need to supplement the remittances. You also screw the farmers over as less of them are needed. Where are you going to put all those people, USAID? In prison, as suddenly "Islamic fundamentalists" as the government has done with about 5000 or more of their neighbours?!

This is not an easy nut to crack, but the ideology that focuses only on Western perfidy or US government hypocrisy and not Russian complicity is really wrong. Yes, it's hard to focus on Russia. Nobody lets you do it. When you  try to do it, everywhere in the world, you are told that you are an evil war mongering anti-Islamic imperialist blah blah. Of course, it's not your military that killed the overwhelming majority of people in Afghanistan -- it's the Taliban. So here we all are.

It's a muddle and not easy but you have to keep hitting hard on it and not get caught up in what the State Department or the Registanis say fretting about realisms. They take care of themselves without you. There really isn't any reason the US can't change their trafficking rating and downgrade Uzbekistan. They can compartmentalize the realtionship because we all know that business really doesn't mean that much.

I also think that the key to this is labor rights and the ILO and that more effort has to go back into that venue, as frustrating as it is, mainly simply trying to line up all the delegations of friendly countries, trade unions, and employers for the eventual vote that you will eventually get on the Commission of Inquiry or other relevant action. Only a labor rights approach -- as distinct from the more hypothetical hate campaign on evil corporations who buy exploited cotton -- will more directly save victims of trafficking and forced labor and the remittance workers in deplorable positions, especially in the nearer abroad like Kazakhstan -- and that means slogging at the UN and OSCE even though this is a long proposition. What else is there?

 

Yes, There's a Turkmen Harlem Shake, Too

Everybody has done the Harlem shake -- absolutely everybody, from the kid next door to the army to even the Uzbeks. Math brain Nate Silvers joked at the tech conference SXSW in Texas last week that 90% of the data in the universe has been produced only in the last decade, and 75% of it comes from Harlem Shake re-mixes. Just kidding!

But to do the Harlem Shake in Turkmenistan, you really have to be a mover and shaker -- Youtube is banned, the government blocks it, and you'd have to even hear about it first in order to devise your own, pull it off under the watchful eye of all sorts of government minders who have cracked down on students in particular in recent years. Then you'd have to upload it -- well, it's a lot to go through.

Even so, Rusten T. reports on his blog that there is now a Turkmen Harlem Shake, that somehow has been put on Youtube. And not from inside the country -- because of all those obstalces -- but some Turkmen students studying abroad -- from the looks of it, the fairly near abroad.

And it's already managed to piss off some in the community  and apparently some watchful Turkmen Embassy minders abroad because it seems to "denigrate" the Turkmen nation when the dance is done in a room with the Turkmen flag in the wall  -- it "shames" the nation, you see. That it shames the nation more to shut off Youtube seems to escape such minders.

You can also get a glimpse of the flowery Central Asian pododeyalnik (I love those) and see how these particular students improvise -- which seems to be with a lot of sheets in a zombie theme with some plastic bags -- and the shelves of a refrigerator. No shaggy Turkmen hats were used, more's the pity.

 

Turkmen Foreign Minister Headed to Washington This Month

Turkmens were turned out by the state to plant trees in the desert this week: will they take root? Photo by Golden Age turkmenistan.gov.tm

This is interesting -- Rashid Meredov, the only one of past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov's men left standing in the Berdymukhamedov administration -- and still left standing there, too, unlike so many other ministers dismissed in disgrace! -- is coming to the US "some time later this month".

Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs has a lengthy statement on Turkmen-American affairs, such as they are, at the Turkic American Conference this week.

I was wondering to what do we owe the pleasure of some of the recent political prisoner releases. Such things don't happen "just so" in this part of the world -- they happen as part of a careful bargaining. So somebody -- our ambassadors, in Ashgabat, in Vienna, elsewhere -- have been pushing for some of these "concessions" before Meredov got the gift of this trip.

That's my hunch. Of course, it might not at all be that stark or that conscious or that stated. But it is sort of in the area of the sweeteners that have to happen to do transactions with these regimes.

What does the US need from Turkmenistan?

o oil and gas rights -- but they won't get those, not any time soon

o help to Afghanistan so they don't have to give it -- and they get some of that

o access to go in and out of Afghanistan and prosecute and wind down the war -- which they get some of, and at a price

o help with Iran, i.e. by not helping Iran -- which they get some of

o other stuff -- regional cooperation on water, building the Wall of Shame around Russia, things like that.

And then there's TAPI. TAPI strikes me as one of those totemic Silk Road illusions that never comes to pass but maybe is never meant to come to pass, as it is a metaphor to bring together people across borders, like the Internet...or something.

But Turkmenistan has gas, Pakistan and India need gas, and Afghanistan does too, and there it is. It inches forward.

Interestingly, human rights and democracy -- or whatever passes for those issues in Ashgabat -- are now always woven into the statements on Turkmenistan like a red thread in a Turkmen carpet. But not a red thread that will stand out compared to the orange thread of gas...or something. But still:

In January I had very productive meetings with President Berdimuhamedov and other senior Turkmen officials in Ashgabat, and later this month Foreign Minister Meredov will come to Washington to meet with Secretary Kerry. In these talks we discuss frankly, as friends, all aspects of our relationship, including our appreciation for the support that Turkmenistan provides to Afghanistan and its leadership on increasing regional connectivity and economic cooperation; the growing commercial relationship between our countries; and the importance of building civil society and democratic institutions and ensuring respect for human rights.

Increasing people-to-people ties and cultural exchanges are an important part of developing any bilateral relationship. Last November, our embassy in Ashgabat staged a three-day “U.S. Culture Days in Turkmenistan” event that featured American jazz, bluegrass, and rock groups; a painter and a jewelry maker, both from Albuquerque, New Mexico, with which Ashgabat has a sister city relationship; a delegation from the Smithsonian Institution, which has longstanding collaboration with Turkmenistan; and a chef from New York.

 

A chef. Okay. Well, good! I can't seem to find out what he cooked. Cheeseburgers?

What I do hope doesn't happen on this trip is that there are those sort of embarrassing moments with dictators that occur at things like round tables at museums where we pretend we're all interested in world culture together. Some of that is necessary to oil the wheels of commerce, but there shouldn't be any sort of Vint Cerf letters praising Berdy's contribution to the Internet as we've had in the past -- ugh. Please, let's don't. Let's try to attend to appearances this time.

Human rights groups, sharpen up your petitions. It's hard to have things to ask for concretely when some of the prisoners are out, others you don't know about or they show know progress, and it's hard to capture the deplorable situation in an "ask".

Even so, I hope Kerry and others at the State Department do the following:

o not praise the press law and make it clear it's not enough and forcing stringers or freelancers or blogger to register is not on

o speaking of the Internet, open it up, stop blocking Youtube, Twitter, etc. and join the rest of the world

o move forward on university, professional, medical, etc. exchanges and restore the Peace Corps which was kicked out

There's lots one could add -- "come clean and report all the revenue from oil and gas sales that go directly into the president's coffers" but State Department people like "doables" and "deliverables".

As for TAPI, one could always ask them to be more transparent on any number of things. Good luck.

What about a little thing like making the jobs exchange that is being held out as a boon to the impoverished people of these countries a transparent and accountable thing, so that the people in those countries get those jobs, get living wages, and it doesn't just get outsourced or people exploited? Use the Internet for something good.

 

Foust Once Against Fails in the Moral Context on Drones

Photo by Debra Sweet

What's more nauseating: seeing Joshua Foust trying to make hash of the human rights movement again, or seeing all the myrmidons in the Central Asian research business nod and retweet?

Once again, we're supposed to take cynicism as a substitute for insight, and we're supposed to see penetrating wisdom in the commonplace phenomenon that yeah, people are idealistic and don't ground themselves in RealPolitik -- and then the junior analysts of IR can pronounce them as stupid -- too stupid to know what they want or know how to get it.

Oh, this posture that people are poorly informed, sloppy researchers, naive, or confused -- instead of simply moral.

It's like a textbook case of, "Nizi ne mogut, a verkhi ne khotyat," as Lenin cynically said about the pre-revolutionary period and revolution: "Those at the botton can't, and those at the top, won't," i.e. reform, or make revolution. Oh, and that's why they need that advanced guard, that guiding intellectual Party elite, see.

Here's the thing about film festivals and the drones thing in general -- they are emotional, and the topic is emotional, and it's about morality and moral feelings -- and that's okay because drones throw up real moral issues of:

o secrecy

o claims of precision that are uncheckable due to secrecy

o fears of greater power due to claims of precision

Foust always behaves in a magnetic moral context as if all the magnet filings are going in the wrong direction and it's all their fault.

But there's really nothing wrong with people protesting drones, as such, although both in Pakistan and the US, it is a totemic symbol of American power used in political movements for their own purposes.

I wonder if Foust really understands that when he hears the facile and ready anti-Americanism and hysteria about drones in Pakistan, and the call to build schools and hospitals instead of throwing drones (as he heard from the Yemen activist that he mercilessly bullied on Twitter the other day), that this is placebo politics -- it's a surrogate. In an odd way, for this generation, for these people, this American-hating is a placebo for the critique they really ought to have (and do have, in an inchoate way) for their own oppressive and abusive and kleptocratic governments which are busy helping terrorists in some ways.

There's this, too: it's just no good telling off Pakistanis and others at a human rights film festival that no, it's not a violation of sovereignty because they were invited in because they weren't part of that voluntary process. And wait, has he no sense of resonance in this region and with history? That's what the Soviets said about the tanks coming into Afghanistan or before that, Prague or Budapest. They were invited in to help save the socialist order.

Even if there is indeed a world of difference between Soviet tanks and American drones and the inviting process is more, shall we say, fluid, the fact is, Pakistan is not a democracy; people in it did not get to chose; the parliamentary doesn't have power over the military; all this is obvious. Why talk about "inviting" in a setting where clearly some political forces didn't get to participate democratically in that decision, and some feel marginalized by the process?

Leave aside the issue of whether it would be "good for the country" to have more drones kill more terrorists in an undemocratic way and oh, maybe hasten demoracy that way, as an engineering proposition. The fact is, it doesn't sound like a persuasive argument, and there has to be some sensitivity to this.

You have to wonder why the organizers invited Foust. Do they like getting lashed?!

The other day I was talking to a colleague from the establishment human rights movement, so to speak, who was trying earnestly to make the case for drones as in fact a new kind of human rights instrument because it is more and more precise and after all, that's what we should work toward with international humanitarian law (IHL), the laws of war -- precision, which means less casualities.

That struck me as a technocratic argument of the sort we hear about everything now all the time, especially with the Internet.

But, before that, there was always a debate between whether the proper subject of the human rights movement was even IHL or should stick only to human rights. No one remembers this any more, but it is worth recalling that there were some strong voices saying that the human rights movements should stick to human rights, and not get into the laws of war or crimes because those issues were better parsed by law-enforcers and militaries -- and of course the ICRC -- because they involved first suppressing what might be an act of conscience opposing war in the first place.

I kept saying that the remoteness of the control over the missiles was creepy and seemed a matter of conscience. My colleague kept saying, but the weapons are more precise now and don't cause as much collateral damage.

But here's the thing about all this then: they are secret, and housed in the CIA. And not "just because"; but precisely as a function of their precision. That is, precisely because they are precise, the information about them has to be wrapped up very tight to remain successful. There was just this unfortunate habit of terrorists hanging out in their home compounds with the whole family.

The other day I was listening to a "progressive" talk radio program dissecting the Rand Paul filibuster and rallying for Obama. One woman called in and spoke fautously of how people who wouldn't agree to Obama's budget should be arrested for "obstruction of justice" -- as if that's what it meant. She had the determined and matter-of-fact ire of someone who wasn't quite educated enough to know that the meaning of the phrase wasn't quite what she wanted (and Foust approaches all human rights activists as being like that woman). Yet despite all that, she had an essential point, from her perspective as an Obama voter -- if the president won, why can't he do what he wants?

Then a man called in whose son was a drone pilot. He described his son as "flying the planes" even though he was located in the United States and not physically flying them there. But he said, "But it's still flying the planes". There were people in Afghanistan or Pakistan who did the ground work and scoped out the area, of course. Then the people who "flew the planes" from the US. He said so much expense, care, training and precision! -- went into this that it would be "inconceivable" that it would be misused on somebody sitting in a cafe in San Francisco.

We're told that people who "fly the planes" even from thousands of miles away like this still get post-traumatic stress syndrome from killing people. But really, what's the difference between 30,000 feet up in the air, and 3,000 miles away? You're still looking at an electronic dashboard nowadays and you can't see what you hit? So shouldn't we accept this as "better" because it's more precise?

Again, the secrecy and housing within the CIA then is the problem -- it has less oversight then from Congress, and victims can't be compensated as they are when the military accidently kills them in ordinary bombings.

A band of eager lawyers and technologists who want to prove that war is "better" because it is more precise now perhaps make a more humane military, if you will, or they make a civil society of sorts that acts perhaps as a brake on military that might want to do things with less precision or expense, let's say. Foust would like to turn the human rights organizations into something like this -- appendages of the military with troubled looks on their faces about "going to far" but essentially getting with the program.

But it shouldn't then be called a human rights movement of conscience -- and that's okay to have, because in the face of the technologists, they have to say: but it's secret, so we don't know; but that kid was killed, so we're not sure.

It's not just the secrecy -- itself dictated by that very precision. It's then the psychological and political impact on other countries. Sure, corrupt governments whip up anti-American sentiment and weak oppositions faced with vicious persecution and even death convert their positions into anti-American placebos. But ordinary people, too, then begin to get caught up in the sense of feeling helpless and pinned by stronger, more precise, more deadly force out there.

We saw what resonance the #StandwithPaul stuff had on Twitter and even in the real world, and how people could somehow come to see that maybe, really, they could be sitting in a cafe in San Francisco, and...

If that much agitation could come just from the *thought* of such a situation, and the reality of only two cases of American citizens, imagine if you were in a setting where thousands of people were killed that way, and you didn't know if maybe hundreds of them weren't militants but were just kids or women and old men. Such it's a psychological situation, if nothing else, and one meriting sympathy.

Foust could only sniff:

A similar mindset afflicted the panel on Afghanistan, where outrage overpowered reason. Jawed Taiman’s documentary about Afghans’ views of the future was done very well, but the audience was raucous and bordered at times on hostile. Panelists and audience members alike blamed everything on America, on Pakistan, or on the military. Most said that Afghanistan would be just fine once the foreigners leave – a conclusion many Afghans don’t share.

Really? But the link is to a New York Times article about "strivers" and a budding "middle class" -- certainly a thin concept in Afghanistan where most people are poor. Those people have not been better off with NATO troops there for the last ten years; it just didn't work in a lot of places. That's not to suggest the Taliban and company are better, but the reason we're leaving is that we have to concede it didn't work.

And then a Twitter exchange:

Gartenstein-Ross ‏@DaveedGR

Very good column by @joshuafoust: "The strange politics of human rights conferences." http://to.pbs.org/ZdlvNz

Gartenstein-Ross ‏@DaveedGR

CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz

@DaveedGR @joshuafoust What is it that makes the human rights movement so loathsome to you guys? Is it the call to conscience?

@catfitz @joshuafoust When a problem set is complex, I think pretending that it's not (even when one's intentions are good) is harmful.

CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz

@DaveedGR @joshuafoust Oh, come now. Those pple aren't pretending the problem isn't complex; they are sifting out the moral angle they wish

CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz

@DaveedGR As always with @joshuafoust its a genre problem and a refusal to accept separation of powers and pluralism in civil society

CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz

@DaveedGR @joshuafoust Everybody, every last drone-injured child, has to be as gripped by complexity as the president's closet aide.

CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz

@DaveedGR @joshuafoust Nobody can take the moral ground simply; it is always viewed as a "luxury" by those not in power. That's nonsense tho

I always come back to that Bonfire of the Vanities insight:

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

While precision should in theory make the ordinary man more secure that he won't be caught up in a mass conflagration and the enemy is only going to target the bad guys very selectively, the government can exploit the "eye in the sky" fears that come with that precision.

Then the precision perhaps might be the very trigger of his immense feeling of helplessness and therefore greater anger.

This is about culture, and psychology and group dynamics, and I have a feeling that even the "human terrain" expert Joshua Foust isn't really good at navigating these things because the RealPolitik is too captivating. Who wouldn't want to be the president's aide instead of the injured child?

 

 

Will There Be Conflict in Central Asia After US Troop Withdrawal? Interview with Me in CA-News (English Original)

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) propaganda video. Comments on Youtube suggest they get some resistance from their compatriots.

I was delighted to give an interview to CA-News, which is a Central Asian news online publication based in Bishkek associated with AKIpress.org  (in Russian).

But because there are a half dozen or so mistakes in the translation that makes me sound like I'm saying the opposite of what I actually said [fortunately fixed within a day!], and because not everybody reads Russian, I'm reprinting the original Russian questions and my answers in English below. I've asked them to make the corrections. I don't mind, because this is an important independent publication and I support its mission. I think they do a good job.

I'm not sure how they came to ask me, a person who is not a formal expert on the region, for such an extensive interview, but they did, perhaps in search of independent analysis.

Although I've spent a career of 35 years in this field where I have travelled extensively throughout Eurasia, and lived and worked in Russia and travelled frequently to Russia, Belarus, Poland in particular for OSCE, I have never been to a single Central Asian country. I worked in the Central Eurasian Program at OSI for six years without such a boon. It's not for any lack of desire; it just so happened that at different times when I was actually invited to go to Kyrgzystan when I worked with various human rights groups, or Kazakhstan when I was a public member at the OSCE, it simply happened that I couldn't go. I doubt I could get a visa to Turkmenistan, having written critically about it for OSI for six years, or Uzbekistan, where I also wrote critically for two years -- and of course before that, I edited two weeklies for RFE/RL and other publications for many years.

Even so, I study the regional Russian-language and English-language press very carefully, go to all the conferences I can, and interview people directly either when they visit the US, or when I see them at international conferences or over email and Skype. That's certainly not a substitute for a personal visit, where you can get the feel of things and have many important one-on-one conversations. But in lack of direct exposure on my skin of the winds of Central Asia, I'm no different than most pundits who have either never been there, or have been there only infrequently, and don't even speak any regional languages.

I do think there's an advantage to having a critical independent view of this critical region. I think those not in formal structures can speak out more loudly about the corrosive effect on human rights that the US and Europe have had; the ongoing pernicious role that Russia plays; and the troublesome future of Chinese domination -- not to mention the ways in which the oppressive autocratic regimes play these factors off against each other to keep themselves in power and their people miserable.

You have nothing to lose if your job does not depend on some certain perspective. I find that the status quo in the human rights movement is to minimize the threat of terror or unrest and play up the awfulness of the regimes. That's a whitewash, given the groups in the region that have many, many more thousands of adherents that Western-style human rights groups -- like Hizb-ut-Tahir.

As for Washington, I find that far from there being the "neo con" belief that a) there is rampant terrorism and a horrible threat of Islamization and/or b) some imminent "Arab Spring" coming, there is actually nothing of the sort. Oh, there's that one paper at Jamestown Foundation or something, but that's it.

That is, those on the left, the "progressives" and the "RealPolitik" adherents constantly pontificate as if there were some horrid neo-cons or hawks or conservatives saying these things, but in fact these groups, which have dwindling influence in any event, either are following RealPolitik themselves or don't even care at all about this region (mainly the latter).

So in my view, there is this whole fake industry of anti-anti commentary, which runs like this:

"There isn't any Islamic threat at all in this region, perish the thought, it's just a poor region with dictators who in fact go overboard suppressing legitimate Muslim activity"

"There's no Muslim fervour in fact, these states are Sovietized and secularized".

"Nothing is going to happen when troops leave, it is all wildly exaggerated and people who say that seem not to realize that the US troops are the conflict generator, not the IMU"

"Russia has little influence any more in this region; it has less gas extraction, it has less money, it has length troop strength and its efforts to make a Warsaw Pact -- the CSTO -- or a Soviet Re-Union with a customs union have mainly failed."

And so on.

While each one of those statements can be true up to a point, they also lead to this strange endorsement of the status quo in these regions that in fact ends up serving the regimes, in my view.

Russia's influence is considerable, and it has been behind unrest by its action (as it was in Bakiyev's ouster and its threats to Atambayev) or inaction (with the pogroms in Osh). The remittance economies are huge -- for the labour migrants from Tajikistan in particular, but increasingly Uzbekistan and even Turkmenistan. That means that Russia winds up dominating the lives of these countries through some of their most vulnerable citizens -- not just the mainly male workers but the females left back home as head of households with children. The Russian language did not disappear from this region, even if it is taught less, because dominating Russian mainstream media, and Russian-controlled social media like mail.ru and Vkontakte, are very big factors in the media space in this region.

As for terrorism, sure, it gets exaggerated and the regimes "do it to themselves". But there are also real terrorist acts that occur. There is a sense that the presence of US troops in Afghanistan has ensured a kind of "frozen conflict" in this region that isn't on the official list of the frozen conflicts. The IMU has been tied up mainly fighting NATO troops. So when they go away, then what? Where do they go, those 5000 or 8000 or however many fighters there are? (And probably there are analysts saying they are only 2000, but who really knows, what, you did a door-to-door survey, guys?) Will they peacefully melt back into the countryside and farm happily? Or what? I think it's okay to look at that question critically without being branded as a terrorism hysteric.

Ditto the question of "Arab Spring". No one thinks there is any Arab Spring coming to Central Asia. I don't know of a single pundit or analyst saying this. Yet again, there is the "anti-anti-" industry making this claim, mainly from the Registan gang. The problem is that when you adopt that scornful skepticism, you stop seeing reality when it appears. As Paul Goble put it, there is a way in which talking about the Arab Spring is a little spring in itself. And there are signs of unrest here and there, and you don't know how they will turn out.

Remember, the same gang at Registan -- Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce -- were predicting with firm determination that discussion of oppression on the Internet was causing a chill in use, a decline in use, and even the shuttering of popular discussion pages. They implied that there would never be any Twitter revolution in Azerbaijan, that it was going to be slow and incremental and we shouldn't artificially speed it up by over-amplifying human rights cases.

Yet thousands of people keep demonstrating in Azerbaijan despite the news of repression, and they keep using Internet tools to make their case -- tools that Pearce is now blithely measuring with machinopology as if she had never written that Internet use would be chilled by such expression. It hasn't been. Facebook membership boomed. Will this "spring" last forever? I truly doubt it. Not with potential European and American oil interests -- and actually existing Russian and Iranian oil interests -- in this mix. Everybody will blame the West for the crackdown in Azerbaijan that is likely to be inevitable and thorough, and fume at the regime-tropic USAID grantees that they ignored last year (or even cooperated with) as the smoking gun of American perfidy.  But it will be Russia's money and military role that will be the bigger factor.

This is how I'm seeing it, in the end: To the extent Russian wants or needs conflict, or is weakened and can't efficiently prevent or manage conflict, there will be conflict in Central Asia after NATO troops are withdrawn.

Part of that resistance to Russian state intrusion will be Islamic ferment. If analysts were busy telling everyone these were secular Soviet states and Arab Spring can't happen, they will be uncomfortably confronted with the reality that Islam is a great organizing tool in countries where it has historic roots, and this need not be seen as a threat to the West. Yet because they've been engaged in such an industry telling us it's not a threat to the West, they will be embarrassed when in fact it will be -- as they emblematically were when the Egyptian woman activist just feted at the State Department turned out to be such an anti-American hater, 9/11 celebrator, and horrid anti-semite on Twitter, and not because she was hacked -- a fiction State had to indulge in to save face.

Yes, It Matters if the West Gives Military Aid to Uzbekistan -- So Don't

Gen. Petraeus meets President Karimov in Tashkent in 2009. Photo: US Embassy in Tashkent.

Sarah Kendzior has a perfectly dreadful article posted on AlJazeera where she is a frequent contributor. "Does it matter if the West gives military aid to Uzbekistan?" she asks, sucking a thumb that she has turned up in fact for military aid because she's never seriously questioned it.  She and the other gaggle of former defense analysts at Registan.net generally support the status quo of US policy -- and that means supporting these regimes, albeit with occasional criticism for credibility's sake -- because we need them to get in and out of the war in Afghanistan.

AlJazeera has a skewed view of the world tilting to the anti-American, pro-Palestinian, "progressive" line that dovetails with Kendzior's crowd -- and they censor or just don't cover stories. I had never known them to censor comments that were legitimate, i.e. not spam or obscene, but for some reason, I saw my comment disappear, and then when I tried to respond to Richard Szulewski, I couldn't post.

I have a few articles in the queue of Kendzior's I've been meaning to sit down and analyze for their flaws in thinking and bad faith, but I put it off until I have the time to really sit for hours and think and analyze line-by-line -- I find most people who have swallowed her line whole need a very careful rebuttal line-by-line or they won't even think of resisting her -- that is if they bother to pay attention in the first place. She is not well known in the fields of either anthropology for Eurasia or in the field of communications or Central Asian studies but she is aggressively making herself known by Twitter, the conference circuit and blogging -- which pass for scholarship these days.

Her article is a stupendous circle-jerk of thinking, as she links to her own piece in argument ("Stop Talking About Civil Society"); then she links to her fellow believers around Registan and Joshua Kucera, a like-minded comrade from EurasiaNet who turned in an awful piece back in 2011 in the New York Times that said "say and do nothing" about human rights because you can't influence Central Asia anyway. It really was pernicious, and seemed to serve the interests of those on the Hill and at State trying to get the Senate Appropriations committee to drop sanctions on Uzbekistan so they could get some modest military help which was a way of papering over a poor relationships and trying to keep the NDN going. An awful business, and Kucera even took a factoid handout from State later, that no one else got, and published it as evidence that State didn't think human rights progress was necessary really anyway, for exigency factors, even though before, they'd postured about progress as if it *was* necessary to convince reluctant senators concerned about human rights implications. Like I said, a bad business...

But Kendzior's arguments are attractive to the do-nothing RealPolitik crowd, so it's worth thinking them through.

Association for Human Rights in Central Asia proposes siging a petition against military aid. I signed it. Kendzior signed it too but she takes a pirouette to tell us she did it as a matter of private conscience, even if as a public intellectual and thinker, she doesn't believe in it. Way to show your hypocrisy, Sarah. And no need to bother.

Says Kendzior:

Analysts have long debated the ethical and strategic ramifications of providing Uzbekistan with military equipment - largely unidentified but allegedly non-lethal - in exchange for a transport route to neighbouring Afghanistan. But the heated discussion that has emerged has more to do with the moral anxiety of Westerners than with the rights or safety of Uzbeks. 

What is intended as activism rooted in a critique of Western militarism actually amounts to an endorsement of Western effectiveness, because it rests on the belief that the West has leverage, that our opinion matters, that the fate of nations hinges on us. The hard truth is that in places like Uzbekistan, it does not.

Well, that's supposed to mean that we ought not debate, because hard-assed authoritarians are going to be brutal anyway. Well, why not? We can move the slider up and down on this, surely. I will never forget a retiring general of the NDN who said at a conference that he told Petraeus and others that the US shouldn't have prostrated so much to Karimov. We shouldn't have. And neither should Kendzior. And that *is* what she does when she coldly and nastily tells every human rights activist they don't matter and therefore should do nothing, as if their advocacy is merely some bourgeois affectation of blinded Western imperialists who don't realize the evils of their own country or its clients (which is a line that plays nicely into the ALJ narrative).

Yes, it's important to call out public figures' immorality when they get too clever by half. It is immoral.

In fact, it *does* matter. Uzbekistan is avidly trying to keep us as friends so that it doesn't have to go into the arms of Russia and China only. It wants its independence from the former and doesn't want to become dependent on the latter. Oh, and Turkey, too. So they like dealing with the US in terms of business and military matters as it gives them some options and choices. We can exploit that to try to get concessions on political prisoners or terms of how we *are* going to prostrate ourselves which is *not that much*. We should always and everywhere call out the Uzbek regime's bluff -- they claim they need help with terrorism and will be cooperate with the war effort in Afghanistan because of that need? Okay, be helpful then.

But other than a few token political prisoner releases, what the US has gotten is only more expulsions of its own funded projects, and US-based non-governmental groups like Human Rights Watch have been expelled. So that prompts Kendzior to her hard-nosed, callused view of how to see this situation -- which comes straight out of Karimov's vision of himself:

And that is the point. Despite the changing relationship between the West and Uzbekistan, the brutality of the Karimov government has remained consistent, impervious to Western influence or Western demands. Uzbekistan's government will do what it wants regardless of how it hurts itself or others. There is no carrot and no stick, only cruel, cold dismissal.

Well, yes and no. Lots of Uzbeks still want to come to the US to study -- and do so and eventually they will grow up and some of them might have some influence on events in their country. Some of them got in political trouble even with very mild educational programs and were forced to remain here -- Kendzior and Registan in fact adopted them. They openly discuss life after Karimov, who will not live forever. So cold or not, cruel or not, dismissal or not, water wears away the stone, exiles discuss, they interact with dissenters inside the country, alternatives are created, the US funds foreign broadcasting, support some NGOs abroad, provides aslyum for some fleeing -- and an alternative political and civic space is made. Certainly more of a political space than would exist if we put Sarah Kendzior in charge of civil society, which she repudiates and says we should stop talking about.

Citing herself, Kendzior discounts that any chaos is coming:

The debate over military aid arrives among speculation that the departure of NATO forces from Afghanistan in 2014 will leave Central Asia in chaos, an outcome predicted by several analysts. This argument assumes that the NATO presence played a significant role in achieving regional stability, a view I disputed in a recent article showing how Central Asian "peace" is structured on citizens' fear of their own governments.

Well, except, she can't be sure. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. And they didn't predict the Andijan uprising and massacre, the Arab Spring and crackdown, the big marches in Russia and crackdown, and so on. If we left it up to these armchair anthropologists that farm out their own surveys to others and don't visit the country to work (and maybe they can't), we wouldn't know anything about unrest in these societies and would be utterly prepared for various scenarios. Oh, I guess we do that a lot, then. But...You have to keep an open mind. Kendzior does not have one. She keeps hammering the same RealPolitik message home as if somebody's budget depends on it. And probably somebody's budget does, and I don't mean her university's.

Kendzior believes ANY talk about possible terrorism or militarism and unrest are just ridiculous. That's insane! This is an area that *does* have some instances of terrorism, even if some are manufactured. There are something like 8,000 Muslim prisoners in jail. Many of them were wrongfully jailed, and that means their relatives are held down only by fear and intimidation -- and that may not last forever, like it didn't last forever in Egypt where people were tortured. We have to care, and we have to develop ways of engaging the regime while in power, those people if they are released and come to power, and everyone else.

She then claims that Akrimaya "didn't exist". But I've heard Uzbek exiles speak openly of its existence as a fact including some that took part in it -- and by that they don't mean some terrorist operation like Al Qaeda, but a Muslim businessmen's society. Here's what I said on ALJ in case it is removed:

It isn't so material to determine whether Akromiya is "real" or not, i.e. was it a fundamentalist Islamist group bent on terror. It was a group of Muslim businessmen who helped each other. And they went to break their fellow businessman out of jail because they thought his jailing on charges of corruption was unfair, and knowing the lack of due process in that country, that is likely. But then they killed policemen and took others as hostages and then human shields as they faced down government troops. So they committed violence, that's wrong, that's illegal, and the human rights groups protesting this massacre always seem to skip over that part way too lightly. Yes, there seemed to have been a lot of women and children who peacefully gathered in the square who were then mowed down by government troops. But government tanks and troops can rationalize their massive human rights violations when the incidents are started by gunmen doing a jail break and a shoot-out, you know?

I think it's the right thing to do not to sell this government lethal weapons. We will not pry them loose from Russia or help them fight terrorism by doing that. Once troops are removed from Afghanistan, we should not be so craven to them. We should attempt to engage them with a series of incremental steps and if they reform or make concessions, adjust our behaviour accordingly.

What's so awful about Kendzior's ideas is that she winds up with an unjustified quietism and endorsement of the status quo -- the authoritarian regime about which we should do nothing because we have no leverage.

***

I can only repeat what I've said before about why you have to keep a level head about terrorism and not just knock the Jamestown Foundation because they aren't in your tribe:

But what happens when you mount academic theses that unrest can "never happen here" or that Islamic fundamentalism "can't happen" is that you are unprepared with policies when it does. If you've assured the world that there is no Hizb-ut-Tahrir problem whatsoever, forgetting even that there might be if the prison policy changes (and it must if we are to insist on our human rights ideals) -- then when a country *does* grow more religious, even shy of the extremities of HuT, decision-makers are unprepared. If you've spent years telling everyone that Islamic fundamentalism in Tajikistan isn't really a problem any more and the civil war is over and the threat is exaggerated, then you have no framework to understand that pretty much all significant dissent in Tajikistan seems to take the form of Muslim activism, and then policy-makers may view what is normal and natural for a country as suddenly a threat. The very analysis that seeks to minimize unrest or religious revival in opposition to mythical promoters of these concepts then winds up fueling the hysteria they claimed to see in the first place.

As I've said before, the US could do more to tighten up its act even within the circumscribed options it has with Uzbekistan -- remember when Karimov threatened to shut down the NDN because the US gave a human rights award to an Uzbek activist?  Karimov is thinking not only about "after 2014" but his own succession. Public and private diplomacy on human rights can be more vigorous.

Kendzior concludes by making it seem as if she is nuanced and thoughtful -- although she's told everyone to stop talking about civil society, she's told everyone that it is pointless to sign petitions, and she's told everyone there is no terrorist threat -- so it's all a sleight of hand and a propagandistic manipulation:

Uzbekistan poses the tough question of what should be done about a country that does not respect international law or its own citizens. There are no easy answers, but one way to start is by acknowledging that the solution does not hinge on Western action, for good or for ill.

Focusing on military aid addresses Western hypocrisy - a subject notable in its own right - but does little to address the everyday challenges Uzbek citizens face. As the issue of Western military aid brings renewed focus on Uzbekistan, we should make sure we do not neglect the quiet, more pervasive forms of violence, the routine brutality that takes place away from foreign eyes.

ALJ eats up anything that talks about "Western hypocrisy" but "Western hypocrisy" is the least of the world's problems because it's dictated by the world's far worse problems: Pakistani intelligence support of the Taliban and related groups; the Taliban and its supporters itself; Al Qaeda; Assad in Syria; Bashir in Sudan and the ongoing state-sponsored civil war, essentially; Putin in Russia and the suppression of civil society there; China hacking the US and suppressing its minorities and extracting resources to grow stronger. Kendzior seldom waxes eloquent on the hypocrisy of any of these abusive forces.

Indeed, the situation in part *does* depend on Western policy in support of internal actors. It has never depended on anything else. Nobody brought about a spring in Prague or Cairo by themselves; they had solidarity if nothing else, but more often somebody to help pay for printing presses, and today, circumvention software. It's a myopic, cynical and most of all immoral view (posing as amoral and pratical). There's nothing wrong with basing American foreign policy on morals.

What's interesting to me more than my own censorship on this article are the people who manage to speak or who are "under moderation" and have to be clicked on now to see, such as Richard Szulewski (in case the post is removed, reprinting here):

Whenever a person starts a supposedly serious article with the phrase..."the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, a group comprised mainly of exiles from Uzbekistan,"

It shows that further reading is not necessary.

Ms. Kendzior...we get it. As a recent Anthropology PHD your insights are INCREDIBLY valuable to world affairs. You completely understand central Asian politics and the intricacies of Geo-politics...

Or it could be that you hate America and are willing to use this incredibly valuable loudspeaker called AJE to bash anything pro-western.

AKROMIYA is real. YOU have debunked nothing and claims otherwise shows your sheer hubris. My experience in the nation directly contradicts your claims and will be happy to show you proof of the same. Uzbekistan is a nation struggling to find itself after decades under the Soviet thumb. Troubles? Yes. Evil? No.

And you left a quote out M'am..."The threat may not be imminent, but extending security assistance to the Central Asian states is justifiable, Blake maintained."

Please Ma'm...stop your attempts at political analysis. You are embarrassing yourself.