With the arrest of two Kazakh students for obstructing the investigation into the Boston bombing, scrutiny has now moved from Dagestan to Kazakhstan. The two young men, age 19, from the University of Massachusetts, are charged not just with hiding evidence -- a backpack and computer -- related to bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; it has also been reported that they heard him brag about how to make a bomb a month before the marathon.
The following are various notes I've collected on the subject. I remain dedicated to open and intense debate on this subject, unhindered by concerns of political correctness. Of course there's nothing wrong with studying the Kazakh connection in this case because it is the post-Soviet culture of this space, funded in part by our government, that led to two people lying about evidence in a bombing in which 3 people were killed and 280 wounded, many with lost limbs.
That's why. It's fine for regional experts and for that matter amateurs to discuss the case and for the press to analyze it. It's not "douchebaggery", as the notorious Sarah Kendzior implies.
Nor is it "ethnic hatred" as Kendzior also implies. It's called "having an open mind and discussing a topic freely in a free society".
The Kazakh angle in the story of the two Tsarnaev brothers, Chechens who had lived in the Chechen diaspora in Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan before emigrating to America, first surfaced in two places in the early days after the Boston Marathan Bombing:
1) In the business connections of Ruslan Tsarni, who is reported to have worked in the oil and gas business in Kazakhstan and also worked for Mukhtar Ablyazov, the prominent Kazakh banker opposed to the Nazarbayev regime who fled abroad -- even giving testimony on his behalf in a London court. Joanna Lillis of EurasiaNet has provided the most detailed account of what these connections are and what they mean and ultimately pronounces them "tenuous". I agree that the connection at present appears attenuated, but that it is worthy of scrutiny and debate precisely because we still don't have confirmation of what actors where might have influenced the Tsarnaevs.
2)In the dorm mates from Kazakhstan with whom Dzhokhar was friends and with whom he hung out after the bombing in an apparent effort to make a semblance of normality. Their relationship to Dzhokhar discovered immediately by "the Internet" in his Vkontakte account, along with pictures showing them together, were intensely scrutinized, along with the account on Twitter and elsewhere of Junes Umarov, another Kazakh youth who does not appear to be a direct relation of the Dagestanti terrorist leader Umarov, as it is a common name in this region.
Now these two Kazakh students have been arrested. According to the Boston Globe:
Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, both 19 and of New Bedford, were charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice by plotting to dispose of a laptop computer and a backpack containing fireworks belonging to bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the US attorney’s office said in a statement.
This is certainly grounds for discussing any involvement of jihadist groups within Kazakhstan in the bombing, although at this point no links have been proven, there isn't much of a jihad in Kazakhstan, although it's still a significant challenge to the regime there. And as I've said throughout, rather than merely trying to extrapolate what we know from every other Islamist bombing and try to pin this on Islamism in the Eurasian region, which may not fit, we shouldn't discount another angle -- revenge of business/crime circles close to the government unrelated to Islam, or perhaps using Islam as a cover -- or even a craven motivation of large cash payments for performing a hit for some other criminal or extreme group.
The diagnosis of one anonymous Twitter commentator, "Lin," regarding these second-generation privileged children of Kazakh state businessmen is that they are "stupid, spoiled, irresponsible, immature princes playing jihad". Well, I don't know whether to call them sovki (the perjorative term sovok means dust-pan and also Sovietized dimwits loyal to the government) or zolotaya molodezh -- the Soviet-era term "golden youth" for the children of parents in the nomenklatura, or Party approved list of top officials.
What I don't know is whether I can call "princes" young men whose fathers seem to run things mainly in...Atyrau.
FATHER DENIES ANY WRONGDOING
The Epoch Times, often described as associated with the Falung Gong and distributed at the UN and other venues in New York, recounts an interview from the Kazakh media.
Murat told Tengrinews.kz that Dias and Azamat Tazhayakov, his son’s friend, that the only violation his son could have committed was an immigration violation.
There was a connection between the two and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, according to Murat.
“They used to have common friends, they knew Tsarnaev and hang around together sometimes,” he said.
MOTIVATIONS FOR EURASIAN DICTATOR INVOLVEMENT?
So let's start from the top down to see if leaders in this region could have any reason to spite the US and be directly or indirectly responsible for this heinous act -- a line of debate I think is merited given the considerable propensity of all four of these regional leaders - Putin, Kadyrov, Abdulatipov and Nazarbayev -- for presiding over systems variously persecuting, torturing, jailing and disappearing their own citizens at home and even abroad.
The possible motivation of Putin-appointed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov for conspiring in the bombing could be his inclusion by the US Senate in the Magnitsky List of sanctions, although this angle is unlikely ever to be proven and does not have any evidence to back it up so far except a hunch. It's also possible he was letting nature take its course out of spite (also not yet proven as the Dagestani authorities were immediately responsible for letting Tsarnaev trough the cracks).
The motivation for Nazarbayev doesn't immediately present itself even with a contrived conspiracy scenario, although perhaps he was gaining revenge specifically against Uncle Ruslan for his support of one of Nazarbayev's main opponents -- but it's a stretch why that would involve scripting a caper with Tsarni's nephews involving Kazakh boys that he doesn't appear to have any reason to harm to make some point about the need for a greater security state. There also doesn't seem to be a reason to set up these boys and have them participate in this anti-American act to get anything out of America; it already has plenty close relations with Washington and would likely not want to jeopardize them over something like this.
What's more important here is not finding some facile, direct mechanism of terrorism in a particular group or plot -- which the FBI is going to be better at finding, hopefully -- but understanding the overall post-Soviet milieu as dominated by Putin, and the role of him and his crony tyrants in Central Asia and the Caucasus in conflict generation, the seed-bedding of extremism, and corruption -- all of which pose a threat to America at home and abroad. The violent and broken culture of the Soviet Union -- the gift that keeps on giving 20 years later and will for generations to come -- is what we have to counter both with public diplomacy and with realistic deterrence if we don't want these kinds of tragedies to occur.
AZAMAT'S FATHER, AMIR, BUSINESSMAN WITH NAZARBAYEV'S BLESSING
The Russian-language Kazakh press has published an account of one of the suspects and his father. According to newskaz.ru citing a local newspaper Ak Zhayyk and other sources, the suspect Azamat Tazhayakov was born in Atyrau and studied in Astana, now the capital. His father is Amir Tazhayakovich Ismagulov, chairman of board of directors of the Abylaykhan Group and a deputy of the local assembly in Atyrau. (Business and polics are often more openly connected in these countries).
Here it's also relevant to ask why 19-year-old Azamat is using as his last name in his passport not his father's last name, which would be the normal custom, but a version of his grandfather's first name, or patronymic, which is the patronymic of his father, Tazhayakov. Perhaps some Kazakh expert could explain this better, but usually the sons have the same names as their fathers, and their father's patronymic, which in any event is a Russian custom and is Russification of the Kazakhs. Unless I'm missing something, Ismagulov isn't such a famous name such as to require disguising. To be sure, I've seen Kazakhs be referred to as "grandfather's grandson" if they want to reference a rich ancestral history, but I await more precise explanation for this curiosity.
Lin (@dutt155) tipped me off to this article, commenting, "here's the rich little father" of the suspect. I'd never heard of him and while he may be wealthy, he doesn't seem to be oligarch material, and frankly, if he were wealthy, we wouldn't find him still in Atyrau going to assembly meetings in between hard days at the office of the Abylaykhan Group.
In an interview on April 26th apparently before he realized that the charges would be more serious than just overstaying a student visa, Ismagulov said, "Everything is fine with them. I'm flying to America and I will provide all details when I return back home to Atyrau." Yet I haven't heard of him having arrived in the US, or at least he's not talking to the press.
Another article from 2011 in the Kazakh press at caspiannews.kz throws some light on how these countries work -- the president controls everything, or at least pretends to control everything as a populist maneuver, and is in the curious position of having to rein in his own considerable army of bureaucrats who savage the independent business sector, seeing it as a threat to Nazarbayev's power just to allow any business at all to succeed. Paradoxically, Narzarbayev had to relax the relentless inspections of business and let it thrive again, so that the kleptocratic state at least has something to rob. It's a bizarre situation at times, and this anecdote involving the father of a future suspect related to hiding evidence in the Boston Bombing, had this strange incident occur to him.
Nazarbayev made one of his "walkabout" visits in the country, where he and his retinue dramatically go about righting wrongs and improving roads or opening kindergartens and hospitals and helping the little guy against evils -- evils that paradoxically come from the very system he presides over as iron ruler. The image is of Lenin and the petitioners or Stalin and the workers in numerous socialist realism paintings.
On a visit to a plant in Atyrau, Nazarbayev comes up to a group of small and medium businessmen, including, as it happens, Ismagulov, and says: "I'll make sure they don't touch Amir".
What that means is that if any bureaucrats try to use red tape or "the law" to harm his business, he will intervene personally. Too bad Navalny didn't have a friend in Putin like that when he did his perfectly normal lumber deal in Kirov, eh?
Before that, Amir ingratiated himself to his patron by thanking the tyrant for suspending inspections of businesses for a time (?), in order to allow business to thrive for awhile. This is a revelation both of the bizarre bureaucracies that thwart and heckle free enterprise in these countries, as well as an admission that normal regulation of business seems like something punitive that has to be periodically loosened to let business breathe, instead of being a core principle of good corporate behaviour>
When Amir Ismagulov, chairman of the board of directors of Abylaykhan Group began to thank the president of the country for his support and noted that the moratorium introduced on the inspections of subjects of entrepreneurship, which had given businesses the opportunity to develop, Nursultan Nazarbayev straightened the badge on his chest and pronounced with a smile, "Well, I'll tell them not to touch Amir." The president's quip drew friendly laughter from the entrepreneurs.
Amir is head of one of those ridiculously-long-named commissions of the perestroika-era sort that sound like they control more than they free: "The Permanent Commission on Issues of Ecology, Compliance with the Law, Law and Order, Glasnost, and Acceptance of Appeals from Citizens of the Atyrau City Maslihat".
Maslihat merely means "assembly," except a persistent phenomenon of these Eurasian countries I've found is to keep the name of their national congresses resulting from unfair and unfree elections by their name in a local language, which helps you realize that it is not exactly "a parliament" in the Western sense. (And to understand Kazakh culture, you have to follow how their kuraltai works, which is any group meeting that seems to start with riotous and chaotic democracy as everyone at the table, high and low, is heard, but which ends in dictatorship, as the group sense somehow gets identified and imposed by a few, and minorities silenced. It's a wonder to see in action.)
Amir, an engineer by training, is in the party called Nur Otan, translated as "the fatherland's ray of light," whose name and the fact that it is the largest political party in the country likely helps you understand its degree of, well, affiliation with Nazarbayev, if you didn't find the fact that the president himself leads it enough of a tip-off.
Despite his aspirations to turn his town into a "European level" city, and his fortuitous and possibly pre-scripted encounter with the president of the country, I don't think Amir amounts to a big fish in Kazakhstan, but I await information. I think he wanted to educate his son abroad for the prestige and clout factor, and now it has quite literally blown up in his face through no fault of his own.
NAZARBAYEV'S RELATIONS TO THE US: CAN HE CALL IN CHITS?
Does Nazarbayev's CONSIDERABLE influence with the United States now extend to him saying "I'll tell them not to touch Amir's son"? I wonder.
Certainly, the Kazakh government will try, especially having once made this publicized connection to this particular family -- and for the good of the name of Kazakhs, as they will see it. They will want to do everything both to minimize the seriousness of the offense and maximize their willingness to fight Islamist extremism, which is exactly what they fight savagely and not successfully in their own country, sometimes renditioning people back to torture in places like Uzbekistan.
The Kazakh government has bought out think tanks, journals, and even congressmen in this country. This information isn't hidden, because those who take gifts or fees or grants from foreign governments have to reveal this information, and with all the sunshine gov 2.0 databases around, it's easy to find. There is an entire caucus in the Congress about which not much is known, but which includes above all Lyndsey Graham who has travelled to the region a number of times.
The US needs Kazakhstan not just for its oil and gas resources and some mineral wealth, and not just as a buttress against China, with which it is in competition in Kazakhstan, and not just as part of the alternatives to Russia these regimes seek and from which the US benefits, but desperately, right now, for the next year, for the Northern Distribution Network, the route OUT of Afghanistan for our heavy vehicles and troops which went IN to this region when the roads became blocked through Pakistan.
UNCLE RUSLAN'S FRIENDS IN FORMERLY HIGH PLACES
Now, some more background and thoughts on the Kazakh angle:
"Uncle Ruslan" as everyone has taken to calling him, the brother of the Tsarnaev's father, Anzor, who became memorable for his denuncation of his own nephews and the act of terror, an admirable distinguishing of individual responsibility from the entire ethnic community that was in fact helpful in avoiding the ethnic stereotyping inevitable in these types of events.
Tsarni is a Soviet lawyer by training who as a young man in the newly-independent Kyrgyzstan went to work at Price Waterhouse in Bishkek as a legal expert on governance issues
I say "Soviet lawyer" to stress that Ruslan, Anzor, who was said to work in the prosecutor's office, Zubeidat, who was also trained as a lawyer, and other relatives, including the sister's brother-in-law, said to work in the Interior Ministry (police) of Ramzan Kadyrov, were all part of the Soviet police state. This extended family were not Chechen rebels; they were part of the system.
But when it came to Uncle Ruslan, he became associated with elements of offialdom in opposition to Nazarbayev abroad, and therefore there might be there some sort of need on the part of the Nazarbayev regime for retaliation against him, or at least neutralization of his efforts on behalf of a very controversial figure.
As we know, Ruslan Tsarni was also married for a time to the daughter of a CIA chief, retired at the time of the marriage in 1996. This has fueled speculation that he could be a CIA plant and feeds the "false flag" narrative around the Tsarnaevs, but one could just as easily speculate that he was related to Kyrgyz or Russian intelligence, although neither of these "versions" seem very plausible. The CIA doesn't need to involve family members in operations in a country where the US has a military base and extensive ties to the government and security forces; in any event, Tsarni seems to have achieved his goals by getting to America soon after -- not remaining in Bishkek -- getting a law degree at Duke, and then breaking up his marriage and remarrying and pursuing business without his CIA family. By the same token, it seems that if the KGB were interested in having an asset close to the CIA, living with the daughter of a retired CIA agent in North Carolina wouldn't likely produce much useful intelligence that couldn't be gained by less obvious means.
Diagnosis: "on na yeyo vyekhal" as they say in these countries -- he used her to get an exit visa from his country, and/or an entry visa to the US, then used her prestigious connections to get into law school, to pursue his own interests. It's a fairly normal and predictable trajectory from these countries, common in mixed marriages between the US and the FSU, and in fact is understandable, given how wretched these countries can be to live in if you are smart and ambitious.
PARTY SCHOOL
The other connection is of course the two Kazakh dorm mates who were picked out in the early days of social-media sleuthing as related to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, with whom he frequently partied and with whom he made a trip to New York, where the boys photographed themselves in Times Square, the same Times Square Dzhokhar and his brother planned to blow up later when they were escaping from Boston.
Some media blacked out the faces of these Kazakhs, believing they were irrelevant to the bomb case and shouldn't be tarred by association, but now they've been arrested for obstructing justice and attempting to conceal evidence. Dhozkhar's back pack, with fireworks from which the gunpowder had been removed, was found by the young Kazakh dorm mates and then thrown out in a dumpster along with his computer, when they sought to get rid of incriminating items from his room after finding out he was likely involved in the bombing.
There are texts and tweets to them during this time and it's not quite clear whether they are actual orders to get rid of the evidence, or just expressions of consent.
Hey, remember when "the experts" insisted that the foray of the Tsarnaevs to buy explosives in New Hampshire wasn't related to the bomb, that the set of tweets and pictures of them with fireworks weren't related to the bombs, and that it would be too time-consuming to extract that powders and wasn't worth it?
Well, it turns out that this backpack and its contents showed that in fact they *did* go through the painstaking effort of extracting the powder. Maybe this is proof of their "self-radicalizing" and "amateur" status if they couldn't even find bomb ingredients properly using the Internet; they also perhaps failed to realize they'd left a trail, and that the maker of the fireworks instantly cooperated with authorities and turned them in.
Which brings me to the nature of these Kazakh kids, and the intense desire of "progressives" to see them as small fry and innocents. And sure, they're young, and it's sad and their role is apparently not so great in the story, and comes after the bombing, and maybe they knew nothing of its beforehand.
A Greek leftist with a high following instantly tweets in a discussion about the youthful suspects "I guess we realize that arresting Tsarnaev's small time associates is not like dismantling Al Qaeda Central or something, do we?" A nice witty line typical of the contempt for which leftist or socialist Greeks and others hold America and its counter-terrorism programs, and I totally get where it's coming from. Indeed, I re-tweeted his remarks because it is important to remember that we didn't find any AQ footprint yet on this story.
Yet this points to a larger world vision of the European left, particularly in the distressed countries hammered by the recession, of blaming America for world economic woes and wars abroad, and minimizing terrorist forces by finding them justified. What, you think it's okay to hide the computer and backpack of a suspect in a killing of 3 people and maiming of some 280 people?! Why?! Why is that okay? Why do we have to disparage American law-enforcement trying to get to the bottom of this case in this fashion? What, because the suspects are young and foreign and appealing, we're supposed to just release them and pretend it's okay to hide your roomies stuff after he's involved in a terrorist act?!
There's no more basis for saying the Tsarnaevs acted alone than for saying they acted as part of an Al Qaeda conspiracy, quite frankly. For some time to come now, "progressives" and hard leftists will lean toward the former to maximize the "America's chickens coming home to roost" theory, and the conservatives and infowars types will emphasize the latter to invoke the weakness of the Obama Administration and the hysteria around world Islam's aspirations, although it is very diverse and disunited. Even so, at this point there's no reason not to look in Dagestan at Tamerlan's connections and any other connections that might turn up.
And as I've pointed out, these connections should also be look at in the sports world and the underworld of mafia crime, because in the former Soviet countries, intelligence, drug mafias, sports, and Islam can all be amalgamated or appear separately or in any mixture.
Laura Rozen tweeted that there was nothing stupider than a 19-year-old boy, remarking on the clumsy effort to get rid of evidence and then lie about it; leave it to Spencer Ackerman to comment that there was -- a group of them -- to imply that all of this is about the Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight.
It's important to understand why this happened, however, and it's not about youthfulness or stupidity; it's a culture of refusal to cooperate with authorities and lie up and down to protect one's own that has been nurtured for a century in Russia and its neighbours and has hardly been eradicated since the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago.
Had the Kazakhs behaved like a number of Americans in this story -- the cab driver, the fireworks seller, the woman who received facials and others who came into contact with the Tsarnaevs and immediately called the police and FBI to help the investigation -- they'd be heros now likely able to stay in the United States and continue their education on US-funded scholarships, instead of sitting in pre-trial detention now facing up to 5 years in prison.
That's really important to understand because it explains how everyone in and around the family could be lying, could be distracting, could be covering up -- and we may never know. And they will be doing this as part of an intensively indoctrinated culture of the police state, where after decades of people being forced to inform on their neighbours and turn them in under pain of death themselves, a culture of antagonism and refusal to cooperate with the authorioties, even when the authorities are legitimate, creates an endless spiral of criminality and corruption. The more these regimes in Eurasia crack down on civil society in general and their political opponents within their own administrations in particular, the more this criminalized antagonism, distrust and non-cooperation grows and becomes an institution in itself. Where once, the Soviet dissident would consider it "zapadlo" (a base, unworthy act) to inform on innocent fellow citizens, and where once Solzhenitsyn advised his fellow citziens to "live not by the lie" and refrain from cooperation with the police state for reasons of democratic resistance, today, these concepts can just as well conceal crime that any police, Russian or no, would be trying to combat.
To see just how little of the hearts and minds the central Russian authorities have going for them in Dagestan, see this video of the surrounding of the home of Nidal, the 18-year-old Salafist who was in the armed resistance to the Kremlin's appointees and with whom Tamerlan Tsarnaev was said to be in touch (this hasn't been proven, but only stated by a Dagestani anti-extremism official and published in Novaya gazeta). In Kazakhstan, the armed Islamist resistance has only made a few attacks and is nothing like the Russian North Caucasus, yet popular resistance to the Nazarbayev regime is present, and accounts for the years of labor strikes at the state oil companies, some affiliated with Western companies like Chevron, which lead to a deadly massacre in Zhanaozen in 2011 in which several dozens workers were killed.
EVIL OIL COMPANIES AGAIN?
BTW, a word on nefarious oil companies. When Tsarni is described as working for the oil business, or Chevron seems to have some tangential relationship to strikes and a deadly massacre, the left automatically finds proof of guilt and complicity. But no one has ever been able to prove how kocal events related directly to economic grievances in a company run by Nazarbayev's son-in-law among other cronies (the son-in-law was even fired by the dictator after the Zhanaozen events) directly ties to Chevron. I have no ideological reason to discount any such connection if it is established, but nobody has been able to come up with it, other than to wave in the general direction of this US company doing business with state oil companies. Many people want to make oil companies responsible for the human rights violations of the regimes with which they do business. That's an admirable thing to do and they should keep trying to do this.
Yet the regimes are the original problem, and they're what need to be changed, not US companies that at the end of the day have domestic laws to control them on issues like taking bribes abroad
SHOULD WE STOP LETTING IN FOREIGN STUDENTS TO THE US?
What can we do about this? Should there be filtration or even an end to student exchange programs?
Of course not, in my view. The only hope we have of dealing effectively with difficult countries and helping promote their transformation to more democratic and accountable government which is what their own citizens seek is by helping with education of the next generation.
But we do need to include in this engagement more willingness to debate and challenge the world-views of these young people acquired in state indoctrination first in their own countries, then in their American settings.
There are zillions of such students in the US, from the former Soviet Union, China, all over. It has always been the strategy of the US in dealing with the world to encourage massive education, particularly of countries with which the US has difficult dealings -- like Russia and China -- of the youth, in the belief that things will normalize in the future after the next generation has a change to become exposed to Western values.
I think these programs are disasters now, not only because they might let slip through the occasional terrorist or various petty criminals, but because they are not working to improve attitudes toward America. While they left thinks "America's wars" do all their own bad advertising, what they can't explain is why people like these kids join "Free Jahar" movements on Twitter and root for terrorist suspects. Time and again, I've run across young people like this who admire Bin Ladn for fighting America in Afghanistan, which is next door to their countries. They have these kind of fractured consciousnesses; on the one hand, they admire or even envy America, and want to come here to study; on the other, they have been heavily indoctrinated in state-controlled media and leap from that heavily tendentious and censored milieu straight into the political correctness of a typical American campus, where their Marxist professors will only encourage them to put up Che posters and read Chomsky and Zizek.
No one ever debates them; they might get through their entire 2 or 4 of 6 years in America without anyone ever explaining to them that it's their friend Russia, and their own regimes unchanged since the Soviet era, who presided over the mass murder of one million Afghan citizens during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-1989, setting up the situation for terror and chaos in Afghanistan in these countries far more than any US funding of the Afghan mujahedeen back in the 1980s (much like the Syrian situation, where the lion's share of the problem comes from Assad and his Russian backing with a billion dollars in arms, and not the US belatedly getting into the conflict and funding some resistance, some of which is radicalized and related to Al Qaeda).
The sheer moral blindess of the left on first the Soviet realities and then the post Soviet realities and their obsession with America make them poor interlocutors with these young people from the stans who collect stipends and educations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American tax-payer, but never face a single challenge to their cramped and misguied world views.
This isn't an easy problem to fix, as a free society like the US can hardly start to engage in the kind of forced indoctrination that these countries still use as a staple, and the broadcasting they do with RFE/RL abroad is by law not supposed to be aimed those in the US -- as part of an old concept of "blowback". Yet in the age of the interconnected Internet, this has to be revisted, and mainly the private sector and universities themselves have to begin to grapple with the issue of how anti-Americanism and even jihad are not being mitigated by the classic approach used for 50 years particularly during the Cold War (and which had some successes then), and have to start figuring out how to reach and debate with people we pay to learn in our country.
