Different Stans

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.

 

Will Unrest Break Out in Central Asia or the Caucasus?

Turkmens performing in state-orchestrated parade on Flag Day in Ashgabat. Photo by Golden Age, State News Agency of Turkmenistan.

No.

At least, not right now, and probably not next week.

Oh, there might be another wave of pogroms as there was in Osh in Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 where hundreds of people were killed, mainly Uzbeks, and thousands displaced, but it might be in some other setting, not Kyrgyzstan's south, but who knows, maybe Tajikistan, as police shoot-outs of suspected terrorists have occurred regularly there since the civil war was over.

Or there might be another massacre of workers as there were in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan in 2011, but probably not that again, and not there.

That's just it -- whenever unrest does break out, whether in Andijan in 2005 in Uzbekistan, where hundreds were massacred or in Osh as I mentioned in 2010, the authorities make sure it is tamped down very well after that, making numerous arrests, silencing or jailing journalists and bloggers and citizen reporters. So that's that, we get it.

Except, we don't. Because unrest does occur, sometimes with large numbers of people, and it surprises those who aren't prepared. Like the overthrow of Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan in 2012, which shows signs of Russian engineering, but which couldn't have succeeded if there hadn't been underlying social disatisfaction with energy price hikes (induced by Russia) and other deeper and long-term economic and social malaise.

Nobody was ready when 20,000 or even 60,000 people came out on the main squares of Moscow and other Russian cities after Putin's orchestrated re-election, and nobody who got enthusiastic about the prospects then was ready for the severity of the crackdown that is now inevitably coming.

So yeah, unrest, but they tamp it down but then, they don't. So you have to be ready, and you have to have some theory about how society changes in these countries -- and that would not be "due to Internet penetration" or "development of the middle class" -- the mantras rehearsed by State Department officials and pundits worldwide. If only Internet saturation reaches X point that it reached in, oh, Iran or Azerbaijan (where unrest is reaching the thousands now in demonstration), why we might see those droids we're looking for.

But oh, remember This is What Can Happen To You, when Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior said about Azerbaijan that publicizing the news of the crackdown on Internet bloggers would chill the use of the Internet? Make people not want to go online or be very careful about their activities online? Remember how I was browbeaten to death for daring to suggest there was an Internet surge in Uzbekistan? But I countered this and said it was an Internet campaign that got the "donkey bloggers" released and I countered their theories of the efficacy of "networked authoritiarianism" (Rebeccah McKinnon's term) here and here (Is There an Arab Spring Bounce in Azerbaijan?) and then here for Central Asia. That is, I don't have ANY illusions that any Twitter revos are coming soon to these countries to utterly turn them over from head to foot, but I do ask: Why Can't We Say Azerbaijani Protest is Influenced by the Arab Spring and Social Media? Of course you can, and you don't need me to say this, you now have the released Emin Milli on the conference circuit to say it.

So last week, we were told at the OSCE Internet 2013 conference by Milli, the former political prisoner and blogger who just served 15 days in jail for his chronicling of demonstrations over the death of a soldier in the army, that there are one million sign-ups on Facebook. That's a lot of people for this small country. Socialbakers, the industry source on Facebook sign-ups, says there are more than a million now.

Says Socialbakers:

Our social networking statistics show that Facebook penetration in Azerbaijan is 12.20% compared to the country's population and 23.97% in relation to number of Internet users. The total number of FB users in Azerbaijan is reaching 1013080 and grew by more than 147280 in the last 6 months

Internet penetration was reported as 44% in 2010 by the ITU; then it was reported last year as 68% and is growing. So it's a lot, and people who say that Azeris are scared off the Internet by oppression were wrong, but people who say that such large percentages of Internet penetration will lead to revolution are also wrong, as the authorities are still very skillful in picking out people to coopt, intimidate or jail and torture as needed to keep the peace -- especially for those Western oil and gas companies coming in to develop the Shah Deniz II fields.

The number of people on the square in Azerbaijan isn't one million and isn't 28,000 but more like 2,000 or 200 sometimes, depending on the topic.

Now, Central Asia is much, much more "backward" or behind when it comes to the Internet, let alone Facebook, and has not had the kind of "Youtube protests" about local official corruption that then leads to street demonstrations -- although the phenomenon still can be found here and there even in these countries.

So you have to be ready, as these things can jump the synapse -- significant unrest/revolution/unheavals in Azerbaijan would obviously affect other neighbouring countries and so on.

Even so, we're been getting for years now articles that tell us not to worry, everything is boringly stable in Central Asia, and implying that anyone who crafts any other scenario is just hopelessly mired in Twitter mania and Jeff Jarvis-style over-romanticization of social media's power (that would not be me) or just not "getting it" about the Arab Spring, which didn't turn  out to be "all that" in the end as we well know (and this article, Aftermath of a Revolution, in the International Herald Tribune really sums it up well).

Even so, along comes Sarah Kendzior to tell us that everything is boringly stable: The Curse of Stability. Kendzior, who, together with Katy Pearce, in an article they'd probably like to forget now, told us how cautious we must all be about Azerbaijan (and the big crackdown and big sleep could be still coming there anyway as well all know, but each time the concentric circles grow).

This article was kind of written already on Kendzior's political home base, Registan.net, by Myles Smith: Central Asia: What Not to Look For, datelined January 2013.

Kendzior doesn't link to her colleague but should have, as he put down the markers for the prediction businesss, and I couldn't disagree, although as I said, you really need to have better theories of change and a more hopeful expectation about the people in these countries and their need to have a better life than they do under their current dictatorships.

I could answer Kendzior in detail but then, I already have in the past, and did on another article exactly a year ago by another specialist, Scott, Radnitz, Waiting for Spring, who told us "not to hold our breaths" and compare Central Asia to the Arab Spring -- and it's a good thing we didn't, as we'd be as blue as a UN peacekeeper's helmet now.

Even so, I'll just cut and paste below the fold what I put in the comments to Radnitz's peace again, because it still applies. And keep in mind that what the Arab Spring had was Al Jazeera (not WikiLeaks or Anonymous, silly, that's just self-serving hacker twaddle). Central Asia doesn't have that; it has Russian TV. So, you get what you get, even if you add Facebook.

Tajik Opticon #5

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

This is my little newsletter on Tajikistan that comes out once a week on Saturdays. If you want to see past issues, look to the column on the right down below for the key word "Tajikistan". If you want to get this in your email or you have comments or contributions, write [email protected]

o One Step Forward (Facebook Re-Opened), Two Steps Backward (Twitter, Russian Sites Closed)

o Could You Ever Turn an Anodyne Development Job in Dushanbe into Anything Real?

o Will Tajikistan Really Become Like Yemen, Guys?

 COMMENTS:

Oh, geez, didn't we just all laugh at the Tajik minister of communications and get Facebook opened up again with the help of the US ambassador?! And now Twitter is down and all the Russian social network sites!

Yes, this is terrible. Most likely it will end in two days. Or maybe 7 days. It's not like Russian troops in Tajikistan are going to get those sites right back up, any more than whatever US military are in Tajikistan got Facebook working again but...Russian troops need those sites, too, so it's not over yet. It's more about which providers are hooked up to which members of the Family in charge of the whole country, and what's in it for them. Watch this space.

Also I think the head of the Internet Service Providers Association, which is independent but subject to governmental directives, got it about right -- it's not about perfidious US envoys who care only about their own California corporations or Russian indifference to their own business people, as @etajikistan was implying last week; it's more about the Tajik elections in a year. Every single resource available, administrative or otherwise, will be deployed in keeping the same set in power.

We all worry about how Tajikistan will develop, especially when foreign NGOs are increasingly blocked, social media is blocked, and domestic NGOs defunded or de-legitimized. How will these groups survive?

TAJIKISTAN SHUTS DOWN TWITTER AND OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS

Tajikistan has ordered local Internet providers to block Twitter, one of more than 100 sites including popular Russian-language social networks starting next week, an industry representative told AFP Saturday.

"The (government) communications service has sent Internet companies a huge list of 131 sites that must be blocked in the country from Monday," said Asomiddin Atoyev, the head of the Tajik association of Internet providers.

So while access to Facebook was opened up last week, now Russian sites are being blocked:  Vkontakte [In Touch], Odnoklassniki [Classmates], the most popular social networking sites in Russia with many users in the ex-Soviet Union, and Mail.ru, an email service.

The head of the Internet Service Providers provides an explanation:

"The next presidential elections will be held in Tajikistan in November 2013, and this will bring even more harsh control of Internet resources and independent media," predicted the head of the National Association of Independent Media of Tajikistan, Nuriddin Karshiboyev.

MISSING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA FIX? TAJKINO HAS DVDS FOR YOU

Just in time for the holidays, Tajikkino has released a DVD box set collection of documentaries on Emomali Rahmon's activities as Tajikistan's president during the last 20 years.

Each year of Rahmon's presidency is detailed on a separate disk, twenty in all, with the remaining seven disks of the 27-disk collection dedicated to Rahmon's role in developing various sectors of the country.

Among those seven are films such as "Emomali Rahmon and Food Security" and "Emomali Rahmon and Energy Independence."

US CALLS FOR RE-INSTATEMENT OF TAJIK HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP

The US seldom says anything about Tajikistan from Washington, but the US mission to the OSCE is empowered to make critical statements -- and thank God it does. Here's a statement as delivered by Ambassador Ian Kelly, to the Permanent Council, Vienna, December 13, 2012

The United States notes with concern that a court in Tajikistan ordered the NGO Amparo to close on October 24, 2012, citing alleged minor administrative irregularities in the organization’s operations. We support Amparo's recently expressed intention to appeal the court's ruling, as the organization seeks to continue its important work. Amparo has worked tirelessly since 2005 to empower the youth of Tajikistan through human rights education and to monitor the human rights situation of some of Tajikistan’s most vulnerable groups, including orphans and the disabled. Amparo is an integral part of the burgeoning civil society tapestry in Tajikistan. Its efforts are precisely the sort of activities that every country should encourage in its civil society in order to strengthen the rule of law, democratization, and respect for human rights.

The United States calls on the government of Tajikistan to reinstate Amparo’s license to operate consistently with OSCE commitments to respect and protect freedom of association.  We further call on Tajikistan to refrain from similar actions against other NGOs working to improve life for Tajikistan’s people.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

WANTED: A LAWYER WHO CAN TAKE THIS SILLY DEVELOPMENT JOB AND MAKE IT INTO SOMETHING USEFUL TO PEOPLE

Here's a typical USAID development sort of "rule of law" job description -- (it's called ROL in the business, although ROFL might be more appropriate in some settings, given their judicial systems). The title is "Program Director" and the program is "Equal Before the Law".

This time it's at the Eurasia Foundation, but it could be any of these still-existing US-funded sort of jobs.

And if it's anything like the hundreds of other jobs in this business, the person who is drafted to fill it will be hired because he has already proven himself as a US bureaucrat, and is able to fill out elaborate report forms and draft budgets, and not because he can actually push the envelop in Dushanbe.

When I read the wimpy job description, I wish they could add things like this:

o Establish contact with practicing lawyers who defend human rights victims and do what you can to assist their work even quietly and help them if they get in trouble; meet those lawyers who protested the whopping punitive fines on their media clients, or those still brave enough to try to help those accused of extremism;

o Keep trying to get the Tajik authorities to lift their ban on the registration of the human rights group Amparo and let lawyers into the courtrooms where "extremists" are being tried;

o Make sure you invite a wide variety of people to your programs, not just the approved and combed government lawyers or officials but people both with and without law licenses;

o Help people with everything from literature and ideas to contacts and pointers to sources of funding to go behind your own silly little program;

o Be careful what you tell diplomats, you could be WikiLeaked. Practice good online security and be well-behaved offline -- nobody likes drunken, ugly Americans who also hit on the locals;

o Keep your go-bag packed by the door, because you may be expelled suddenly because you are doing a good job -- and have a zip drive of your stuff ready to roll and easy contact of all major news and diplomats who can easily protest your expulsion;

You get the idea. I don't think enough people do it this way. Yeah, I get it that I'm writing a description for a Human Rights Watch job that in fact should also have in it "Be willing to accept and roll with death threats emanating from close watch of your personal life by creepy people."

But still. More can be injected into these anodyne roles and never is.

IS IT MALEVICH OR IS IT TAJIKISTAN?

Is this Kazimir Malevich's famous Black Square painting? Or is it Kulyab at night? You have your answer from the Tajik blogger Hasavor, who blogs in Russian here (and hasn't gotten the memo yet from foreign planners that would instruct him to stop using Russian so we can all share in his insights). Translation:

"How is it possible that in a country that sells electricity to Afghanistan and builds the highest flagpoles in the world, gigantic (although empty) libraries, enormous mosques and super-expensive residential complexes for rich people doesn't have enough electricity for ordinary people"?

"We continue to live in the stone age. The people are chopping tees for firewood, heating stoves with dung fuel and buying up coal for the winter."

h/t Global Voices.

RIPPLE EFFECT OF BAN ON FOREIGN-FUNDED ACTIVITIES

Like Russia, which has gotten a lot more attention doing this, Tajikistan has cracked down on foreign-funded activities; in October, there was an official ban on foreign-funded seminars and conferences. Hey, do these CIS leaders attention their on Russian-funded conferences where they plot and harmonize these things?!

I'm going to try to be very upset that somebody can't have an all-expense-paid seminar in Dushanbe, truly I am, but the real problem with this is that the per-diems that can keep Tajiks alive also dry up with something like this and the contacts that can be helpful even in silly development jobs.

And of course, scrutiny of foreign funding then is the next thing to come.

Western diplomats are shocked at the ban, since international NGOs play an enormous role in the country’s economy, public health, and infrastructure.  Students are traditionally the main target of these NGOs in developing countries such as Tajikistan, which is still recovering from years of stagnant Soviet rule.

This role isn't without its controversies as we've reported regarding the Agha Khan Foundation.

h/t @ericamarat

HOW CAN YOU SUPPORT NGOS IN TAJIKISTAN?

Wanted: More pretty mountains, less ugly realities. Photo by dwrawlinson, 2006.

The question then becomes how you can support NGO activity in Tajikistan if the government bans it.

And you have to ask the question that if the government is banning it for some, why isn't it for others? And what is to be done about sorting this out?

This organization -- about which I know nothing directly -- appears to be trying to solve the problem of how you survive when the UN doesn't renew your original start-up grant and when perhaps you don't have other options with other big funders.

You sell calendars of the beautiful Pamir mountains.

So if you're indignant about the failure to sustain NGOs, why, you can go buy a £9.95 calendar from this outfit that supports eco-tourism in the Pamirs, META, founded by UNESCO and now 'restructured' and struggling to exist on its own.

Someone will explain to me why the Agha Khan folks left these people out, or maybe it's a different opera -- I have a lot to learn. But the idea is one that might work for others.

I'm just trying to figure out who can pose for "March" for the "torture" concept that some other groups need to illustrate their causes on their calendars.  Anybody to pose for "June" for "domestic violence"? Ok, back to the pretty mountains...

HOW MANY TAJIKS CAN FLUSH THEIR TOILETS?

Outhouse in Bulunkul, Tajikistan.  Photo by kvitlauk, 2009.

"Only 5% of population have access to safe drinking water and drainage in Tajikistan," says the scare headline based on a UN report at CA-News.

But that's incorrect and misleading, so you have to go see what the original report said by looking at the UN News Centre.

"Access to clean water one of most pressing environmental challenges," is the way the UN directly states it.

This is how they wrote the story more clearly:

The EPR finds that only one third of Tajikistan’s 7.2 million inhabitants have access to chlorinated piped water. Some 30 per cent rely on spring water and the remainder of the population depend on river and ditch water sources. Only five per cent of the population are connected to public sewerage.

They also mention the tailings from mines as does CA. We're going to keep hearing about those 55 million tons of radioactive waste in every conceivable way under every conceivable rubric -- because it makes a good scare headline -- until the cows come home -- or they don't, and die glowing. It's not as if nothing is being done about this problem, as we reported, but it's a perfect storm of problems in Tajikistan, and this is just one more thing.

TAJIKS LOVE THEIR FELLOW PERSIANS AND HATE THE JEWS:  IRANIAN TV

You know how I said we don't have very many polls really to explain the attitudes of Tajiks to Islam, extremism, the treatment of suspected Islamic extremists and terrorists in their country, and so on. Well, we don't.

But, to fill the gap, there is always Iranian TV!

Say, if you want the polls to come out right, pay for them yourself and put them on state-controlled TV in an authoritarian state, I always say.

But there's more -- and totally predictable, about Israel:

The Zionist entity was least favorably viewed with 57.5 percent of respondents choosing negative and very negative to describe their feeling about the regime. England and France followed the Zionist entity with 30.6 and 28.8 percent respectively.

Evil Satan America is not even mentioned, and perhaps not mentionable.

Well, this is what you get from a poll about the two Persian speaking members who are members of the Economic Cooperation Organization, as Iranian TV helpfully explains.

HOW IS TAJIKISTAN NOT LET YEMEN? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

Nate Schenkkan ‏@nateschenkkan asks on Twitter:

Serious question: if we project out 5-10 years, how much does Tajikistan look like Yemen in this description? http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/12/19/zero_farce_thirty?page=0,2

In the piece he links to, about the controversial film about hunting bin Ladn called Zero Dark Thirty, Ty McCormick interviews Ali Soufan, who says this:

We also need to study the incubating factors that promote terrorism. What are the factors in South Yemen that are making people and tribes join al Qaeda? For example, one sheikh, when asked why he was sheltering al Qaeda fighters, responded that the government had promised to send him six teachers. Fahd al-Quso brought 16 teachers. In some areas al Qaeda has also supplied electricity and water. These things don't cost much, and we used to give billions of dollars to the Yemeni government, but most of it went to line pockets. It did not reach ordinary people. So we have to deal with the roots of the problem: What are the incubating factors for terrorism? And there's no cookie-cutter approach to this. What works in South Yemen probably won't work in the north of the country, and what works in Saudi Arabia probably won't work in Libya, because there's a range of incubating factors. Sometimes it's sectarian, sometimes it's tribal, sometimes it's economic, but the roots are never religious or ideological.

We could add that what works in Yemen won't work in Tajikistan, either. But for Ali to tell us that the roots are "never" religious or ideological is just plain daft. Of course they are religious -- extremist forms of Islam -- and of course they are ideological -- and some Islamism got its start with copying Marxism-Leninism, and it's okay to say that. Every single Central Asian regime sees it that way, and our job isn't to pretend they aren't seeing some real problems with extremism (how did the Arab Spring turn out) but to persuade them to address it in less abusive ways.

Ideas matter, people think about them and study them and talk about them and then sometimes they do them, and we should follow that and not blank it out of the equation. If it were possible to fix countries by just 10 more teachers for every Al Qaeda gifting of teachers (and what kind of teachers those might be!), USAID would have triumphed in every corner of the world by now; OSCE too.

Come on, Yemen and Tajikistan are not really so alike, although to the "progressives" in Washington with their my-focals, any place where there is American activity can all seem alike and all evil.

Here's how these two are different:

o Yemen 24.8 million Tajikistan 7 million

o Yemen has considerable Saudi Aid backing it up; Tajikistan has some but nearly nothing like Yemen

o Yemen gets some US aid, but a lot more from Russian and China -- say, ditto Tajikistan but the dynamics are different as the number of US military in Tajikistan is dwarfed by the number of Russian military.

Asia Times explains it all for you:

Russia has stolen a march over the United States in the multimillion-dollar arms market in cash-strapped Yemen, whose weapons purchases are being funded mostly by neighboring Saudi Arabia.

The Yemeni armed forces, currently undergoing an ambitious modernization program worth an estimated $4 billion US, are equipped with weapons largely from Russia, China, Ukraine, eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics.

With the attempted bombing of a US airliner on Christmas Day by a Nigerian student, reportedly trained by al-Qaeda in Yemen, the administration of President Barack Obama has pledged to double. Yemen’s military and counter-terrorism aid, to nearly $150 million, to strengthen the besieged government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

I've just spent the same half hour looking online that I've spent many times before trying to find the exact dollar number for how much US military aid goes to Tajikistan, and it's hard to do and there aren't clear answers -- but I think it's a VERY safe belt that it is not $4 billion, you know? It's more like that $150 million to Yemen, that looks very insignifant to Russia and China -- whose aid never stirs the blood of the NGOs and the pundits in Washington like US aid.

Yes, Nate can say something like this not only because Russia and China simply don't bother him as much as America -- he's American and in America and it's easier to reach: CENTCOM is directly involved with Tajikistan -- they're easier to scold than Russia not only because they are closer to hand but because they tell you what they are doing.  We also know about the "secret drone war" in Yemen because we have free media to cover it; the Russian free media, such as it is, is preoccupied usually with other things.

TAJIK  PARLIAMENT APPROVES LAW AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Wedding musicians in Khorog, Badakhshan, 2011. Photo by Evgeni Zotov.

RFE/RL reports a new law responding to the problem of domestic violence in Tajikistan:

The law includes a statement that the elderly should play an active role in preventing domestic violence among young families.

The advice of elders carries significant weight in traditional Tajik society.

According to official statistics, more than 200 women took their own lives in 2010 and a majority of the cases were related to domestic violence.

Nate Schenkkan frets that this "a bit mild."

Yes. But it's better than -- if you'll forgive the expression -- a stick in the eye.

One does have to worry about a law that tries to solve modern problems -- all the men having to go work abroad and some of the women also having to go do that now, too, instead of herding goats -- and then tries to perpetuate ancient solutions to them from institutions that have now broken up (like the family) or which, like the elders may help certain patriarchal traditions best left discontinued, like wife-beating.

UNFPA also tries to get the Islamic elders in Sudanese society to do more to get the African men to stem the epidemic of rape of women. Sometimes it works. Generally, it doesn't.

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT BIG NEIGHBOURS AND BIG POWERS THAT DON'T HELP YOU VERY MUCH

Alexander Cooley ‏@CooleyOnEurasia tweets about a new report from Finland:

Interesting and topical new @FrideEUCAM working paper on the security-development nexus in #Tajikistan http://www.eucentralasia.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/PDF/Working_Papers/EUCAM-WP12-Tajikistan-EN.pdf

The report is by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland EUCAM Security and Development project implemented by FRIDE and the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland -- and one bonus from clicking on that link is that you will sort out all these acronyms and what they mean.

 

The EUCAM-SD is a key component of the EUCAM programme and focuses on the links between security challenges in the Central Asian region and the need for development in the broadest sense, including governance, poverty reduction, ethnic tension and social equality.

I could only take the time to skim it now, but it looks useful. Let me say this: this report comes from a country that has also itself had to grapple with the problem of having a very big neighbour on its border who, well, Finlandized it. Tajikistan has that same big neighbour, too.

Shop in the Pamir mountains. Photo by Sugar Melon.

"Great Gain, Not Great Game" -- But Increased Militarization?

Mitsubishi ATV given by US in EXBS Vehicle Donation program to Uzbek Institute of Nuclear Physics

Argh, who writes these lines?

Assistant Secretary of State for Central and South Asia Robert O. Blake, Jr. put out the transcript of a speech yesterday made at Indiana University's Inner Asian and Uralic Natural Resource Center  titled Toward a Great Gain, Not a New Great Game. OK, who profits, as Lenin would say?

Most of the references to human rights are generics, but there's this:

It is important to note that we always take into account the political, economic, military and human rights situation of a partner country when deciding what kind of security cooperation to pursue. As an example, we provide only non-lethal assistance to Uzbekistan because of our concerns about its human rights record. But we continue to engage, making it clear that our relationship can reach its full potential only when Uzbekistan meets its human rights obligations.

Non-lethal, but still military, i.e. still assistance to police and troops that might be directly or indirectly, as a system, part of human rights abuse. I don't believe human rights and democracy "rub off" from training, and that those kinds of exercises are mainly fallacious and at best, aspirational -- and really more about having contacts with regimes so that when all hell breaks loose you have people to talk to. Or even before all hell breaks loose -- in another program, the US supplies vehicles to the IUzbek nuclear institute to be able to zip around and monitor radiation at borders. During the presentation ceremony in July, Amb. George Krol explained:

The U.S. and Uzbekistan are partners in the fight against transnational threats including international terrorism and the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The problem of proliferation and trafficking of illicit materials is not just a problem for our two countries but for the world, and the work performed by Uzbekistan’s Institute of Nuclear Physics is vital to making the world safer.

These Mitsubishis are donated for "the war on terror," and are hopefully used for their intended purpose -- if used wrongfully, it's more likely they wouldn't be involved in cracking down on dissidents so much as driving groceries home. But speculation that the US might leave military vehicles or equipment (or more seriously, sell arms) remains -- and there's nothing wrong with continuing to watch this with that speculation in mind, because it could happen quickly. For one, we have Blake's words at a press conference in August in Tashkent which are a reassurance, but also involve his own thinking of what might be expected -- but not certainty:

AP:  Also in Uzbekistan, there have been some reports from Russian media recently suggesting the possibility that during the drawdown during 2014 that military equipment might be left along. What assurances can be made making certain that the wrong things do not end in the wrong hands, by which I mean weaponry.

Blake: First of all, the process of allocating Excess Defense Articles is only just beginning. We are beginning the consultations on that. It won’t be just for Uzbekistan but for all countries partnering on NDN. There will be quite detailed conversations with our military people based in embassies in each of these posts, with host nation counterparts on this thing. With respect to Uzbekistan, I do not think there will be any lethal weapons of any kind that will be offered. I think most of the kind of things that will be on offer will be military vehicles, Humvees, those kind of things. It is in our interests to provide those kinds of equipment. Uzbekistan has been a strong supporter of the NDN. That has in turn raised their profile with international terrorist organizations, who may want to target Uzbekistan in retribution. So, it is very much in our interest to help Uzbekistan defend itself against such attacks.

We are certainly prepared to think about how we can do that. I myself have been engaged over the last year in the U.S. Congress to get a waiver so that we can provide non-lethal military assistance to Uzbekistan, even though they have not met a lot of the human rights conditions that would allow for more regular military assistance. That waiver has been approved. We are providing non-lethal military assistance now and will continue to do so, and the EDA process will be one way that we could help.

Around Blake's trip to Uzbekistan in August, the Uzbek regime acquitted one token activist, Shuhrat Rustamov, as Democracy Digest reported although of course a dozen or more human rights defenders and journalists remain, and many thousands of religious prisoners remain. I haven't seen an independent read-out of this civil society meeting, which was likely choreographed and selective, but at least it was a departure from past years and trips by high-profile US officials who avoided civil society.

The Indiana speech doesn't add anything new with regard to these intentions or the prospects of deployment of a US base, but it certainly doesn't make such speculation seem unreasonable or even "conspiratorial" as Joshua Foust has claimed. It's an evolving situation. Joshua Kucera at the Bug Pit focused on the speculation about whether a base would be negotiated and noted Blake's denials. Although no base was negotiated, he felt the trip was used by Blake to understand Karimov's motivations and intentions for leaving the CSTO. But then Kucera overlooks the real practical goal of the visit, as Democracy Digest pointed out, in describing the "sweetener" to this trip that came with the activist's court acquittal:

The ruling came as Obama administration officials prepare to negotiate an agreement with Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s authoritarian president, to permit thousands of military vehicles, and other equipment to transit from Afghanistan through Uzbek territory.

This week General William Fraser III, the Commander of the U.S. military Transportation Command (TRANSCOM), visited Uzbekistan to meet with Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdulaziz Kamilov and Minister of Defense Kabul Berdiev to discuss issues relating to the Northern Distribution Network through which cargo transits Uzbekistan en route to Afghanistan. Those issues are likely less about supplying troops in their last year and more about bringing the heavy military vehicles out. All in all, the effort is to increase closer cooperation between the Uzbek and US militaries, as this other recent program for fraternization also indicates. 

The UK has also, of course been very busy doing this same type of negotiations -- and this is what prompted the AP reporter to ask whether these transiting vehicles could "fall into the wrong hands," i.e. Uzbek military and/or Interior Ministry troops/police that might use it to oppress their own people as they did in Andijan in 2005 or -- I would add -- terrorists.  Certainly when *thousands* of vehicles are going from point A through point B, some of them will get lost, stolen, misappropriated, and maybe given away, despite Blake's claims that this will be tightly controlled.

Kazakhstan also was described in the speech yesterday with a strange amalgam of business and human rights:

Turning to some of our specific security priorities, we have excellent cooperation with Kazakhstan on non-proliferation issues ranging from proliferation prevention to improvement of the regulatory framework for strategic trade controls, and we look forward to building on our cooperation on mutual security concerns with complementing progress in human rights, and labor and religious freedoms.

It's too bad we couldn't have that "religious freedoms" for Uzbekistan, too.

Then for Kyrgyzstan, hopefully not by design, no mention of human rights but something about "services". Is there a "service" citizens can sign up for to get equal treatment under the law if they are ethnic minorities like Uzbeks?

In Kyrgyzstan, which also hosts the Manas Transit Center through which all of our troops going to Afghanistan pass, we are helping the new democratically-elected government to reform the security sector and to address issues related to corruption and rule of law. We are also helping the government improve services for citizens.

The NDN continues to be vital despite resumption of relations with Pakistan and truck routes opening:

The Northern Distribution Network, or NDN, is perhaps the clearest example of the benefits to the U.S. our security engagement with the Central Asian countries has yielded. Over the past year, we have seen how the NDN provided critically important alternate routes for our non-lethal cargo transiting to and from Afghanistan, particularly when we were experiencing challenging moments in our relationship with Pakistan.

I do wonder a) whether small business get to contract with the NDN or only the big state cronies and b) how that GM plant, which was reducing its output, is doing and c) whether there is any really stringent review going on of the corruption issue in contracts, per the waiver passed last year that still provided for six-month reviews.

But here's the part that is new -- or at least, articulated with more emphasis, and contains the seeds of concerns about further militarization of the relationship with Central Asian dictatorships, and their own further militarization throughout the region. Many people think of 2014 as a kind of cliff, after which US troops come home and only a few remain behind to turn off the lights. But the Administration now describes the post-withdrawal period as a Transformation Decade , and that Transformation Decade actually includes, well, the continued presence of troops:

In addition to our important bilateral security relationships, the United States helps facilitate increased regional coordination and support for Afghanistan. The Central Asian countries are vital partners in support of the International Security Assistance Force’s efforts against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, especially as Afghanistan increasingly takes the lead for its own security, as it has done now for over 75 percent of its population. None of us has an interest in seeing Afghanistan ever again become a platform from which Al-Qaida or others could attack our homeland.

The Central Asian countries will remain important partners as a NATO Enduring Presence replaces the ISAF mission in 2014, and as Afghanistan embarks upon its Transformation Decade between 2015 and 2024. Afghanistan will increase coordination with NATO on internal security and with its neighbors on shared issues such as border security and combating flows of narcotics and other contraband [emphasis added].

The United States is likely to maintain a presence in Afghanistan, the particulars of which will be negotiated over the next year. We are committed to the success of Afghanistan’s security transition and to regional security, and we have communicated this commitment to our Central Asian partners.

Certainly there will be a lot less troops in Afghanistan, but I wonder if it's fair to say there will be more military advisor presence then in neighbouring Central Asia -- for a number of reasons, including the fact that the Central Asian governmentgs will want to have some US troops as a counter to Russian troops, and as a deterrent to Islamic insurgency springboarding from Afghanistan.

As for the concept of "Afghanistan as platform for Al Qaeda," I think the way to think about this is more like this: Al Qaeda is the platform from which attacks on our homeland and our diplomats abroad are launched. Or: Al Qaeda is the software that can be installed on any platform to attack our homeland and our diplomats abroad. And it seems pretty permanently installed in Afghanistan.

MTS Back in Turkmenistan -- But Only for Foreigners

Is Russia's mobile company MTS back in Turkmenistan just for foreigners, or for everybody?

Rumours have been floating around for some time, punctuated by upbeat predictions from corporate executives, that MTS was going to get back into Turkmenistan after a protracted hiatus since December 2010, when Turkmen tyrant Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov turfed out the Russian cell company unceremoniously, leaving 2.4 million customers in Turkmenistan without cell phone service -- and that meant Internet access as well for some.

The reason for the expulsion was in one sense straightforward -- a five-year contract had come to an end and negotiations for a renewal had floundered on the Turkmen demand to get a bigger cut. There was also an assumption that with the Arab Spring and all, the Turkmen government just didn't want 3G or 4G and further Internet expansion to come to their country. They do a good job of blocking the Internet, with all of Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites all unavailable. They also have Chinese engineers as experts and their monitoring equipment installed for a song.

Berdymukhamedov said he wanted competition to the sluggish, poorly performing sole state provider, named  Galkynysh (Revival) like every other thing in Turkmenistan that is poorly performing, too. So he invited back the Finnish telecom Nokia Siemens and the Chinese mobile company Huawei and said he wanted to see even three mobile companies compete in Turkmenistan.

Not it's not clear where those deals are going, but maybe that was a ruse and a feint to get MTS back to the table on less favourable terms. Who knows.

It's also been rumoured that the Turkmen government would turn on MTS at first only for foreigners or only for those in the capital or for the "specials".

Sure enough, when an orchestrated media law conference was convened in Ashgabat this week by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the foreigners who came prepared to criticize Turkmenistan even within the confines of such an exercise were then pleasantly surprised that the cell service to which they've become addicted to in their own countries was working.

Ali Navruzov, an avid blogger an activist from Azerbaijan (@ljmaximus) reports "MTS is just back in #Turkmenistan! I was a witness of a historic moment :)" in reply to my query.

He was live-blogging the conference so check out his feed if you would like to see a less-sanitized version of events than you'll get from Turkmenistan: The Golden Age. (Why hasn't *that* been renamed Galkynysh?!)

I naturally asked if MTS was turned on just for the area around the conference with the foreigners, or for everybody all over Turkmenistan, and the next day he replied:

"As I reported yesterday, second cell phone operator in #Turkmenistan #MTS was back - today I learned it could be only for us, for roaming."

All the better to monitor you, my dears!

As Ali reports, Turkmen officials were all for the Internet and all for universal standards, but naturally asked penetrating questions like this: "MP Kurbannov: All schools should get the Internet, but question is what kind of the Internet?"

Indeed!

"What kind of Internet" is a question that Dave Winer asks!

Pete Leonard did a story on the conference but didn't address the all-important mobile issue. Mobile is how the Internet grows by leaps and bounds in these countries.

When asked why Facebook was blocked, Navruzov reports, a Turkmen Foreign Ministry official said he couldn't answer and since the head of Turkmentelekom wasn't present, he would have to wait to ask him. We saw that one coming!

 

 

What Will Be Tajikistan's Plan B?

Foreign Minister Zarifi at CACI SAIS in Washington, DC, May 17, 2012.

The NATO Summit in Chicago provided an opportunity to hear a number of Central Asian officials speak who stopped in Washington on their way to the summit.

I've blogged about the many challenges Tajikistan faces as US troops exit Afghanistan in 2014 and the issue of terrorism and related challenges to religious freedom.

Foreign Minister Hamrokhon Zarifi spoke at CACI SAIS May 17 on "Tajikistan and Central Asia in Light of 2014." Dr. S. Fred Starr opened the meeting. Zarifi worked for Tajik national security, i.e. the Soviet KGB from 1973-1993 and then in the 1990s served as ambassador to Austria, Switzerland, and Hungary and then came to the US from 2002-2006. So he is an important figure in terms of understanding the deep security issues of not only his own country but the region, and also understanding the thinking in Washington.

Like so many speakers today, he described the turning point for the world and his country in September 2001; Tajikistan of course was riven by civil war from 1992-1997, in which 50,000-100,000 were said to be killed; perhaps it says something about the world's indifference and the closed nature of the society that the estimates vary so wildly.

The first thing Zarifi mentioned was his 1,500 kilometer border with Afghanistan which is "very, very different" than our borders -- "it's not like Canada" he explained helpfully for people who know this but need to think about it more -- and even different than Mexico.  It's mainly mountainous rock, and it has very little electronic facilities; 70% of the border does not have any kind of electronic surveillance, electric fence or physical barrier or communications but just some dirt paths.

"I hope we will be well-prepared for 2014," he said -- and his schedule in recent months reflects the worry of the world -- he has been to Beijing, Moscow, and now Washington, and consulted with the SCO and CSTO; also Istanbul and Bonn  Zarifi described his border as "quite silent," i.e. generally without incident, although of course EurasiaNet and other sites do have a number of stories of border incidents, mainly with Uzbekistan. "Except for drug aggression," he added -- which, while not perhaps the precise English phrase he meant to say, conveyed something very important: the fierce determination of aggressive drug-smugglers against whom the world's various weak defense systems can't cope. There wouldn't be 30,000 illegal drug-related deaths in Russia otherwise.

So what's his thinking about how to address the post-2014 challenges? Well, he has a lot of ideas. Building highways and railroads -- there are a number of projects in progress and coming on line later in the decade. Vocational training, investment, trade; regional disaster and risk monitoring, regional fiber optic networks. CASA-1000 is quite important for these plans as it is building cooperation in the electricity market -- Tajikistan suffers from such shortages of electricity that it impacts its press freedom because people literally can't print news or share news online if they are in the dark. "There are serious shortages in winter-time," added the minister.

There's the Turkmen-Tajik rail system of 500 km that will go through the northern part of Afghanistan -- these plans for more crossroads on the Silk Road are in play because Tajikistan does not have much ready gas and oil to export like other Central Asian nations -- the deposits are very deep and not accessible, so railroads for other countries' products become important -- of course, if relations with Uzbekistan ever improve enough (and Uzbekistan seems to exercise most of what we could call "transport aggression" here by simply blocking Tajikistan's passage due to disputes about the hydropower station that could deprive Tashkent of water for its cotton crops.)

Although not mentioned very often or tied up to human rights concerns in the way Uzbekistan is, Tajikistan is part of the Northern Distribution Network, with important trucking routes.

Different powers have their own idea of what the Silk Road should be, of course, and Zarifi indicates that it is not just a repeat of the old Central Asian Silk Road but draws in China, Iran, and Iraq, and connects the former Soviet Union to the Arab World.

Notably, as to future projects, particularly gas pipelines, Zarifi makes it clear that neither disputes and rivalries among Central Asian powers, or America's concerns about relations with Iran will not be factored in, to deter regional development.

"Nobody will be a resister or destroyer of these projects. Everybody will protect them." They all understand it will help their families, he added, as the economic cooperation will help the region be stable.

As for pipeline projects with Iran, "Why should we avoid participation of Iran in gas pipelines? I'm not seeing any obstacles. If Iran would be ready to discuss, we will discuss."

Zarifi also spoke optimistically about converting crops from opium to sweet potato, which Afghanistan exported 20 years ago. Obviously, the cash values of these crops differ wildly...

Dr. Starr pointed out that a lot of the projects, such as those related to CASA-1000, were due to come online in the future -- 2016, 2018, and so on. Meanwhile, 80% of the GDP of Afghanistan derives from the NATO countries. "A lot of bad things could start to happen" when that's withdrawn, he cautioned.

"First, we don't know, some will stay," said Zarifi hopefully about the troops. The Coalition should "finish his job," he said.

"Do you have a Plan B?" asked Starr. Indeed.

What sort of Plan B could Tajikistan, a small and poor country with 25% of its own GDP made up of remittances from labour migrants in Russia, have regarding this tremendous challenge on its border?

That's of course why the US military is in Tajikistan spending $1.5 million and more to train and equip troops particularly to make a more secure border.

I heard a discussion at this conference that encapsulated the problem of this region for me in a way that nothing I have heard in a decade has:  A stable Afghanistan is of interest to Iran and a stable Afghanistan is of interest to the United States.

Now, at first glance you might thing, "Can't we all get along, and a stable Afghanistan is in all our interests."

But it doesn't, because the way this is interpeted in military and political doctrine is that a stable Afghanistan encourages Iran to become more interested in it and in fact Iran would prefer Afghanistan to be stable its way -- thereby making both an increased threat to the US. A stable Afghanistan that is stable in the way the US would like it to be then becomes a threat to Iran.

I recall back in the early 1980s, analysts would comment that the real war in Afghanistan was between communism and the West, as liberals often described it -- a Soviet communist incursion that the West fought by proxy because it was interesetd in deterring the USSR -- but rather was a war between communism and Islam. Now, we've ensured that it is more about Islam and the West.

Tajikistan has a "strategic partnership" with Russia -- the labour migrants and the students in universities and of course Russia's largest military base in Central Asia is in Tajikistan. "We would like to continue this relationship," said Zarifi carefully, but of course it's not without its problems.

A stable Tajikistan is of interest to Iran as well, as they are from the same great Persian civilization. Many have concerns about a return to Islamic unrest and civil war as in the 1990s. Asked a bout a harsh new religious law, Zarifi responded:

"We all respect and love our religion, but would never have it as a diktat in our country," he said. He pointed out, however, that unlike some other Central Asian countries, Tajikistan legalized the Islamic Party. "The law is not against Muslims," he explained, "but about the responsibility of parents for raising their children."

Asked to explain why children were not allowed to attend mosques or obtain education in Islam, Zarifi said that several organizations abroad in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran were fomenting radical Islam. "We're not blaming the countries, but some groups in them," he elaborated.

According to intelligence information -- and he'd be in a position to know, or for that matter, spin this information -- there were plans to train young children in suicide-bombing, a la Palestine.

"We have concrete facts that children as young as 8 and 11 were going to be used," Zarifi said.

Later I asked some Tajik journalists whether they found this information compelling. They didn't, because they had a basic journalistic question: what are the names of these children? Who are their families? What are the organizations? What countries were involved?

When they find Tajik students are brought home from study in Egypt from Al Azhar, the top university, because supposedly they are being trained in suicide bombing, the Tajik journalists just aren't buying the story.  It's not a sophisticated notion, they feel.

If there were children brought abroad and prepared for suicide missions, as claimed, shouldn't we get more facts about them? Where are they now?

Zarifi also points out to those worried that Islam is suppressed that in the Soviet era, there were 15-17 mosques; today, there are 5,000-7,000 -- although we do hear of some being shut down.

"Nowadays, some are led by extremists who came back from the war in 1994, and nobody knows what they are teaching," the foreign minister complained. "We need to prepare our own imams."

There's a vicious circle here, however, if the belief of foreign training in Islam is accompanied with so much suspicion; 800 persons were brought back home from studies abroad due to concerns about spread of the Arab Spring.

Registan may not believe we can ever talk about the Arab Spring and Central Asia in the same breath; officials in charge in Tajikistan not only talk about it, but act on it.

"There are some in Saudi Arabia, some in Iraq, and they try to teach our children a different way." Again, we need details ultimately to be persuaded, and it doesn't seem to reflect the lion's share of Islamic activity in Tajikistan. Zarifi indicated a vision of a "modern Islam, a peaceful Islam" with people studying Islam in Tajikistan -- when sufficient numbers of domestic (i.e. state-controlled) imams are prepared, "maybe we will change our laws," he indicated.

Children have to stay in the state's school, and study -- they cannot be studying in religious schools. It is not that they are instructed not to go to the mosque at all; the idea is not to train them there, although for any religion, worship and instruction are hard to separate.

Ultimately, Zarifi's attitude toward religion was sort of summed up with this off-handed remark:

"If we pray five times a day, who will work?!"

Asked a number of times about his advice or his "lessons learned" from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Tajik civil war regarding NATO, Zarifi replied:

"Don't hurry. Be patient."

Can the Arab Spring reach Tajikistan? Recently, Zarifi heard a report from his chief of telecommunications in the government who quipped that they had "7 million people on the Internet." Of course they don't, in a country of 7.5 million -- it's a small fraction of penetration.

But they all have mobile phones, and increasingly, the phones are getting the capacity to connect to the Internet.

Starr batted away in irritation several Russian-speakers who wanted to speak to Zarifi in the language he likely spoke better than English, insisting that English remain as the language of the meeting. Russia looms over Tajikistan, of course.

But an "extraordinary painful transition" is coming to Tajikistan with the wrenching changes in Afghanistan, "and the terms are created in Washington and not in Dushanbe, and it presents extreme dangers."

The US does have a chance in concert with other NATO members and even Russia to mitigate this if it keeps a focus and a meaningful budget on the region.

Networked Academism: Is Anyone Going to Challenge the Troubling Theses of Kendzior and Pearce?

On Tuesday, March 27 in Washington, there will be a conference at Georgetown University featuring two academics I've criticized many times in these pages, anthropologists Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce. (Notably here and here, but see also here and here)

Judging from a veritable flurry of smarmy Twittering, basically what these two very tight co-authors and girlfriends, associated with the notorious site Registan.net, have done is get their friends to hold a conference and invite their friends -- that's why I call it "networked academism" -- in a parody of their own paper's discussion of the dubious concept of "networked authoritarianism".

Oh, it's always done, and we see it everywhere -- academics in a certain school of thought or discipline or location develop networks of friends, and they all speak at each other's conferences and they all write blurbs for each other's books or cite each other. It's human nature, it's done everywhere, and we've all seen it in whatever field or endeavour we're in. As an old boss at Soros Foundations used to tell me, "I don't care if you pick your friends; just pick good friends!"

In the case of this conference, I suspect Dr. Paula Newberg, Director, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown, who is convening the meeting and speaking, just wanted to have a conference about a very hot and topical issue, and invited people she knew to speak and they suggested other people they knew, and that's how it goes.  Far from sponsoring a thesis that concedes authoritarianism and implies we shouldn't fight it, she no doubt imagines she is sponsoring a discussion about how people overcome authoritarianism on the Internet. At her institute, they teach diplomats things like how to write blogs or discuss topics like "What is hype and reality in e-diplomacy?" so it's all good.

Another speaker, Dr. Séverine Arsène is the 2011-2012 Yahoo ! fellow in residence at Georgetown University; as Yahoo tells us, "Dr. Arsène’s project will explore how different notions of modernity across the globe are contextually based and how these varied representations shape the uses of social media, more specifically, as a tool for online protests."

I'll leave aside the Derrida and Foucault and Chomsky and Zizek on that bookshelf and simply note that I suspect this fellowship, part of Yahoo's Business and Human Rights Program, grew out of its considerable guilt trip for sending Chinese dissidents to the gulag. I don't know if the combination of Big IT corporate machinations around business and Big IT corporate guilt make for the best impetus and environment for serious academic study, but that question is just too big for my pay grade -- I suspect it's a question that if asked thoroughly, would take you to places that would undermine every single university in America. I'm not an academic.

The title of the conference is, "Having Your Say Online:  The People's Voice in Authoritarian Contexts."   I imagine my bristling at the uses of "The People" especially in a context where we're supposed to be talking about authoritarianism will date me to the Cold War, but I don't care -- there isn't any such thing as "the people," and even "civil society" and "the public" are institutions that can scarcely said to exist or are very fragile and fledgling in these societies anyway -- and that needs to be said. "The People" -- who are they, comrades? (Oh, and hey, I know at least one web site where the "People's Voice" is banned in the form of at least one people.)

Let's see: The conference is filled with zams -- Internews is sending a vice president; Katy Pearce is an adjunct professor of Communications, Culture and Technology at Georgetown University; Zeynep Tufekci is  Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill;  Courtney Radsch is Program Manager, Global Freedom of Expression Campaign,  Freedom House, etc.

So it isn't a big-name slate and it is probably is as good as it gets when you organize conferences with your friends (and Pearce has just arrived at Georgetown. No matter -- these are all people with lots of "mindshare"  through Twitter followers and blogs and forums; and zams, after all, do the staff work and really influence things even unbeknownst to the top bosses.

The viewpoints all range from about A to A and a half -- the differences between Kendzior and Pearce, with their doom-and-gloom news about authoritarian Azerbaijan, and Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with her over-enthusiasm about the power of networks in the Arab Spring and the revolutionary change of her own country, or Zeynep Tufekci, a booster of WikiLeaks (and celebrator of Twitter's news censorship-by-country program) are really negligible because they are all on the same managed-democracy circuit. They fawn over each other on blogs and Twitters excusing each other repeatedly for not really knowing each others' fields and therefore only willing to learn, blah blah. But they don't really differ about their central thesis: that the objective of social media is to put -- and keep -- a New Class of intellectual elites in power (including themselves!) who will decide what is effective or not effective in "global governance".

Our government, which has a much-discussed but not terribly well-funded (or speedily expended) Internet Freedom Program is supplying Katharine Kendrick, Foreign Affairs Officer, Internet Freedom, U.S. Department of State for the conference, and God help us, that may be as much grounded criticism of these extreme academics and activists as we'll be getting here.

CRITIQUE OF KENDZIOR/PEARCE PAPER 'NETWORKED AUTHORITARIANISM'

Kendzior and Pearce will discuss the theses of "Networked Authoritarianism and Social Media in Azerbaijan" in the latest issue of the Journal of Communication (I was finally able to get a copy). I've critiqued the summaries and discussions of it before as noted above, mainly here.

I've only been able to make one quick read through and I caution again that I'm not a social science academic. But I certainly have a right to critique it as much as anyone concerned about Internet freedom and how US public policy will be shaped on the Internet, so I will raise these concerns:

1. The paper is only 16 pages, of which 2 are taken up with footnotes and halves of others are taken up with charts -- it's slight. So slight as to be hardly construed as holding the weight of this awesome claim -- that reporting on abuses of authoritarian regimes using the boon of social media only retards the overall growth of social media (the hope for change) and therefore... we should stop that. Or something.

2. The paper is based on public opinion surveys made in 2009-2010 *before* the Arab Spring, which had a dramatic impact on the world, and this region, because of the many analogies (I reject Kendzior's thesis that discussing the Arab Spring's impact is "reverse orientalism" here.)

3. To be sure, the academics have studied social media content up to as late as 2011, but the surveys do not appear to be taken from that year. They also provide no indication of the social media they studied.

4. Although they make reference to the donkey bloggers' case as a premise upon which to hinge their arguments, and are studying the impact of the donkey bloggers' repression on Internet users during this period, the authors do not appear to have asked their informants in the survey about the "donkey bloggers" per se (at least, they don't say they do and don't make this explicit if they did).

Instead, in fact, they are using several questions that are part of a survey put on not directly by them, but by the Carnegie-funded Caucasus Research Resource Center as part of a larger survey that has been run annually since 2006. In it, they used a contrived "vignette" in which they mount two propositions and asked for five levels of agreement ranging from "disagree" to "neutral" to "very much agree."

As they write in the paper:

"Measuring support for protests was a significant challenge given Azerbaijanis' hesitance to criticize the government. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic as well as the political environment, this measure was presented as a vignette, a cameo description of a hypothetical situation ((King, Murray, Salomon, & Tandon, 2004; King & Wand, 2006) which allows for a specific interpretation of what the question is attempting to measure. Vignettes are less threatening because they are less personal (Hughes, 1998). The following three-step process was ultimately adopted as a result of pilot testing by the Caucasus Research Resource Center. First, respondents were given a privacy card in which they were asked to agree with one of two statements: (1) "People should participate in protest actions against the government, as this shows the government that the people are in charge" or (2) "People should not participate in protest actions against the government as it threatens stability in our country."

Obviously, these are accepted methods in the field, judging from their references, but the wording of the questions simply have to be challenged at the root:  1) the premise that "the people" can show the government that "they are in charge" is simply not one present in these societies. The people aren't in charge and haven't been in charge in centuries. They don't mount demonstrations with the presumption that they should be, or will be and 2) people can in fact perceive the authoritarian government as destablizing their own local situation with unfair actions such as shutting off electricity or forcing people to pick cotton, and may view protest as a means to restore stability.

More often than not, demonstrations in these countries are mounted on single issues like jobs or housing; in the recent case in Guba, it was about the governor's insult to people who opted to sell cheap land given to them by the government. The demonstrations are mounted on notions of justice -- often people expect that "the good tsar" who only has "bad advisors" will hear and see the victims' plight if only they can get past those "bad advisors" or "corrupt officials" and make a direct appeal. Justice has to do with making the system work as promised -- heavy punishment for miscreants, ridicule and banishment for corrupt officials -- not overturning the government or instituting alien concepts like separation of powers where some mythical "people" or civic entity will now take over and mount all kinds of supervisory organs over the all-powerful executive.

Thus, hearing any question put that way, many people would respond to the part of it that just doesn't tally with their experience or understanding and reject it -- the people aren't ever in charge and won't be. Stability is always advisable and that sounds like the right action. That could add significantly to the skewing of the outcome to a negative. And of course there's the tendency of Soviet audiences, well known from the University of Iowa studies done in the past, to pre-anticipate what the survey-taker wants and give it to him to be good subjects. The survey should factor that in with some kind of coefficient -- that doesn't seem to have been here and the problem is mentioned only in passing as a difficulty of the environment.

5. The concept of "networked authoritarianism" isn't an academic or scholarly concept, it's a journalistic slogan coined by a former CNN bureau chief in Hong Kong, Rebecca McKinnon, who has published a book about Internet freedom issues recently, but not a scholarly book.

(Oh, if it turns out "networked authoritarianism" really is a scholarly term accepted in the field, then shoot me as the networked authoritarian that you are, but I haven't heard this.)

My problem with McKinnon's use of this term -- and I've heard her speak on this and seen her numerous blog posts and articles on it -- is that it simply isn't true. Her premise is that the Soviet-type states are more sophisticated now, and use the Internet themselves now, and don't use crude methods of prior censorship or outright blockage -- instead they compete with a different narrative, or occasionally make object lessons of people in support of their authoritarianism.

Except, that's not how it is. In fact, these states don't even register certain newspapers, NGOs, parties, etc. which means at a very basic and crude level in the society there is outright censorship of the old-fashioned analog kind. In fact, they do block websites and jam mobile phones during demonstrations and engage in surreptious DDOS attacks on sites and all the rest of it in a very physical and very direct form of censorship. In fact the government is not open and the state media tightly controlled, in the most basic forms of censorship there have always been.

That they allow the Internet, the way they allow, oh, flush toilets and telephones and electricity, doesn't mean anything. It's just another layer. We never had a theory for "electricity authoritarianism" when Lenin declared that "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country".  We never had "fax" or "email" authoritarianism. Why is social media special? Because it makes collectivism easier? But it was always easy.

Sure, these governments have sophisticated sock puppets and regime tools and an oprichina-like elite around themselves whose privileges depend on their cynical support of the regime and obnoxious harassment of dissidents. So what? They don't have to be networked to censor; or rather, they were always networked, as that's what collectivism, Soviet-style, is all about -- rigid networks suppressing individuals.

6. This brings me to my main complaint about the Kendzior/Pearce thesis -- that it is too harsh a predicter -- in its rigid descriptivism -- of the poor potential for, and inevitable failure of online dissent and democratization in these countries. Sure, the regime makes an object lesson of the donkey bloggers and the discussion of their persecution in fact leads people to reduce their usage (if in fact the survey really delivers that news -- I'm not so sure it does). But so what?

What Kendzior/Pearce don't have them is a theory -- or the rest of a theory -- to explain how the activism at home and abroad grew for the donkey bloggers, and the regime was eventually forced to release them. That reality -- that these imprisoned people were released! -- is something that just doesn't fit in their model so they don't analyze it. Instead, they prefer to describe how the internal and international protests failed throughout 2010, although finally the bloggers were released in 2011.

7. Imagine my surprise at discovering in this paper that Facebakers is referenced! Facebakers, renamed Socialbakers in December 2010, is a commercial agency that cooperates with Facebook and supplies information about how many people have joined Facebook and use it in a given country.

I wrote a simply blog post for EurasiaNet about the Socialbakers' numbers for Uzbekistan, and I was repeatedly savaged on Twitter by both Kendzior and Pearce for my supposed poor analytics (!).

In fact, this was part of a drum-beat of harassment that they and Joshua Foust and Nathan Hamm cooked up to try to silence my criticism of their theses on Registan after I was banned.

Pearce wrote that she couldn't accept my simple reporting of simple numbers until she could "see the methodology" and snarked that it was a commercial firm. Huh?! But she quoted it in her own paper here! The hypocrisy!

QUESTIONS TO ASK ON THE THEORY OF NETWORKED AUTHORITARIANISM

There's lots more to say about the paper and the troubling aspects of the theses, but let me cut to the kind of questions that I think need to be asked at this conference:

1. If the documenting and reporting of human rights violations in a country leads to less Internet usage because of fear of reprisals, are Kendzior and Pearce counseling people not to document human rights abuses and publish them online? Do they recommend that the State Department Internet Freedom Program not supply training or grants to those who maintain human rights web sites?

2. If documenting human rights abuse leads to a plunge in usage, or a plunge in political discussion, are Kendzior and Pearce recommending that democracy program directors and other foreign policy personnel steer their patrons toward more innocuous activity and safer content so that they can secure the increase of Internet penetration first and benign social networking activity first, and move to more critical stuff later?

Test case: all eyes will be on Azerbaijan with the coming EuroVision song contest. Should Internet users and bloggers use this as a chance to talk about the problems of human rights and social justice in their authoritarian, oil-rich state? Or should they stick to happy musical tweeting? (Guess what: no one will be able to stop them gabbing on social media and we'll hear a lot of hate of Armenians mixed with other interesting stuff.)

(This sort of cautious incrementalism of "what the traffic can bear," BTW, was the Internews recipe for TV broadcasting in 1990s and early 2000s, and frankly, it failed miserably as countries still shut down their clients in places like Azerbaijan anyway, even with their cautious programming, as the Internet VP might be prepared to admit.)

3. Whatever "chilling affect" the oppression of people like the donkey bloggers and other journalists killed or jailed in the last year may have had, in fact, the people of Guba show that both the Arab Spring model as well as the use of Youtube to get out their message worked dramatically to remove a disliked official and get people jailed for protest to be released. How does the "networked authoritarianism" model adapt to these kinds of phenomena, or in fact do they disprove the theory? In fact, after Guba, can we really talk about the concept of "networked authoritarianism" as really working so effectively?

4. Is there another model for Internet usage and societal change that might account for the actual fluctuations and moments of progress and regress? Can there be a pluralistic approach -- some people will try the hard stuff and get jailed; others will try the soft stuff and maybe live to cautiously discuss politics on a social forum; eventually those jailed may be released and those who were cautious may be radicalized for other reasons, or even out of a sense of solidarity?

5. Kendzior and Pearce challenge two statements by American leaders that sum up the hopes for the Internet in foreign policy, "Reagan's proclamation that the "Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microship" and "Secretary of State Clinton's bet than an open Internet will elad to stronger, more prosperous countries". But what's really wrong with these inspiring statements? They're true, broadly speaking. Faxes, Xerox machines, and CNN all had a lot to do with bringing the Soviet Union down after the failed coup, and arguably samizdat, that helped galvanize and link earlier movements of dissent, helped lay the groundwork for the following electronic age.

6. If we're to be cyber-skeptics about the efficacy of social media for changing regimes, and don't credit machinery with automatic effects on societies, why aren't we as skeptical of about the effectiveness of social media in the hands of those regimes? If it's powerless, it's powerless because not only machines effect or change human behaviour.

And a question to Tufecki:

7. You've applauded Twitter's decision to censor tweets at the request of even authoritarian governments, and even declared it a helpful decision for activists, on the theory that this will provide "transparency" about the bad actions of authoritarianism and help gain support for democracy causes. You cited the need to "follow the law".

But can you concede that "the law" in countries like Russia and China, as the Russian saying goes, is a bridle that can be turned hither and thither -- that these laws are not *just* laws that liberal democratic societies would declare as right. Why concede such lawlessness and legal nihilism?

As for the deterrent effect of the "transparency," several things could go wrong with that notion -- the system could be flooded and become so much noise that it can't be coherently analyzed; and authoritarians may not wait to request censorship by tweet, but will introduce their own software or regimes to either completely cut off Twitter, or block the view of certain accounts without even interacting with Twitter's central management. We are told this already happens with Facebook, where in countries like Uzbekistan, separate pages are said to be blocked (we've even heard of separate words or entries by certain people being blocked on Medvedev's Facebook page in Russia). It would be interesting to get a technical readout on whether/how that is happening. In other words, it's quite possible that before any magnificent "censor-by-tweet" and "censor-by-country" regime comes into effect, these networked authoritarians will pre-empt with their own filtration technology.

I realize that the questions I've outlined here are not likely to be asked, and the topics aren't even included in the agenda.

In fact, the sessions are about "identity" and "inequalities" -- two standard-issue "critical Marxist" sort of academic topics which regrettably provide endless opportunity for waxing at length about "identity as a construct" and "the inherent violence of the patriarchal society" and all the rest.

No doubt there will be a discussion of the "nym wars" if Jillian York is present, a topic where I've disagreed with her strenuously because the same anonymity that she wants to award as a special dispensation to her revolutionary friends in the Middle East can be/is used to harass and heckle and bully people on line with differing views from behind secret identities, and used of course by Anonymous to hack and avoid accountability. I don't believe all platforms should be forced to add the nym feature; it should be a voluntary policy and feature that they supply if they wish to take the customer service headaches that go with it.

As I've noted before, the nym wars, driven by hordes of revolutionaries, "progressives, " Anonymous e-thugs, hackers, etc. should be a separate topic from this: asking American companies not to turn over the private data of customers in any form to abusive authoritarian foreign governments or to our own government without a lawful court order.

Courtney is going to talk about "gender". See this discussion and this discussion for a gander on how badly women can be treated in York's company.

 Finally, on a personal but definitely relevant political note, I'll say that any decent academic concerned about free speech and free intellectual inquiry both in academic and the wider culture of social media discussion must be actively alarmed at the manner in which Kendzior and Pearce (particularly Kendzior) tried to silence my critique of their academic work by making the most outrageous claims and spears. These two not only kept lobbing up @ tweets addressed to the front page of EurasiaNet where I previously worked, they went to the editor to complain about me and urge my removal. Incredibly, their machinations had an effect and an effort was made to put a total Twitter/social media gag on me to forbid me to discuss the region at all or debate anyone at all.

Naturally, I rejected that effort and when my contract expired, I indicated that I found the notion of a Twitter gag unacceptable for freelancers, especially in the absence of any contractual specification or any written policy.

I stand by everything I've written on Twitter -- there is nothing obscene or extreme there, no action that would constitute "bullying" or "stalking" -- the fake notions purveyed by these two net nannies -- that would warrant calling the police -- which is what Kendzior threatened to do to me (!) over my blog.

Networked authoritarianism! Coming soon to an academia near you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the Donkey Bloggers Were Released from Prison After an Internet Campaign: the Troubling Thesis of Kendzior and Pearce

Donkey parody video which led to sentencing of Azeri bloggers to jail.

The troubling article by Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce published in the Journal of Communication is now published here behind a paywall, where it will cost you $35 to access the article for 24 hours. Just like those old heady days of reading samizdat overnight -- except for that $35 part! Needless to say, I can't spend a day's grocery bill on these newly-baked "networked authoritarianism" gurus, so I will see if I can either get it in the NY public library or perhaps someone will have a copy in their office. Funny, both of them complain about paid academic content and boost open source stuff on Twitter, but their own article will cost you.

I wrote about my concerns related to their article here and here -- prompting both Kendzior and Pearce not only to react with thin-skinned fury but to start attacking me for "poor analytical skills" etc. myself. Academia is a terribly closed society and they are exemplary of some of the worst aspects of it -- stifling criticism, suppressing critics (Sarah assists Nathan Hamm in moderating at Registan, and is responsible for my banning from that site for criticizing the notorious Joshua Foust).

Like Evgeny Morozov, Kendzior and Pearce are anti-utopianist regarding the Internet and take almost glee in informing you just how bad authoritiaran states suppress it and how foolhardy dissenters are to resist this. And like Morozov, they discount anything but their own grim message and essentially counsel scholars -- and by implication policy-makers -- to accept this status-quo and not attempt to change it or look for alternative narratives. In reacting to hypotheses -- and documented evidence -- in the Middle East and Russia that purport to show that increased social network participation is leading to increased political activism (and that this starts with exposing the regimes' crimes),  Kendzior says:

The “failures” – the many countries where the circulation of evidence of state crimes through social media prompts no change in state practices, and in some cases, dissuades citizens from joining activist causes – tend to go unmentioned. They are, I suspect, more the norm than the exception, and they have proven the rule in former Soviet authoritarian states.

The ellusive and changing and contradictory creature known as "the Internet" may not lend itself to firm pronouncements taken only in time-slices (the paper deals with the period 2009-2011) and things may be getting better or old conceptions being unravelled, but that's not the affair of anthropologists -- they need things to stay put.

In many places in the world, including in this region of Central Asia, documenting abuses by the regime leads to change. It may not be massive as in Tahrir Square or even in Bolotnaya Square, but it is something. Not so for Central Asia and the Caucasus, as Kendzior writes:

"In the Journal of Communication article, we suggest the opposite: that greater documentation and publicizing of suppressed dissent is often what derails political protest."

I reject this thesis myself, and it's fairly easy to do so as more and more episodes pile up. As I noted, when protesters uploaded a video of an abusive governor in a province in Azerbaijan he was ultimately fired; protestors who had been arrested were freed; and increased scrutiny was given to the problems of injustice.  Shh, don't tell Kendzior and Pearce! The story completely falls outside of their paradigm; indeed, it didn't fit in the framework of this EurasiaNet, author, either, but eventually the pressure of events caused him to revise his telling of the story.

It's not necessarily an indicator of anything big, given that Facebook is relatively new and there are other local social networking sites with more relevance, perhaps, but there are now 782,000 on Facebook in Azerbaijan, and their numbers have increased significantly as we can see from Socialbakers. By the way, Uzbekistan's numbers on Socialbakers, which Katy Pearce fiercely contested and demanded to know about the methodology -- as if this respected commercial agency cooperating with Facebook to report on its growth couldn't be trusted! -- are now rising substantially again -- to 128,680. That defies Kendzior's complaint that the growth rate was slowing so much last year that the numbers couldn't really be said to be evidence of a "surge". Look at the graph again. In all the countries of Eurasia except Turkmenistan they appear to be taking quite a jump. Sometimes the facts of real life get in the way of your academic thesis.

Regrettably, Luke Allnutt of RFE/RL  tends to chase every "progressive" social media fad story that comes along has now celebrated Kendzior and Pearce -- and in a manner that I have to say is frankly disgusting -- by essentially trashing the "constricted" Soviet-era dissidents and "fractious" opposition today and indicating there is some shinier new Internety bunch who are "beyond politics" and now have "social media" instead of parties. Ugh:

When I first heard about Azerbaijan's "donkey bloggers," I couldn't help think of an opposition politician I had met on a reporting trip in the town of Lankoran, close to the border with Iran. The head of the local Musavat Party, Yadigar Sadigov, a genial and intellectual man, seemed to be the personification of the marginalized opposition in the former Soviet Union. His office was small, dark, with a few academic tomes, and posters curling up on the wall. He seemed resigned to the fate of being in a state of perpetual and nominal opposition. You didn't get the impression that this was an organization that was going to take down the Aliyev regime.

The donkey bloggers, on the other hand, were young, web-savvy, and English-speaking. The poster boys of Internet activism, Adnan Hajizada and Emin Milli were jailed for 2 1/2 years for making a video mocking the government, which involved a man dressed up as a donkey. They were representative of a new generation, unburdened by the fractious politics of the traditional opposition or of the constrictive paradigms of Soviet-era dissidents. What tied their generation together were not political parties or ideology but rather social networks and the Internet.

Sigh. I shouldn't have to spend too much time explaining why Soviet-era dissidents were in "constrictive paradigms" -- but it might have to do with facing 7 years of labor camp and 5 years of exile merely for writing critical samizdat. I suppose it's fashionable to think of anti-communist Soviet dissidents as hopelessly mired in Cold War categories, but Sakharov's "Thoughts on Progress" and Solzhenitsyn's "Letter to Leaders" still make very interesting and relevant reading -- and there's the added creepy part where Putin embraced some of "Leaders" and visited Solzhenitsyn.

The age-old debates about whether capitalism or communism is better, or whether they even work, didn't go away, as unfashionable as the progs find it in the US -- it's still the essential argument of the Internet, collectivism and "sharing" and copyleftism and memes, or the individual and freedom of expression and privacy.

So to suggest that the opposition figures in places like Azerbaijan are marginal, doomed, out of touch, fractious -- gosh, that wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that they are too often persecuted and sent to jail, would it!

Is There an Arab Spring Bounce in Azerbaijan?

Juma Mosque in Guba. Photo by Claire A. Taiwan

Shhh! There's a mosque in Guba, site of unrest, and Muslims there -- or more notably Mountain Jews and Lezgins! -- but don't think they will have anything at all to do with the Arab Spring!

A few days ago I published a blog in which I questioned how EurasiaNet's Shahin Abbasov was covering the Guba demonstrations.  He said,

Despite much online speculation, though, the protest was neither the work of opposition activists inspired by the Arab Spring, nor Islamists protesting government restrictions against practicing Muslims.

I asked, why can't we say Azerbaijan's protest is influenced by the Arab Spring and social media?

This is ridiculous. When are we going to get over this silly posturing that no protest anywhere ever has anything to do with social media or the Arab Spring spread by it? The reality is, every single protest of any size anywhere these days is influenced by the Arab Spring and by social media. It's now part of the DNA of protest everywhere, spread by the self-same mobile phones and viral social media. Why is there this constant effort to dismiss it and even ridicule those with "the Arab Spring frame"?

There has been a constant pious orthodoxy maintained around the question of the "Arab Spring frame" by Eurasianet and of course Registan.net -- and the liberals in general. We must never, ever say that the Arab Spring can "spread," or conclude that just because there are lots of Muslims in Central Asia, and they live under tyranny just like Arabs have, that there are any real parallels to be drawn.

Nonsense, I've always said, because even if we all "get it" that the stans are not going to see waves of public unrest and dictators toppling any time soon (and specifically in Guba, there didn't seem to be organized Islamist opposition behind the discontent with the governor), there will be stuff happening and it will indeed be an echo of the Arab Spring (more than the colour revolutions, certainly).

Islamic unrest has been an issue in Azerbaijan, although secular intellectuals wish it weren't.

Now Abbasov has taken a second stab at this story, this time by actually getting out of the capital and going to Guba -- or at least calling people there -- and now he has this revised version to say about it all in, Is Guba Protest Response a Harbinger of a Political Shift in Baku?

And now he's willing at least to allow one of the people on the scene to mention the dreaded "Arab Spring" concept:

One former presidential-aide-turned-opposition-activist, Eldar Namazov, believes that Guba may be a sign of changing times, saying that in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in 2011, Azerbaijani officials are more attuned to public opinion. Other opposition members have asserted the same.

“The opposition, civil society activists and experts during recent years have continuously expressed concerns about the existence of serious social, economic and political problems in Azerbaijan and have called on the authorities to start a dialogue with civil society [groups and activists],” Namazov said.

This, despite the admonition last week, "Despite much online speculation, though, the protest was neither the work of opposition activists inspired by the Arab Spring, nor Islamists protesting government restrictions against practicing Muslims."

Well, this is the EurasiaNet clarification and caveat, then -- opposition people are never supposed to be actually inspired by the Arab Spring -- lest we think especially that they are Muslims agitating for more Islam -- but officials can be influenced of it. This is sort of an "Arab Spring Bounce" theory -- it affects the rulers in Azerbaijan by its negative example of what could happen if corrupt and oppressive officials don't shape up and dialogue with civil society -- whatever that means! -- and become "better". Or get fired by the president (who has to have a hand in every single affair).

Aliyev stayed close on this one:

In an interview with EurasiaNet.org, Guba parliamentarian Vahid Ahmadov, a non-aligned politician who played a key role in convincing demonstrators to disperse, emphasized that President Aliyev “gave a clear order that weapons should not be used against protesters.” Ahmadov also stressed that the president, during the clashes, stayed in constant phone contact with Transportation Minister Ziya Mammadov, who was widely seen as Habibov’s political patron.

(I have a little difficulty believing that there is anything in Azerbaijan that can be fairly described as a "non-aligned politician" but in fact Ahmadov did play a documented role in calming demonstrators. And that while his online footprint revealing that his religion is described as "Judaism," or that he believes "only Putin" can solve the protracted Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, or that we must insist on Azerbaijan's "territorial integrity," or that there was a "genocide" committed in Guba in 1918 by the Armenians against the Azerbaijanis might mean in American terms that he was engagé, in the terms of Azerbaijan, he is as plain-vanilla as they come without turning into a scoop of ice cream.)

There's also definitely a social media factor -- somebody uploaded that Youtube!

One local civil society activist told EurasiaNet.org that investigators are checking local Internet cafes in an apparent attempt to determine who posted the video on YouTube in which Habibov makes the controversial comments that incited the protest. They are also reportedly trying to find out who posted comments on social networks calling for residents to take to the streets. The activist could not confirm reports of arrests being made.

I don't know why Abbasov still doesn't mention that this was a land-related dispute -- free land given to people was then "sold for a song" which prompted the governor to disparage the locals saying they were "traitors" because they sold free land, apparently. But this may have been taken out by EurasiaNet's editor, who can believe local details like that "ruin the flow of the narrative."

But it isn't so much about the specifics, perhaps, but about that dissing of male pride that can get people so angry:

Guba parliamentarian Ahmadov, indeed, noted that "[t]he problem [with Habibov] has been brewing for a long time.” Without getting into specifics, he said “it is not the first time when Habibov offended local residents and ignored the people of Guba.” The recent YouTube video, in which Habibov characterizes Guba residents as penny-pinching traitors, simply proved “the last straw,” he said.

While this "riot" (now Abbasov is avoiding that word he used in his first story and calling it "an outburst," "a protest" characterized also by "clashes" with police) ended well with Habibov's firing and the release (reportedly) of several dozen jailed protesters, it may spread.

Then sources are cited who would be called "senior fellows" if they were in Washington:

Political analyst Elkhan Shahinoglu, the head of Baku’s Atlas research center, believes that the government now finds itself confronted by a dilemma about how to respond to what he terms an unexpectedly serious message about the population’s level of discontent.

"The immediate fulfillment of the protesters' demands by the government could indeed be considered by some as a weakness. Unhappy people in other regions could consider that now they can protest freely and even burn houses, and the government would step back,” said Shahinoglu. “I do not know how the authorities will handle this difficult situation.”

Indeed!

This time, too, EurasiaNet's editors fail to state that Abbasov is on the board of their foundation in Baku, saying he is merely "a freelance reporter". Or did he step down?

The government may have already sensed the unrest in places like Guba and become alarmed at possible "usurpers" and "intriguers" from abroad by possibly signalling to the Soros operation that it must close or "revise itself" or whatever it is that it is doing ... I will attempt to parse this soon.