I just want to draw everyone's attention to the urgent case of Dilmurod Sayyid, an Uzbek journalist who exposed corruption in agribusiness in Uzbekistan and has been a political prisoner for many years. Committee to Protect Journalists has included him in their list of reporters jailed for their work.
I just saw on Twitteran appeal in Uzbek on the BBC World Service for Uzbekistan posted by Khayrullo Fayz (@xayrullofayz), an Uzbek journalist, who summarized it for me in a few lines in Russian.
Khayrullo did give me a summary of a few lines in Russian.
As far as I understand, Sayyid's brother just visited him recently and found that he has lost 55 kilograms. He had already ill with tuberculosis. He has lost hope of getting out of prison.
The US and other Western governments do work quietly to get prisoners of conscience released in Uzbekistan and has had some success, even recently. So I hope some attention can get Dilmurod's name put forward and appeals going out on his behalf ASAP.
- In December, I was able to see my brother in a prison in Karshi . I was given a date for four hours. In October, he had his chest x-rayed, and the doctors said that the results came out good. Therefore, after the Sangorod he was not returned to the colony for tuberculosis patients in Navoi, but was transferred to a labor colony in Karshi. During the last meeting I prepared some mean, we sat and talked. But he ate almost nothing. Brother was very thin, weighs about 55-56 kilograms, and has become so small, his hair all white. Dilmurod said that he was working in the colony, perhaps he did not want to upset me and said that he was not given the hard work, - says Obid Saidov.
Note the difference between lost 55 kg and weighs 55 kg. This should be clarified but the bottom line is that he is very sick and has lost a lot of weight.
Elena Urlayeva and Abdujalil Boymatov call for resignation of Karimov on Nov. 7, 2010. Photo by p de la Fuentes.
The extraordinary scandals and dramas in the presidential palace and halls of the national security ministry in Uzbekistan lately seem almost larger than life. There are lurid tales of voices raised as the First Daughter wages a war against her sister and fights for a cousin arrested by the secret police, flinging ashtrays and slapping people -- all leading to the aging and weakened president weeping in the garden.
Meanwhile, on a lesser stage at a UN panel, you could see the dramas actually playing out, with shouting and fists banging on the table.
Long-time UN watchers are calling it the most incredible thing they've ever seen -- well, none of them are old enough to remember Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the UN Security Council.
The normally smooth-tongued and placid Akmal Saidov, chairman of the official National Human Rights Center, was literally shouting and pounding the table at a recent session of the UN's Committee Against Torture, the body charged with assessing countries' compliance with the Convention Against Torture.
Uzbekistan is notorious for torture in its prisons and other facilities of incarceration, and also notorious for backing and filling and double-talking its way out of pressure from the international community. Tashkent is infamous for perpetuating old Soviet methods; when the International Committee of the Red Cross came to visit a prisoner who had filed complaints of torture, the wardens simply substituted the real prisoner with a prompted fake who said everything was fine. Relatives were able to uncover the deception, and eventually this fraud and other difficulties -- like not being able to obtain conditions usually required by the Red Cross for visiting prisoners privately -- led the ICRC finally to withdraw from Uzbekistan.
Although this is a bit simplified, Steve Swerdlow of Human Rights Watch was live-tweeting the session which will give you the flavour. The UN, particularly under pressure from Russia, China and other major-league human rights abusers is always trying to take away NGO privileges at the sessions, but cell phones, lap-tops and i-Pads are allowed in the session, mainly because the UN diplomats and experts refuse to do without them.
Saidov accused committee members of using outdated information.
"You also refer to 'systematic torture' -- an antiquated, hackneyed expression that has long been thrown in our faces," he said. "There is no such phrase as 'systematic torture' in international law. That's not my conclusion, but that of the former UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak."
After Saidov's angry outburst, Felice Gaer, vice chairperson of the UN committee and the country rapporteur for Uzbekistan, said the committee dealt only with the facts. She recalled the saying, "If you can't cite the facts, you cite the law, and if you can't cite the law, you bang the table," and said that's what the committee had witnessed at the review.
There were some other highlights -- CAT has repeatedly asked for what was being done in terms of redress for families of victims of the Andijan events, the massacre by Uzbek troops in 2005 of hundreds of civilians who came out on the public squares to demonstrate, following a jailbreak by armed opposition, the murder of several policemen, and the taking of hostages. (Human rights NGOs tend to emphasize the first part of that sentence and not mention or minimize the second part, but the two have to be mentioned together -- violence did beget violence.) Saidov's answer: "Andijan is a closed subject for Uzbekistan. It's over." Once again, he claimed that the fact that Human Rights Watch could send observers to the trials of some of the people in the Andijan case was somehow the same thing as providing a full and frank report and permitting impartial investigators. It was not.
Another creepy note was sounded when the Chinese member of CAT -- this is the UN, and any country can run for elections and be voted into these bodies -- praised Uzbekistan for "making so much progress" -- why, it already had drafted several "national plans of action" -- which is the usual sop to UN requirements -- avidly encouraged by the UN bureaucracy -- to try to do something about bad human rights records.
Saidov responded: “We’re studying the Chinese experience” and “Your experience is highly valued by us.”
Ugh. Nobody wants to think about what it means in real terms when China buys up half the gas and mineral companies and such in Central Asia. Well, that's what it means.
The official summary record also failed to mention all the names of the cases -- representing every issue from absence of lawyers to coerced confessions from torture to unjust imprisonment, etc. brought to Uzbekistan's attention, which I obtained:
1st day
Ruhiddin Komilov, Rustam Tyuleganov and Bakhrom Abdurakhmanov
Vahit Gunes
Solijon Abdurakhmanov
Turaboi Juraboev
Sergei Naumov
Zahid Umataliev
Dilmurod Saidov
Azam Turgunov
Bobomurad Razzakov
Gaibullo Djalilov
Rasul Khudoynazarov
Norboy Kholjigitov
Yusuf Jumaev
Elena Urlayeva
Tatiana Dovlatova
Azam Formonov
Rayhon, Khosiyat, and Nargiza Soatova
Gulnaza Yuldaseva
Mehrinisso and Zulhumor Hamdamova
Katum Ortikov
Mutabar Tajibaeva
2nd day
Erkin Musaev
HRDefenders :
Nosim Isakov
Ganihom Mamatkhanov
Chuyan Mamatkulov
Zafarjon Rahimov
Nematjon Siddikov
Batyrbek Eshkuziev
Ruhiddin Fahruddinov
Hayrullo Hamidov
Bahrom Ibragimov
Murod Juraev
Davron Kabilov
Matluba Karimova
Samandar Kukanov
Gayrat Mehiboev
Rusam Usmanov
Rashanbek Vafoev
Akram Yuldashev
The Uzbek delegation didn't have any answers, but apparently they may provide them in writing later.
Kyrgyzstan will be reviewed November 11th and 12th at the UN CAT.
The mission shouldn't have gone, because they couldn't get all the conditions they needed to do a proper independent monitoring without interference. They then participate in the sealing of a bad situation instead of maintaining standards.
As I pointed out, no human rights groups should have endorsed this and should have loudly and forcefully condemned it.
That's what you do when you're an NGO and not a government.
Human Rights Watch signed their cautious welcome, yet their Uzbek researcher still felt called upon to object to the conditions:
Campaigners are concerned that the observers will not gain unfettered access to the cotton fields. “It is essential that monitoring teams be comprised only of independent observers and not include any Uzbek officials,” Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia Researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, told EurasiaNet.org.
Yet surely HRW knows that it's too late to insist on conditions when the mission is already deployed and the bad terms already set. While HRW received $100 million from the Soros Foundations to establish them as the leading human rights group in the world, they should have long ago told the Soros strategists that they were withdrawing from the Cotton Campaign because it was ineffective and wishy-washy when it needed to be strong.
I don't understand how it is that the Cotton Campaign couldn't keep its distance from both State and the ILO on this, but I think it has to do with a variety of factors:
o the wish to stay "engaged" -- these post-Soviet authoritarians are masters at guilt-tripping liberals into staying involved with them for fear that they are "missing opportunities" or "moving the goal-posts" or "never being able to say yes". The fact is, the only things these regimes understand is a consistent "no," pressure, and the refusal to legitimize
o possible promises from State that they'd either move Uzbekistan down to tier 3 on the trafficking report, or some other gesture -- I've been told by officials myself that "after 2014, things will get better" because the US won't be under pressure to maintain the NDN;
o former State Department officials who have revolved into Soros or Human Rights Watch or other groups who feel beholden to their old comrades and/or a perspective that says you must "stay engaged"; Tom Malinowski, the former advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, a former Clinton Administration official and great engager of Russia and the post-Soviet countries, is now Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; HRW received $100 million from the Soros Foundations;
o some members of the coalition, i.e. in the apparels industry, who don't want to appear too radical.
Well, all of these issues are endemic to any coalition that ranges from radical to conservative on an issue. There are reasons to keep coalitions like this going, but individual members should feel they can step out and criticize Uzbekistan when they need to.
International Monitors are still in Uzbekistan: Authorities are instructing students what to say to them
23.10.2013
A father whose child studies at Yangier Construction and Communal Services Vocational high school in Syrdarya region, called Radio Liberty. After requesting anonymity, he reported on a meeting between the international monitors and students of his child’s high school on October 22.
Prior to the meeting, all the first-year students (ages 15-16), who recently returned from one month picking cotton, received special training on what to say to the visitors and were thoroughly coached.
"My daughter told me that her teacher told them that a commission is coming to visit, so they need to teach the students what to say to the commission. The director himself came and taught the students what to answer if they are asked questions. While in the cotton fields, these children were taught what to say to anyone who asked. Back at the school, they were taught to say that they didn't go to pick cotton, that they studied, that their facilities are great and warm and they don't have any difficulties," said the father.
On October 22 a commission accompanied by government officials arrived to meet with students and schoolchildren in the Syrdarya region. Residents assume that the commission members were the international monitors, because since September these international observers have been monitoring across the country and researching the situation with child labour and forced labour.
Despite efforts by officials in Tashkent to keep children under the age of 18 from participating in cotton harvesting, the many fatal incidents involving students and schoolchildren who were forced to pick cotton is reflecting the real situation. Particularly, on October21, 16-year old Yuldoshev Erkaboy died. He had been forced to go to pick cotton and stay in Galaba village, Urganch district of Khorezm region.
It's highly troubling that so many deaths have occurred this year at a time when the government claims it is no longer using young children and international monitors are coming on the scene. That suggests a condition of pressure and disintegration. I wish the international community had more access. It doesn't and hasn't really sufficiently tried to get it.
WikiLeaks barged into offices all over Central Asia, pressuring independent journalists like these reporters at the highly-respected Asia Plus to instantly sign agreements on WikiLeaks' terms to publish US cables about their country.Here Marat Mamadshoev and a colleague are being told to sign the agreement immediately, but decline.
I'm sickened by Mediastan, the latest propaganda piece by anarchist impresario Julian Assange.
This is my quick take upon first view of this video (so sorry if there are mistakes or names missing, they will be fixed). It's available for rent ($2.99) or pay $7.00 plus on Vimeo. Naturally, I'm unhappy that I had to give a dime to WL, which I oppose on principle -- and I have to wonder how it is that Paypal could agree to accept these payments when it has blocked payments directly from WikiLeaks (and I plan to raise this issue with both Vimeo and PayPal).
This piece of vile stuff is supposed to be Assange's attempt to provide an "antidote" to a movie about him coming out in theaters October 18 which he doesn't like called The Fifth Estate (it's too critical) which he trying to kill off in various ways.
Perhaps he's counting on the fact that most people don't know anything about Central Asia, and will merely be impressed that he and his merry band of hacksters caroming around the perilous but picturesque mountain roads of Central Asia -- complete with Soviet-style policeman stopping and searching traffic, tunnels under repair until who knows when, and lots of sheep blocking the road -- are the coolest of cypherphunk hipsters going on a " journalism" trip through dangerous territory.
So an unintended bonus is that with Wahlstrom narrating most of the film -- when the Great One Himself isn't butting in and pontificating -- is that WikiLeaks cannot claim anymore that Shamir and Son don't have anything to do with them and don't represent them. They most surely do, as this film proves.
Johannes is a Russian speaker because he likely grew up in Russia or at least speaking Russian with his father -- who has played a sordid role in the Snowden affair, too, about which you can read on my other blog, Minding Russia. But he and the other handlers or minders or whoever the hell they are really have no sense of this region, whatever their Russian language ability, and burst in aggressively -- and disgustingly -- to try to strong-arm local news media in dire straits in Central Asia, where there is a huge list of murdered, jailed, disappeared and beaten journalists, into publishing WikiLeaks cables.
Another bonus is that one of the Russian-speaking journalists on the tour admits openly that he fabricated stories at his job (supposedly because he felt himself to be pressured to do so by his bosses and their need to sell newspapers) and then was ultimately fired. This is just about the level of journalistic quality we can expect throughout this film.
(The reason I mixed up Wahlstrom and this Russian in an earlier version of this blog, since corrected is because both are accused of fabrications; the Russian admits it in the film, Wahlstrom denies it. And while some WikiLeaks operative @Troushers is accusing me of "lying" here in my summary of the dialogue of this Russian journalist, I stand by it -- indeed he openly admits he fabricated letters and indeed the implication is that he was pressured by his boss, who needed to sell papers even if he didn't say literally that phrase -- Internet kids are so literalist. The obvious reality is, the theme throughout the entire film is that editors and journalists in mainstream media only do things to sell newspapers -- i.e. the obvious point of the snarky portrayal of Bill Keller and Sulzberger talking about traffic for a column of Bill's "half supportive" of Obama. Here's the script verbatim from Dmitry Velikovsky, from Russkiy Reporter, who has been active in covering Manning's trial in the past. Russkiy Reporter also sponsored the showing of the film in Moscow.
Velikovsky: I began with some funny study. I was obliged to edit the column "letters of readers". But the problem was that there were absolutely no letters to edit. But the column should be published twice a day. And so I was obliged to to invent those letters me myself. And I just invented a lot of them.
Wahlstrom: did you get some, any letters at all from real readers?
Velikovsky: Yes we got some maybe three, four or five in two months but they were all containing some critics.
Wahlstrom: but these letters you didn't publish.
Velikovsky: I wanted to publish those letters in the factual content of the newspaper because I found it rather important to have some kind of self criticism. But our marketing department had no self criticism and they forbid me to publish it. So i invented letters about problems of veterans, problems of pensioners, problems of no matter whom. So that's how I became a journalist.
Cue tinkly music...
Astoundingly, this aggressive, beligerent crew have no sense of themselves in this film, so imbued are they with their self-righteousness, even as they beam in Julian Assange on Skype who instructs the locals how they are to treat this material.
It's very clear WikiLeaks has absolutely no interest in the substance of the local stories, they just want to collect partners -- or conversely, shame those potential partners who refuse to deal with them for various reasons by making them look like they are boot-licking lackeys of the United States.
They tape phone conversations with people that are rather sensitive -- like a journalist in danger discussing whether he should publish a story about somebody who wants to run a coup in Tajikistan (!) -- and we have no idea if the people involved were informed that these calls would be taped -- and included in the film.
The single most damaging aspect I've seen in this agitprop trash is that the utterly unsupported claim is made that the local press are paid by the US Embassy to print flattering things about the US in order to get the leaders and publics of these countries to bend over while the US uses them as a launching pad and staging area for their war in Afghanistan.
The WikiLeaks people are too ignorant and blinded by their anti-American ideology to understand that a) the US has no need for this because these countries have cooperated anyway b) these tyrants have their own interests in playing off the US against Russia and China c) it doesn't matter as the US is pulling out of Afghanistan next year anyway.
Now, I write as someone who for six years worked at EurasiaNet and Open Society Foundation and wrote critically about the US role in Central Asia, particularly about the severe human rights and humanitarian issues -- about which the US government was oftne silent -- and the issues around the Northern Distribution Network, the supply path to Afghanistan from Russia which enabled the US to bring non-lethal cargo to NATO troops.
I also worked in the past as a free-lancer for RFE/RL ("(Un)Civil Society" and "Media Matters") and never experienced any censorship -- I wrote and published directly to the site. I recall only instances when care was taken in covering mass demonstrations once in Ukraine to make sure that the article didn't incite people -- as RFE/RL has a history of being charged with causing uprisings, i.e. in the Hungarian revolution and invasion by Soviet troops. RFE/RL is funded by Congress, but it doesn't have overlords hanging over you as you write -- there is far more independent coverage there than anything you'd see at RT.com, the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda outlet or Al Jazeera.
I have no relationship whatsoever to the US government, so I am certainly qualified to say that this film is an unfair hatchet job on people in harm's way -- oh, so typical of WikiLeaks.
The film opens with the WikiLeaks crew rolling through the mountains with Mehrabanb Fazrollah of Pyandj, Tajikistan, born 18 October 1962, in the back seat of the car telling his story. He was held five years in Guantanamo about which you can read some here.
Through a series of astoundingly leading questions, broad innuendos or outright promptings, the WL gang incites Fazrollah into saying he really knew nothing of any military significance, and his jailing was all for nothing, and boy is he mad. I don't know anything of his case except what I've read in the papers, but the duplicitious smiles and repeating of what foreigners want to hear are very old stories to me from having traveled in this region (I haven't ever been in Tajikistan but I've spent years travelling to Russia and other countries and interviewing Tajiks outside of Tajikistan).
Assange claims bitterly that this poor fellow spent five years ""to find out about a couple of fucking refugees in Tajikistan".
Actually, that's not even what the cable said or even what the man in the film says. They said there were 100,000 refugees. This is relevant of course regarding the Northern Alliance and the Tajiks in Afghanistan. The fellow is charged with membership in the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan (IMT) allied with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group on the American list of terrorist organizations.
Sorry, but this is not nothing, these are real terrorism movements, even if supposedly in decline (like, you know, Al Shabaab was in decline and chased out of their stronghold when they hit Westgate Mall in Kenya?)
You would never know from Assange's sneers that this is a country that was in a civil war for years, that it had the highest number of journalists murdered -- some 50, nearly as many as Algeria, also in a civil war at the time, that these journalists were killed by Islamists because they were secular or visa versa because they were not approved Muslims killed by state security. The war is a complicated one but to pretend that terrorism and war isn't a factor here -- right next to Afghanistan -- is absurd.
This is of course the game, too, of the International Relations Realist school in Washington and elsewhere, who minimize terrorism and laugh it away as a fantasy of Pentagon planners. But the reality is that both are true -- real terrorist acts have occurred here and there are in fact real Islamists pressuring secular society including press, and there are also fake terrorists that the oppressive government thinks up to keep itself in power. And you know something? I surely do not trust Julian Assange and his crew of losers to tell the difference.
I will never forget in my life the terrified face of a Tajik journalist who had been receiving death threats that I helped rescue from Tajikistan in the 1990s -- and it was a brave man going the extra mile inside the US Embassy actually that got him and his family out of there.
In the film, after reading some cables on Gitmo -- and as I said, the cases may be innocent, but the WL goons are hardly the judge, and there are real complex problems of terrorism and pressure on secularism in these countries -- Assange and Wahlstrom sit and guffaw about a line in a memo they've found about Bildt getting in touch with Karl Rove instead of really trying to understand the complexities of the region They find this such a smoking gun and so "evil" that they roar for minutes, but we don't get the joke.
The translator asks outrageously leading questions and they all laughed and carried on and made it clear they sympathized with the Tajik taken from the battlefield from Gitmo and don't interview him impartially or critically at all. In the same way the pick up a memo from someone named Michael Owens, and start roaring about the US "empire of the 21st century" -- which is of course a rather lack-luster claim these days -- some empire of the 21st century which they are just now leaving, eh?
Then they read from cables -- only partially -- with a "scene-setter" -- talking about how the Tajiks have "unfailingly" allowed their overflights, which is all they really wanted from them. They then purport to read from a cable implying that these "imperialist Americans" in Dushanbe want to "make the local media more pro-American" and will first plant positive stories in the Russian media, then pay the local media to reprint them in the local press.
They don't actually cite from any document or give any source, and it isn't in any known cable from the WikiLeaks Cablegate already published that the US Embassy engages in this practice.
So without anything to bolster this claim, WikiLeaks smears gazeta.ru, Interfax, and Ekho Moskvy, claiming that they've somehow engaged in this practice.
It really is an outright lie. I have read the Russian-language press in this region for years. They are critical of the US and there aren't these glowing planted pieces they imagine. And the US doesn't need to engage in such a silly, crude practice.
Secondly, none of these papers in the region have very big readerships -- they don't have the capacity. We are talking about newspapers with 50,000 or 100,000 or 500,000 possibly at the most, but more at the low end. It's just not a way to reach people. Internet penetration is very low in some of the countries -- it's about 60% in Russia but drops down sharply as you go East.
The US already has Voice of America as an outlet to cover the perspectives of the US, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty which serves to enhance or enable struggling local media -- they have open partnerships with some local stations, and because they are far more independent than the official media of these authoritarian states, they have more credibility. To be sure, RFE/RL are not going to be radically antithetical to the foreign policy of the United States, any more than the BBC or Al Jazeera or RT.com. But unlike Al Jazeera and RT.com, RFE/RL really tries to cover critical local news without fear or favour, and proof of that is just how many journalists have been arrested, jailed or expelled over the decades. The US government doesn't need to crudely pay somebody to hide behind, in other words. But these, too, don't have a huge audience outside the intelligentsia in the big cities.
The fact is, WikiLeaks has not produced proof of this disreputable claim, because they've cited one cable only partially where it sounds like a proposal that one doesn't know was fulfilled, and in citing another cable, in Kyrgyzstan, it appears that the Kyrgyz foreign minister presents this idea, and that it doesn't come from the Americans.
To be sure, paid-for press and infomercials and advertorials are rampant in this region in the official and unofficial press. But to claim that these brave independent outlets take payments to portray te US nicely is just an outright smear for which there isn't an iota of proof. It puts these brave people in danger to suggest it.
There is nothing likely more diabolically tempting to the human rights activist's mind (as distinct from the peace activist's mind) than the notion that war -- which is a given, which is legal, which even has rules -- can be made "better" or "more precise" or "more legal" or "less damaging".
And that's precisely the argument that the diabolical Joshua Foust makes to the policy community and the human rights movement which he always seeks to undermine with his latest apologia for drones, "The Liberal Case for Drones".
There's even a feel-good sub-headline, "Why human rights advocates should stop worrying about the phantom fear of autonomy". That's a reference to the idea that if machines are coded to go and do things, human agents will lose control over them, i.e. lose their autonomy, and cede it to machines, which thereby become more autonomous even beyond human agency.
I've written in the past about Foust's immorality on the drones issue here and here and about the problem of so many civilians killed here.
To extreme groups like CODE PINK, to the legions of facile shallow anti-American re-tweeters, it's easy to put Foust down as doing the evil bidding of the Amerikan war machine and discount his sophisticated arguments -- but they're not his audience and they don't matter to him.
Foust wants to convince the technocrats in the human rights organizations and liberal press and think tanks to come around to his way of thinking, and he is already successful in some respects. While Human Rights Watch has boldly started a campaign against "Killer Robots" (like Yoshimi!), there are those in the same international law circles who find the Foustian logic compelling; they think that having a cleaner and more precise way to kill people, given that it actually isn't against international law to wage war if you follow humanitarian law, would be a boon for humankind.
"Lest You Dash Your Foot Against a Stone"
At one level, this parable is worth invoking because it's about a premise that divine (perfect) agency will work right every time and the right angelic interventions would kick in every time, and at another level it's simply about bad literalist arguments that don't take into the complexity of the divine.
In the Bible (Luke 4:9-11), Jesus Christ fasts for 40 days and nights, and then Satan tempts him three times. The first time he suggests Jesus turn a stone into a loaf of bread to show off his powers, and Jesus says "man cannot live by bread alone". The second time he shows Him all sorts of earthly kingdoms that could be His if only he would serve the devil, and Jesus dismisses him quoting scripture about serving only the Lord God.
Then Satan takes Jesus up to the top of the temple and says:
He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you, On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.
But this time, Jesus doesn't answer the substance of the temptation either literally or spiritually, as he did with the first two, but simply says "You should not put the Lord God to the test."
And what's diabolical about this -- like the idea of the perfect, liberal drone -- is that it's true that the angels would bear up any falling Jesus -- that He could count on, He could go against the laws of nature, or perhaps that would be their fulfillment. But testing spiritual powers in a frivolous and self-destructive manner like this? No, that would be wrong. Jumping in the first place would be a misuse of perfection.
Knowing that many people, even if they hate drones, dislike religion and find parables annoying, let me be less oblique: this is a story about the uses of perfection -- that you don't have to use perfection just because you can, or use it to show off perfection itself. The intellectual temptation that Foust is offering is the lure of perfection which then overshadows the not only commandments like "thou shalt not kill," but precludes an examination of whether a war without the deterrent of war's immediate effects is itself immoral (because it's beyond the reach of the premises of humanitarian law) and a course an examination of intent, effectiveness, and the psychological impact on local people that they simply won't change because somebody's been clever on Twitter.
"A Just War"
In our age of scientism, these arguments that are technically right and technically have nothing wrong with them and don't even have a sacred answer (for example, the arguments of "just war" seem to be irrelevant to the liberal drone advocates if they were efficient in ending war) -- they are the most persuasive.
The three reasons most people think to oppose drones are as follows:
o the program is secretive so you don't know what they're doing, whether they're attacking the right people -- it's under the CIA's management;
o people, even children, are killed accidently and aren't combatants and weren't meant to be targeted
o the people in these countries where drone attacks take place seem least persuaded of all those in the world that a liberal technocratic solution has been conceived justly to solve their problems -- and more insurgents spring up in the wake of those killed by drones.
But Foust answers all these objections and more, and always diabolically replies that if you don't like the wars in which these robotic machines are used, hey, go and attack the "war on terror" policy at its root and don't blame the messenger.
Foust will be happy to say that the program should be less secret, or more careful, or even that it doesn't work so well in, oh, Yemen. But he keeps on finding more and more diabolical justifications to which human rights advocates don't have good objections, and peace activists have even less (they just keep saying war is bad for children and other living things, and who could disagree?)
Jesus could tell the devil that powers shouldn't be tested needlessly "because it's blasphemous" or "you're just trolling me" but he simply says "don't tempt me any more with this stuff because it's not going to work, I won't fall for it". So ultimately, while it may seem pretty thin and not very technically impressive or profound and scholarly, the argument must still be tried that says drones are immoral for all the reasons you can think of if we are to remain human, and not "more than human". Or less.
Agency and Autonomy: Whose?
Foust dismisses the arguments about agency -- the engines of death are too removed from the people who fire them -- by impishly citing examples of weapons such as South Korean guns that can target from two miles away -- which nobody protests. Or indeed one could cite all kinds of weapons with computerized systems, and submarine missiles and so on. Even so, two miles is two miles, and a thousand or two thousand or more are, well, awfully far away.
It's not just about the agency, but the deterrence that you want war to have on the warrior. If they are on the battlefield or in situations where they are wounded or their buddies killed or they see awful scenes, they will want less war, right? Enough of all those atrocities, as they are having in Syria, and people will stop warring on each other, right? Well, no, it doesn't seem so, and there aren't even any drones in Syria. That argument could have been tried in the past, but it works less and less.
There's nothing magical or extra-terrestrial about robots -- they are just the concretization of human will -- for now. That's why I say whose autonomy is a good question to ask. So it's just the will of one set of humans against another, and it need not be made special or fetishized any more than computer programs. They can be criticized; they can be stopped; they can be modified with user imput. They have to be. So you can throw overboard some of the technological determinism by going back to the coder and his absence or morals or the buggyness of the code or the poor user experience (those people in countries who don't like the psychological feeling of drones bearing down on them from the sky).
But that only gets you so far, because like a good solutionist of our time, Foust says the drones are getting better and better, more and more accurate, and they can be made to be more perfect than humans.
Collateral Immorality and More Than Human
After all, he says -- and here the devil is surely at work -- "Collateral Murder" lets us know just how imperfect human beings are when they go about the task of finding an appropriate military target -- armed men -- and shooting at them without harming civilians. Right? Says Foust:
It is a curious complaint: A human being did not distinguish between civilians and combatants, apply the Geneva Convention, or determine an appropriate use of force during the infamous 2007 "Collateral Murder" incident in Iraq, when American helicopter pilots mistook a Reuters camera crew for insurgents and fired on them and a civilian van that came to offer medical assistance.
Of course, using Julian Assange's agitprop (which I totally take apart here) ought to be out of bounds morally all on its own in a debate like this, but such scruples wouldn't stop Foust, although he claims to be a critic of WikiLeaks and claims to have thought Cablegate was harmful.
The problem with "Collateral Murder," however, is that a journalist chose to be escorted by, or to be in the company of, armed men. Journalists endlessly debate whether this was appropriate, but it is a legitimate debate and it is at the heart of the matter -- after all, had they not been, they wouldn't have been killed. It is a battleground, after all. The soldiers in the helicopter in fact rightly picked out armed men -- their assumption that another man with a camera on his shoulder and not an RPG wasn't a combatant was wrong, but it wasn't immoral or a war crime. Reuters doesn't call it that; Human Rights Watch doesn't call it that; only the anarchists in WikiLeaks pretend that it is, for political purposes.
Foust holds out the possibility that in our forthcoming more perfect world, the drones will "just know" that they shouldn't shoot if they see something that they will know better is a camera tripod. Although he never specifies how exactly the more-perfect drones will now be better than error-prone humans (so very Foust!), the only thing I can think of is that the drone will do less shooting if it sees small forms that might be babies, or cameramen's tripods, which their facial-recognition or object-recognition programs will be very good at -- better than humans. Or if the drone can see right through the van, and see that the small forms in it are children. Right? So if they can't lock on the target as exact, they just won't shoot, right? But they don't do that now...
Cyber-Autonomy
Foust then finds experts to fit his theories. First, if you were going to use the argument that drones are too autonomous, Foust would say, oh, but autonomy is on a spectrum -- Armin Krishnan a political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso has parsed it all for you.
If you were going to raise objections about the general tendency of machines to malfunction (which is why you had to simply turn off and turn on again your computer, phone, Xerox machine, etc. today, maybe multiple times), why, that's just not so: Samuel Liles, a Purdue professor specializing in transnational cyberthreats and cyberforensics, discounts your argument, pointing out ""We trust software with less rigor to fly airliners all the time." (In what year do you think they will drop the "cyber" for these phenomena because so little of these things will happen in the real world?)
Yet airplanes do crash, and they don't kill the wrong people when they take off and land normally. Drones are different; they are meant to kill and do. This is ultimately like those stupid arguments that gun-rights obsessives make about car accidents killing so many more people (although of course, cars mainly drive people to their destinations and people are mainly killed accidently) -- or the argument that only four people died in Benghazi but so many more people are killed in fires every day. Yes, these kinds of "persuasive pairing" arguments are ALWAYS stupid at root.
Says Foust, about the tendency of machines to make mistakes -- and maybe these are magnified by death-dealing machines sent from far away:
The judgment and morality of individual humans certainly isn't perfect. Human decision-making is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of recent conflicts....Yet, machines are not given the same leeway: Rights groups want either perfect performance from machines or a total ban on them.
Well, why not? Rights groups are trying to stop the inevitable and they should go on trying. The UN is trying to cope -- it's already too late as lots of powers have drones now and more of the worst kind of regimes will get them, too.
Perfect Assassins
I often wonder why nobody interrupts these kind of arguments of organic morality versus technocratic machinopology by saying: you know, the CIA used to make very carefully targeted assassinations. Instead of sending lots of American troops into a country, where they'd get killed, and the locals would dislike them, and the locals would get killed, they'd just surgically take out one leader, or set things up to take out just one leader, like Patrice Lumumba, and then pull the strings in a government. Imagine if you were to take this debate and put it back in the 1960s or 1970s:
The judgment and morality of individual humans certainly isn't perfect.
Human decision-making is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of
recent conflicts....Yet, CIA assassins are not given the same leeway: Rights
groups want either perfect performance from CIA assassins or a total ban on
them.
Okay then, back to autonomy...
The Singularity
Of course, none of this is without context. We are all going to be living in what Robert Scoble calls the "age of context" soon enough (while he means something more airy about social networks, what it boils down to as far as I can tell is a future where machines do all the learning and remembering for you and serve it up to you through wearables like Google Glass). There's going to be the Singularity, and we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed.
Before that, comes the Internet of Things where everything will be wired and talk -- and listen and watch, too. Perhaps in that bright future, you won't even need drones except as a last resort, because the Internet will find that whenever there is a nexus like "fireworks" or "jihad video on Youtube" or "pressure cooker" or "big black knapsack," the door will lock tight or the car won't even start or road blocks will spring up out of nowhere.
Until then, there's Yemen.
Deleted Tweets
And here where Foust's creepy immorality was really on display recently -- and now it isn't.
I was following his tweets and copious re-tweeters one day in February, when he began sparring nastily (as he always does) with a Yemeni activist namedFarea Al-muslimi whose Twitter handle is @almuslimi
I don't know this Yemeni activist's background and I don't know whether he's an extremist or preaches "defensive jihad" but if so, it isn't visible. He appears to be a man who is simply disturbed by the extrajudicial executions the United States is perpetrating in his homeland, and that seems legitimate, whatever his back story might be.
Al-muslimi gets into a Twit-fight with Foust, who is merrilly going his usual drone-apologetics way and tweets:
almuslimi Farea Al-muslimi @joshuafoust @gregorydjohnsen 8- stop ALL u r dn pollitically in yemen. 9- every place u shot drone, go build hospital/school.
Some other people chime in and say "stop tweeting from your couch about our country, you dont know anything".
Foust then savages the guy as if there is something false about the aposition of drone-killings versus school-building simply because the American miltiary does both.
I remember being appalled at the intensity and viciousness of this exchange and I wanted to copy it and put it up on Storify as a very good example of just how nasty Foust can be -- as any of us who have Twit-fought him know for a fact.
But when I went back through his feed now, it was gone. He deleted the tweets. In fact, he shows only two tweets for all of February. Now, it's possible that there's a glitch on Twitter. But I think they're gone.
An indirect evidence of them comes from the fellow cc'd -- @gregorydjohnsen -- who writes a tweet about how he regrets their fight because "both of them are smart guys" -- although Foust was most assuredly nastily to this guy who had the upperhand street-cred wise as it was his country where the drones were falling.
One of the more poignant things he said was:
u can't train me on rule of law wth ur right hnd - USAID- & shoot me without a court by ur left hand- drones.
Well, exactly. Who couldn't put it better? But Foust lobbed off something nasty about false apositives again -- now deleted.
What journalists are saying about #Yemen on Twitter - Muck Rack
for those who enjoy these things: @almuslimi & @joshuafoust are currently having a twitter argument abt US counterterrorism policy in #yemen · February 28 ...
Why would Foust erase those tweets? Did he have a change of heart that he was so nasty? But he's nasty in exactly the same way to so many people...
No, it's merely because suddenly, Al-Muslimi was hot. He actually came from Yemen to the US to testify in Congress. Now, Foust was sucking up and re-tweeting:
RT @Yemen411: Farea @almuslimi having a moment before he speaks @ the Senate Judiciary hearing on drones in #Yemen http://t.co/gqtMzA4krY
He even acknowledged that they had "disagreed" but that he was impressed with him.
Well, Twitter. Whoever looks at past Twitter streams? You can't put your foot in the same stream twice... And @almuslimi likely doesn't care about this anyway, as he has much larger problems to worry about. I can only say, I saw what you did there...
Human Rights Drones
Meanwhile, Foust assures us that drones are veritable instruments of human rights compliance: "In many cases, human rights would actually benefit from more autonomy -- fewer mistakes, fewer misfires, and lower casualties overall. "
Yet I'm not persuaded about the auto-magic way in which we get these precision targets that first depend on HUMINT and even re-checking from the ground.
And while Foust doesn't concede it or even mention it, it seems to me the precision and human rights capacity could only happen if the machines are programmed not to fire if they get to a house and see that the terrorist target is surrounded by his wife and children. Right? Is that what he means? Because isn't that really the problem, the only way you can get these people more often than not is by attacking them in civilian type of settings because they don't stay on the "battlefield," whatever that is.
That's why there is a total illusion here, regardless of autonomy and precision -- it's not really about the drone itself. It's about the need to be precise *in a civilian setting* and only blow up somebody, say, in a car on a road, not when they reach a farmhouse.
"It Should Not Be"
In any event, the technocrats will never be satisfied with emotional answers, but in politics, the psychological matters. Sen. Markey is running for office again, and when the people of Boston let it be known that they didn't want Tamerlan Tsarnaev buried in their state because they had already been convinced he committed the Boston marathon bombing, Markey didn't say, as a good liberal Democrat, "we must be civilized; we must properly bury even our dead enemies"; instead he said "“If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried
on our soil, then it should not be.” And that's how it was, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Virginia. There's all kinds of things Markey could have said to try to lead and to educate -- he didn't, not on this.
Ultimately, the arguments of drone apologists are about emotions, too, because they say that the concretized will of one set of people in the form of automated robots should prevail over other sets of people who feel they should not be used and they are immoral. And it's the lack of democracy and due process as much of the emotional and spiritual feeling of revulsion that matter in the political mix of how these weapons will be controlled; overriding those very real considerations and feelings is illiberal, especially when the goal is to prevent the killing of innocents.
In his testimony, Al-Muslimi speaks to an interesting problem -- the lack of knowledge by local farmers as to why some leader is being targeted -- they may not associate him with terrorism -- and the fact that their own local security chiefs are connected to him and doing business with them. They are angry because they could have been accidently with him when the drone hit; they also feel they could have arrested him and questioned him about his wrong-doing and made a more careful and durable solution. In fact, their own security chiefs in cahoots with the terrorist were the problem -- there was a texture and layers to this story that even the smartest drone couldn't figure out; what, it's supposed to hover while people hold a town meeting?
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.
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).
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.
1907 Solar Eclipse Expedition by Sergei Prokhudi-Gorskii, Russian Photographer in Central Asia.
This is my little newsletter on Tajikistan that comes out once a
week on Saturdays. If you want to see past issues, look to the column on
the right down below for the key word "Tajikistan". If you want to get this in
your email or you have comments or contributions, write
[email protected]
As I've seen New Realist Eurasia Foundation Young Pro, Kerry think-tanker and long-time defense analyst Joshua Foust of Registan trash Zenn before when he reported factually on terrorists in Kazakhstan, I take it all with a grain of salt. I have no separate information. I have only questions. Zenn says:
The Southeast Asian militants who returned to their home countries after
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan carried out or trained others to
carry out terrorist attacks, which killed hundreds of people, but, they
proved much less effective at generating change than the mass social
movements in the Arab World in 2011. As long as the populations of
Central Asian countries remain vigilant to the threat posed by these
militant groups, the fighters returning from Afghanistan will likely be
able to only carry out sporadic attacks but gain no traction in society.
However, crises like the ethnic riots in Urumqi in 2009, the ethnic
clashes in Osh in 2010, the deadly Zhanaozen protests in 2011, and the
instability in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakshan in 2012, all have the
potential to erode government legitimacy, while increasing support for
alternatives to the present leadership. Most alternatives come in the
form of opposition parties, but some of those who have been aggrieved
may turn toward groups like the TIP, Jund al-Khilafah and the IMU
instead.
Everything about this statement seems prudent; it doesn't overstate the case -- if anything it points out that the last time this happened after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, it didn't amount to much. Of course, that was before the Internet.
Defense consultant Nathan Hamm is scornful:
Whether or not terror groups are likely to be more active in Central
Asia after NATO withdraws from Afghanistan is a useful thing to think
about, but it is vital not to overhype the risks. The governments of the
region are phenomenally imaginative at devising and hyping threats to
justify not only repressive domestic policies but to extract concessions
from Western governments in the forms of financial assistance and
tempered criticism of their human rights abuses. Assessments of the risk
of terrorism need to capture the scale and timeline for the risk. Zenn
is correct that there is a risk of the “return” of Central Asian terror
groups at some unspecified point in the future. However, Central Asian
security services have shown more than sufficient capability to monitor
and disrupt terror groups. Furthermore, as grim as it is to point out,
Afghanistan and Pakistan will continue to be much more permissible and
target-rich environments for all of these groups.
Both of them seem to think these governments will remain strong, although they face rattling as Karimov in Uzbekistan is going to have a succession and Rahmon in Tajikistan will have "elections" and there could always be another toppling in Kyrgyzstan.
In any event, for the purposes of this newsletter, the Tajik situation might not be so much "returning warriors" as opportunistic kinsmen or brotherly fighters seeing an opening. We don't know how it's going to turn out. Sure, Afghanistan and Pakistan will always be worse; maybe even Pakistan more than Afghanistan. But that doesn't mean the post-Soviet stans will be quiet. What would be more advantageous, staying in a place where the Taliban and related allies no longer need you and you have no unifying factor with them to fight NATO/the US? Or returning to your own country or travelling to neighbouring kin in order to use your acquired battle skills?
Nate Schenkken said on Twitter that Islamist terror from returning warriors should be on the list of concerns, but only under something like drug lords; he blames them for the pogroms in Kyrgyzstan. There's nothing to say that the two things can't coexist in one gang, however.
* Ten Tajiks Killed in Moscow Blaze, Exposes Poor Working Conditions
A fire ripped through a new Moscow building’s underground parking lot
on Saturday, killing 10 migrant workers and injuring 13 others who had
been working and living there, city police said.
All those who died were citizens of Tajikistan, Moscow police
said in a statement. It said they were killed after a garbage heap on
the floor they were working on caught fire, but the cause of the blaze
itself was under investigation.
The impoverished Central Asian state of Tajikistan said Monday that it
had been cut off from natural gas shipments by its neighbour and sole
energy supplier Uzbekistan.
The IMF in its report of last year wrote that around US $3.5 billion from Tajikistan was deposited in offshore accounts. Zafar Abdulloev, a Tajik journalist researching economic issues, claims that the entities from Tajikistan with offshore accounts are: Talco, the aluminum factory; Innovative Road Solutions or IRS, and companies belong to the Tajik businessman Hasan Asadullozoda, brother-in-law of President Emomali Rahmon.
Ali Ironpour,
a member of the agriculture committee of the Iranian parliament, says that
Tehran can solve the problems of drought in eastern Iran by purchasing some one
billion cubic meters of water from neighboring Tajikistan, a step he says the
two governments agreed to in May 2012.
Russia and Tajikistan have come to an agreement on one of the sticking points
in their deal to extend the lease of Russia's largest military base in
Central Asia, reports Tajikistan's minister of energy and industry Gul
Sherali. As part of that deal, Russia agreed to duty-free fuel shipments
to Tajikistan, but wanted a guarantee that the discounted fuel wouldn't
be reexported. Tajikistan had objected, but now has agreed to Moscow's terms.
And...Russian troops and Tajik border guards are really, really going to be able to check on 1m tonnes of oil products and make sure they never, ever get re-sold anywhere else, Scout's honour?
Moscow insists on the clause because of the high level of fuel smuggling
in south Central Asia and the risk of fuel delivered to Tajikistan
being sold on to third countries such as Afghanistan. Dushanbe had
previously objected to the clause, with Tajik officials saying they
would be unable to guarantee that gasoline from Russia will not be
re-exported.
Trilling thinks Tajikistan has no leverage. True enough, but it has something else -- continued non-compliance and pleading the inability to monitor all those mountain roads not even demarcated. This is an regular ritual...
Tajikistan’s ever-more-ridiculous elections
exercise will end predictably, as we all wonder how far Emomali Rakhmon
can push his authority over economic and political life of the
ostensibly conflict-averse population. Who among us has not thought that
this was the year that the country would implode, divide into ungovernable de facto criminal states, and drag the whole region in. He’s gone ‘too far’ with the IRPT, HT, Pamiri clans, Turajonzoda’s clan, or myriad other rivals to maintain his power base. But, it has not happened yet, somehow, so we stop predicting it.
I agree. We were endlessly hearing how that overcrowded teeming Ferghana Valley was going to explode, too, but then the state managed to sterilize the women and suppress the demonstrations and keep the lights dim...
A recent discussion in the country's blogosphere offers a rare
glimpse into what it means to be gay in Tajikistan and how the country's
people view members of the LGBT community.
‘It means PAIN…'
... It was decided that the [gay] should be taught a lesson. About eight of
our classmates beat him up in the bathroom. They beat him up badly;
there was a lot of blood on his face and clothes…
Tajikistan is a transit point for one of the most lucrative drugs routes
in the world. Illegal drugs from neighbouring Afghanistan flood into
the country on their way to Russia and Western Europe.
Rustam Qobil travels to remote border villages in Tajikistan to find out how communities are being affected by the drugs trade.
INL’s “Sport Against Drugs” campaign, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, February 19, 2012. International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement (INL) section of the U.S. Embassy and local partner NGO
National Olympic Academy (NOA) organized an anti-drug dance competition
titled “Jam Master” at the Spartak Youth Center in Dushanbe on February
19, 2012.
***
Check out my Pinterest -- I want someone to bring me this in the cold of New York City right now like in the cold of these Tajik mountains.
I have known and worked with Vitaly for years, and he is one of the most solid and dedicated researchers on human rights and humanitarian issues for Central Asia. Memorial Society is the leading Russian human rights organization devoted to keeping the memory of the victims of the crimes of Stalin and also preventing and responding to their legacy, the human rights violations of today under the Putin regime. Russians tend to be preoccupied with the human rights problems in their own country, of which there are no shortage, but it has been the hallmark of Memorial that they try to care about what is happening outside of Moscow, especially in places where the Russian government can be part of the problem.
Ponomaryov was particularly noted recently in 2010 when he did difficult, in-depth and dangerous reporting about the pogroms in the south of Kyrgyzstan.
Ponomaryov is a modest fellow who will not go around trying to get press attention, so it's up to his friends to spread the word and speak to their governments and ask them to intercede with Uzbek and Russian authorities so that they investigate these threats. These incidents are in a context of increasing threats to Russian human rights defenders such as Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch in Moscow and takes place in a climate of crackdown by both Russian and Uzbek authorities on human rights groups.
I saw Sanjar Umarov, the former Uzbek political prisoner, instantly responded on Twitter when he heard the news and linked to BBC Uzbek Service which carried a report.
Investigate threats against Memorial Central Asia staff
The Norwegian Helsinki Committee
was distressed to learn of serious, anonymous threats made against the
Central Asia Program
Director of Human Rights Center Memorial,
Vitaliy Ponomarev, on 12 January 2012 and urges Russian and Uzbekistani
authorities
to open an investigation.
Mr. Ponomarev is a prominent human rights
defender and researcher based in Moscow, who has led Memorial’s
important work in
Central Asia since 1999. On 12 January, he
received several e-mails from different internet addresses, containing
disturbing
death threats against himself and members
of his family.
While the threats were made anonymously, they
were sent from the same IP-address, found to be located in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan.
The emails themselves were made to appear
to be from ethnic Uzbeks residing in the south of Kyrgyzstan. However,
Memorial
reported that linguistic analysis
indicates the use of an Uzbek dialect used in Tashkent rather than in
Kyrgyzstan.
Human Rights Center Memorial has reported
the threats to the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB) and the
Prosecutor General’s
office, requesting that an investigation
into the threats be carried out.
- Unfortunately, threats against human
rights defenders have become commonplace in the CIS. The reason for such
threats can
often be hard to pinpoint, said Secretary
General of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, Bjørn Engesland. - In Mr.
Ponomarev’s
case, the threats would seem to come from
persons who are concerned at the unusually high quality of his work to
expose human
rights violations.
Here's an interview in English with Ponomaryov by the NewsBriefing Central Asia, which explains an important thesis: that the thousands of people the Uzbek authorities have arrested and tortured on vague grounds of "religious extremism" in fact leads to instability, not stability.
API Will Hold a Conference on Human Rights Violations, Forced Child Labor and Potential Regime Change in Uzbekistan, January 19th 2013 at Seattle University, Boeing Room 10 a.m. Admission is FREE
Our Impressive Speakers List Includes: Sanjar Umarov, Founder of Sunshine Coalition Nathan Hamm, Founder of Registan.net Sarah Kendzior, Writer at Al Jazeera Ruslan Nurullaev, Projects Coordinator at API Bahodir Choriyev, Founder of the Birdamlik Movement Aziz Yuldashev, Executive Director of API Dmitriy Nurullayev, Founder of API
If you saw their October conference, it was about stability, not regime change. Stability is what the New Realists want in these regions, with American help.
Why do I call them the New Realists and not just "realists"? Because I think if they are a new generation and a new school of thought you have to call them "New"; realists of the past, like the liberal realists who challenged the radical Marxists in the Vietnam era were not the same thing. Robert S. McNamara, the longest serving Secretary of Defense, may have opposed the Vietnam war, and later been friendly to the Soviets in the perestroika era at the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity, but he both respected the Domino Theory in the beginning and also wouldn't defend drones if he were alive today. That's why he isn't exactly the political godfather of Joshua Foust.
I think it doesn't hurt if they echo the 1960s Nouveau Realism because they are also contrived and artistic in their presentation of the story. I may think up a better term as I go along but this will do for now.
Nathan Hamm works for a defense consulting company; Joshua Foust used to work for defense contractors and now works at a defense policy think-tank with John Kerry on the board called American Security Project. The other academics they have gathered around them might be more or less slavish to the Registani line, but they are joined by their "realism" about this region -- which can mean different things on different days -- and in my view, is itself a construct than can rival the construct of the "Neo-Cons" and leaves them without a backup plan when changes occur without them.
Foust is infamous for launching a series of vicious and vitriolic attacks on various high-profile human rights advocates and nonprofit journalists at EurasiaNet.org He spent more than a year trashing them for their critique of Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the dictator, and for any of their critical reporting on Uzbekistan and invocation of the Northern Distribution Network as a development that was making the US become craven to dictators and forego human rights advocacy, or so the theory goes.
Stop talking about civil society! She orders. This is like Katy Pearce telling people to shut up and use the hashtag she thinks they should on Twitter. Maybe she will talk some about civil society at this conference, but no one except the in-group will hear.
Sarah often does a strange little dance on Twitter. Foust will make some outrageous comment. She will respond with some little statement of fact or different opinion that tends to mitigate what Foust just said. One can almost hear the dulcet tones of June Cleaver. Foust never, ever answers her. She then never pushes with her obvious factual point or slightly contrary opinion to continue to argue with his outrageousness. She lets him go time and again and he never feels he has to answer her. That way she's on the record "in the community" as having said the factual thing everyone thought when they saw Foust's little outrage; he gets to save face, however, by never really truly being challenged by his fellow School of Thought member. Nice work if you can get it -- and they did get that work.
I don't know who/what gave them a new infusion of cash, but that's how they were able to have their October "stability" conference.
So what's up here with "regime change"?
I'll cut to the chase and I think that the Pentagon/defense contractors/defense think-tank world that these people move in are now getting to the point where they are willing to think about shedding Karimov.
Karimov is useful to them until 2014. After 2014, he is not useful. They need to get people and armaments and equipment out of Afghanistan because it's expensive, the budget-crunched US military needs it, and they don't want it to "fall into the wrong hands". While they are always dancing around giving the Central Asian tyrants more military aid, it stops short of lethal aid of the actual helicopter/tank sort because they are not authorized even in the current language of their exceptions, in light of Leahy, and because they don't have an objective need apparently to arm up these folks.
It may also be the case that if they rattle the sabers, so to speak, and invoke their possible power to help with regime change (which I actually doubt they have), they can get what they want in the End Game before 2014.
Registani types are all around these defense contractors, but what aboutAwareness Projectsand Sanjar Umarov?
I have a lot of respect for Umarov, who is a determined opposition leader and former political prisoner who endured enormous suffering and has survived to tell the tale.
I have some differences from him, namely his claim, made in a New York Times interview, that only lower-level Interior Ministry officials are involved in torture, and that it is not sanctioned from the very top, and that we can convince them to stop.
While this or that individual police investigator may make decisions to torture in this or that case, and maybe pressure could get them to stop, I think it is sanctioned from the highest level. I believe the Andijan massacre was sanctioned by Karimov and all overall directions of the use of torture are sanctioned by him. That's how these societies work, with incredible top-down vertikal management; to try to cordon off the top leadership and pretend they might become better if we just reform the lower or middle levels is a strategy that might buy someone longer life, but I think it's misguided and possibly deliberately misleading, I don't know.
Umarov headed the Sunshine Party which seems one of the more credible non-violent and non-extreme opposition groups, but I am happy to hear other opinions. I'm not an expert on Uzbekistan; I speak Russian but not Uzbek. I'm just somebody who has taken an interest in the country, blogged about it for years for EurasiaNet and also worked for the Cotton Campaign. I care about human rights there and have worked on cases there in various ways. I've never been to Uzbekistan and I don't plan to go any time soon. I'm not so different than the Registanis in that respect, however, because they don't go there, either.
Umarov has run a logistics and transport business and evidently came in to contact with the US and the NDN practitioners in that capacity. We don't know publicly what the rest of that relationship might mean but there is private speculation about it. It doesn't matter to me if Umarov helped the US and now they helped him get out of the country and support, ideologically or even financially, his opposition work: that's exactly what they *should* be doing and it is *legitimate*.
Awareness Projects don't say who they get their funding from, although they have a button that anyone can click on and make donations on the Internet. It isn't any wealthy group; it appears to be run by Uzbek students forced to remain in this country and some professors and religious leaders. It's exactly the kind of group we need more of for this region, even if I don't agree with everything they do or say.
The mission statement of Awareness Projects (which isn't just limited to Uzbekistan) gives you a sense that they might have a "realist" and "incremental" approach to the problems presented by authoritarianism in Central Asia:
Our mission is to empower communities to face global challenges through small-scale, sustainable, educational projects. Our areas of focus include: promoting healthcare awareness, human rights initiatives, and climate change consciousness. API empowers communities to address these issues using localized programs and resources. We take an innovative, micro focused approach while maintaining a global perspective.
I don't like the word "empower". I don't believe anybody in the country or abroad "empowers" anything. They have to find their own sources of power or they are doomed. I say that not as a New Realistic, but as a classic liberal student of civil society, that is very hard to manufacture abroad.
Like USAID, API has figured out that the milder issues of AIDS prevention or "climate change" environmental work may "pass" more easily with these regimes and with their timid subjects -- "micro" is always better to gain reassurance that you don't mean to topple the regime, so the thinking goes (I don't buy that approach myself although if somebody wants to try it, let them, as long as they don't keep bashing sturdier and more confrontational human rights projects -- which is what these types often do.)
So why are they yapping about regime change with an old dictator who has probably already cunningly locked up his succession to make sure it's just a clone of him and his policies?
Perhaps they really think Karimov is about to topple, either keel over from death or incapacitation from sickness, or they'd like him to think they think that.
Registan adopted Dmitriy Nurullayev when he decided to remain here rather than returning to Uzbekistan after claiming that he faced a threat of imprisonment. These kinds of threats are common and the story is credible, but I did ask questions about it.
I don't know why the organizers left out groups like Human Rights Watch (Steve Swerdlow) and International Crisis Group (Andrew Strohlein, who is actually moving to HRW now, regrettably depriving the landscape of some diversity and competition). Maybe those groups wouldn't come to something with Registan leaders in it because of how nasty they were in the past to them. Maybe the organizers themselves think micro-projects rather than in-your-face human rights work is the way to go -- I just don't know. I ask questions.
To be sure, topics include forced child labour in the cotton fields -- a topic the regime accepts in principle and says it is "working on" and has signed the appropriate international treaties banning it. So maybe this area will be covered in full, although they really aren't the center of gravity for Registan.
The conference also features Birdamlik leader Bahodir Choriyev. Birdamlik is an opposition group that tries bravely to demonstrate against the regime. Bahodir often invites me to join his groups or pages. I don't simply because I'm not interested in becoming a member of an Uzbek opposition group, I'm not in the Uzbek opposition even though obviously I oppose Karimov and company. They need to make their own opposition inside the country, with help from abroad, as best they can, but it's not my area of expertise. Actually, I even turned down a request to join a Russian opposition group in exile recently, where at least I speak the language and have years of working in the country and following the issues. I think it was because they were going to make me to a lot of work, and I already have enough volunteer activities.
I have to say that Choriyev seemed rather naive, or perhaps simply overly determined, when he returned to Uzbekistan -- naturally the goons got to him eventually. But I suppose that had the added benefit of convincing all those USAID types that "realism" is in order regarding this regime.
I'm all for protests against this regime, it's important to keep visible here in the US and Europe especially when the regime officials visit. I'm all for 1,000 flowers blooming, but I'm certain we're not seeing a big range of flowers at the Awareness conference with only Registani speakers. I look forward to a much wider range of organizations, such as NED, Freedom House, etc. to hold conferences about whither the regime and Uzbekistan in 2015.
The site has a poll: With the new elected president in 2015, the situation will be better, worse, the same.
I voted "the same," but found that most people believe it will be "better". Why they think this president will be "elected" in some kind of authentic way within only two years from now is beyond me, but one lives in hope.
Evidently this conference is under "Chatham House Rules" (which, if people were less pretentious, they could call "Council on Foreign Relations" rules), i.e. no papers or transcripts will be published -- as they weren't with the October conference. So if you aren't in Seattle or didn't get your way paid there, you're out of luck.
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