Different Stans

Energy Shortage Leads to Gas Explosion in Andijan

Many people have cautioned about just this sort of terrible accident -- with the cold weather and energy shortages in Andijan, an explosion has occurred in an apartment building, fergananews.com reports. At least two people have been killed and there have been more injuries, along with the destruction of several multi-storey dwellings.

Precisely because there have been constant electricity blackouts, gas turn-offs, and shortage of fuel, people have been bringing gas balloni (cannisters) into their homes to cook (which you can see for sale or wanted on sites like torg.uz).

Fergananews.com has been warning that because of the gas shortage and low pressure in the gas system, people have been resorting to all sorts of dangerous makeshift methods to keep warm and cook their food. The fuel crisis and the risky behaviour both have led to tragedies -- a newborn died in a hospital from doctors' neglect where the lights were shut off; a  7-month infant froze to death in his cradle at night in a home without heat or light; a 17-year-old died of gas poisoning.

The reasons for this shortage are complex, and have to do with everything from antequated systems and equipment to theft and siphoning off of resources, to resale of gas abroad for foreign currency.

 

 

Why Does the #Uzbekistan Government Hate St. Valentine's Day?

Photo by CoCreatr.

Nothing sounds grumpier than the annual blast against St. Valentine's Day we get from Uzbekistan and some of the other stans, and for that matter, Russia. It's not just about Muslim clerics seeking to eradicate dubious Christian cultural traditions that undermine their authority; it's about the Russian Orthodox Church also seeing something particularly loathsome about this particular Western Christian feast-day -- a holiday that is just about shorn of all its religious connotation in the West, as it has been absolutely commercialized and monetarized.  (And it's a good thing, too, or recession-hounded merchants would have nothing to bring in revenue between Black Friday, which has now spawned even Black Thursday Night at Thanksgiving time, Christmas of course, and Easter -- another chocolatified monetarized bonanza).

So what bothers the Uzbek government so much about this particular holiday? If you read the supposed history of this holiday, it was a pagan festival to start with on the (pre?)-Roman holiday of Lupercalia, which the Catholic Church worked overtime to convert because of its undesirable activities -- described sedately by that source as young men picking the names of young women randomly out of an urn for sexual couplings, but explained in Wikipedia as being more about wolves and sacrificing goats and dogs, then running around naked and beating with thongs any women willingly coming out to meet them.

I'm having trouble believing the claim that Emperor Claudius II completely outlawed marriage in the 3rd century (!) on the grounds that single men made better soldiers than married men, helping St. Valentine to get his start, because he then secretly wed young lovers. I can't help thinking there would never even have been a 4th century if Emperor Claudius II was even slightly successful with this venture, but whatever the origins, St. Valentine himself, associated with lovers and love himself (falling in love despite being destined for sainthood) was used to overlay a precious culture's undesirable features.

So here we all are now with the holiday largely serving as a retail stimulus, mainly for chocolate, cards and flowers, and yet the Uzbek government (not the spiritual authorities, although they may have been pressed into service) getting all mad at this. Why?

Perhaps it symbolizes all the worst features of Christian holidays -- promotion of the individual's romantic love for no particular purpose, in defiance of state plans; promotion of love despite the emperor's tendency to throw people in jail they don't like; promotion of the couple's desires in defiance of the state's military imperatives.

None of these features may be particularly "Christian" in their notion but certainly are Western (and since "Rome" is part of the West, it would be interesting to follow how we got, by way of St. Valentine, from a world in which the Emperor could even stop human pro-creation supposedly in the name of military exigency to a world in which people could have a great excuse to buy -- and eat -- lots of boxes of chocolate.

I couldn't help wondering if what the Russian, Uzbek and other post-Soviet governments hate about St. Valentin's Day is that it so glibly popularizes and monetarizes a religious holiday. Everybody remembers the "saint' part of it and that this saint had something vaguely to do with love, but they don't really recall the religious context and the Catholic Church or other Christian churches don't promote any special St. Valentine's Day masses or festivals.

I recall the Uzbek government and spiritual authorities were particularly exercised in recent years about what they saw as the commercialization of Ramadan, or at least, the ostentatious celebration of the nightly breaking of fast in lavish public dinners where people treated their friends. That seems awfully surly, given that such social occasions loosely based around a religious custom seem to be the heart of the community -- and this year, the Uzbek government relented on discouraging the feast day altogether, and limited themselves simply to cautioning the faithful to refrain from excesses.

Interestingly, now Uzbek authorities aren't going to stop at just banning St. Valentine and his dubious romantic, individualist, anti-state threats, they are going to substitute him -- much like the Church authorities of another century did with Valentine himself -- with Moghul Emperor Babur, as the BBC reports. Fortunately for them, Babur's birthday was on February 14, which is why he has come in so handy.

I turned to Flickr to see what visuals were available for Emperor Babur, and of course found that he had built some delightful gardens in Kabul. And among the delightful photo streams comes one from the US Embassy in Kabul, which contrived to put on this interesting cultural exchange in October 2011:

Thousands of Kabul school children will have the opportunity to learn about the history of Babur's Garden, Babur's tomb, and the Queen's Palace through an education initiative funded by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and conducted by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. The students receive printed materials about these cultural heritage sites, school supplies, and snacks as part of the tour. More than 10,000 local school children have received tours as part of this initiative. (Department of State)

I wonder if there are any chocolates in those goody bags.

US Embassy Kabul

 UPDATE:  On cue, David Trilling has a piece on EurasiaNet in which he decides the anti-Valentine's Day spasm in Central Asia is all about Muslims:

So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders?

A menace of the heart must grip Registan.net's Nathan Hamm, who then grumps about Trilling and the Western media obsessing about this hate on Valentine's Day for weeks. In doing so, he reveals something funny -- somebody -- David himself or Justin Burke, the managing editor, trimmed Trilling's fulmination (bold added):

So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders? Could it be, since governments around the region already maintain a monopoly on people’s voices, they also expect control over their hearts? Without more than empty “national values” on offer, they’re unlikely to succeed.

Good Lord, that's hilarious, not the first, and not the last such perlustration to occur on EurasiaNet!

Actually, both Trilling and Hamm are wrong, because it's not about Muslims, it's about Soviet state culture persisting and taking this form to this day.

A Russian mayor of a region, Belgorod, neither of which is distinguished by being Muslim, also banned the holiday -- and in the past, going all the way back to the Soviet era, this was always a holiday the commissars discouraged.

But don't let those sorts of facts get in the way of having a good hate on "ignorant Westerners" who once again are saying something unfair about the "Mooooslims" as Jillian York would put it.

I think it's fine that the Western press obsessed about it, because it helps the mass public think about what these societies are about and how they respond to the West, which is something you have to understand.

Hamm sounds as fussy and controlling as the authorities in these Eurasian countries, scolding us for caring about this story:

Yes, the way that not only Uzbekistan’s government, but also others in the region, attacks rock music, modern incarnations of western holidays like Valentine’s Day or Halloween, etc. make them look silly. It’s not even clear if the constituencies that are generally in support of the amorphous collection of culturally conservative linguistic nationalist beliefs that are the content of “national values” even care about things like Valentine’s Day all that much. (If Tata Ulan or the self-described intellectual quoted in the BBC story are any indication, there are in fact such constituencies — the governments are not entirely out of touch with the public.) But the explanation for the attacks, which sadly was lacking in most of the western coverage, needn’t be overblown.

Well, it's Valentine's Day, and the story is fairly light-weight, so no need to write a treatise about every single holiday and every sort of prescriptive morals code the Uzbeks or other Central Asians come up with to control culture. What it's all about is not only alient cultures but commerce, and it's commerce that helped propel the cultural memes throughout the world

Registan Makes Sure Nobody Ever Questions the SNB -- Really

Three-card monte, Paris, 2006. Photo by Nelson Minar.

Sarah Kendzior's at it again -- first re-telling the Uzbek suicide student story yet another time, and yet another time not conceding that it may well have been an SNB (secret police) disinformation plot to discredit the opposition and the human rights movement. Then, she re-warms her academic theory once again on the coals of Registan.net implying that if "everybody's a spy" and there is such deep lack of trust between people in Uzbek society, then...we never really have to face the fact that the SNB really *does* do bad things, because it's just "paranoia" seeping into the society.

It's the PERFECT theory for the regime symps and protectionists around Registan.net and it's the sort of thing that becomes very compelling to the "progressive" mind. The progs always hate it when people see fundamentalist Islam behind every bush or exaggerate the threat of regimes in such a way as to distract what they see as the main problem of the world -- the US. So if they can get an anthropologically-validated theory of "SNB-as-metaphor" -- merely affecting people's psychology and not what-it-is -- why, we can dispel this silly belief that the secret police are really terrible.

Kendzior even manages to turn Arendt inside out even as she quotes Arendt:

"In a system of ubiquitous spying,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote, “everybody may be a police agent and each individual feels himself under constant surveillance."

Yes, they do. Because...they are (in states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union about which Arendt wrote).

But then Kendzior turns around and renders that actual police state and that actual constant surveillance as merely "virtual" (a sleight of hand not unlike three card monte):

On the internet, Uzbeks can access censored information and debate controversial topics like politics and religion – though not without awareness that they are being watched. They can operate in relative secrecy, cloaking themselves in anonymous avatars, or connect through semi-closed social media networks. What they find harder is shaking the SNB’s long shadow, its psychic hold. The SNB inhibits whatever space it inhabits – physical, psychological, and virtual.

See how that worked? Real secret police -- and then just people *imagining the secret police when they might not really be there*. Real secret police -- and then just a "psychic hold" which is merely about the "anthropology" -- how people perceive their state and surroundings, without really caring anymore what the reality is.

The story of the students questioned by the SNB told earlier this week which I questioned thoroughly here is recycled yet again, to become more persuasive in the telling (Kendzior used the same technique in establishing the suicide girl story, then appearing to be very cautious about *not* debunking it; then taking her time to debunk it; and never admitting that it might be an SNB plot.)

Every day, there are human rights violations in Uzbekistan and a hardy human rights community and independent press that reports on them. Registan never, ever covers those stories. There are the trials of religious believers charged with extremism about which we know very little, but whose relatives come to complain about torture. People picketing injustices. Harassment of journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, cultural people in all kinds of contrived ways. None of this EVER captures the attention let alone the imagination of Registan because it would carve too close to the bone on the regime - and Registan is never really about questioning the fundamental power of the Uzbek establishment (or the US government and foreign policy establishment that now supports it).

So instead, we get *this* story. A story that -- as I pointed out already -- even if true, is being put to a certain use. That certain use is to let people in official US educational programs like FLEX know in no uncertain terms that they better watch out -- they better completely scrub even the benign human rights topics that seem pre-approved like HIV/AIDS or trafficking or child rights -- and shut up.

We get it that people are asked to work for the SNB all the time. In fact, it's assumed that many of the people who remain publicly active in some way in Uzbekistan have at least agreed to report certain things to the SNB or to agree to have "conversations". Those who don't are the ones jailed or tortured. The point isn't to question THAT the SNB does this sort of thing; the point is to question the uses to which Registan is putting it now, with academic backing from Kendzior and others on the site.

The entire Gulsumoy Abdujaliova story could have been contrived by the SNB itself; indeed, I supply good arguments for why it likely could have been. (And also explain how carefully a human rights leader worked to research it and ultimately disprove it.) Yet Kendzior once again blames NOT the SNB, but people who "have fabricated claims of SNB abuse in order to discredit others or promote their own agendas."

There's no evidence for this insinuation that emigres made up the story to gain attention or some kind of bizarre street cred as victims. The opposition leaders said they were fooled and in fact conceded the exposure of the story. And we are still left with this: the woman who told the story says she herself was put up to it by the SNB.

Registan Scares Young People Away from US Exchange, Human Rights

Three-card monte hustle in NYC. Photo by RunsWithScissors.

Whenever you see Registan.net run an article about human rights, you have to ask: hmm, what's up here?

They may appear as if they care about human rights issues, and part of building up their street cred is to tell critics suspicious of their support of the establishment that they are wrong or out of touch or haven't read the archives and seen all their Genuine Expressions of Concern.

So at first blush when you see a lurid story about two young men intimidated by the National Security Service of Uzbekistan (the KGB's successor), you're supposed to think, "Oh, they care."

Well, no they don't, because Joshua Foust has blasted human rights activists in the West relentlessly, all over the place, and critics of Uzbekistan's brutal regime who risk appearing on Registan constantly find themselves facing legions of anonymous ankle-biters trying to make them fall off the ledge of their position.

So what's this really about? It strikes me that it is more of the same effort to try to accomplish two things:

o scare off supporters of the opposition or human rights groups, especially in the younger generation, especially related to anything in the US or Europe;

o enable the ankle-biters to come on in full force to knock any such supporters of human rights and  harass and bully them into giving up -- and enabling their positions to stand without challenge.

Both of these purposes are served one again with a post about how the SNB (National Security Service, Russian initials) is threatening Jizzak activists.

With pictures even -- imagine!

Two Uzbek participants in a US educational program called FLEX (Future Leaders Exchange) and Awareness Projects International found that when they returned to their home town of Jizzakh after studying in the US, they were questioned and warned and threatened if they continued their "human rights activity".

Now, what does this remind you of? Yes, the suicide girl story -- she, too, returned to her home town of Andijan, was supposedly interrogated, threatened -- and then committed suicide. This sparked a tide of stories in social media about a Facebook-related suicide -- and it was all revealed as a hoax. That hoax  I believe was perpetrated by the SNB, with the help of uzmetronom.com and other regime supporters, and amplified at first by Sarah Kendzior on Registan. Ultimately, it didn't work to scare people off the Internet, or so it seems (and as I pointed out, maybe they never even heard about it, so low is Internet penetration in Uzbekistan).

So now we have a possibly "more believable" story in which the two young men don't commit suicide, Facebook-related or really, but return to tell their tales -- and on Registan, of all places! With pictures, even!

And in this story, the two boys handily make it back to the US, where they alert US officials to the interrogation and threats.  Hmm. Usually people like that not associated with the opposition or human rights groups (far and few between as we know) who still have relatives there (which these kids must, as they returned home?) don't talk. They don't make more trouble for themselves and their relatives.

Their story is likely true; it's hard to know, as the SNB isn't exactly on Twitter telling us when it interrogates students. But it's likely it had the desired effect -- the US officials running FLEX or other educational programs probably felt spooked and wrapped up their programs even more tightly. No more "human rights" chatter.

Why did I say "human rights" in quotation marks? Well, because what they did was indeed human rights related, but more in the anodyne vein that is allowed even in these countries -- issues like HIV prevention, "youth leadership,"  or even forced child labour -- which the government hasn't eradicated, but which it has accepted as a topic that it claims to have done something about.  Done right, all these topics aren't safe or anodyne, but they can become a substitute in some US-sponsored programs trying to steer clear of hard-core topics like torture or political imprisonment.

These kids may have been very sincere in what they were doing (one of them said he studied the structure of the Uzbek regime and even called Karimov's third term "unconstitutional" -- so even their mild educational/summer camp programs really may have been seen as a threat) and maybe really experienced what they experienced.

Interestingly, they hewed to the USAID/US exchange menu of the "safer" rights: "Nurullayev says he also discussed mistreatment and sexual abuse of women, the widespread use of forced child labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry, and the catastrophe of the Aral Sea." Again, it may be perfectly feasible that a young Uzbek man on his own became concerned about sexual abuse of women and child forced labour and the environment, just like a New York liberal, but that's usually not the menu for groups inside the country that tend to focus on political and religious imprisonment, freedom of expression, torture, etc. -- or the "social justice" side of the rights equation related to education, jobs, travel abroad for work.

Now, that doesn't mean that I think people inside Uzbekistan hew to "Western values" that prefer hard-core civil rights to the softer social issues. It's a different point: it's precisely the USAID crowd that promotes the softer issues in their programs and that's where it sounds like it comes from, not from indigenous concerns (which wouldn't necessarily be free expression, either!)

But regardless of whether the stories are true, or the experiences valid or concerns sincere, the uses to which this story is now going to be put benefit...whom? Not the human rights movement. Not US educational programs. But the regime, because now people reading it will say, "Oh, we need to make sure educational programs don't cross the line," and young Uzbeks will say "Oh, we need to make sure we don't go overboard or we could get in trouble." Mission accomplished.

That's what I said about the suicide student's story; that's what I said about Kendzior's role in purveying it. To be sure, she debunked the story, but not before it had a good long run, my efforts to fight the ankle-biters led me to be banned from Registan (!) and the message sent was very well established: don't mess with the Uzbek regime.

The reason I think this story of the two students may be regime-sponsored -- or at least instigated by the regime at this point to "send messages" -- is because the Turkmen government has also gone after FLEX at this time -- and we know the security services of these countries compare notes and do things together, inside or outside of the CSTO.

So Turkmenistan put pressure on FLEX in recent weeks as well, deliberately holding a competition for students right at the time as the FLEX exams were being held, and asking teachers about their students' participation in it -- it seemed they wanted to discourage them from getting near a US program. They could formally assent to the program by signing exchange agreements with the US, but then turn around and harass participants.

Ultimately, I would say: treat this story critically. Ask about the details and the implications. Ask why Registan is pushing it, all of a sudden, and not, oh, Human Rights Watch or something...

And if US officials have any starch in their shirts, they should march right up to the Ministry of Education and ask why SNB agents are harassing participants in a program that is officially part of an exchange agreement, and not start filtering all the content.

Muhtorov Insists on Innocence; Islamic Jihad Union Insists on Existence

Not surprisingly, terrorism suspect Jamshid Muhtorov, an Uzbek refugee and former human rights activist, is pleading not guilty to charges that he sought to aid the terrorist group Islamic Jihad Union.

He's asked for a lawyer and asked not to be treated as terrorism suspect, i.e. not to be held in special correctional facilities but with the general prison population. He said he has not been allowed to see his wife or an attorney (the state will provide one for him).

"I have been held as a terrorist," Muhtorov said during the hearing. "But I swear to Allah I have never done anything."

Surely he should get his day in court like all suspects in crimes, with all due process. The FBI believes that he contacted the Islamic Jihad Union in Turkey and planned to travel there to assist them in some kind of terrorist attack. The hypothesis was strengthened by his telling his young daughter that he would not see her again, but would see her in heaven.

That seems like the sort of thing you'd tell someone if you were planning to die in a suicide bombing attack, but was that the case? It's hard to think of any other hypothesis. Is it possible his daughter said something like, "But what if you die in a plane crash?" And he said, "Don't worry then we'd see each other in heaven." But...that's not what the FBI claims to have in a phone transcript.

The skepticism about his case from Registan.net and others largely hinges on the notion that the Islamic Jihad Union "doesn't exist." Defying the best efforts of the think-tanking security bloggers, the IJU nevertheless insists that it does exist and just released a video.

The Long War Journal has this to say:

The video, titled "The Path to Paradise, Part 6," was released to jihadist websites in early December 2011 by Badr al-Tawhid, "the media arm of the Islamic Jihad Union," according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which translated the video.

"The first part of the video shows new fighters receiving training in firearms, explosives, and heavy weapons at an IJU camp in 2009-2010, while the second shows the fighters applying this training to clashes and strikes against NATO-led ISAF forces and Afghan soldiers in Khost, Kunduz, and Paktia provinces," a summary provided by SITE stated.

BTW, they make it awfully hard to get a peek at these jihad videos -- you have to give your name, telephone number, and purpose.

There follows an awful lot of detail about this group and their fighting and their whereabouts, and yet Registan may not find it compelling -- I'd have to go research whether they find this particular blog or writer somehow "suspect" -- they often make judgements like this based on mere association.

I can't imagine where this blogger would get so much detail if this terrorist group didn't exist, but I have no independent knowledge about anything to do with the IJU. This video can be viewed here on the MEMRI site, which says "A new video from the Waziristan-based Uzbek "Islamic Jihad Union" contains footage from an IJU madrasa in which young children are shown undergoing military training."

Resettlement Watch, a group that seems terribly preoccupied with the idea that refugees coming to this country could harbour terrorists, has weighed in with great suspicion about Muhtorov. I've posted a comment that I think that isn't a fair assessment of the majority of Uzbek refugees -- I was going to follow up, but trying to log on to a WordPress blog -- as always! -- is just as hard as viewing those jihad videos at SITE -- I give up.

Another commenter asks why there was a special airlift of refugees. But Muhtorov wasn't "airlifted" -- he wasn't even involved in Andijan and isn't an "Andijan refugee" although he is a recognized refugee for the generic reasons anyone would be fleeing Uzbekistan and facing "a well-founded fear of persecution" if he were to return. Muhtorov happened to flee to Kyrgyzstan at about the same time as the Andijan events, and there he spent some months being processed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and was then eventually resettled in the US. Not exactly an "airlift".

Now why were the people really fleeing Andijan rescued quickly as a group? I can think of a number of reasons:

o the US decided to condemn the massacre and was then given an eviction notice, and they decided to save the people they could while they could
o those people may have given valuable human rights testimony that helped document the facts of the massacre
o I've also heard -- and have no way of confirming -- that some of the Andijan refugees were businessmen who actually helped the US with logistics or even intelligence in their efforts to use Uzbekistan as a route to Afghanistan.

Maybe? I have to wonder how useful such persons really could be. It may have been just a useful precaution of building up contacts among "the opposition" -- the active people who might take over after Karimov passes on.  I don't know. We have to realize that our country has a proud tradition of taking in persecuted refugees and also has a proud tradition of taking in defectors from countries where they sometimes have useful intelligence, and both are in the same stream. It's not like the US deliberately seeds terrorists into immigrant flows. There's also the question of whether Muhtorov "radicalized" once on US soil. There isn't enough information to tell. He came from provincial Uzbekistan where many people are devout Muslims to start with, although he was not known for religious garb and beard while in Uzbekistan.

Meanwhile, the Russians are concerned that Central Asians aren't quite up to snuff to fight terrorism, and just as they are constantly pressuring Tajikistan over its porous and dangerous border with Afghanistan (no angels they), so they are now pressuring Kyrgyzstan.

Dierdre Tynan of EurasiaNet has the story. Paul Quinn-Judge of the International Crisis Group said:

“It is not clear how much of a threat will emanate from Afghanistan. Will this free up Central Asia Islamists to return to Central Asia, for example? Do they have the capacity to challenge security in a country like Uzbekistan? These sorts of questions are completely open. No-one seems to have enough reliable information to make a plausible case either way."

Moscow’s gift of military hardware to Bishkek makes it clear that Russian leaders are worried about the ability of Central Asian states to address regional security threats. Speaking at a hand-over ceremony in Bishkek , Vladimir Pronichev, the head of Russia's border service, warned; "There are tough tasks ahead of us. Trans-border crime is gathering pace in Kyrgyzstan. We know what kind of difficulties Kyrgyz border troops are facing. We intend to continue developing cooperation and our friendship."

I wonder how that "friendship" will go.  Quinn-Judge seems to think that the Kremlin isn't at panic stations yet, reports Tynan:

Quinn-Judge said. "If the Russians were seriously worried, you would expect a more serious deployment of forces and equipment. Absent that, the weapons delivery seems more like a gesture of good will towards a government that, Moscow hopes, will be a little more consistent and compliant than its predecessor."

As the date of 2014 or even 2013 approaches with further US withdrawal and likely more Taliban encroachment, this may very well change.  I don't play down the Russian threat the way the Soros-funded EurasiaNet and the oft-cited Soros-funded ICG do.

Indeed, Bakiyev's ouster stands as a lesson of what happens to Central Asian leaders who aren't "compliant" -- as has been remarked, those bazookas in April 2010 in Bishkek didn't grow out of tulip beds. While there was plenty of home-grown opposition sentiment to Bakiyev, it appears it had some help. In fact, it seems sometimes overlooked that Russian precipitated the April events by suddenly jacking up gas prices and affecting Bakiev and son's cushy fuel deals, including with the Americans at Manas.

As soon as Roza Otunbayeva -- educated in Moscow and Russian-speaking and of a certain Soviet generation -- came into office as an interrim leader, she made overtures to Russia and even asked Moscow to help quell the pogroms in June 2010. It didn't. That's important to remember when reflecting how/whether Russia will amp up its troop presence on the border. A powerful deterrent isn't just "Chechnya syndrome" or "Afghan syndrome" before it, but Uzbekistan, which definitely, definitely doesn't want Russian troops on or near that border, full stop -- and was a key factor in preventing the CSTO from becoming embroiled in the ethnic clashes.

Even so, the Russians stand ever-ready to meddle on pretexts just like drugs or thugs, and now they have more of a foothold with all this new gift of $16 million of military hardware. $16 million! That's a lot more than say, the $100,000 the US is now giving Uzbekistan for night-vision goggles and bullet-proof vests.

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IMU Trial in Tajikistan; IMU Denial at Registan

While Registan continues to tell us that the IMU doesn't exist any more and terrorism in Central Asia is over-dramatized, and Foust continues to joust on the Muhtorov case, the independent news site fergananews.com just reported that 34 persons suspected of membership in the IMU were put on trial in Tajikistan.

The US has recently designated more arrested or wanted suspects as members of the IMU and IJU (more commentary from the Long War here) including Jamshid Muhtorov.

CLOSED TRIAL OF 34 IN TAJIKISTAN

Fergananews.com cited an Asia-Plus report that on January 30 in in the Sugdh Province of Tajikistan, 34 residents of the Isfar district were put on trial on charges of belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and allegedly committing a number of serious offenses. They were said to have committed murder; organizing an unlawful armed formation; banditry; organization of a criminal gang; incitement of national, racial, origin or religious enmity; violent seizure of power; and public calls to change the Constitutional order.

Whew! Now, who are we to believe? Regional press, which relies on the Tajik government and official law-enforcerment reports because it's hard to do their own investigation (the trial was probably closed; the defendants probably had state lawyers or even no lawyers) -- or a bunch of think-tankers in Washington already disposed to discount any evidence of terrorism anywhere as exaggerated?

Just like so many large and hastily-prepared trials in Uzbekistan, these group trials in Tajikistan are probably riddled with procedural violations and reek of lack of due process. So you don't know what these people really were doing. Did they just get together to pray in their living rooms? Did they get together on the street corner and talk tough? Were they "Internetting while Muslim?"  Did they just shoot off some guns at a wedding the way young men can do sometimes?

We don't know.  While we could easily say the entire thing is fake, we could also ask, but if the government wanted to fake up a case, why 34 people? 17 would do, even 10. Why did they "need" to put so many people away? Do they just go around grabbing people for no reason? They might. But sometimes even authoritarian states have a reason to go after real criminals, and really have to make their case to keep even in their (shaky) legitimacy.

Asia-Plus goes on to say that the prosecutor reported that there were 135 such "active members of religious extremist parties in Sughd" uncovered last year, including members of Hizb-ut-Tahir, the IMU and other banned organizations.

So maybe they weren't in the IMU, but just the H-u-T -- banned in Central Asia and some European countries but not all (the UK) on the theory that they don't call for violence (just for imposition of a caliphate, without a clear plan about what they'll do to people who don't want a caliphate.)

Or maybe they were in a splinter group that wasn't part of the "global jihad." Or maybe they just went to the mosque or looked at somebody cross-eyed. Who knows? But can we, on the basis of our deep suspicion of these authoritarian governments in Central Asia airily conclude that there's nothing to this? I mean, charges of murder and armed gang activity?

THE IMU

Fergananews.com goes on to explain -- as Joshua Foust and others admit -- that IMU was created in 1996 and did really exist (the issues seems to be the readiness for pundits to say it no longer exists or at least doesn't do much.) Russia, the US and others have designated it a terrorist organization (Russia's designation of it as such never gets the juices flowing for the "progressives" as much as the US designation, of course.)

Fergananews.com describes the IMU as "being based" still in some districts of Afghanistan and Pakistan and as being "under the control of the Taliban movement." They go on to mention Usma Osil, an "amir" who is leader of the IMU, although he's been reported dead by vesti.uz, killed in a joint operation of NATO and "local intelligence services" in the north Afgan province of Tahar.

So that's that, and we will likely never hear of these 34 people again, even in the independent press. Their hundreds of relatives have probably been scared into silence, and those few who aren't are probably busy forming something that sooner or later somebody will call "an armed formation" -- and might be.

Maybe all these people aren't actually in something organized called "the IMU" that is really run by the "amir" (their quotation marks) or even the Taliban; maybe it's just a local gang. We don't know anything!

But if we're going to put on our skeptics' hats, I don't see why we have to accept the "non-existence" theory over the "horrible scary terrorists" theory but can remain skeptical and curious about both.

IN TERRORIST DESIGNATION, THE US 'DOES THE DIRTY WORK' FOR UZBEKS

Foust, instead, blows off a careful critic with an airy wave of the hand and the usual hyperbole. Foust has a litany of these rhetorical flourishes. "Let's put on our honesty caps," he told me nastily -- as if...calling him out on his hypocrisy somehow involves "dishonesty" on my part. Or "don't argue with a point you think I'm making, argue with what I actually said" -- as if everybody always misunderstands this tragic artist or are too incompetent to read his gnarly texts. Or "I didn't actually say that, it only seems like I said that, but that was in another place, or that was yesterday anyway" -- and so on. They really are laughable to watch.

Continuing to argue about the significance of the Muhtorov case, says Foust:

The one thing the IJU has supposedly done — some bombings in Tashkent in 2004, was identified by the SNB, the Uzbek secret police. The SNB are also fond of labeling every dissident religious leader in the country an IMU or IJU terrorist as well. Based on their recommendation, the U.S. government classified the IJU a foreign terrorist organization and made it a crime to communicate with them (or to “provide material support”). In other words, the U.S. government is doing the Uzbek government’s dirty work for it, about a group that probably doesn’t really exist. And they do this a lot: a few years ago Registan.net contributor Sarah Kendzior wrote a brilliant article about how the regime in Tashkent invented another group, Akromiya, to justify its massacre in Andijon.

Well, actually, the SNB aren't fond of labeling every single dissident religious leader an IMU or IJU terrorist. That is, if you look at the press reports or human rights reports of the actual group trials, sometimes they mention those designated terrorist groups, sometimes they don't (maybe they don't want to over-do this, so as not to make it seem as if they're losing the battle). Sometimes they merely say "extremist group". We don't know.

I don't share the assessment of Sarah Kendzior's brilliance any more, but I'll return to that later; what we do have to ask are two questions about Foust's current theses:

"MATERIAL EVIDENCE": INTENT AND CAPACITY"

1. He claims "material support" is an overbroad category and part of that big, baggy abusive war-on-terror that the US is guilty of badly mishandling by "progressives". Well, maybe indeed they are. Renderings to certain torture. Rendition holding camps. Shady things happening. Not a lot of transparency. All very important to keep a scrutiny on.  Foust says:

And this carping, of course, skips past my broader complaint that the FTO language is broadly written and the “material support” laws are even more weakly defined. To wit, the criteria for inclusion include not just proof that an organization has either engaged in terrorist activit or terrorism, but who, as an exclusionary clause (broken by an “or,” so it meets the criteria on its own), “retain the capability and intent to engage in terrorist activity or terrorism.”

Er, why can't we carp? Foust always does. But by the same token, if we're to be wedded to that intellectual posture of skepticism, why make it work in only one direction? Yes, "material support" may just be too broad a concept if it only means visiting a website and "toughing tough" with some other tough-talkers. Was that all? We'll await the legal defense and the trial.

2. He claims "intent and capacity" aren't enough to make an arrest. On the other hand, why should the US have to wait until a terrorist act was actually committed, and not take a harder look at support of groups that seem to have the will and capacity to put one on? I mean, counter-terrorism, is, well, counter-terrorism.

That intention and capacity are what Foust objects to as overbroad concepts. Indeed they are. But a judgement is made about just how far along that will is, and just how serious (with armaments) that capacity is -- and in the end, it comes down to whether you literally trust the FBI under the most liberal president you will ever get in America, or you don't. So...why don't you? Where's your evidence?

HIZB-UT-TAHIR

People parse this with H-u-T endlessly. H-u-T endlessly tells you that they are a peaceful group not calling for terrorism. And perhaps that's true. It only ever seems to be those former H-u-T people who do those nasty things, or splinters of people who once read H-u-T literature and attended meetings. Never H-u-T itself, oh no. Well -- maybe, maybe not. The government tends to call everything it doesn't like by a name, and sometimes they can be wrong. Indeed, they are no good; indeed, they are evil.

But there are extremists, and among the reasons they exist is because the human rights movement never, ever challenges them. They never worry about how to make a good social movement; they worry about how to issue their next report. They don't challenge extremism for reasons of ideological leftyness and "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" politics; they don't for the fatal attraction of organized rigid systems like Islamism to the extreme leftist mind already pre-disposed to ideological explanations "for everything"; they don't for reasons of liberal political correctness (never comment on the nature of the victim, his victimhood and status as representing a violation of human rights is all that matters); and most of all, because if the human rights secularists/liberals began challenging local extremist groups, there would be more of them who would end up dead.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT

An article in the Daily Mail tells us that Jamshid Muhtorov "worked closely with Human Rights Watch" although we don't know that for a fact, or from HRW itself (although I will try to check); we only have sources saying he distributed HRW's publication on Andijan. In that same story, however,HRW's Hugh Williamson tells us more detail information about his arrest back in 2005 that wasn't on web sources before (as far as I know), namely, that Muhtorov was beaten severely, intimidated, afraid to contact his family, and forced to go to Tashkent -- and then returned:

After becoming director of Ezgulik, Muhtorov eventually joined the Free Peasants Party, which favored regime change and worked closely with Human Rights Watch, but in January 2006, he was detained with another activist.

Uzbek authorities beat him and released him only after he wrote statements promising not to write internet articles or to oppose the government, according to Human Rights Watch reports.

'His nose was broken. He was covered in blood. And the assailants told him, 'This is your last warning.' ... He was scared to go back to his family home, so he went to Tashkent (the capital),' said Hugh Williamson, director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia division. 'But then he came back again a few days later and was beaten up again. This time, he lost consciousness.'

As I've often noted, there is nothing that radicalizes a person more than being tortured and intimidated. They turn to radicalism and terrorism (as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt did) because they lose faith in the human rights approach. The human rights approach of non-violent protest, documentation, patience -- it's just not good enough. It doesn't work, in a place like Uzbekistan, except very slowly, and in a very limited fashion. Those countries that have strong non-violent human rights movement willing to follow this tough path under authoritarian regimes usually help their countries be better off after transition start, but it's a tough sell.

Even so, somebody has to say (and it won't be Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International), that just because you and your family are victims doesn't mean you can turn other people into victims from acts of terrorism. The terrorist method has a beef with a regime or a party -- yet  it harms innocent people unrelated to that beef to try to turn the entire population against the regime (as they will be too scared to turn against the terrorists themselves -- they will do anything to make them stop).

'THIN GRUEL' OR DUE DILIGENCE?

So whatever Muhtorov's tragic past, if he was hoping to help out a bunch of people with the capacity to throw bombs and hurt people, not only is the US within the law in arresting him, the law on material aid may not be "wrong" as Foust says. It really does depend on the nature of the people in Turkey, and what Turkey has on them. And here, we just don't have any journalism or NGO in Turkey that we've heard from writing about this, there's only the blogger AJK. That's not persuasive enough for me.

Foust complains that people outside the defense staffs only have puny information on all this. ("the open source IJU evidence that us peons have access to about that event is crap. Even the Sauerland testimony is awfully thin gruel for deciding a group is really real and it poses a threat.") Sure, whatever is supplied may be thin gruel, we get all that. But why are we so sure that what the government has is crap? Maybe part of the reason they can't tell you is because to do so would harm their sources.

'SELLING OUT DISSIDENTS FOR THE NDN'

At the end of this thread, Joshua Kucera shows up to imply that he didn't really mean to say anything so wacky as the US actually selling dissidents down the river for the sake of opening the NDN (which I objected to strenuously as lacking in any evidence.)

But he nevertheless wound up saying the same thing, even if switching the focus to the terrorism designation by State. Yes, we get that this is likely a political negotiation and a horse-trading-type of setting. Even so, it was a designation made long before the current NDN negotiations. Why would keeping a designation in place (when there's no overriding reason to remove it) be necessarily tied to NDN negotiations? That doesn't seem reasonable to me. And if the reference is to the recent designation of individuals as IMU members, then...you're back to the claim that the US is selling individuals down the pike to open up the NDN lanes.

And...what are the real reasons why the IMU "doesn't exist" anymore? Because you say so? Because they don't seem active? Then what's all this in Tajikistan -- a piece in the local press like so many, which you don't even comment on at Registan? (Foust doesn't read Russian.)

I'm going to keep reading and keep thinking about this; what I won't accept is that there is nothing to it at all.

Uzbekistan Begins Repairs at Rail Bridge Blast Site: Tajikistan

Uzbekistan has begun repairs on a rail bridge that authorities said was destroyed by a terrorist bomb, fergananews.com reports, citing a statement from Tajikistan's Foreign Ministry.

"Tashkent has informed us about the start of restoration work on the rail bridge at the Galaba-Amuzang crossing, linking Hatlon region with the outside world," Nizomiddin Zihidov, deputy foreign minister of Tajikistan reported January 27 at a press conference in Dushanbe.

The rail bridge was said to have been damaged in an explosion November 17.  No terrorist group is known to have taken credit for the attack. The incident halted traffic on the line to Tajikistan, blocking food deliveries and driving up prices for Tajiks. The Tajik railroad says 298 freight cars bound for southern Tajikistan have been stalled. Tajik authorities believe Uzbekistan deliberately created the blockage to stop rail traffic into Tajikistan as part of a long-standing dispute over Tajikistan's plans to build a hydroelectric power station that could adversely impact Uzbekistan's irrigation-intensive cotton industry.

Despite the simmering conflicts, Zihidov believes Uzbek-Tajik relations are back on track, fergananews.com reports. While Tashkent turned off gas to Tajikistan for non-payment earlier this month, it restored service after just a day of negotiations.

 

Foust Backpeddles Furiously on US "Sell-Out" Charge; Nathan Hamm Defends the Honour of Uniform for Registan

 After several days silence from the Registanis on their theory that the case against Jamshid Muhtorov is all trumped up by the evil Muslim-hating feds, first,  more stubborn skepticism pretending its not conspiracy theory from Foust, in a post, "The Merits of the Mukhtarov Case, and Why Skepticism Is Not Conspiracy."

It's a response to a tasty intellectual beat-down of Foust from Gunpowder & Lead which does a pretty good job of tackling the "college stuff " like the "epistemological errors" and does a "critical" reading pointing out that the indictment doesn't even mention "chat rooms" -- a good answer to Foust's nonsense.  The Gunpowder & Lead bloggers Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Lauren Morgan then proceed to question the basic Foustian premise that "the IJU doesn't exist." They also call out Foust, as I have done with another author misrepresented in this way by Foust on the Atlantic, for misrepresenting an author on the global jihadi movement,  JZ Adams.

And I'm so glad that these authors also called out the obvious -- that the groups themselves actively portray themselves as global jihadi, and that's important to document even if they don't have the capacity to really go big-time -- which I did with Foust on his claim that the extremist group in Kazakhstan was invoking the Zhanaozen killings.

Oh, you can't win if you try to prove that Foust is or isn't in a conspiracy theory, but I do point out that there are schools of thought that form around power groupings of various sort that have a vested interest in either minimizing or maximizing the terrorist threat in Central Asia, as I outlined them. This prevents open-minded and clear analysis of the real situation because those in the schools become attached to their theories -- the anti-anti crowd has the mindshare much of the time in public discussions and it makes it impossible to judge whether the government is in fact making its case because looking at any piece of it only earns withering scorn from the punditocracy -- and questioning them only causes their knee-jerk reaction to put you in the same basket as Atlas Shrugged.

(On the 2004 bombings, while I don't think we have to take the Uzbek government's word about anything, I do think we have to show the mechanisms and mindsets that bring even a brutal government to deliberately setting off bombs and destroying property or even killing their own people in an "active measure" and nobody really does have the facts of what really happened there as there has never been a credible Uzbek defector or WikiLeaks of the regime.)

Like Kendzior, Foust attaches Muhtorov to the human rights movement. Is that deliberate so as to smear the human rights movement -- the human rights movement they both often scorn (in favour of the establishment in Uzbekistan and a soft touch for Karimov). Muhtorov was not representative of the human rights movement. He joined a group because he appeared to have family reasons to protest injustice -- his sister was accused of murder at the age of 19 that she appeared not to have anything to do with, but that may have been gang-related. He was not in Andijan nor did he flee the persecution related to Andijan. He was kicked out of the group that he was in by its chair because he demanded more money but didn't file financial reports. He joined another more radical farmer's group and then fled to Kyrgyzstan where he was portrayed at least by the official refugee committee as an "opportunist". He may or may not be a double agent and so forth and so on -- in other words, he is not a credible human rights activist by anyone's account, and yet these two keep describing him as one in a two-for that both smears the human rights movement that in fact disbanded the chapter he headed to get rid of him (!) and which also seems to exonerate him in advance from terrorism charges.

Next Foust does one of those reversals and double-backs for which he is infamous:

As Daveed notes, Mukhtarov does seem to have fallen afoul of the “material support” laws in the U.S. My argument, poorly stated in that initial post, was that those laws are themselves inherently flawed, a point JM Berger also picked up on in the comments and as I repeated. Saying the law is flawed is not the same as saying Mukhtarov broke no law, which is what Daveed (incorrectly) reduces my argument to.

This is so much like the way he nimbly evades any moral condemnation associated with drones, by saying "drones don't kill people, bad 9/11 anti-terrorism legislation kills people" -- and puts it all off to a meta layer that he doesn't have to analyze then because it's too big and complex and removed from the specific drone.

Perhaps these laws are inherently flawed -- I'd have to think about that some more. There are many legal critiques of the war on terror that find it overbroad. In Muhtorov's case, however, the "progressives" at Registan have to explain why it isn't material support to make travel plans to go meet up with a group of extremists watched by the Turkish government in a group that appears to have committed terrorist acts already, using a code word that has been used by Al Qaeda, and promising to die and only see his little daughter in heaven. Do they really believe he was only going to a relative's wedding and saying the bride's dress was "to die for"?

Having pitched that lie mispresenting his own original position which -- we can all read the record -- claimed the US was "crazy" for making these charges against this specific man (not that "the law" was bad and misused) he goes further and suddenly disassociates himself from the original claim by Gazistan and The Bug Pit:

All that being said, and this is separate from me and Daveed, there is a growing chorus of skeptics that seem to allege some sort of weird-ass plot between the Uzbek government and the State Department, or whatever, to trade Mukhtarov, a prominent dissident, in exchange for access to the NDN. That is, put simply, silly and completely without data even to suggest it is the case.

Oh, are we going to see that rapprochement established with at least some "good" EurasiaNet writers now start to evaporate?! Oh, and thanks for claiming falsely that Muhtorov was a "prominent dissident". Fake!

I agree that it was without data and was pure speculation and I characterized it as such during the days Registan was silent and treading water and talking to their hook-ups, whatever they are.

THAT Foust has hook-ups (as every good defense pundit would be expected to have) is revealed (bragged about) in his next paragraph:

I can say that more than one U.S. official working on Uzbek policy was genuinely surprised by Mukhtarov’s arrest, and it almost certainly wasn’t a feature of the NDN negotiations (and it isn’t something either State or DOD would do anyway)

I agree it's fake, but I don't agree that it's something DOD "wouldn't do". Of course, it doesn't work in some a literalist, instrumental way. But THAT Karimov literally put the NDN on the block over the State Department's award to a dissident is revealed in a WikiLeaks cable and it stands to reason State might tip-toe. The DOD might well get into talks, which State would then have to be part of, about designating certain groups as terrorists formally on the US list. That process isn't something that necessarily proceeds with all due legal and IHL rigour but can indeed be bargained with.

Foust provides more cover for Muhtorov's actions:

Turkey does have a large Uzbek population, and that population is vocal in its dissidence and opposition to the Karimov regime. There are perfectly legitimate and innocent reasons for Mukhtarov to travel there, whatever his emailed statements have said.

Well, sure. But to a non-existent wedding? To a group that is characterized as a terrorist group?

Then all Foust can do is say "there's no such thing" despite the evidence:

Back to Daveed’s point: about the real threat posed by the IJU, he too engages in some epistemological perfidy. While scolding me for reducing the Mukhtarov indictment to “crimes on a chatroom,” Daveed pulls from the indictment itself a list of crimes that include sending emails favorable of Juma Namangani and saying he supports the goals of a website administrator. I fail to see the distinction, even if he is working on semantics rather than specifics, between “email correspondence with a website administrator” and “crimes on a chatroom.” It comes down to a lot of big talk on the Internet (including the bay’ah, because who ever engages in hyperbole on the Internet, ever?) and the purchase of a plane ticket. I don’t dispute that that can constitute a U.S. crime — I do, however, think that is a dumb basis for a law.

Ultimately, Foust's argumentation hinges on the idea that "the US gets very bad information from the Uzbek government."  He was not available at all to question the case of the Uzbek who wanted to assassinate Obama -- no comment at all. He wasn't available to question the cases of trafficking by Uzbeks which coincided in time with big cases solved in Europe and Uzbekistan to make it possible to declare Uzbekistan as fighting traffickers in the annual State Department reports -- although all these cases may have had Uzbek intelligence, too. (And maybe Uzbek government intelligence, as awful a regime as it is, isn't always wrong? How can we tell?)

He reverts finally to claiming it's all just big talk in a chat room (something Foust knows a lot about himself, personally, with all of Twitter's big-talk chat room and his 5,000 followers) and getting on a plane to a country where a lot of your fellow countrymen happen to live isn't a crime -- and ducks from explaining why connection to a terrorist group isn't a crime, the crime of "material support" -- leaving only the very dubious claim that this group -- which is shown to have had explosives in Germany and charged with making attacks on Coalition Forces -- as "fake".

Nathan Hamm then appears to Ask Some Important Questions and essentially "defend the honour of uniform" (as they say in Russian) so that the powers-that-be don't think Registan is just a tabloid with Jousting Faust at the helm.

I don't know if he read my own notes on the case -- with skepticism about Registan's skepticism -- but he, too, does respond to Joshua Kucera's claim that the US was "selling out dissidents" for the sake of the Northern Distribution Network (the NATO cargo lane through Central Asia). I had a lot of questions about that dubious thesis even though I'm quite prepared to say that the US doesn't do enough for dissidents and may sacrifice human rights principles at times. (It's precisely because I think this that I think you have to make the case as carefully as you can -- after all, they are professionals, we are amateurs.)

As I studied Kucera's links in his blog making this hyped-up claim, I could see that he likely got it from Gazistan -- because Gazistan put out the idea first, and more starkly. To be sure, Kucera constantly links human rights and the NDN, and scours the landscape to find human rights activists inside the country complaining about the US so he is capable of coming up with this concept on his own. Still, I think the musings of Gazistan on Muhtorov helped

Gazistan is written by "Aslan Juhayman Khan" which translates as "Scowling Lion King" from Arabic. I haven't read enough of his posts to figure out where he might be from, or whether he's actually an Arabic-speaker. He sounds like a typical foreign student in the US or the West dumping on Western civilization and with many grievances about US power in the world. His story of a visit to the Met's new Islamic art exhibit is telling -- he drips with cynicism and contempt at the way this exhibit was put together -- which boils down to um, white northern ice people putting vibrant tan Arabic -- and Persian! -- people in constrictive boxes...or something...  I visited the exhibit -- very crowded -- and found it fascinating and educational although I felt there was not enough "story" in the placards at each item. I got much more enjoyment from it by coming with a friend who studied in Central Asia and knows a lot about the cultures and could unpack some of it -- and she was more interesting than the tour guides whose canned explanations I could catch here and there. Of course it needs more visits, but I don't anything deliberately different was done about the Islamic exhibit versus the Indian paintings (I do think it's possible the exhibit was rushed to opening for various reasons -- I did an analysis of the craven misuse of museum art to suck up to Berdymukhamedov in a preview). For Aslan, it's a study in evil Western Orientalism.

Aslan has persisted in his defense of Muhtorov -- "Internetting While Muslim" (i.e. like "driving while black," like the phrase used to describe American policemen's excuse to stop and search black drivers).

His defense basically seems to be: Muslims get in touch with various groups that don't really exist or if they exist aren't so terrible; they sometimes say things like they hope to die for their cause but they don't really mean it; the FBI shouldn't listen in on Muslims' chat like this because it's racist and they are nabbing the wrong people.

He made this conclusion after reading the complaint and the indictment which I provided; Kucera hadn't seen these, and hasn't returned to the topic.

Interestingly, Hamm doesn't get into the group-think supplied by Foust (who claimed the entire prosecution of Muhtorov was "crazy") and Kucera and others, notably Uzbek social media expert Sarah Kendzior, who has made out Muhtorov and his group affiliations to be "philosophically like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International" (wrong, or at least, partly wrong, as AI does defend "defensive jihad" and has dropped its once-noble credo of supporting only non-violence cases).

He steps out of it slightly because he can see that they are all cruisin' for a bruisin' if they continue that unsupportable line, and he inquires about The Facts -- although in doing so, he reveals his own deep "anti-anti" prejudices:

I get the reasoning you’re using in claiming the IJU might not even exist. Since the position is philosophical, where you do draw the line? When is the organization “real?” There was a period when the fair question would have been whether or not the IMU existed anymore. The tables are now turned, and the IJU doesn’t do much beyond an odd job here and there and, apparently, practice horrible communications security. Small and unsuccessful as it now is, it’s not non-existent. They don’t pose much of a threat, but they are still active. Are you arguing instead that they don’t rate high enough to be a designated terrorist organization? Or are you saying that they aren’t actually active they’re just some dudes who talk big on the internet? You’re right that they’re hard to pin down, and we’ve both seen people fill in gaps with a lot of bullshit, but in laying out the realities of the organization and putting its threat into context, I think you have to be careful not to go overboard

Given how Hamm normally defends Foust, and given how Fousts literally lies about and misportrays the writings of people on terrorist groups, making claims about them that aren't supportable which you can debunk merely by reading the people's texts, I would be more inclined than ever to think the IJU exists. And it doesn't have to be part of the global conspiracy, and can be the gang that didn't shoot straight, and still constitute a crime for a US resident to be in touch with.

Then here's some truly Foustian fancy foot-work in response to Hamm:

To be precise, I did not actually say “the U.S. government is doing the Uzbek government’s dirty work for it, about a group that probably doesn’t really exist.” I’ll cop that one can read that into what I was writing, which you’re right is the result of an off-the-cuff history of how the government forms its opinion about these groups. But I most certainly didn’t say that quote, and I don’t think that’s an accurate distillation of what I did write.

As for the threat Mukhtarov poses… I mean yeah. I’m still lost for what he did that would actually constitute criminal activity, at least apart from the “material support” laws (and that’s what really worries me). I’m not sure, however, that you can neatly disaggregate Mukhtarov’s indictment from a broader overreaction to some Uzbek groups — especially when the one we even really talk about as a “threat” anymore, the IMU, is bottled up in the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus.

And I have to conclude this: how is Foust so sure that the US government, that has far more resources than he, even if he used to work for the DOD, is out of date? Maybe he's out of date? He's on the outside now, right?  And what's so terrible about the material support laws in this narrow construction -- traveling to help a group apparently commit a terrorist act of some kind that was coded as a "wedding"? Whether or not they were capable of putting it on or whether they really are "global," it's still wrong. There are 4,000 Uzbeks fighting in the Afghan war. Do the Registanis really think they do nothing but just wander around getting lost in the AfPak nexus?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elitist Blogger Dumps on Elitist Tweeters over Twitter Censorship Issue

Sarah Kendzior appears to have stopped digging among exclusive Uzbek-language materials that leave her with "more questions than answers" about terrorist-suspect Jamshid Muhtorov -- and has fallen silent on that case (so typical of what happens with controversial stories at Registan).

Twitter's awful new country-by-country censorship policy provides her with a hook to hawk her theory of the "secret Internet" of Uzbeks -- that special-sauce web where Uzbeks only speak in Uzbek to each other, so that the rest of us can't know what they're talking about -- and MORE importantly, require the expert services of Prof. Kendzior to interpret it for us.

I suspect those secret Uzbeks are talking about soccer games and cars and rap videos and love interests and the price of gasoline, just like anybody else anywhere, and aren't so super-arcane-special, but I could be wrong, as I hardly know any Uzbek. I do know Russian, though, and since a lot of Uzbeks will speak Russian on Russian-language news sites, I see they aren't THAT different than everybody else.

In fact, one of the reasons anthropologists may secretly mistrust the Internet and see it as "a problem" is that it both homogenizes people and makes them more similar with a mass global culture (like it or not, there it is) AND it reveals to people that they aren't so different from one another. That puts anthropologists out of a job!

Kendzior's theory of the "secret Internet" hypothesizes about:

regional activists whose situations do not get discussed because we don’t know much about them, and we don’t know much about them because social media skews our understanding toward popular languages, successful causes, familiar geopolitical contexts, and media-savvy dissidents who know how to attract an international following.

So as I suspected, she maintains an ideal picture of the Ur-community of Uzbekistan, untainted by those nasty Westernized human rights activists or exile-influenced political dissidents who just turn into "media-savvy" showboats on social media. If only we can scrape away the acretions of social media's "skewing," and its "popular" languages like English or Russian, or "successful causes," why, we will find the "authentic" people of Uzbekistan.

I was thinking that Sarah might actually oppose the Twitter policy in some useful way, even with this sort of narrow sectarianism, but she doesn't at all -- it's merely yet another occasion for her to toot her horn with her ethnic specialness theories.

And here's what's wrong with it again:

Her prime example is the cases of  Malohat Eshonqulova and Saodat Omonova, two journalists who blew the whistle on corruption and censorship at their TV station and who were dismissed, and then who went on a hunger strike. They had one Twitter account, @Malohat_Saodat which you could follow (which I did) -- if you spoke Uzbek, as most of it was in Uzbek.

I was among the journalists in this field who wrote about their case repeatedly -- you can see that in fact far from not being covered, and being in an Uzbek-language silo, these journalists were able to get their story known because Russian-language correspondents, and Uzbek emigre sites willing to report in the Russian and English languages, were thus able to reach wider audiences. And all those journalists additionally tweeted about their hunger strike. Just not a lot of them.

I will say there's a factor in these kinds of stories that can work against coverage. Human rights activists and journalists don't like hunger strikes as a publicity tool. I sure don't -- and I know others don't even if they don't like to speak of it for fear of being politically incorrect. Hunger strikers trying to force attention to their cause hit hardest against those directly next to them -- the family members and the usually already-overstressed local human rights movement now forced to drop everything and accommodate somebody's decision to use force in this way. Indeed, it is a form of violence, and that's why none other than the Dalai Lama himself has spoken against hunger strikes as a campaigning tool.

Protest fasts like this seldom work to get the attention of the people who are supposed to reverse decisions or make new ones -- and this one didn't. Sometimes they do, if there's a lot of momentum, but this one didn't. In fact, at one point, the journalists had to call off a press conference because foreign embassy people wouldn't come. They may not have wanted to be helping to further incite a health-damaging action -- there was also speculation that the human rights defender who was supposed to help with the news release on email didn't send it around, although he claims he did.

The story becomes about the drama of the hunger strike and less about the conditions that prompted it, which is a shame, because these two women had an important story to tell about the corruption and oppression of state TV.

In any event, aside from these drawbacks this story did get as much attention as anything can expect to get in Uzbekistan, and the fact that they tweeted only in Uzbek was entirely irrelevant, because there is a persistent and hardy corps of human rights defenders and independent reporters, both Uzbeks and Russians in Tashkent, who keep reporting on these things and give it wider coverage through exile press and the foreign RFE/RL and BBC. Indeed, just like the Abadan story, this story wasn't about tweeting because it was more about independent and alternative news sites -- that doesn't fit the "progressive" social media theory and so the theorists tend to discount the role of those sites in amplifying social media (instead of visa versa).

Kendzior takes a narrow look at this only through the Twitter lens:

Most of their tweets were in Uzbek, although some were in Russian. By the time of their final post, they had tweeted 730 times, had amassed around 65 followers, and had attracted no international media attention or global outcry.

But in fact specialized international media did cover them and various nonprofit web sites like Index on Censorship -- which is more than most stories get covered out of this country and is about to be expected for Central Asia.

And groups like Human Rights Watch did take up the case to a certain extent (I recall discussing it with them), but within the harsh attention-economy of their own internal priorities, this case and this country was not going to be flavour of the month -- in part because it didn't illustrate other easy-to-understand global issues and in part because it couldn't be won.

There are a number of reasons why the human rights causes from this region never gets picked up globally:

1. Few English speakers -- Russian is the lingua franca and fewer young Western journalists speak it, and fewer Central Asians as well.

2. The global left always treated the Soviet Union as "progressive" and even took ideological instruction from Moscow -- these old memes and ideologies and networks die very, very hard (look at RTV and its disgraceful following). It is very hard to get the left excited about anything happening in these countries that they felt were workers' paradises for decades. If you can't get the global left excited about a cause, and if they don't see how it fits in with their own anti-corporate anti-imperialist, etc. agenda easily, it's hard to get energy behind a cause -- the global right isn't as causey. The global left could easily pick up the narratives of Iran (an enemy of the US) and Egypt (whose dictator was propped up by the US for decades). The same dynamics apply in some of the stans, but the narrative isn't as clearcut and compelling.

3. As a consequence of no. 2, the global activist networks tend to see dissidents or social movements of resistance in these countries as reactionary, i.e. nationalists, extremists, paid for by the West, etc. They don't take them seriously or even think they shouldn't get near them for fear of "taint" from their own enemies (their own governments, neoliberal politicians, blah blah).

4. While some of the ingredients in this region like the presence of US bases or US military exigencies like the Northern Distribution Network could potential get the blood flowing the way bases or presences in Turkey or the Phillipines or Saudi Arabia can get people indignant and supporting local rebel causes, the war in Afghanistan never engendered a mass anti-war movement like other wars because it was believed to be a "just war" involving legal pursuit of terrorists who had first attacked the US on 9/11.

So it's not just the saga of Malohat and Saodat -- it's any activist that does anything in this part of the world -- they have not only the language barrier and the technological problem and the sheer financial problem of having to use up scarce funds to keep Twitter going from a cell phone -- they encounter the Soviet wall that surrounds any form of activism related to this region to this day.

Sarah concedes that the independent media helped publicize this case, but she doesn't seem to want to concede the role of the Western broadcasters, nonprofit Western media, etc. And unfortunately -- but not surprisingly, given her tendency to go with the establishment -- she comes around to invoking "the law" in the same disingenous way that Tufekci does:

Tufekci is correct that Twitter’s policy is realistic – as she points out, “the Internet is not a ‘virtual’ space, and cyberspace is not a planet which can float above all jurisdictions forever.” But realistic does not mean right. Twitter’s policy privileges the already privileged, hurting nascent dissident movements and the regional activists who struggle to promote them.

As I pointed out on my tech blog Wired State, there isn't just law when it comes to Uzbekistan, so enabling that brutal regime to invoke "the law" is just plain wrong. I don't know what's really driving this for Tufekci. I suspect it's part of the platform-uber-alles that I see with all these gurus lining up now behind Twitter -- and serving as the best proof I've had yet of the existenced of the nascent Wired State -- that its own network and own sustainability on corporate platforms are more important than democratic institutions and universal principles and the rule of law organically. These gurus could all become the lapdogs of the big social media companies because their power derives from these platforms -- if they don't have Twitter or Facebook or Google+, they don't have the substrate for their theories.

Kendzior merely joins them with a local quibble -- and she takes a poke at them as internationalists without enough particularity for her own special snowflake, Uzbekistan.

Jillian York puts up her dukes in the comments, admitting she "bristles" at the word "elites" -- Kendzior implies that the Arab Spring people and their adoring global left (of which Jillian is an avid part) are the sounding board for elites in these countries (and indeed, that is about the size of it) and that's the only reason Twitterati know about them. (Indeed, as we know, Anne-Marie Slaughter could cook up an entire international relations theory around the fact that she has some inside connections at State she could tweet about an Egyptian woman arrested, and Tufecki could write a post triple the length of most of mine explaining how wonderful all that was.)

Jillian tries to sink any claim of elitism by saying that the sheer number of Arabic speakers in the world -- 310 million -- which she says dwarfs the number of Russian speakers "by half" -- means that they are inherently "not elitist". This is silly on several fronts, because for one, there are way more than the 147 million Russians of Russia speaking Russian -- there are all the other former Soviet republics with not only sizeable Russian minorities but Russian as a lingua franca -- plus the diasporas, bringing the number up closer to the Arabic speakers. More practically, there's nothing to suggest that all those Arabic speakers are on Twitter or care about the activist issues that York and her friends care about.

Tufecki comes in to the comments to assure us that the real problem is lack of people's willingness to commit civil disobedience, not companies' repressive policies (of course she'd never say that about the struggles of Occupy Wall Street). Her sudden upholding of "law" everywhere and "practicalities" are strangely at odds with her willingness to drop those concerns when it came to SOPA and piracy.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for Tufecki and others simply to call on Twitter not to do business with Uzbekistan and some of the other most severe censoring regimes. It's not as if Twitter is planning to open an office in Tashkent. The only reason Twitter won't do that is because they want to "leave the door open" for commercial opportunities anywhere. That's silly. They should do the same thing that 60 apparel companies have done and announced that they will not knowingly source their fabric  from Uzbek cotton -- naturally they can't police every source, but they announce their good intentions. Twitter could function the same way on some of the worst censorship countries -- and include China instead of getting greedy about expansion. Like Facebook, Twitter has only the ad-click and marketing data-scrape as business models.

The worst thing about the accommodationist approach to Twitter's bureaucratic solutions by Tufecki and others is that they proffer the "transparency" and the "tools" of seeing chillingeffects.org as somehow a good enough substitute for not doing the right thing. But they aren't, because the system will be overwhelmed with DMCA notices and arcane British libel suits and it will be hard to pick the signals out of the noise. As I've noted, creating "an international conversation about what gets censored" far from being "liberating" is going to tend to reinforce and validate censorship and create new supportive audiences for it.

The coyness with which Twitter and its lapdog social-media gurus are telling people they can just Tor around this policy or toggle their geolocation is nauseating, too, given what's most likely to happen is that states will cut off Twitter completely -- they already do that with Youtube in some countries such as Turkmenistan.

 

The US Tap-Dance on Human Rights in Uzbekistan

A hip-hop dancer sponsored by the US is part of the cultural exchange approach the Administration has employed to engage with Uzbekistan. Photo: US Embassy Tashkent.

The pressure of the Soros-funded EurasiaNet articles, even criticizing the Administration on selling out dissidents for the sake of the NDN , as well as the shadow defense ministry pundity circuit exemplified by Registan.net (the Kerry-for-Secretary-of-State lobby?) is finally making the State Department fight back a little.

In a speech at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where he was welcomed by regime-enabler S. Frederick Starr, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake, Jr. has this to say:

Contrary to suggestions in some recent articles, we do not see our engagement with Central Asia as an either-or choice between developing security relationships at the expense of core values like human rights. Progress on one issue can help reinforce, or create incentives for, progress on other issues.

Those "recent articles" likely include the well-placed op-ed piece in The New York Times by Joshua Kucera saying the US was hypocritical and should remain silent (although begrudgingly conceding the weird claims by both Blake and Secretary of State Clinton of "improvement" -- I've noticed that it often happens with these State and blogger sparring partners that they somehow observe the niceties in their gentlemen's disagreements as they are all sort of in the same club).

And given the readers and audience for Registan, Blake could have even mean this piece by Joshua Foust that implied there was some horrible moral dilemma around either delivering military aid through the middle-man of Uzbekistan, or raising human rights issues.

Blake is at pains to say that there isn't such an either/or. And by combining the articulation of the different policies -- fighting terrorism, delivering aid to NATO, promoting regional prosperity on a "new silk road" and raising human rights in a carefully-structured framework -- he tries to persuade us that the US really is being all things to all men.

I'll be the first to say it's fake, however, even while conceding that the US does more than Foust or Kucera claim and that those bloggers' hyping of fake moral choices isn't really how the US government works (as I outlined in this post in reply to Foust's attack on the human rights movement for contrasting hypocritical US postures for Belarus and Uzbekistan and insisting on ownership of the Uzbekistan problem.)

Why is it fake? Because all human rights concerns are shoe-horned into this rickety and ridiculous structure called "he Annual Bilateral Consultations" (which sort of get held twice a year because they have the actual consultation and then assessment of it). Human rights is mixed in with a lot of other silly -- and expensive -- USAID-type development stuff and even more dodgy American Chamber of Commerce in Uzbekistan fandagos.

And indeed, our strategy for Central Asia explicitly states that our efforts to strengthen and broaden relations with Central Asia should not impinge upon our strong support for democratic development and universally recognized human rights. U.S. engagement in the five Central Asian states consistently focuses on political liberalization, good governance, civil society capacity building, and addressing human rights concerns – as well as a wide range of other important interests such as non-proliferation, energy, economic development, and educational exchanges.

By creating this four-part package of everything from baggy USAID programs funnelling money to corrupt local khokhims, ineffectual if well-meaning notions to encourage  local municipal programs,  to having both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and  Amb. Melanne Verveer patting women entrepreneurs on the head, to mentioning a few forlorn cases of prisoners -- in fact human rights gets very, very diluted. Indeed, as I reported, it's been turned into a hand-maiden of good business.

The ABCs shouldn't be the only place human rights is funnelled -- there should be periodic vocal statements by US officials responsible for human rights about cases and issues of concern -- like the five-year additional sentence just handed to Muhammad Bekjon, brother of Erk party leader Muhammad Solih, or the persistence of forced child labour in the cotton industry despite government claims to the contrary. Germany and the UK do a little more of this; the US can, too, without losing its precious cargo lane.

And indeed, the ABCs aren't the only place where the US "puts" human rights -- it can go in private bilateral talks at OSCE or the UN or other settings of international meetings or bilateral trips by Uzbek officials to the US. But these could be more vocal and even if kept out of the press, could involve more collaboration with human rights groups.

The USAID and related development programs at State and through Congress should be reviewed with an eye to whether they really promote and protect human rights. Do they have staff in them who try to push the envelope and go under the radar and really help dissidents, unjustly disbarred lawyers, human rights reporters, prisoners' relatives? Or do they just collect their per diem and help reinforce the regime?

Yet as Blake's speech indicates, the US is very wedded to its existing rigid structure for "dialogue":

We feel strongly that the best way to advance U.S. interests across the region is by enhanced engagement at all levels with the Central Asian governments, civil society, and people themselves. A cornerstone of this engagement has been the Annual Bilateral Consultation process that I chair with each of the five Central Asian countries. These consultations are a face-to-face structured dialogue based on a jointly developed agenda that promotes candid discussions on the full spectrum of bilateral issues, including human rights, religious freedom, science and technology collaboration, economic development, defense cooperation, and other subjects either side would like to discuss.

Perhaps someone can persuade me that "enhanced enagement" is actually helping human rights, but this statement from Blake looks like what I said: that everything from soup to nuts is packaged into the ABCs. The worst feature of this construction is that the agenda is "jointly developed". That means the Karimov regime gets a veto on topics they don't like -- would torture in the prisons or the unjust trials of religious believers be among such topics? And with such a jumble, does business ("economic development") get more play than some of the others?

I realize the US doesn't have a lot to work with, in dealing with Uzbekistan. But I think it could have more articulation and more rigour in how these topics are discussed. I vigorously opposed the McFaul-Surkov Commission for Russia (and its successor) because I don't think with Russia, especially with a far more free and articulate human rights community and opposition (especially now), that you should create creaky vehicles that only reinforce bad actors (like Surkov and the anti-gay Russian commissar who has followed him.)

But a more-defined specifically human rights-oriented commission/scheduled series of bilateral talks might help keep these topics more focused and less subject to that taffy-pulling that comes when you send the ABC delegation over with a business delegation hard on its heels to promote enterprise with state-owned corruptioneers.

To give you an idea of just how hard it must be for even the official human rights promoters of the US government to get anywhere with all this, look at Blake's next paragraph:

The Annual Bilateral Consultation process has given seats at the table to virtually the entire U.S. Government, including the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Commerce, and the U.S. Trade Representative, to name just a few active participants. Each discussion results in a work plan that outlines practical steps to advance U.S. and partner policy goals. The road to achieving these goals is not always smooth, but our continued engagement with the region is yielding results. We also use the consultative process to engage civil society and business communities in each country.

Given seats at the table? You mean it works like that? (Yes, I realize it works like that, but I want to hear them answer.) They all have to lobby for attention and hope they get a seat? Does the human rights and democracy bureau have to fight for attention?

The problem with making work plans for "a consultative process to engage civil society and business communities in each country" with all those State Department desks/interest groupings is that you get caught up in the mechanics and lose sight of the stark fact that there isn't really an authentic and free civil society in Uzbekistan.

Instead, there are some exotic human rights groups that try to remain free; there are some battered former prisoners or relatives of existing prisoners; there are GONGOs that might do some good but are coopted or worse, are instruments of repression; there are fake businesses in the government's pocket, and so on. But that's why you have to be more outspoken on the individual cases and evidence of injustice, you are speaking to a kind of virtual civil society that might some day come into being, on principle, so that you are not aligned with the regime, the regime that will inevitably fall, one way or another.

Now for the topics that most preoccupy Blake:

The threat of terrorism makes very clear the security interests the United States shares with Central Asia. In support of the International Security Assistance Force’s efforts against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and now as Afghanistan is increasingly taking the lead for its own security, the Central Asian countries are serving as vital partners.

Expanded trust and cooperation with Central Asia has made possible the Northern Distribution Network, or NDN. Over the past year, we have expanded the capacity of the NDN to offer critical alternate routes for our non-lethal cargo transiting into Afghanistan to support our troops. These have become particularly important given current challenges in our relations with Pakistan, and Islamabad's decision in November to close the border crossing points to Afghanistan, effectively leaving NDN as the key land route for supporting Coalition Forces in Afghanistan.

Well, there you have it, but it isn't the horrid moral dilemma that the Registanis imagine. They minimize the threat of terrorism and extremism, saying it's all concocted, and don't have a plan for where it really does exist and in part should be addressed by increased rather than reduced religious freedom and human rights.

What I never see here is the calling of Tashkent's bluff. If they are threatening cooperation with the NDN because of any vocal criticism or even private carefully-manicured discussions about "governance," does anybody ever remind them of their own professed claim to wish to deter terrorism? Shouldn't it be Tashkent that faces the "moral dilemma" of either helping the US extract itself from its Afghan quagmire and tolerating some "governance" and "human rights" lecturing (and even concessions) versus reinforcing its dictatorship? Shouldn't those competing claims get tested more often than they do by US interlocutors? (We never see anything like this in WikiLeaks -- the US is a willing player in Tashkent's game to do "just enough to get the West of its back" and exploit the relationship with Washington to tweak the Kremlin.)

Does the US ever send any delegations of religious leaders, including Muslim clergy, to discuss frankly with both state officials and religious bureaucrats the question of how to address Muslim aspirations?

Of course it's easy to sit all day on your blog and come up with ideas that other people in very constrained circumstances could do. The US has done some expert tap-dancing here confronting the claims of fake moral dilemmas thrown up at them by some bloggers -- they do have a carefully-choreographed script and song sheet with which to continue to address the recalcitrant Uzbek regime.

But within that script, there is loads of room for tightening up the act. Why should the US be "building capacity" with local farmers under the thumb of corrupt and authoritarian governments in Uzbekistan, if they are doing nothing about forced child labour? Why is the US not more vigorously using its membership in the World Bank to vet the aid that goes to this regime and fine-tune it better? Why didn't the US work harder to get the ABA and NDI -- much less Human Rights Watch -- back into Uzbekistan as a price for lifting military sanctions?