Lots of Bad Choices in Osh, Yet International Community Can Take Action

The struggling interrim Kyrgyz interim government in Bishkek, and ethnic Uzbeks fleeing for their lives into Uzbekistan -- from which they fled for their lives in 2005 -- as well as everybody else around the inter-ethnic conflict in Osh -- are all faced with a lot of bad choices.

You have to imagine just how awful things got in Osh for desperate Uzbeks, many refugees only five years ago after the 2005 Andijan massacre, to be forced to go *back* to the place from whence they fled, where frankly, they may face certain arrest. The track record so far for Andijan refugees returning to Uzbekistan is pretty terrible. Maybe the Uzbek government might rise to the occasion because it is mainly women and children we're talking about, but experience suggests they may not. I'm not sure how much capacity Uzbekistan's Red Cresent Society has, and how much people can depend on its tender mercies, given that it is not an independent NGO and cooperates closely with the government and law-enforcement.

And other NGOs that might be very helpful in alleviating the misery are going to face definite difficulties from Tashkent, which has expelled a lot of Western NGOs and made life difficult for those few international agencies that try to maintain some low-key non-confrontational programs.

Roza Otunbayeva, the interrim president, surely remembers 1990, when Kyrgyz-Uzbek ethnic riots in Osh led to 500 deaths, and an intervention of Soviet forces to restore order.

So you would have to understand how desperate she would have to be to call for Russia to send in forces to quell the unrest now -- and how she must feel getting a "no". That has to be the first time in history anyone has actually asked for Russian forces -- and gotten a "no" (correct me if I'm wrong). Russian- speakers in Abkhazia, for example, got a "yes". Throughout history, the Kremlin has sometimes made it look like local leaders wanted Moscow's intervention, so that they could have a pretext to intervene -- perhaps they never had to think about what they'd do if they had a genuine plea.

IS THE CSTO LIKE THE WARSAW PACT?

For now they are saying "no"; that might change when the Collective Security Treaty Organization meets Monday. The Russian-led CSTO has always said they were not invented or equipped to handle internal civilian unrest, although it is less clear as to whether they would handle "conflicts between states". The concern that such a mandate might make for trouble has made Uzbekistan be very wary of participating in the security exercises of the CSTO or coming to the meetings. Russia has indicated a wish to deploy a second base, labelled "CSTO" in addition to the base it already has in Kyrgyzstan, in southern Kyrgyzstan. Tashkent has been unhappy with an essentially Russian-led base right next to its border, because it wants to control its own neighborhood.  Now what? 

Russia itself will not likely intervene unless it could be proven its citizens were in danger -- so far one Russian citizen has been reported killed in the Osh riots.

THE UN IS A TERRIBLE -- AND IMPRACTICAL -- IDEA

Human Rights Watch has called for UN peacekeepers to intervene, apparently because the prospect is so terrible of either Russian troops intervening, or God forbid, U.S. troops somehow related to the Manas expedition supplying NATO in Afghanistan, intervene (and I don't see any indication whatsoever that the U.S. is even remotely contemplating such a thing). U.S. officials are headed to this region next week. I hope they will speak out forcefully about the massive violations and abuses of human rights, which are a function not just of non-state actors but a weak state. So far, they are serving up rather thin gruel.

UN intervention is a total non-starter, however. Russia recently tried to block *even a situation report* to the Security Council by Secretary Ban Ki-moon about his trip to Central Asia on the grounds that it was not relevant to the business and mandate of the SC, which is supposed to deal with threats to *international* peace and security, and Central Asia is only *regional*. Fortunately, other members responded that they had heard reports on all kinds of situations of concern that didn't amount to "international threats" yet, so this was no different. But if you can't even get a *situation report* read at the SC without Russia fussing, how are you going to get peacekeepers?!

Anyway, China -- if it is consistent -- will invoke the need to allow regional organizations to deal with the problem -- and leave the UN out of it. The UN peace-keeping system is stretched horribly thin, and has suffered some terrible setbacks lately with "a la carte peacekeeping" from some African countries who just simply decide that they don't like the full-fledged Chapter 7 sort of mandate (the ability to intervene to protect local civilians and peacekeepers themselves with force), or even Chapter 6-and-a-half, or whatever they get, and pick and chose what they like -- and then announce the mission has to leave before its mandate is even expired (like MINURCAT in Chad).

The world's abstract appetite -- and even the UN's -- for peace-keepng is one of those "eyes are bigger than your stomach" kind of situations. People forget that the UN is made up of individual states acting through the Security Council, which has only 100,000 peacekeepers deployed around the world it strains to pay for, costing billions of dollars -- by contrast with Russia, which at one time could put 90,000 troops just in Chechnya, or the U.S., which has 59,000 troops in Afghanistan alone and about 310,000 others deployed elsewhere outside the U.S.

States simply do not have the capacity or the political will to train, deploy, pay for -- and back up with will for the use of force -- these UN peace-keepers. The last thing you need in Kyrgyzstan is some toothless UN mission that can't do the things that people imagine it should do, that bring in a lot of ex-pats who displace local markets, make prices shoot up, introduce more bars and inevitably more prostitution, and ruin local roads with big vehicles -- and stay in their bunkers while locals are shot up by thugs a few feet away.

RUSSIAN PIECE-KEEPERS

In the Caucasus, Russian peace-keepers didn't keep the peace in Georgia, and turned into Russian piece-keepers, hastening the declaration of independence of Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia. In fact, that's *precisely* why Vladimir Putin hates peace-keeping of the UN sort or even any kind of monitors such as the OSCE in places like Chechnya. He very firmly believes, as he has said in speeches and his book, that once you bring in those monitors, you get situations like Kosovo, where local movements gain strength to declare their independence. And he should know, as that is exactly what happened in Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia.

I suppose if you envision "Russian peace-keepers' to be some kind of "multinational forces" from the fairly-untested CSTO, which is no Warsaw Pact, you might in a best-case scenario have some forces that would deter violence, and in the worst case scenario carve out a piece of southern Kyrgyzstan and give it to Uzbekistan or have it declare independence. I'm not seeing that Tashkent feels it would need an extra million people and some territory to add to its social burdens

I don't know if the Chinese People's Army is busy this weekend -- they're awfully overstretched guarding pipelines in Africa with what the late Roman Kupchinsky called "The Great Chinese Takeout" -- but I don't think anyone's going to be calling them, either.

U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, now the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, once had a brainstorm about using unarmed monitors as a kind of giant buffer of defacto peacekeeping, by deploying something like 11,000 OSCE and UN monitors in Kosovo. The thought was that the sheer numbers would deter the Serbians from violence. Maybe it did for a bit, but not for long. Soon, the Serbs were making it deadly clear how they felt by shooting dead the restaurant owners who served the expats in town. Then they all had to evacuate to make way for NATO bombing, and we still haven't heard the end of that, years later, and not only from Russians.

Even so, OSCE could send more than...one person, even three in a "Moscow mechanism" would be better.

WHERE ARE THE NGOS?

A twitterer -- yes, there are people who tweet from Kyrgyzstan, and yes, Twitter goes on being a revolution in all kinds of places (although it has no magical properties) -- asked where Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. Peace Corps was. Why weren't they coming to solve the conflict?

It's touching -- but frustrating -- to see a plea like that, because not a single one of those groups is mandated or equipped to resolve conflicts, even if they could have a robust presence in countries that frankly haven't been terribly hospitable to them in this part of the world. The first two groups monitor and report on human rights violations, and don't become involved in peace talks, at least, in theory. The U.S. Peace Corps might sound like some sort of rapid-action peace-making sort of outfit, but in fact it is merely involved in teaching English or setting up windmills and grain silos and such. There are programs within the Peace Corps or USAID or other U.S-sponsored bodies like NED that *might* have some relevance, or merely some very capable and thoughtful people who can sometimes "make a difference" in an awful situation like this -- and I presume they are doing what they can -- and frankly, if the Obama Administration had more of a theory -- and a praxis -- for forthright human rights and democracy action abroad that would replace Bushism without shrinking from the implications of challenging dicators -- we'd be better off.

But they are not peace-keepers. They are not armed. And they don't have access or involvement in political bodies and political affairs -- in theory. The theory is that by keeping the record of human rights violations strictly to the letter of international human rights treaties and serving them up at the right time, you will be able to "make a difference" in compelling political actors to act.

They don't. They should.

Now, why don't they, in this situation? It's not as if ethnic conflict in southern Kyrgyzstan is new; it's not as if this isn't deja-vu all over again with no "lessons learned". 

BUILDING UZBEK LANGUAGE CAPACITY

Lack of Uzbek language autonomy has been a key "conflict generator" in these riots. You would think if lack of Uzbek language capacity in local administrations, lack of Uzbek community autonomy as an ethnic group, lack of Uzbek participation in local governing structures, lack of Uzbek language broadcasting, serving as the "conflict generators" of 20 years ago" and still festering as unsettled issues, that they would...settle them. So naturally, one hopes Otunbayeva and the UN and the EU and the OSCE will get busy doing some of that, some of which is pretty fixable. (What could it really cost to deploy more Uzbek language TV broadcasting for a million people? What has Internews been doing all these years if not preparing for these sorts of moments?)

TV IS THE CONTINUATION OF WAR BY OTHER MEANS

There are two problems with "Uzbek language broadcasting," however, which people find it difficult to face up to openly and they let fester precisely because they have political implications:

1) There's already an Uzbek language broadcaster. It's called "Uzbekistan". Their TV has been less free and more propagandistic than Kyrgyz TV, even under Bakiyev but more so now as media freedoms start to restore under the interrim government (unevenly). What does it mean to have a million people watching Tashkent TV? It means you have a million people propagandized and mobilized to take Tashkent's point of view on every single dispute of the many disputes of this region regarding border demarcation, water, energy resources, attitudes toward Russia and the U.S. and china. Is that helpful? No.

And ask Belarus, which has millions watching Moscow TV (and that's why Lukashenka turns it off every now and then). Language broadcasting might seem a pacifier in some respects. But it's not just innocuous entertainment and music programs and Brazilian and Spanish sit-coms with sub-titles or re-runs of "Flipper", it's a point of view, and news through a certain key-hole. Mounting the alternative Uzbek-language programming to this already-filled space takes work and thoughtfulness, and like the Zen of all such situations, if you had that in the first place, you wouldn't be seeing ethnic riots.

2) If you let people make their own television outside of the confines of Tashkent, at some point they will tend toward making various conflicting political opposition broadcasts, with their pluses and minuses of tendentiousness and inflammation, but more alarming for local secular leaders, start making religious broadcasting that inevitably will be seen as "extreme". Every indication from Uzbekistan shows this already. There's a tremendous appeal to unorthodox Islam outside of state control for binding communities and giving them hope. There are various competing schools of thought in this part of the world, some fueled or exploited by outside countries or extremist movements, and it is hard to sort through them for outsiders. Nature takes its course. Uzbekistan's response is to crackdown ferociously on such phenomenon -- and handily ensuring that it only gets worse, as now people who were previously indifferent to religion see that merely praying in their homes lands their sons and fathers in jail -- and to certain torture. They get mobilized and inspired further. Long story short, Uzbekistan will not likely sit idly by while an Islamic TV renaissance gets underway if there is unrestricted free broadcasting in southern Kyrgyzstan.

There's no such thing as a blanket OSCE TV throughout the region, spreading tolerance and joy in local languages, but I'm not certain even if there were, that people could be persuaded to sit still and watch...seminars on water management. Even so, the OSCE Rapporteur on Freedom of the Media has worked very hard to try to build capacity of Kyrgyz journalism, and not just free it up, post-Bakiyev and this has to be continued and sustained by all the OSCE members.

SOME MODEST SUGGESTIONS

As I said, there are a lot of bad choices here, but a few things can be done and policy options drawn: