Conducted by Jesse Tatum,
Associate Editor of CRIA
CRIA: Can you weigh in on the recent upheaval
in Kyrgyzstan and summarize what type of international
intervention may now be appropriate?
Clearly, the subsequent ethnic violence in Osh was sparked
by the political crisis and dynamics of 2010. The political
crisis was not essentially ethnic but had ethnic aspects
and, more importantly, created the conditions of insecurity
which enabled the violence in and around Osh. Those that
attempt to read the ethnic violence back to the border
delimitations of Stalin’s era often miss out this crucial
political aspect. Central Asia since 1991 has suffered far
less armed conflict (and certainly ethnic conflict) than
most security analysts have predicted and this is testament
to the need for exceptional explanations of exceptional
violence. But the relative lack of conflict is of no
consolation to those that still suffer from the awful ethnic
violence in of June.
Regarding intervention, I must make the pedantic point of
the scholar of International Relations that intervention is
historically understood as deployment of foreign military
and/or civilian forces without the expressed permission of
the host state. No one is seriously arguing for that in
Kyrgyzstan. However, we do use “intervention” more generally
to denote consensual as well as non-consensual unilateral
and multilateral deployments.
I have weighed in here arguing that most forms of
international intervention would be counter-productive in
Kyrgyzstan today. A more robust OSCE police mission,
deployed very quickly after the Osh violence of June, would
probably have been a good thing over the medium-term but it
has now been both politicised and weakened in ways which
severely limit its ability to do any good. This was almost
inevitable given the structure of the OSCE as an extremely
weak and divided regional formation. Rapid, effective,
multilateral intervention is the pot of gold at the end of
the rainbow for liberal internationalists. That said, even
Russian intervention, which was requested by Otunbaeva,
failed to materialise either unilaterally or through the
CSTO.
My argument against intervention is twofold. Firstly, there
is a domestic political process in Kyrgyzstan which, whilst
not able to address all Uzbek political issues (such as
language rights) which emerged before June, did lead to a
greater than expected number of Uzbeks going to the polls
and elected some Uzbek candidates in the October elections.
This process is right now keeping conflict within
non-violent politics but may be disrupted by a major foreign
intervention which would prompt a rush to nationalism by
even the most moderate figures. Secondly, the main role for
international actors is not to bring peace or democracy to
Kyrgyzstan but to avoid taking actions which make these
things more elusive – for example, the fuel contracts for
the Manas base struck with both Akaev and Bakiev regime
figures by the US Department of Defence. Liberal
interventions of the peacekeeping- and peacebuilding-type
typically lack the modesty and circumspection that is
required to ascertain their own impacts.
There have been some excellent short analyses of the Osh
ethnic violence and the removal of the Bakiev government in
April by my colleagues
Madeleine
Reeves
and
Nick Megoran
as well as a doctoral student of mine,
Asel
Doolotkeldieva.
CRIA: How do you see the post-election (Oct. 10)
coalition talks playing out in Kyrgyzstan? Is
a parliamentary system the ‘right’ way for the country at
present?
The dominant interpretation in Russia and the region is that
a parliamentary system does not provide for the
concentration of power (‘power vertical’) which is required
in the post-Soviet context. This is a culturally
essentialist approach with which I disagree. The dominant
perspective in the West is shorn of this essentialism but
argues that weak security structures provide opportunities
for conflict that endanger the system. This too is an
inadequate explanation.
The popular coups (I prefer this term to the celebratory
‘revolution’) of 2005 and 2010 took place not because of the
decentralisation of power but because of the centralisation
of power to the hands of the Presidential Administration in
a state in which the political-economic class had been used
to a much freer political and economic environment. Thus, it
is not just about opportunity but about the expectations
that this greater freedom engendered in the 1990s. In other
words it is about the discursive and institutional
environment. The opportunity to rebel exists in Tajikistan
(but despite recent events) is rarely, if ever, taken
because of a discursive and institutional environment which
generates low expectations and relatively stable
compromises, however unjust.
So, in an environment such as contemporary Kyrgyzstan,
greater power for a proportional parliament is the best way
forward. Moves to this end in 2005–2006 were stillborn.
There is greater hope under Otunbaeva, in my view. But there
are considerable risks. A Kulov or Tashiev victory in
Presidential elections could start the cycle of increased
centralisation and conflict once again. As to the
coalition-building, it is difficult to predict the exact
composition or the identity of the PM but I think there’s a
good chance that there will be a lot of chopping and
changing which may precipitate new elections sooner rather
than later.
CRIA: What do you make of the recent outbreaks of
violence in Tajikistan? How will Islam and the state coexist
in the coming months?
The outbreak of violence is only partially about Islam and
the state. It is also about central control over regions
which have never been fully under the control of Dushanbe.
It is about the brutality of conscription as an institution,
the hopelessness generated by the difficulties of migration
and the hidden resentment against the government in many
peripheral regions. That said, Islamism does serve as a
vehicle for opposition in Kamarob and pockets of Tajikistan.
That is what has happened with Ali Bedak’s group and its
armed conflict with government forces since mid-September.
It was easy for this commander to recruit alienated youth
and re-form a group which had been dormant as a military
formation since the civil war. But let us not believe
official pronouncements that this is chiefly a manifestation
of regional or global Islamism. It is very much a conflict
made in Tajikistan.
However, the question of the co-existence of Islam and the
state raises issues that go far beyond this conflict.
Clearly the Tajik government does not know how to handle
religiosity in its various manifestations because it
operates under a (post-)Soviet variant of the secular
conceit that religion must be purely spiritual and customary
in some banal or ‘traditional’ sense. Whilst most Hanafi
variants of Islam in Central Asia are not properly
politicised, they are nevertheless political in that they
allow believers to see the injustices wrought by
authoritarian governments and economic globalisation much
more clearly than things might appear through worn-out ideas
of liberal democracy, communism or even nationalism. Banning
the veil or harassing the Islamic Renaissance Party won’t
deal with the increased appeal of Political Islam as
political and social critique of arbitrary power and global
inequities.
CRIA: Can you summarize the relationship between
foreign intervention and authoritarianism in Central Asia?
I would repeat
my point about intervention above. There has been only one
clear case of foreign military intervention in post-Soviet
Central Asia – that of Russian and Uzbek involvement in the
Tajik civil war – and it was very much about reinstituting
‘stable’ (read: authoritarian) government.
But
international and global relations with Western states and
multinational companies provide sustenance to authoritarian
regimes as well. U.S. awards of fuel supply contractors,
without proper transparency and accountability, increase the
prize for those who control government in Kyrgyzstan. This
further encourages ‘businessmen’ and organised criminals
into politics.
In the global
economy, the very relationships that facilitate foreign
trade or investment themselves help sustain authoritarian
regimes and rentier states. For example, the IMF and EBRD
helped arranged the off-shore tax avoidance schemes which
ended up defrauding the Tajik people of hundreds of millions
of dollars of revenues from Talco (the state aluminium
company) from 2005–2008, according to provisional judgments
in the London high court. In this case, the IMF demanded
audits of both Talco and the National Bank. Thus, there is a
global dimension to both the source of the problem and the
(limited) holding to account of oligarchic, authoritarian
regimes in Central Asia.