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  • WikiLeaks Propaganda Stunt “Mediastan” Smears, Endangers Local Central Asian Journalists

    Pressure
    WikiLeaks barged into offices all over Central Asia, pressuring independent journalists like these reporters at the highly-respected Asia Plus to instantly sign agreements on WikiLeaks' terms to publish US cables about their country. Here Marat Mamadshoev and a colleague are being told to sign the agreement immediately, but decline.
     

    I'm sickened by Mediastan, the latest propaganda piece by anarchist impresario Julian Assange.

    This is my quick take upon first view of this video (so sorry if there are mistakes or names missing, they will be fixed). It's available for rent ($2.99) or pay $7.00 plus on Vimeo. Naturally, I'm unhappy that I had to give a dime to WL, which I oppose on principle — and I have to wonder how it is that Paypal could agree to accept these payments when it has blocked payments directly from WikiLeaks (and I plan to raise this issue with both Vimeo and PayPal).

    This piece of vile stuff is supposed to be Assange's attempt to provide an "antidote" to a movie about him coming out in theaters October 18 which he doesn't like called The Fifth Estate (it's too critical) which he trying to kill off in various ways.

    Perhaps he's counting on the fact that most people don't know anything about Central Asia, and will merely be impressed that he and his merry band of hacksters caroming around the perilous but picturesque mountain roads of Central Asia — complete with Soviet-style policeman stopping and searching traffic, tunnels under repair until who knows when, and lots of sheep blocking the road — are the coolest of cypherphunk hipsters going on a " journalism" trip through dangerous territory.

    Except it's not at all that. What this journey consists of is a bunch of people from the region whose first names only are given within the film (but see the credits below), and the discredited journalist Johannes Wahlstrom, son of the notorious antisemite and provocateur Israel Shamir. Discredited — because of the tendentious way he has covered Israel-Palestine issues, and disgraced because he is accused of falsifying quotes and of antisemitism.)

    So an unintended bonus is that with Wahlstrom narrating most of the film — when the Great One Himself isn't butting in and pontificating — is that WikiLeaks cannot claim anymore that Shamir and Son don't have anything to do with them and don't represent them. They most surely do, as this film proves.

    Johannes is a Russian speaker because he likely grew up in Russia or at least speaking Russian with his father — who has played a sordid role in the Snowden affair, too, about which you can read on my other blog, Minding Russia. But he and the other handlers or minders or whoever the hell they are really have no sense of this region, whatever their Russian language ability, and burst in aggressively — and disgustingly — to try to strong-arm local news media in dire straits in Central Asia, where there is a huge list of murdered, jailed, disappeared and beaten journalists, into publishing WikiLeaks cables.

    Another bonus is that one of the Russian-speaking journalists on the tour admits openly that he fabricated stories at his job (supposedly because he felt himself to be pressured to do so by  his bosses and their need to sell newspapers) and then was ultimately fired. This is just about the level of journalistic quality we can expect throughout this film.

    (The reason I mixed up Wahlstrom and this Russian in an earlier version of this blog, since corrected is because both are accused of fabrications; the Russian admits it in the film, Wahlstrom denies it. And while some WikiLeaks operative @Troushers is accusing me of "lying" here in my summary of the dialogue of this Russian journalist, I stand by it — indeed he openly admits he fabricated letters and indeed the implication is that he was pressured by his boss, who needed to sell papers even if he didn't say literally that phrase — Internet kids are so literalist. The  obvious reality is, the theme throughout the entire film is that editors and journalists in mainstream media only do things to sell newspapers — i.e. the obvious point of the snarky portrayal of Bill Keller and Sulzberger talking about traffic for a column of Bill's "half supportive" of Obama. Here's the script verbatim from Dmitry Velikovsky, from Russkiy Reporter, who has been active in covering Manning's trial in the past. Russkiy Reporter also sponsored the showing of the film in Moscow.

    Velikovsky: I began with some funny study. I was obliged to edit the column "letters of readers". But the problem was that there were absolutely no letters to edit. But the column should be published twice a day. And so I was obliged to to invent those letters me myself. And I just invented a lot of them.

    Wahlstrom: did you get some, any letters at all from real readers?

    Velikovsky: Yes we got some maybe three, four or five in two months but they were all containing some critics.

    Wahlstrom: but these letters you didn't publish.

    Velikovsky: I wanted to publish those letters in the factual content of the newspaper because I found it rather important to have some kind of self criticism. But our marketing department had no self criticism and they forbid me to publish it. So i invented letters about problems of veterans, problems of pensioners, problems of no matter whom. So that's how I became a journalist.

    Cue tinkly music…

    Astoundingly, this aggressive, beligerent crew have no sense of themselves in this film, so imbued are they with their self-righteousness, even as they beam in Julian Assange on Skype who instructs the locals how they are to treat this material.

    It's very clear WikiLeaks has absolutely no interest in the substance of the local stories, they just want to collect partners — or conversely, shame those potential partners who refuse to deal with them for various reasons by making them look like they are boot-licking lackeys of the United States.

    They tape phone conversations with people that are rather sensitive — like a journalist in danger discussing whether he should publish a story about somebody who wants to run a coup in Tajikistan (!) — and we have no idea if the people involved were informed that these calls would be taped — and included in the film.

    The single most damaging aspect I've seen in this agitprop trash is that the utterly unsupported claim is made that the local press are paid by the US Embassy to print flattering things about the US in order to get the leaders and publics of these countries to bend over while the US uses them as a launching pad and staging area for their war in Afghanistan.

    The WikiLeaks people are too ignorant and blinded by their anti-American ideology to understand that a) the US has no need for this because these countries have cooperated anyway b) these tyrants have their own interests in playing off the US against Russia and China c) it doesn't matter as the US is  pulling out of Afghanistan next year anyway.

    Now, I write as someone who for six years worked at EurasiaNet and Open Society Foundation and wrote critically about the US role in Central Asia, particularly about the severe human rights and humanitarian issues — about which the US government was oftne silent — and the issues around the Northern Distribution Network, the supply path to Afghanistan from Russia which enabled the US to bring non-lethal cargo to NATO troops.

    I probably wrote more than anybody on the WikiLeaks cables in Turkmenistan, strategically located between Iran and Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries with heavy US involvement, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. You can search for all these articles and those of my colleagues here eurasianet.org

    I also worked in the past as a free-lancer for RFE/RL ("(Un)Civil Society" and "Media Matters") and never experienced any censorship — I wrote and published directly to the site. I recall only instances when care was taken in covering mass demonstrations once in Ukraine to make sure that the article didn't incite people — as RFE/RL has a history of being charged with causing uprisings, i.e. in the Hungarian revolution and invasion by Soviet troops. RFE/RL is funded by Congress, but it doesn't have overlords hanging over you as you write — there is far more independent coverage there than anything you'd see at RT.com, the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda outlet or Al Jazeera.

    I have no relationship whatsoever to the US government, so I am certainly qualified to say that this film is an unfair hatchet job on people in harm's way — oh, so typical of WikiLeaks.

    The film opens with the WikiLeaks crew rolling through the mountains with Mehrabanb Fazrollah of Pyandj, Tajikistan, born 18 October 1962, in the back seat of the car telling his story. He was held five years in Guantanamo about which you can read some here.

    Through a series of astoundingly leading questions, broad innuendos or outright promptings, the WL gang incites Fazrollah into saying he really knew nothing of any military significance, and his jailing was all for nothing, and boy is he mad. I don't know anything of his case except what I've read in the papers, but the duplicitious smiles and repeating of what foreigners want to hear are very old stories to me from having traveled in this region (I haven't ever been in Tajikistan but I've spent years travelling to Russia and other countries and interviewing Tajiks outside of Tajikistan).

    Assange claims bitterly that this poor fellow spent five years ""to find out about a couple of fucking refugees in Tajikistan".

    Actually, that's not even what the cable said or even what the man in the film says. They said there were 100,000 refugees. This is relevant of course regarding the Northern Alliance and the Tajiks in Afghanistan. The fellow is charged with membership in the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan (IMT) allied with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group on the American list of terrorist organizations.

    Sorry, but this is not nothing, these are real terrorism movements, even if supposedly in decline (like, you know, Al Shabaab was in decline and chased out of their stronghold when they hit Westgate Mall in Kenya?)

    You would never know from Assange's sneers that this is a country that was in a civil war for years, that it had the highest number of journalists murdered — some 50, nearly as many as Algeria, also in a civil war at the time, that these journalists were killed by Islamists because they were secular or visa versa because they were not approved Muslims killed by state security. The war is a complicated one but to pretend that terrorism and war isn't a factor here — right next to Afghanistan — is absurd.

    This is of course the game, too, of the International Relations Realist school in Washington and elsewhere, who minimize terrorism and laugh it away as a fantasy of Pentagon planners. But the reality is that both are true — real terrorist acts have occurred here and there are in fact real Islamists pressuring secular society including press, and there are also fake terrorists that the oppressive government thinks up to keep itself in power. And you know something? I surely do not trust Julian Assange and his crew of losers to tell the difference.

    I will never forget in my life the terrified face of a Tajik journalist  who had been receiving death threats that I helped rescue from Tajikistan in the 1990s — and it was a brave man going the extra mile inside the US Embassy actually that got him and his family out of there.

    In the film, after reading some cables on Gitmo — and as I said, the cases may be innocent, but the WL goons are hardly the judge, and there are real complex problems of terrorism and pressure on secularism in these countries — Assange and Wahlstrom sit and guffaw about a line in a memo they've found about Bildt getting in touch with Karl Rove instead of really trying to understand the complexities of the region They find this such a smoking gun and so "evil" that they roar for minutes, but we don't get the joke.

    The translator asks outrageously leading questions and they all laughed and carried on and made it clear they sympathized with the Tajik taken from the battlefield from Gitmo and don't interview him impartially or critically at all. In the same way the pick up a memo from someone named Michael Owens, and start roaring about the US "empire of the 21st century" — which is of course a rather lack-luster claim these days — some empire of the 21st century which they are just now leaving, eh?

    Then they read from cables — only partially — with a "scene-setter" — talking about how the Tajiks have "unfailingly" allowed their overflights, which is all they really wanted from them. They then purport to read from a cable implying that these "imperialist Americans" in Dushanbe want to "make the local media more pro-American" and will first plant positive stories in the Russian media, then pay the local media to reprint them in the local  press.

    They don't actually cite from any document or give any source, and it isn't in any known cable from the WikiLeaks Cablegate already published that the US Embassy engages in this practice.

    So without anything to bolster this claim, WikiLeaks smears gazeta.ru, Interfax, and Ekho Moskvy, claiming that they've somehow engaged in this practice.

    It really is an outright lie. I have read the Russian-language press in this region for years. They are critical of the US and there aren't these glowing planted pieces they imagine. And the US doesn't need to engage in such a silly, crude practice.

    First of all, CENTCOM, the US military command for the region of Central Asia, has its own official news service, but more to the point, it has its own supported English- and Russian-language Internet news service everyone knows they are behind as they tell you, that it uses to put stories for the local media  to pick up – where they are identified as such and sourced from this page, not hidden under bylines or mastheads from the indigenous media.

    Secondly, none of these papers in the region have very big readerships — they don't have the capacity. We are talking about newspapers with 50,000 or 100,000 or 500,000 possibly at the most, but more at the low end. It's just not a way to reach people. Internet penetration is very low in some of the countries — it's about 60% in Russia but drops down sharply as you go East.

    The US already has Voice of America as an outlet to cover the perspectives of the US, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty which serves to enhance or enable struggling local media — they have open partnerships with some local stations, and because they are far more independent than the official media of these authoritarian states, they have more credibility. To be sure, RFE/RL are not going to be radically antithetical to the foreign policy of the United States, any more than the BBC or Al Jazeera or RT.com. But unlike Al Jazeera and RT.com, RFE/RL really tries to cover critical local news without fear or favour, and proof of that is just how many journalists have been arrested, jailed or expelled over the decades. The US government doesn't need to crudely pay somebody to hide behind, in other words. But these, too, don't have a huge audience outside the intelligentsia in the big cities.

    The fact is, WikiLeaks has not produced proof of this disreputable claim, because they've cited one cable only partially where it sounds like a proposal that one doesn't know was fulfilled, and in citing another cable, in Kyrgyzstan, it appears that the Kyrgyz foreign minister presents this idea, and that it doesn't come from the Americans.

    To be sure, paid-for press and infomercials and advertorials are rampant in this region in the official and unofficial press. But to claim that these brave independent outlets take payments to portray te US nicely is just an outright smear for which there isn't an iota of proof. It puts these brave people in danger to suggest it.


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  • Will There Be Conflict in Central Asia After US Troop Withdrawal? Interview with Me in CA-News (English Original)

    Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) propaganda video. Comments on Youtube suggest they get some resistance from their compatriots.

    I was delighted to give an interview to CA-News, which is a Central Asian news online publication based in Bishkek associated with AKIpress.org  (in Russian).

    But because there are a half dozen or so mistakes in the translation that makes me sound like I'm saying the opposite of what I actually said [fortunately fixed within a day!], and because not everybody reads Russian, I'm reprinting the original Russian questions and my answers in English below. I've asked them to make the corrections. I don't mind, because this is an important independent publication and I support its mission. I think they do a good job.

    I'm not sure how they came to ask me, a person who is not a formal expert on the region, for such an extensive interview, but they did, perhaps in search of independent analysis.

    Although I've spent a career of 35 years in this field where I have travelled extensively throughout Eurasia, and lived and worked in Russia and travelled frequently to Russia, Belarus, Poland in particular for OSCE, I have never been to a single Central Asian country. I worked in the Central Eurasian Program at OSI for six years without such a boon. It's not for any lack of desire; it just so happened that at different times when I was actually invited to go to Kyrgzystan when I worked with various human rights groups, or Kazakhstan when I was a public member at the OSCE, it simply happened that I couldn't go. I doubt I could get a visa to Turkmenistan, having written critically about it for OSI for six years, or Uzbekistan, where I also wrote critically for two years — and of course before that, I edited two weeklies for RFE/RL and other publications for many years.

    Even so, I study the regional Russian-language and English-language press very carefully, go to all the conferences I can, and interview people directly either when they visit the US, or when I see them at international conferences or over email and Skype. That's certainly not a substitute for a personal visit, where you can get the feel of things and have many important one-on-one conversations. But in lack of direct exposure on my skin of the winds of Central Asia, I'm no different than most pundits who have either never been there, or have been there only infrequently, and don't even speak any regional languages.

    I do think there's an advantage to having a critical independent view of this critical region. I think those not in formal structures can speak out more loudly about the corrosive effect on human rights that the US and Europe have had; the ongoing pernicious role that Russia plays; and the troublesome future of Chinese domination — not to mention the ways in which the oppressive autocratic regimes play these factors off against each other to keep themselves in power and their people miserable.

    You have nothing to lose if your job does not depend on some certain perspective. I find that the status quo in the human rights movement is to minimize the threat of terror or unrest and play up the awfulness of the regimes. That's a whitewash, given the groups in the region that have many, many more thousands of adherents that Western-style human rights groups — like Hizb-ut-Tahir.

    As for Washington, I find that far from there being the "neo con" belief that a) there is rampant terrorism and a horrible threat of Islamization and/or b) some imminent "Arab Spring" coming, there is actually nothing of the sort. Oh, there's that one paper at Jamestown Foundation or something, but that's it.

    That is, those on the left, the "progressives" and the "RealPolitik" adherents constantly pontificate as if there were some horrid neo-cons or hawks or conservatives saying these things, but in fact these groups, which have dwindling influence in any event, either are following RealPolitik themselves or don't even care at all about this region (mainly the latter).

    So in my view, there is this whole fake industry of anti-anti commentary, which runs like this:

    "There isn't any Islamic threat at all in this region, perish the thought, it's just a poor region with dictators who in fact go overboard suppressing legitimate Muslim activity"

    "There's no Muslim fervour in fact, these states are Sovietized and secularized".

    "Nothing is going to happen when troops leave, it is all wildly exaggerated and people who say that seem not to realize that the US troops are the conflict generator, not the IMU"

    "Russia has little influence any more in this region; it has less gas extraction, it has less money, it has length troop strength and its efforts to make a Warsaw Pact — the CSTO — or a Soviet Re-Union with a customs union have mainly failed."

    And so on.

    While each one of those statements can be true up to a point, they also lead to this strange endorsement of the status quo in these regions that in fact ends up serving the regimes, in my view.

    Russia's influence is considerable, and it has been behind unrest by its action (as it was in Bakiyev's ouster and its threats to Atambayev) or inaction (with the pogroms in Osh). The remittance economies are huge — for the labour migrants from Tajikistan in particular, but increasingly Uzbekistan and even Turkmenistan. That means that Russia winds up dominating the lives of these countries through some of their most vulnerable citizens — not just the mainly male workers but the females left back home as head of households with children. The Russian language did not disappear from this region, even if it is taught less, because dominating Russian mainstream media, and Russian-controlled social media like mail.ru and Vkontakte, are very big factors in the media space in this region.

    As for terrorism, sure, it gets exaggerated and the regimes "do it to themselves". But there are also real terrorist acts that occur. There is a sense that the presence of US troops in Afghanistan has ensured a kind of "frozen conflict" in this region that isn't on the official list of the frozen conflicts. The IMU has been tied up mainly fighting NATO troops. So when they go away, then what? Where do they go, those 5000 or 8000 or however many fighters there are? (And probably there are analysts saying they are only 2000, but who really knows, what, you did a door-to-door survey, guys?) Will they peacefully melt back into the countryside and farm happily? Or what? I think it's okay to look at that question critically without being branded as a terrorism hysteric.

    Ditto the question of "Arab Spring". No one thinks there is any Arab Spring coming to Central Asia. I don't know of a single pundit or analyst saying this. Yet again, there is the "anti-anti-" industry making this claim, mainly from the Registan gang. The problem is that when you adopt that scornful skepticism, you stop seeing reality when it appears. As Paul Goble put it, there is a way in which talking about the Arab Spring is a little spring in itself. And there are signs of unrest here and there, and you don't know how they will turn out.

    Remember, the same gang at Registan — Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce — were predicting with firm determination that discussion of oppression on the Internet was causing a chill in use, a decline in use, and even the shuttering of popular discussion pages. They implied that there would never be any Twitter revolution in Azerbaijan, that it was going to be slow and incremental and we shouldn't artificially speed it up by over-amplifying human rights cases.

    Yet thousands of people keep demonstrating in Azerbaijan despite the news of repression, and they keep using Internet tools to make their case — tools that Pearce is now blithely measuring with machinopology as if she had never written that Internet use would be chilled by such expression. It hasn't been. Facebook membership boomed. Will this "spring" last forever? I truly doubt it. Not with potential European and American oil interests — and actually existing Russian and Iranian oil interests — in this mix. Everybody will blame the West for the crackdown in Azerbaijan that is likely to be inevitable and thorough, and fume at the regime-tropic USAID grantees that they ignored last year (or even cooperated with) as the smoking gun of American perfidy.  But it will be Russia's money and military role that will be the bigger factor.

    This is how I'm seeing it, in the end: To the extent Russian wants or needs conflict, or is weakened and can't efficiently prevent or manage conflict, there will be conflict in Central Asia after NATO troops are withdrawn.

    Part of that resistance to Russian state intrusion will be Islamic ferment. If analysts were busy telling everyone these were secular Soviet states and Arab Spring can't happen, they will be uncomfortably confronted with the reality that Islam is a great organizing tool in countries where it has historic roots, and this need not be seen as a threat to the West. Yet because they've been engaged in such an industry telling us it's not a threat to the West, they will be embarrassed when in fact it will be — as they emblematically were when the Egyptian woman activist just feted at the State Department turned out to be such an anti-American hater, 9/11 celebrator, and horrid anti-semite on Twitter, and not because she was hacked — a fiction State had to indulge in to save face.

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  • Tajik Opticon #3

     

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

    This is my little weekly newsletter on Saturdays about Tajikistan. You can send news or comments or get it sent by email by writing to me at [email protected]

    COMMENT:

    So the in-your-face Tajik telecommunications official Beg Zuhorov did keep his word as I reported last week and opened back up the Internet sites Facebook and RFE/RL  — after implying they could be shut any time by having announced that "the public" had complained about "extremism" (never explained precisely). It turns out some of the providers didn't even bother to follow the blocking orders, and one of them was owned by President Emmomali  Rahmonov's own son. It always annoys me when a story likes this gets reported by EurasiaNet.org and others as a Bad Thing About Central Asia, and gets  picked up by numerous tech sites, blogs, etc. but then the un-doing of the Bad Thing doesn't get reported. At least RFE/RL had a report about its unblocking but it was never clear what it was really all about.

    While it may be only a coincidence, given how many of these types of trials are, the blockage came just as a group of people were about to go on trial for this nebulous "extremism" in Khojand (the verdict was announced after websites were running again). This seems a particularly strange and brutal case — among the 7 defendants are two middle-aged women and their minor teenage sons, 16 and 18 (the defendant was arrested before he turned 18). They all got very high sentences for "advocating the violent overthrow of the Constitutional order". Helpfully, they pleaded guilty using the exact same language of the charges in the criminal code. But we have no idea what they actually did. It's hard to picture these moms and their teenage sons throwing bombs.

    I have no use for Hizb-ut-Tahir; I have absolutely no hesitation condemning it as extremist and likely cunning and duplicitous about its ultimate aims. It claims that it is merely "peacefully" going about building a caliphate, i.e. theocratic rule, but it never explains what the plans are for all the infidels who don't want a caliphate. Too often, HuT members or ex-members, as somebody always patiently explains in exasperation at your suspicions, are tried and found guilty of real crimes. Even Western countries like Germany have banned the group.

    It's too bad that human rights groups and pundits who see these kinds of awful cases such as occurred in Khujand can't find a way to condemn the way the Tajik government misuses the law and persecutes people — AND condemn the groups that seem to have gotten their clutches into ordinary poor people in this backward country. I'm quite prepared to believe that all these people involved are innocent, and even the repeat offenders at least suffered lack of due process, yet I'd like to see the literature, the activities and the groups behind these cases as well — and I don't see anything wrong with morally condemning them and opposing them, even if the opposition should not take the form of prosecution. There is such a legion of determined do-gooders with the position that HuT is innocent because innocent people are wrongfully prosecuted over HuT that I am the only person in the metaverse with this position. I wish I had more company. If I had more company, and if especially Tajik journalists and human rights activists felt more free to condemn HuT and make the distinctions between the group's reprehensible goals and those victimized around it, I think we might see less victims.

    The World Bank is telling the Tajiks to cut their already very sparse electricity consumption in half. Tajikistan is already a place with blackouts and the lights going off all the time routinely, yet it's like that old Vietnam-war joke about the Soviets writing to the Vietnamese Communists: "Tighten your belts!" Reply: "What are belts? Send them!"

    This outrageous austerity program is unlikely to get consent from the Tajik government, but I really have to wonder why it is even being proposed. Yes, electricity is the cheapest in the world, but the country is also among the poorest in the world AND it is supplying some of its power to war-torn Afghanistan, which the US is usually grateful for. I guess I can think of a lot of things that might be done to save energy in Tajikistan before consumers are told to shut off their lights. It's not like they're leaving their computers and kindles and microwaves plugged in all night running. Example: are there a lot of Soviet-era huge Stalin-type giant buildings all over the place? Why are they being heated day and night?  And is the government looking the other way or even taking bribes while some companies steal electricity, as they do in Uzbekistan? If I were Tajikistan, I'd stall on that outrageous World Bank proposal and tell them to get busy doing a usage and hot spots report for a year and get back to them.

    Seems like the US military also wants to tell Tajikistan not to run their toasters too much: in a tweet, the Central Asia Newswire tells Dushanbe that austerity, not Roghun, is the answer. To be honest, I don't have an informed opinion as to whether it's true that Roghun is the ecology-busting monster that Uzbek propagandists claim — who have an easier time making their case in the world media and world's institutions than Tajikistan. The World Bank has gotten stung around the world over the decades backing big, stupid, expensive, destructive dam projects, and now all that Western NGO yammering against them has caught up with them — and they have to take it out on Tajikistan, I guess. There doesn't seem to be an international multilateral organization that seems to have the stamina to take this issue on — neither the UN, despite the marbled heated halls of the UN Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy in Ashgabat, nor the World Bank, or OSCE has been able to get the traction to really decide this for the region – read: stand up to Russia, waiting in the wings, and Uzbekistan, which is nasty.

    So, like a lot of things in Central Asian life, maybe it will be left to the Chinese…

    Surprise — Tajikistan is corrupt, says Transparency International in its latest report. But interestingly, it's not *as* corrupt as its immediate neighbours. There's a 20 point or more gap in their scores, even though all of them are hugging the bottom of the barrel. Now why is that? Is there a fine line between corruption that is deterred through authoritarian persecution (i.e. as in Iran, not an ideal way to handle it obviously) and authoritarian persecution that in fact only leads to corruption to get around it? (Uzbekistan). Or are their cultural factors? Or is it that if you are just too poor, with half your GDP made up of people gone abroad to work,  it's hard to be corrupt?

    Cue up the garden perennial story that the Russian language is dying out because somebody has made a trip to Dushanbe and has anecdotes to tell. Sorry, this old Russian-speaker isn't buying it. Maybe because I speak Russian to all the Tajiks I ever run into in New York or Washington, even 20-somethings, and they never seem surprised or angry. Now, I get it that Russian isn't being taught as much, that young people aren't speaking it as much, and so on. And there's also the living fact that actual native Russian-speakers are being driven out of Tajikistan by repression and poverty — doctors and engineers among the ethnic Russians and Russian speakers of the old Soviet Union are forced to leave — 3661 last year, which doesn't sound like very many, until you realize this is among the tens of thousands who have left since the fall o f the USSR, and they happen to be among many of the professionals. It's brain-drain, which isn't a surprising thing in a country where the dictator turns off Internet pages on a whim.

    Even so, I think programmers for this region, whether at RFE/RL or OSI or OSCE or any institution, have really lost an opportunity due to their hatred of Russians and aversion toward the Russian language. Here was this built-in lingua-franca that you didn't have to pay anyone to teach or learn, like English, which still isn't as widespread as these planners believe. There is all kind of literature — good, democratic literature — published by all kinds of institutions, including even the old CIA-funded bodies like the International Literary Center, now defunct. Here's a lingua franca, by the way, that would enable these peoples to talk to *each other* and others in the CIS who might support them and at least learn about their issues. Yet the nationalists in the State Department or Soros — the people who think that every country has to follow the path of Poland by relying on language and religion to gain freedom — block even the most benign efforts to try to have cross-border Russian materials. The radios don't have Russian-language pages for most of the stans, except Kazakhstan, where the excuse is that there is a large Russian minority. I wonder what their traffic is on that page from all the stans? Somebody in Turkmenistan has to find out free news in Russian from RFE/RL by going to the Kazakhstan page instead of the Turkmen page. The success of fergananews.com and chrono-tm.org in Russian should succeed in making the point to these planners that they are short-sighted and misled. They could be promoting local languages while also trying to use what remains of this lingua franca to promote freedom and understanding.

    Here's When to Schedule Your Trip to Dushanbe, Mark Zuckerberg

    Ever diligent Facebook friends have found out the office hours of Beg Zuhurov, the brazen Tajik official who justified the closure of Facebook on the grounds that "the public was complaining too much about extremism". The official is only at his desk to meet supplicants on Saturdays from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. Nice! So after a week's hard work, just when you might be sleeping in or spending time with your family or doing your second job to make ends meet, that's when Zuhurov's office is open!

    Fergana.com reported that Tajikistan had blocked Facebook on November 27, and that Zuhurov had invited Zuckerberg "or one of his assistants" to come visit him to discuss the matter. All six Internet providers were ordered to block it and complied; mobile providers did the same.

    Zuhorov made this evasive comment at the time:

    I personally didn't give the order to block the access to the social network Facebook The Communications Service didn't give it either, but if it is necessary, the access will be closed. Every day I receive complaints from people about the contents on the network. The network does not resolve social issues, but purely commercial. Everyone remembers how the civil war began in the country, so then everything then began with criticism. We will not allow war to occur.

    I reported last week that Zuhorov then soon promised to unblock the sites — and he kept his word.

    Are Web Sites Unblocked in Tajikistan?

    But there was still due diligence to be done. Fergana.com asked on December 4 whether reports from RIA-Novosti, the Russian state news agency, were true that Facebook and other Internet sites were unblocked.

    "Access to Facebook is unblocked by the state Internet provider Tajik-telekom," Asomuddin Atoye, head of the Tajik association of Internet providers. "If the state Internet-provider has unblocked Facebook, then I'm sure there will be permission from the Communications Service for other providers and operators as well," Atotyev said.

    Some Tajik Providers Are More Equal Than Others

    Radio Liberty's Tajik Service Radio Ozodi reported that it was blocked on December 1, and apparently later that it  had been unblocked, fergananews.com reported. RFE/RL confirmed that the site was unblocked on December 3. This apparently happened after Tajik state agency for communications sent out SMS messages with "a demand to unblock the site". Fergananews.com was still trying to check whether this was true on December 4, and also discovered that some providers had never blocked the sites in the first place.

    Fergananews.com says a source reported:

    "You know why? Because, for example, the Saturn-Online provider belongs to the son of the president of the country, Rustam Emomalievich, and the Ministry of Communications doesn't touch that company."

    Russian Language Fading Away

    RFE/RL reports: A Tajik who grew up in Dushanbe but only
    recently returned after decades in Russia has noticed a change in the
    Tajik capital. Hardly anyone speaks Russian anymore.

    As Konstantin Parshin at EurasiaNet.org tells it: 

    Evidence is mostly anecdotal, but the linguistic changes are
    obvious to Tajiks who have been away for years. This past summer, for
    example, Ruslan Akhmedov wanted to sell an apartment he inherited, so
    returned to Dushanbe from a small Russian town where he's lived for most
    of his adult life. "I placed an ad in a local paper indicating my phone
    number," Akhmedov recalled. "Out of about thirty people who called me
    during the first couple of days, only three or four easily switched into
    Russian. With the others, I had to communicate in my primitive Tajik.
    Regrettably, I've almost forgotten the language."

    CIS Heads of State Meet 

    The heads of state of the Commonwealth of Independent States met in Ashgabat on December 6.

    Nothing happened.

    The Golden Age, the Turkmen government website, reported:

    The meeting participants considered and discussed a series of issues,
    including organizational. Owing to them, it was made relevant decisions.

    Wait. Did something happen? According to trend.az:

    The Declaration stressed that organized crime, terrorism, illegal drugs
    and psychotropic substances traffic are a serious threat to the security
    of CIS states.


    "We declare our intention to fight against these threats," the document said.

    Russia thinks something did happen, however. Putin hopes to use his leverage hosting the G20 and G8 meetings in Russia to represent Central Asia's intersts. RT reports:

    However, it can happen only on condition that these interests are timely and duly formulated, the Russian president added.

    Developing
    the topic of international cooperation, Vladimir Putin told the
    participants that they should develop and promote a common agenda in
    various other international organizations, such as the OSCE.

    Putin added that the current situation in this organization “was not a source of optimism”. “OSCE
    should have long ago stopped servicing the interests of certain
    countries and concentrate its attention on unification issues,” the Russian leader said.  Putin also expressed hope that when Ukraine takes it turn to chair the OSCE in 2013 it would promote this very position.

    Transparency:  Two-Thirds of Countries Said to Be 'Highly Corrupt

    RFE/RL reports:

    The anticorruption group Transparency
    International (TI) says high levels of bribery, abuse of power, and
    secret dealings continue to “ravage” societies around the world, despite
    a growing public outcry over corrupt governments.


    The annual Corruption Perceptions Index,
    published on December 5 by the Berlin-based group, shows that
    two-thirds of 176 countries are perceived by citizens to be highly
    corrupt.

    Tajikistan is among them, of course.  But as you can see from the map, it ranks only 157, by contrast with its neighbours Turkmenistan, at 170, and Afghanistan, at 174, Uzbekistan at 170, but not as good as Iran, at 133 and just a tad worse than Kyrgyzstan which is at 154.

    Intervention at the OSCE Ministerial Council

    Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a little bit to say about Tajikistan in her speech at the OSCE meeting of foreign ministers:

    In Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, there are
    examples of the restrictions of the freedom of expression online and
    offline as well as the freedom of religion.

    Ok, that's it. The resolution on digital freedom didn't pass, despite now finally — after some hard negotiations — having 47 signatories. Still, 57 are needed in this consensus organization.

    Russians Leave Tajikistan for Russia

    Asia-Plus says 3,661 people left for Russia this year.

    3,661 people have left Tajikistan for Russia under the Russian
    national program to assist the voluntary resettlement of
    fellow-countrymen living abroad to the Russian Federation since 2007.

    According to the Russian Federal Migration Service (FMS)’s office in Tajikistan, 62 percent of them have higher education.

    So these are ethnic Russians or Russian speakers of other "nationalities", i.e. not Tajiks or Tajik-spakers.

    Speaking at the meeting, Viktor Sebelev, the head of FMS’s office in
    Tajikistan, noted that 30 percent of those who had left Tajikistan for
    Russia under the mentioned program were technical and engineering
    employees and 15 percent physicians.  30 percent of physicians that have
    left Tajikistan fro Russia have scientific degrees.

    Court Sentences "Extremists" in Tajikistan

    Asia-Plus reports December 8 that in Khujand, seven people have been tried for "extremism," accused of membership in Hizb-ut-Tahir, which is a "banned religious extremist party" under Tajik law (in Russian).

    Judge Shukhrat Akhrorov said that the sentences were announced in investigation-isolation building no. 2 in Khujand, and that among the convicted were three women and one minor. Most of them pleaded guilty in exactly the language of the law itself, including "the forcible change of the Constitutional order," said the judge.

    Among them were two Chkalovsk residents, Islom Boboyev, 16, and Sukhrob Khafiz, now 18, were sentenced to 6 and 10 years incarceration, respectively, and were serve their terms in prison colonies under "strict" and "common educational" regimes, respectively.

    Others sentenced:

    Mavloniddin Ermatov, resident of Isfar, 28, second-time offender, 3 years strict regime colony

    Sattorkul Kholikulov, 36, resident of Zafarabad district, also repeat offender, 3 years strict regime.

    Mukhayyo Khafizov, mother of Sukhrob, 39, 12 years, common regimen prison colony

    Mukhabbat Khafizov, 28, 10 years prison

    Minir Boboyev, 40, mother of Islom Boboyev, sentenced to 8.5 years, common regimen prison colony.

    The sentences are being appealed.

    According to the Sogdi region prosecutor, "56 active members of religious and extremist parties have had their cases sent to court."

    Earthquake in Tajikistan

    4.7 magnitude, in Murghob.

    Joint Tajik-Afghan Drug Raid

    Tajik and Afghan authorities nabbed nearly 1,000 pounds of drugs in a six-day border operation.

    “The successful 6-day joint operation was launched in northern Afghan
    province of Badakhshan and Khatlon province in [southern] Tajikistan,”
    the Xinhua news agency reported Afghan Deputy Interior Minister Baz
    Mohammad Ahmadi said at a press conference. The seized drugs included
    heroin and opium.


    Thirteen Afghan citizens are now in custody, the minister said. There
    has been no official statement on any Tajiks arrested in the operation,
    although two Tajik women who had been taken hostage by the drug
    traffickers were released.

    No word on any psychotropic drugs.

    World Bank Advises Tajikistan to Hike Electricity Price 50%

        Central Asia Newsire reports:

    The World Bank has advised authorities in Tajikistan to hike
    electricity prices by 50 percent as part of its solution to the
    country’s perennial winter power crisis, local media reported on
    Tuesday.

    The study, entitled “Tajikistan’s Winter Energy Crisis: Electricity
    Supply and Demand Alternatives”, notes that aside from the country’s
    inability to meet energy requirements, consumers are not incentivized to
    use power carefully.

    That article doesn't mention Roghun, yet the US military-funded Central Asia Newswires has some advice on top of the World Bank's report in the tweet sent to link to the World Bank report: 

    #Rogun is not answer to #electricity woes – increasing fares, conserving #energy is

    Automatic Check-in Down at Dushanbe Airport

    Central Asia Newswire reports that Tajikistan’s international airport at Dushanbe have been checked-in the
    old fashioned way for the last two weeks over a pay dispute, citing local media
    outlets.

    David Trilling of Eurasianet.org calls this "one of the world's worst airports" and tweets that it "just got more inefficient".

    Forests and Wildlife Increased in Endangered Area in Tajikistan

    Good news! UNDP reports:

    Tajikistan’s Vakhsh River valley is crucial to the livelihoods and food
    security of millions of people, but the degradation of natural resources
    has been persistent and extensive over the past 100 years. The tugai
    forests, reservoirs of biodiversity and source of income for local
    communities, have been stripped at an ever-escalating rate, either to
    clear land for agriculture or as source of energy.

    But UNDP stepped in with a project to reverse these trends.

    After four years, an evaluation of the project found that tree-cutting
    had declined by 90 percent since 2008, allowing the forest to
    regenerate, while populations of birds and animals increased by 50
    percent. Community members say they feel a sense of pride and ownership
    in what they have been able to accomplish. "Protecting the forests is a
    noble cause that should always be supported," says Bekmurodov
    Kurbonmahmad, a member of the committee.

    Did they stop cutting trees merely because they ran out of them? What are they using for fuel now? Animal dung? And while it's great that the animals returned, how are the people doing?

    In the district of Jura Nazarov, UNDP assisted communities with other
    aspects of sustainable rural development. Almost all of the district’s
    14,000 inhabitants depend on farming, but more than 70 percent of the
    land is no longer arable, after years of poor agricultural and
    irrigation practices during the Soviet era.

            Yet, UNDP says it has good news there, too:

    Seventy-five percent of the respondents reported that they were able to
    sell additional crops, with a 25 percent increase in income on average.
    The extra funds have gone into renovating family homes, hiring farm
    labour to expand production, repairing irrigation systems and sending
    children to school.

    Feeling Glum About Tajikistan? Here's a Nice Promotional Video

    From the Embassy of Tajikistan in the US. It has a nice American narrator with a mellow accent, despite that "Ta-JICK-istan" to rhyme with "ick" and will be broadcast on ABC News. The message is that with US investment and lots of mining, the region will become more stable and the relationship will grow stronger.


     

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  • Party For Everybody

    I was thrilled that the Buranovskiye Babushki at least came in second at Eurovision 2012, held in Baku this year.

    I usually give Eurovision a pass most years — so much of it seems really derivative of American music and it's just awful, treacly stuff, even if you like Eurotrance, which I do. Celine Dion was a winner one year, remember?

    Once I drove with some friends to visit a Zoastrian fire temple far outside of Baku. We drove through the countryside, littered with oil rigs and poor villages and rock. We got there very late, and it was already closed, but some teenagers came out, and for some American dollars, they agreed to wake up the guide and take us on a tour. Afterwards, we found a little tavern in the hills and went inside to eat. I thought here, at least, I would be safe from something that had bombarded me from every supermarket, mall, and airport forever.

    Suddenly, the strains of the Titanic Song came wafting in over the olive trees…The manager thought he was doing us a favour.

    I feel bad for Europeans singing in English, Globish-type English that many of them many not even understand. Why can't they sing in their own languages?! Wouldn't that be better? And why can't they sing songs that are more in line with their real native traditions, instead of singing these awful, thin retreads of the worst of American pop music? I just don't get it.

    That's why the babushki from Buryanovo were so refreshing — they came out singing not even in Russian — in fact not a single Russian word is heard in the song. They're singing in Udmurt, which is the language of one of the native peoples of Russian Federation territory that go back to the Stone Age.  To be sure, they look like the quintessential Russian babushka or grandmother, with the classic Russian pechka or large stone oven with a place even to sleep and warm a loaf of bread. Their dresses are patchwork in what may be either a more Udmurtian or more modern pattern, but they wear the classic bast shoes of the Russian peasant. What's great about this song is that they start drooning away in a folk song style with the curiously harsh but sweet harmonizing for which the Russian folk song is known.

    Then all of a sudden the old ladies pick up their skirts and start dancing to a disco tune with disco lights flashing, crying 'Party for Everybody" which is one of those classic Angrusski type phrases, not quite grammatical, but effective. Then they top off the effect by crying "Come on and dance" and even "Boom Boom!" It's just great.

    Word on the street, however, was that Russia deliberately put these babushki into the Eurovision stream as a prank to dis Azerbaijan, maybe for some political or economic dispute, perhaps for signing a pipeline deal with Turkey? Who knows. The unhappy looks on the faces of the judges in some clips of the babushki singing lets us know that there is divided opinion on the act. In fact, the Eurovision people seem to want a united Europe with a common banal culture with English apparently as a dominant language, and this song and dance troupe singing in…Udmurtian…and dressed in folk costumes goes just in the opposite direction.

    Even if this group was manipulated by the Kremlin in this fashion, I'll prefer to take the higher road in looking at it, and see it as something else: something that is the best of Russia. Russia has many peoples in it, and has come from the Soviet Union which is called the "Prisonhouse of the Peoples." Many of the Udmurts' intellectuals were purged by Stalin in the Great Terror. It's also often overlooked that one of the peoples in the Prisonhouse of Peoples is Russia itself. Russia is striving to find its new identity in the modern world, and part of that identity in fact has to be appreciation of the non-ethnic Russians in this highly multi-ethnic state. It has to appreciate its old folk roots of the long-suffering Russian peasant dreaming beside the stove after a cookie sugar-high, but it also has to join the modern world to a disco beat.

    I like the "Come on and dance" not merely because its modern, however, but because it reflects something that I have always seen in Russia in different cities at different times, that I haven't seen at home or elsewhere in Europe or Latin America, although it is sometimes visible in Africa. And that is the ability of people to break into dance spontaneously. Not just song, but dance. Large demonstrations or rallies or festivals will usually have at least one old babushka or maybe an old couple or even some young people breaking into folk dances. I recall many scenes of people playing accordions and other people dancing around them — and now Youtube is full of them. It's an interesting phenomenon and shows the life of a country despite all the ravages of state terror and wars.

    The stage director also really shone in the finals at Eurovision on this song. In previous performances the Russian stove would twirl around the stage like a Disney animated cartoon. In the finale, the babushki took cookies out of the ofen to present them to the audience and the burning logs framed their circle.

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  • No, the Russians Will Not Help with Syria and Should Get Unrelenting Pressure to Stop Arms Deliveries

    I always marvel at people on web forums who claim that the 100,000 people who have died in Iraq are "caused" by the US. There's an infantile clinging to the "big revelation" that the Bush Administration lied, and there weren't weapons of mass destruction there.

    So there wasn't a good reason to invade the country? There were very real enemies there who didn't appear merely because the US showed up to topple Saddam. The terrorists supported by Al Qaeda; the militants supported by Iran and Syria — these are realities for which the "progressives" claiming the untruth about the 100,000 never have an answer. One of the reasons I ran a news clipping site "Not Killed by American Troops" for awhile was to keep reporting and archiving the news that most of the killings in these wars were not being done by American troops.

    That doesn't mean we don't criticize these invasions or we don't condemn American soldiers when they do kill civilians, which of course they have, at times in grisly and horrifying fashion. But the overwhelming number of civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan were killed by terrorists and militants such as the Taliban.

    By the same token, I see little awareness among those spouting on forums, that Russia is propping up the Assad regime in Syria, and has given Syria $1 billion in weapons.  An appalling massacre has occurred in Syria of more than 90 people, 32 of them children. Even now, despite this horror, a Russian ship is on its way delivering more arms to the Assad regime. Even Amnesty International had to concede that most of the world's killings of civilians are done with Russian weapons — not American weapons. That was a bitter truth for the left to swallow, and the protests are shrill on AI's website. But it is the truth.

    People like Robert MacKay at the New York Times profess surprise on Twitter at WikiLeaks trying to spin the Syrian massacre today. Why the surprise? Long ago WikiLeaks revealed itself to be a pro-Kremlin operation seeking sustenance for its largely anti-American agenda from what they rightly identify as America's enemy ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend"). More than that, the anarcho-Leninism that WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and others espouse sees the world in a dichotomy where America is always evil and Russia is always misunderstood or victimized, if not good.

    The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq were supported by Iran and Syria all this time; these are Russia's allies and never stopped being their allies from the Soviet era.

    So when I see an article like this in the New York Times, US Seeks Russia's Help in Removing Assad, I have to conclude: what are you smoking, guys? Why these fantasies?

    Russia has never helped on Syria and is highly unlikely to do anything different than it has already done for the entire latest round of the mass crimes against humanity — which is nothing. Russia is busy at the UN complaining about the less than 100 civilians killed not deliberately by NATO during the fight with Qadaffi for Libya. Russia is not helping on Syria. While Russia may have technically supported Kofi Annan's mission, or the notion of monitors, it could indicate external assent while practicing internal dissent because its ships keep steaming to Syria with arms and it keeps excusing Iran.

    Russia does not like how either Iraq or Libya turned out, hates the idea of humanitarian interventions (in part with good reason), and does not want to remove Assad and precipitate what it sees as a messy civil war with Al Qaeda in the wings to help the opposition. It may lie about this actual danger, we can't know. But it does not want to help. If it waits long enough, Syria might turn out to be like the huge crimes against humanity in Africa in places like Sudan or the DRC — that is, the world will turn away and stop caring, and become preoccupied again with even just one death in Israel/Palestine.

    Why does Prime Minister Medvedev hate the idea of Mubarak in a cage, as the Times reports? Because he does not want to envision either Putin or himself in cages — and cages are what the Russian criminal justice system puts people in — as they did Mikhail Khodorkovsky. As the Times reports:

    “The Russians now consider President Assad a liability,” said Dimitri K. Simes, a Russia expert and president of the Center for the National Interest in Washington. “But Putin doesn’t like having his clients removed one after another by the United States, and he considers Assad his client.”

    Frankly, I don't think the Russians consider Assad anything of the kind. That is, sure, he's a problem and a challenge, but so is the Syrian opposition, and they have the stamina to wait out things like this and they have the brutal and grim determination to keep allies like Assad. We don't. Very, very few people are demonstrating in Russia against Moscow's relationship with Assad; and very, very few people are demonstrating in the US against Moscow's relationship with Assad, either. The fairly small turnout of protesters from Occupy Wall Street that turned up at the NATO summit wanted to denounce NATO for Libya and prevent NATO from ever exercising force anywhere in the world again — they weren't concerned about massacres in Homs. They line up perfectly with the Kremlin in that regard.

    What's more imporant is the second half of what Simes said — indeed, Putin hates the US, doesn't want to be seen to be taking dictation from the US, and will cling to Assad for that reason alone — with the help of WikiLeaks stirring up the massages, claiming we must "guard against spin" on the Syrian massacre. As if there was a "spin" involved in pictures of 32 bloodied little children. OWS keeping up such pressure as they can muster on having any kind of international military response.

    Helen Cooper and Mark Landler at least reported accurately that in fact Russia didn't sign on to a "Yemensky Variant" for Syria.

    Human Rights Watch has also apparently been in quiet talks with the Russians — more and more, this large and wealthy organization behaves like a foreign embassy. I don't see any call on Russia to do something about this latest Syrian massacre on HRW's website, but it's a holiday weekend and that's not their policy with Russia, despite some open protests — they believe Russia can be influenced better by dialogue than by confrontation (I think they're absolutely wrong about this, and shouldn't even have an office in Moscow, which is constraining their statements.)

    “There’s a deep strain of anti-Americanism at the heart of Putin’s Kremlin,” said Carroll Bogert, a deputy executive director of Human Rights Watch, who has also discussed the Yemen option with Russian officials. “When a proposal is perceived as something the Americans want, it can automatically become less desirable to the Russians.”

    Still, she and other human rights activists said the plan was worth trying, even if the odds are against winning wholehearted Russian backing, much less the acquiescence of Mr. Assad.

    The plan will fail, and human rights activists had better have a plan B, if they are advising governments quietly on what they should do. Of course, it isn't direct military action in Syria that's the issue for the Kremlin, but another NATO action via Turkey on the border of Syria in quest of the bad idea of safe zones.

    Here's why it will fail, as the Times explains:

    In Syria, by contrast, Mr. Assad oversees a security state in which his minority Alawite sect fears that if his family is ousted, it will face annihilation at the hands of the Sunni majority.

    Everybody wants to do something about Syria. Pronouncing an idea like the "Yemensky Variant" or the latest peace venture as failures in advance make it seem like you are hopelessly pragmatic.

    Oh, but there *is* something to do, and I want everyone to do a lot more of it: gang up on Russia. Nobody should be pretending Russia is helping; nobody should pretend that Russia is going to help bridge the violent situation and lead it to "talks". Everybody should apply unrelenting, prolonged, and principled pressure on Russia until it stops shipping arms to Syria and enabling mass crimes against humanity. Anything less than that risks being part of the problem, not part of the solution.

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  • What Will Be Tajikistan’s Plan B?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    "Don't hurry. Be patient."

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Worried Watch on China Situation As Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures Piling Up

    I'm embarrassed for my country and my government.

    Here's it's taken a poor, blind provincial Chinese human rights activist named Chen Guangcheng, taking tremendous risks, to escape from house arrest and leave his family behind, and come to the US Embassy seeking refuge, to throw into stark relief the awful human rights situation in China. It's a situation we always seem to relegate to quiet diplomacy

    Hillary Clinton was hoping to get through her talks there without any hub-bub and that usual delicate quiet diplomacy, and now this.

    To underscore the seriousness of the reputational risks here for Obama, the top legal advisor of the State Department, Harold Koh, was brought in to personally escort Chen to the hospital.

    The harrowing account of Chen's escape, his pick-up by the Embassy diplomats who decided to give him temporary refuge, and his leaving on terms that aren't clear into a situation that worsened are all detailed in the Times.

    But I'm really worried about all this, watching it from afar — as the State Department press spokesman today describes his own position, although he's got a briefing book and cables, and we don't.

    What's really going on? Why couldn't Chen stay in the Embassy? He says officials "weren't proactive enough" and essentially asked him to leave, according to the Times. Why couldn't a US official stay with him until he's had adequate time to articulate his wishes and leave the country with his family if that is what he wishes?

    There's a lot of confusion, but having been involved myself in these high-stress highly visible summit dramas between superpowers, such as with the exchange in the Soviet era of political prisoner Yuri Orlov and journalist Nick Daniloff for Soviet spies (I worked as a translator for Orlov), these things are never easy. There are always difficulties and last-minute hitches and people changing their minds about things.

    I don't know if the memory of the five years with the Soviet Pentacostals in the basement of the US Embassy was still fresh in anybody's mind (it would be in the mind of Wayne Merry, the diplomat who had to live through it in Moscow!). But it's tremendously difficult. Obviously, Embassy staff want to avoid a situation where they are seen to create a magnet for asylum-seekers. In the Soviet era, there were droves of them usually arrested before they even got near the door, who were filling up the labour camps (we met them in Perm 36).

    On the other hand, they can't in good conscience feed people to the wolves and if someone like Chen has made it this far, you have to stay the course. And the nature of Chen's state of mind, and his possible reversals, and his possible misunderstandings aren't the issue:  he's a man by whom the US must do right.

    The US has to obtain more than diplomatic assurances here; they have to have the right to accompany Chen or perhaps, failing gaining agreement for that, try to deploy an NGO volunteer as a witness to accompany him and report back to the Embassy. They must try to get them all out of the country.

    I feel as if Obama's foreign policy — such as it is — is really falling apart now in the last part of his term. It was never sterling, and caused my growing lack of support for him.

    But it's almost as if he and his people said to themselves, "Let's make a series of quick wins or QIPs (quick-impact projects or whatever they call them) across the global chessboard on a variety of problem countries, and see if we can get them to stay put until I'm re-elected."

    And it's that craven, utilitarian attitude toward foreign policy as merely an instrument of domestic power that is messing it up. Sure, all politicians play foreign issues for domestic audiences. Yet to turn foreign policy purely into a campaigning platform never seems to have been done so egregiously.

    First, there was the stumble with the live mike with Medvedev. "I need space" — no standing up to the Russians — no offset when the reset hasn't worked — and the humiliation of having that taken up by Romney who rightly said that Russia is our major enemy *because Russia has made us its enemy* and doesn't help on a whole host of problems from Syria to Afghanistan to Iran.

    Next, there was the scandal where Obama Administration officials leaked a story that may not have been true, or was only partly true, that Israel was making some deal with Azerbaijan for refueling rights in some ostensible plan related to the bombing of Iran. Than Baku could hardly make anything that stark without retaliation against the Azeri minority in Iran and a host of other problems in the region didn't seem to matter. The main thing was to send a message to both Israel and Azerbaijan not to do anything funny on Iran until Obama got re-elected.

    Then there was the trip to South Korea, to stand tall on North Korea and settle things there — which backfired and led to the North Koreans firing a (failed) missile. Not good.

    Then on to Latin America, where we really looked like imperialist sexist pigs with the president's own security detail taking advantage of the local women. Everybody looks bad here, and it isn't helped by Obama joking at the White House correspondents' dinner that he had to leave soon and get the Secret Service home on their new curfew.

    Then this eerie trip in the middle of the night to Afghanistan to give a press conference in a heavily guarded army compound, with little said about how the country is going to really fare or what we're going to do for it after troops are pulled out — and then with a suicide bombing right after the presidential plane leaves.

    And now this Chinese mess.

     I have to wonder if there was an adequate translator here — it sounds as if there wasn't if they can't seem to tell the difference between him saying "kiss Hillary" or "see Hillary".

    I can't help wondering if the reason why Chen now seems to be speaking more clearly isn't only because of a night in the hospital to treat his wounded leg, but because there's an independent reporter (i.e. not a Chinese or American diplomat) who speaks his language now covering his story, Melinda Liu at the Daily Beast.

    He wants to leave with his family on Hillary Clinton's plane.

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  • Atambayev Ready to Turn Manas into Civilian Airport with Military Cargo Transit

    Atambayev Medvedev
    Medvedev and Atambayev. Kremlin.ru. Russian Presidential Photo Service.

    Traditionally, it seems to be important for the leader of Kyrgyzstan to get along with Russia — for lots of reasons.

    The new president of Kyrgyzstan, Almazbek Atambayev, has already gotten himself into trouble at home both for insufficient regard of the national hero Manas (calling him curiously "an ethnic Rossiyanin, i.e. from the territory of Russia) and refusing to meet with an Uzbek astronaut and even blaming him for the violence in Osh — which seemed not only excessively nationalistic on his part but unjust.

    But it's not as if he's going to keep Russia happy, the way he's talking.

    Registan (Joshua Foust) may have this all wrong — because he belongs to the school of thought that always understates Russia in Central Asia and sees it as a weak and vacilating power that isn't a threat.

    Foust told us not to take Atambayev seriously when he said he wanted the US out of Manas; he told us that again, and also said "he's a friend of Russia":

    Atambayev, however, is a friend of Russia. And Russia likes making noise about the U.S. presence at Manas. Russia, however, also likes keeping the U.S. nearby so it can absorb any negative spillover from the war in Afghanistan. A full American withdrawal worries Moscow as much as it worries Afghanistan.

    I'm not so sure he's such a big friend of Russia — and there are signs that Kyrgyzstan remains unstable and who knows how long he will last.

    And this idea of "America as security umbrella for Russia" is nuts of course, for a number of reasons, including the fact that Russia just blocked the US in its efforts to convert the war in Afghanistan into a joint anti-narcotics war with Central Asian governments and the Kremlin.I really this is a very, very entrenched "received wisdom" idea that "the Russians like the Americans in Manas because they "take the heat" (and of course pay Russia for fuel. But it's worth disloding from the received-wisdom slot because it could change.

    I don't see why you can't take Atambayev at his word — read his interview, and he says he doesn't mind having Manas serve as a civilian airport through with military freight passes, but doesn't want it to be "an American air base". This might be a distinction without a difference, but it probably means less personnel — and command and control issues.

    He also is extremely blunt about not wanting the Russian base, and finding it merely a Russian general's vanity project.

    RIA-Novosti has a lot of the most sensational bits from the Kommersant interview in English— calling the $15 million rent for the Kant air base the Russians haven't paid in four years "measly," and saying it exists merely to "flatter the vanity of Russian generals."

    For some reason, Joshua Kucera seemed to think that the Russians only agreed to finally pay this $15 million because they "got something" out of it.

    I think it probably worked somewhat differently — they didn't pay it because…they can.  Do what they want, I mean. They have Bishkek over a barrel, they weren't happy with Bakiyiev and strung him along and put pressure on him and didn't pay the rent…Otunbayeva was an interrim leader so they didn't really have to deal…now they are assured that Atambayev will cooperate with them so they said they'd pay. In 10 days. Let's see if they do. '

    But I don't think Atambayev had to offer them the scrapping of the US plan to build a training facility in Kizyl-Kiya — we may well see them put that in to keep a "balance."

    No, it might be simply a pledge to really make sure the Americans leave Manas in 2014 as Atambayev has stated. Kucera doesn't mention this, maybe he takes it for a given.

    Here's my notes with some important sections in bold from the Kommersant interview:

    (more…)

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  • Russians Protest Kremlin’s Support of Murderous Syrian Government

    Syktyvar
    Photo by Ernest Mezak, member of Memorial Society in Syktyvkar at a picket in front of the United Russia Party office, February 9, 2012.  This was a demonstration staged by Komi's Memorial against the Russian government's position on the Syria crisis.

    An interesting factor in the waves of Russian protests recently against the autocratic Putin and election fraud:  for the first time since 1968, protesters are taking up the awful aspects of Russian foreign policy.

    Back in 1968, you will recall that eight brave Russian citizens went out on Red Square to protest the Soviet-led invasion of then-Czechoslovakia. Two of the women were released, the rest went to jail. I know most of them. It was a rare flash of interest in affairs not directly inside the Soviet dictatorship — but even when things became a bit more free in the 1980s, Russians tended to be preoccupied with their own affairs — and still are. They have enough to do just trying to gain their own freedom.

    One of the slogans the Red Square demonstrators had on their posters during their short-lived action was "For our freedom, and yours" — actually, an old Polish saying that means that when you fight against a tyrannical government that oppresses other countries, too, you are fighting "for our freedom, and yours." They put some of their slogans in Czech — Ať žije svobodné a nezávislé Československo!" (Long live free and independent Czechoslovakia).

    In the same way, a group in the Russian region of Syktyvkar in the Komi republic (where, as it happened, the famous writer Dovlatov did his guard duty) has staged a protest at the local office of the United Russia Party, a symbol of Putin. The group is part of the Memorial movement dedicated to remembering — and preventing — the crimes of totalitarianism.

    The man in the photo here being questioned by police has a sign with Russian, English, and Arabic.

    Wikipedia says, "Many of the 'settlers' who came in the early 20th century were prisoners of the Gulag who were sent by the hundreds of thousands to perform forced labor in the Arctic regions of the USSR." So it's that kind of place where people are free thinkers.

    I've seen a few Facebook and Live Journal entries here and there talking about Syria and arguing about whether Russia is doing the right thing or isolating itself. This is really the first time in a long while I've seen Russians care about their country's bad behaviour abroad. Of course, the two aspects are intertwined — the bad behaviour becomes possible because civil society is suppressed inside the country.

     

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  • A Challenging Assignment — in Chechnya

    I don't know what's more scary — going to Chechnya and working with local NGOs while Ramzan Kadyrov is still in power?

    Or filling out one of those complex USAID proposals (*shudder*).

    I'm told this is something of a pioneering project and that Grozny is "safe" for foreigners nowadays.

    You decide.

     

    USAID grant-writing consultant for Russia/North Caucasus NGOs (immediately)

     A coalition of grass-roots NGOs in the North Caucasus region, working on women’s empowerment and post-conflict development and supported by an international volunteer advisory committee, is seeking to hire an experienced grant-writing consultant to prepare an application under USAID’s currently open ASP for Russian NGOs. The ASP is open to Russian NGOs only as well as to new applicants. Details are at http://www07.grants.gov/search/announce.do;jsessionid=TJzhPgyLMGq2ZYds7vYRFYCjy7L9h0GvhXLGTbFdlhvtnfxXM5JV!-1135953825.

     

    Description of responsibilities:

    The NGO coalition envisions a collaborative writing process together with the consultant, who will be based in Grozny, Chechen Republic, for one month leading up to the ASP’s deadline on March 9, 2012, to develop a competitive proposal jointly with the applying grass-roots NGOs. The consultant will briefly analyze the applying NGOs’ strengths and weaknesses, as related to the ASP’s themes, through consultations and observation of their work. He/she will advise the NGOs on the themes and develop program activities that comply with the ASP’s rules and USAID policies and priorities. The consultant will also analyze the NGOs’ compliance with USAID “responsibility” rules and assist applicant NGOs with making the necessary steps towards compliance. The consultant will write the proposal in collaboration with the NGO applicants through regular (daily) interaction and devise shared writing responsibilities, based on their respective skills. Where NGO applicants experience difficulties with time-management and understanding the technical demands of the proposal format, he/she will provide leadership and guidance to ensure timely completion. The consultant will coordinate all steps, including drafting timeline and content, with an international volunteer advisory committee and liaise closely with the committee through the process. He/she will edit the final version of the proposal, ensure that it is complete and correct, send it several days before the deadline to an international advisor committee for review and make certain that the application are submitted on time.

     

    Required Qualifications:

     

    • Demonstrated record of writing successful applications for USAID grants in the past three years, preferably for Russia or the former Soviet Union and/or Conflict Management and Mitigation and/or women’s rights and livelihood and/or on behalf of national/local NGOs.
    • University education, preferably a master’s degree or higher, in fields like development studies, conflict resolution, non-profit management, gender studies, political science or similar field.
    • Demonstrated understanding of USAID’s “responsibility” standards
    • Strong technical writing skills (writing samples will be requested)
    • Experience working with grass-roots NGOs on project development, fundraising and/or capacity-building
    • Maturity, leadership, team-building and motivational skills
    • Native Russian-speaker professionally fluent/like-native English skills; or native English speaker who speaks Russian with professional fluency
    • Be able to work in Grozny , Chechen Republic , from approximately February 9, 2012 to March 9, 2012 (local partners will make arrangements for housing prior to arrival)
    • Russian citizenship or Russian residence/work permit or ability to travel visa-free to Russia or willingness to make all visa arrangements without employer’s support

     Preferred Qualifications:

    • Hands-on experience with post-conflict development and human rights challenges in the North Caucasus
    • A minimum of five years of experience in the fields of development, humanitarian aid, civil society, human rights or women’s rights/empowerment in Russia, the former Soviet Union or elsewhere in developing/post-conflict environments.

     

    How to apply:

    Interested candidates who meet all the required qualifications should submit:

    • a resume (in Russian or English),
    • a cover letter outlining their qualifications for this consulting position (in Russian or English),
    • a writing sample of 3-5 pages (an excerpt from a previous USAID application written by the candidate is strongly preferred – in English),
    • their fee requirements for one month and expected travel costs,
    • and the names and contact information of three references who can discuss the candidate’s relevant experience (especially with USAID proposals).

     

    Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, so apply as soon as possible. The deadline is February 5, 2012, but applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis and an applicant may be selected before the deadline. Please send all application materials to [email protected].  

     

     

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