Fancy car driven by Velikovsky journalist in Afghanistan interviews by WikiLeaks on the road trip in Mediastan (although it could be owned by Wahlstrom or anyone else). Can anyone
tell me its make and value, and also why it has Arabic script on the
license plate, part of which is blurred out in the film? Is this related to Wahlstrom's reporting on Palestine? ANSWER AND CORRECTION: It's not Arabic, and it's Pashtun, as it is in Afghanistan — I hadn't realized when going over frames in the film that they were already in Afghanistan by this frame–CAF.
I've been researching Dmitry Velikovsky, the Russian journalist who
seems to take a lead role in the Mediastan road trip, and is narrating
and asking questions in the film — second after Johannes Wahlstrom, who is listed as the
producer. Velikovsky's name comes first on the list after Wahlstrom's.
I've been trying to understand who is helping WikiLeaks, who is helping with this film, how they tie into Israel Shamir, Wahlstrom's notorious father, and what the real agenda is.
Velikovsky seems to do most of his publishing at RR, although he is also on Voice of Russia, which is a pro-government.
Russkiy Reporter is owned by the same media group that owns Ekspert, which they visit in Kazakhstan, which refuses to run the WikiLeaks cables. I will let the seasoned Moscow correspondents describe RR and its affiliations and its future possible sponsorship by the oligarch Deripaska. And RR may not even be the point, as the only reporter from RR on the Mediastan tour appears to be Velikovsky, but more research is needed.
Another article, about Assange, called "Prisoner of the World" (uznik, in the sense of prisoner of conscience) is subtitled: "How the Western Establishment Beat Assange." And this tells you a lot about Velikovsky's psychology. Russians, especially those leaning toward the government or who are nationalist-minded even if urban hipsters, tend to have this feeling of insecurity/hatred/venom about the superior United States, and that's what attracts them so much to WikiLeaks and Snowden. They get to stick it in the eye of the loathsome West, which they've been taught to hate in everything they get in schools and the state-controlled media. They see WikiLeaks as an undergo on the run from the "gegemon" America, and they root for it.
So something like helping Wikileaks here is not just some mechanistic pro-government work like robots, or some intelligence plot, although I think we will find the FSB's fingerprints on this story given the presence of Wahlstrom and his dad lurking behind the scenes. No, rather it's that some Russians genuinely love the story. That the West tried to haul back Assange to Sweden to face questioning on a sex offense is offensive to Russians just on the face of it, culturally, as something like that would never happen in their sexist culture where domestic violence or sexual assault cases are very hard to get into court. That the NSA is snooping even on their Vkontakte somehow, and that Sweden is supposedly even selling Internet traffic from Russia — these ideas are offensive to them, naturally, and they hate America first. Their own government is far worse a problem for them, but they've internalized that; indeed, the way they can even express themselves on these topics in a controlled media situation is to make America the target.
I see that a lot with Central Asians, as well — they grab on to the issues of Guantanamo andWikiLeaks and Occupy with a vengeance and obsess about it because it enables them to feel part of the world and to not feel the sting and humiliation that comes with being intellectuals in a country that has situations of imprisonment and torture far worse than Guantanamo, and snooping far worse than the NSA — and no WikiLeaks.
Then at RR, if you see his list of stories, he has a strange amalgam — story after story after story under just his own name, or only one other name about…cars. Racing cars, new cars, hot cars. He's a specialist on cars (and drives one in Mediastan, as he is shown narrating his story at the wheel.)
That's when he tells his story about how he made fake letters to the editor to please his boss, and then found that the marketing department didn't want him to print the real letters in a column about letters he was responsible for.
But somehow despite not working out in that job, he found his way to reporting on cars at RR — and Assange.
Interspersed between the cars are stories on WikiLeaks, Manning, and unrest in Egypt for Ekho Moskvy as well as Southern Ossetia — a favourite topic of Russian nationalists of course, who endlessly intrigue around the Russian-Georgian war.
One article in which Dmitry writes with 4 or 5 other people is a critical study of jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky which takes him back to his days at the Komsomol's Youth, Science and Technology Center and the Menatep bank and all the rest. It's a fairly cynical study accentuating things like quotes purporting to show Khodorkovsky saying "in a normal country, I'd be put in jail," but it's not that different from what Western reporters say about him. I do tend to wonder if in a normal country, Khodorkovsky would merely be fined, not jailed, but he isn't in a normal country.
He also is among 6 authors who wrote favourable about five NGOs who were trying to fight off the "foreign agent act" that Putin is using to try to rein in groups that get foreign funding and engage in "politics" (it was Khodorkovsky's support of opposition parties that also bothered Putin and was the motivation for his imprisonment). This article seems fine, i.e. not snotty, but it's not clear which part of it Velikovsky wrote, that's just the thing.
In this recent piece, Velikovsky understandably trashes The Fifth Estate, but then at least notes that "an RR report was involved" in the movie he then praises, Mediastan. That's himself, of course. He says he prefers documentaries to Hollywood. He notes that Mediastan got thrown out of the Toronto Film Festival because they picked The Fifth Estate instead.
Velikovsky, although he mainly seemed to report on cars and fill in with a few other stories critical of the West's favourite topics, is described as a WikiLeaks expert by Voice of Russia.
And no doubt he is. That makes him suitable for the VoR program on the NSA and interception — a program that aired in April 2012. April 2012 was when there was a huge flurry of activity against the NSA by WikiLeaks' Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, and Laura Poitras, which I've discussed at length in coverage of the Whitney Museum event on surveillance and other items in my timeline of the Snowden affair.
Do you see a pattern here? People doing active measures, well, they schedule them. They coordinate them. And remember, they don't have to have all the people "in the know" that they are actually part of some plot; they can merely be in the networks, they can be "agents of influence."
So…If I were a Moscow reporter, I'd no doubt have called Dmitry by now trying to get to Snowden. Among others that seem to have shown up around this story. Obviously, he was a figure trusted by the paranoid Assange for this Mediastan film — and he goes several years back covering Julian very favourably.
I guess all doubt is removed with the appearance of Mediastan now that WikiLeaks is "removed" from Snowden or "not on Russia" anymore or somehow "not involved". While you could posit that Mediastan was filmed in 2011 and 2012 and therefore isn't relevant to 2013, the fact that a Russian publication could hold an evening with a film showing and involve Russians in Moscow related to Shamir currently in this means that WikiLeaks is still very much in the Russian tank. That WikiLeaks got hold of the film of Snowden from his Sam Adam award lets us know that, too — and of course they would, given Sarah Harrison's presence at the event.
Yes, perhaps by now I'd be told there is a price for that entree to Snowden, like there was a price of supposedly $3000 for that Life News photo of him shopping. Geez, guys, you got burned on that, you should have waited a week, and you could get him in a suit holding a candle at a swank dinner.
Meanwhile I won't be a bit surprised if the next feature about Snowy comes from Dima.
I didn't get this post published back in May when I first drafted it — and now I don't think I can find the links and tweets referenced, but given "Omar and Me" and the awful Al-Shabab attack killing 39 people in Kenya in a shopping mall, and the discussion around J.M. Berger, I'm going to publish this now and hunt for the links later.
I also hope to take up a critique of what the new revised Registan management is doing now with a new study of the IMU which looks like — just as under the old management of Joshua Foust and Nathan Hamm — it also minimizes the terrorist movement and tells us all it won't be a problem.
BTW, Nathan Hamm is now in Portland, Oregon making leather goods or something to sell, and he may be the person from Portland, OR that heckles me on this blog anonymously. He's a creep.
So the old post:
I came across the news of the arrest of Fazliddin Kurbanov, a 30-year-old Uzbek emigre suspected of material aid to terrorists, by reading the snarky comments of two terrorism experts on Twitter.
Like Joshua Foust, Sarah Kendzior and the other authors at Registan. they were snickering at news that came out of Idaho — Idaho! — concerning a possible affiliation to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).
These two — one is @intelwire (J.M. Berger) with many followers and highly respected — smirked at the invocation of the IMU affiliate as people of this perspective do because they believe it doesn't exist anymore, or its activities are totally reduced, ever since the US killed its leader in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. They only exist outside of Uzbekistan! Or they don't even exist! They are just a Fig Newton of your imagination!
The pair of them joked and said the IOU was an offshoot of the IMU — you know, like a debt? Harhar.
I interrupted and sent them the link to the story of a female suicide bomber who was said to be related to the IMU, in Pakistan. Her motiviation was said to be an attack on a religious school by Pakistanis.
Ten people were killed and at least 75 were injured, but the IMU doesn't exist, you see. It was just made up by Karimov to exercise his authoritarian powers….
Now, that may very well be true, and maybe some of it is made up and many of the people he has put in jail don't seem to deserve to be in jail.
But the case of Kurbanov, like the case of Muhtorov and his accomplice, seems to be one where these individuals have been properly arrested. It may turn out that the US government cannot make its case against them, but that it had grounds for arrest seems clear.
@intelwire and company can smirk so much at the very thought of IMU in part because it's a male bonding exercise (nearly all the terrorist experts are male) and it's part of establishing the pecking order that says "We're the smart ones, surrounded by idiots". But it also positions them as the savvy ground-breaking innovative thinkers who challenge the status quo of all those hidebound haters of Islam — whoever and wherever they are. I actually never see them (I don't mean extreme bloggers like Pamela Geller; I mean people in think-tanks who are specialists on terrorism.) The derision about the IMU is nearly universal among those who follow this part of the world, yet none of those making the claims of its falseness ever seem to adequately challenge the FBI or State Department with their beliefs.
Foust went so far as accusing me of helping to put an innocent man in jail with my blog (!) merely because I legitimately researched and published the open-source information I could find on Muhtorov and tried to piece together why the human rights groups in Uzbekistan had rejected him for extremism; why refugee officials in Kyrgyzstan had him pegged as in fact cooperating with police; why some emigres believed he was in fact an agent of Uzbek intelligence (these types of beliefs are common and of course hard to prove) and how it came to be that he spent years in this country, became a conservative Muslim, and then began to plot to help an IMU-related group in Turkey, getting together funds and equipment and planning a trip to Turkey to deliver it (he was arrested at the airport). The case seems to have stalled, as he has been in pre-trial detention more than a year.
The Registanis base their disdain for these types of cases — which they call "Interneting while Muslim," i.e. people arrested only because they watched extremist videos or any Islamic videos at all — because they think they are all stings. Many of them are. The FBI offers to sell explosives or weapons to someone they've been tracking, and lo and behold, the person bites, and then is arrested. Sure, stings need to be questioned. But I think the public would probably prefer a sting to take someone like Tamerlan Tsarnaev off the street and prevent him killing and maiming people rather than some more ACLU-approved method waiting until first they helped terrorists with websites and Twitter accounts and translations and "Interneting while Muslim," then, it took deadly effect….
Yes, these are very real civil rights problems and they need to be debated. Debating them is not what these terrorist experts are doing, however; they are smugly delivering the same set pieces over and over.
This entire cast of mind of the "anti-anti" — it's so much like the "anti-anti-communism" – is one I can only condemn because I think it
has no basis. I think it also represents a close-mindedness that
means that these experts are not willing to take in fresh information,
revise their hypotheses, and listen to something other than their own
well-worn narratives.
BUKHARA, Uzbekistan — A 6-year-old boy has died during cotton picking in Uzbekistan's southwestern province of Bukhara.
Provincial law enforcement officials told RFE/RL on September 19 that Amirbek Rakhmatov, who was sleeping in a trailer, was suffocated under a cotton load.
The incident occurred on September 15, one day before a university student stabbed four fellow students, killing one and injuring the other three, at a mandatory cotton-picking site in the province of Qashqadaryo.
Earlier this month, another college student died in a cotton field in Qashqadaryo Province after she touched a live electrical wire.
For years, rights watchdogs have accused the Uzbek authorities of forcing schoolchildren and university students to pick cotton, one of the country's biggest exports.
***
This is really awful — the highest number of deaths related to the cotton harvest I've seen in years.
The very fact of the existence of child labour organized by the state is the root of these deaths — it's the largest forced labour program in the world, state-controlled, and not due to "family farming" or anything like that.
Children are taken out of school and bused to fields; adults, too, removed from schools, hospitals, plants.
I'd like to think this was "getting worse before it gets better" as there is a lot of attention to the topic, but I fear there just isn't enough political will by the countries intertwined with this evil.
And I have to say Western human rights groups campaigning on this have been limp — and just never tackle this like they mean business, the way they can do when they want to, oh, get attention to low wages at McDonalds or hate on Wal-Mart for its alleged practices.
Like all leftists and "progressives," they've preferred to focus on the Western companies buying the cotton and boycotting and shaming them, as part of their real target — capitalism — and their need to tie bad things to it to discredit it. That's why this never goes anywhere, as the groups involved tend not to take this issue for its own sake, but only as an add-on or to illustrate their overall anti-capitalist thesis. It just doesn't get their juices flowing as deep down, they think there is something vaguely "progressive" about Soviet socialism, collective farms, fixed prices, etc.
They also want to keep Uzbekistan in a pastoral socialist paradise of their imagination, and tend to reject outright any solution that would bring more mechanization or modern agribusiness to Uzbekistan and reduce the need for child labor.
Indeed, in Uzbekistan, the scourge of forced child and adult labour isn't about capitalism, it's about state socialism. Prices are fixed for farmers, they are forced to accept state-mandated quotas, and they have trouble getting loans to get the necessary equipment.
There isn't a free market where farmers themselves could get higher prices and then pay adult labour — instead of a huge chunk of the male work force going abroad to work as labor migrants in Russia and other nearby countries. People either pay others to work for them in this mandated work program.
The human rights groups also have tended to pull their punches regarding the real way to get Uzbekistan to focus on this: relentless pressure through the International Labour Organisation.
Part of the problem is that Soros, the main human rights funder, and the major US and European groups like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International tend to be run by elites who in fact don't take up labour rights as a central part of their program, or even with much enthusiasm. And the groups that are labour unions or labour organizers are preoccupied with the US or all the way on the hard left with Occupy like SEUI.
While there has been some advocacy around Uzbekistan at the ILO, when the Uzbeks snowed everybody this year by pretending to go along half-way with some of the ILO demands, and allowed some sort of partial arrangement for a partial inspection, there were just too many groups, mainly funded and guided by the Soros Foundations (where I used to work on this cotton campaign) who were willing to compromise and who felt they had to praise some progress or look too hard-line.
It would have been better to reject this compromise and keep applying relentless pressure until the full demands were met and full recognition of the problem was made.
I can't rule out that this weak response from the NGOs is a function of too much proximity by too many to the Obama Administration which has repeatedly waived any sanctions against Uzbekistan under US law regarding forced labor and trafficking because it desperately needs Tashkent to get goods and equipment out of Afghanistan in the reverse traffic of the Northern Distribution Network. So US officials tell NGOs they'd be more effective if they didn't push too hard and worked for incremental change quietly instead.
But having this compromised half-way house inspection makes no sense to me as it is merely an avenue for manipulation — like the "monitoring" of the harvest by UNICEF in secret that only enabled the regime to keep the system instant. No, only hard, relentless pressure and maximum publicity can work with this type of Soviet-style regime.
All that will happen is that the Uzbek regime will get to take a star turn as "cooperating" with the "international community" and pretend it is making progress instead of cynically manipulating international groups and screwing over its people.
This story in EurasiaNet takes awhile to explain that in fact this "inspection" isn't really progress — given the ILO's real demands and the long-time efforts made by the Soros-funded Cotton Campaign to insist on these maximum standards in their advocacy with the US and the EU.
Just as Uzbekistan won't let the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visit prisons without their security agent minders to suppress independent examination and expression by prisoners, so Uzbekistan won't let the cotton harvest monitors from the ILO function freely without monitors, as EurasiaNet reports.
And that's why no human rights groups should have endorsed this and should have loudly and forcefully condemned it.
That's what you do when you're an NGO and not a government.
Human Rights Watch signed their cautious welcome, yet their Uzbek researcher still felt called upon to object to the conditions:
Campaigners are concerned that the observers will not gain unfettered access to the cotton fields. “It is essential that monitoring teams be comprised only of independent observers and not include any Uzbek officials,” Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia Researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, told EurasiaNet.org.
Yet surely HRW knows that it's too late to insist on conditions when the mission is already deployed and the bad terms already set. While HRW received $100 million from the Soros Foundations to establish them as the leading human rights group in the world, they should have long ago told the Soros strategists that they were withdrawing from the Cotton Campaign because it was ineffective and wishy-washy when it needed to be strong.
The other thing that Western human rights groups won't do because they're just too damn busy bashing the West and its allies first is mount a concerted campaign on forced labour in Uzbekistan with the governments that really keep Uzbekistan in business in the cotton industry — Russia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Western purchases at this point are negligible as most Western companies have pledged not to buy the Uzbek cotton (however, the honest ones not afraid of NGO brow-beating admit that they can't really control their supply when they buy from Asian countries that in turn bought from Uzbekistan.)
They feel like these governments aren't responsive to human rights campaigns, but they've never even tried and they've never tried to find counterparts inside Russia who might make common cause with them.
All of these ills are part of the deep, deep flaws the left has had for 50 years around anything to do with the Soviet Union and its successors and advocacy on universal human rights and I don't expect anything different.
C. Christine Fair is one of the experts in our nation's capital who is hugely credentialed, who has spent her adult life going to school and acquiring numerous degrees and learning foreign languages, and who has even gone to war zones. There's no disputing her capacity. But when I read her Twitter timeline (when I remember to search for it, because I'm blocked now), I have to wonder when and how maturity and good judgement are going to be acquired for such a person to temper knowledge with decency.
Remember when I asked whether Christine Fair should work at the State Department? That was a year ago. She attacked me on Twitter because I had the temerity to call out Joshua Foust's slam of Pussy Riot and cunning defense of the Kremlin as the bad faith it was, and after a bunch of name-calling intoned about me, "She can rumble with the trailer park rabble!" and then called me "cat-hoarding, stalker crazy." I thought that was a horrible way for a future government official to behave — I'm not sure that she ever got that position, although she might well have – or might not have, for other reasons that unhappiness over her social media outbursts.
Ah well, all in a day's work on Twitter, some of the people are like that in Thinktankistan — nasty, vicious, snarky, horrid on Twitter — they cross the street to slam you first, and if you fight back, they then portray you as the problem — and lob off a bunch of awful insults before they hide behind a block and get all their friends to high-five them for their "troll bashing". Sigh.
I'm not for firing people over Twitter or forcing them to resign. What I am for doing, however, is standing up to bullies and freaks on Twitter who disparage others and questioning whether they are fit for their jobs or desired positions in government in this case – as a means of trying to get some form of accountability from them. It's my hope that asking this compels them or their bosses to bring some moderation of their nastiness.
Of course nothing I say or do will make a bit of difference with a highly-credentialed (and therefore hugely elitist and arrogant personage) like Fair, but still, I think for the sake of decency, for the sake of a more credible think-tank culture and public discourse, I will push back anyway.
Here's Christine this week with an appalling tweet making light of the shooting of 12 people in the Navy Yard by a crazed gunman (!)
For the record, Mr. Alexis (aka The DC Shooter) was smoking hot. Save your howls: I KNOW that's in poor taste. I also thought UBL was hot.
And mind you, I get that these issues are "complicated" and need people with multiple degrees and languages to parse them for us, but I wonder about the product — if the output tends to be more about how we can empathize better with terrorists and accommodate them, but doesn't in the end provide any context or moral condemnation let alone a path for the West to protect its free civilization from these illiberal fanatics, can't we question the value and values of Thinktankistan?
I put all these tweets next to each other because I think they beg these questions:
1. Why do terrorists who use their religious extremism as a justification to kill people get a Twitter denunciation (rightly!), but an American mass murderer who likely was crazy (and was a symptom of a troubled military over-reliant on contractors) get a creepy joke tweet as if he were sexually desirable? Huh?
2. If Fair feels a great sense of outrage at religious fanatics thinking they have a go-ahead from God to kill people (and we all should), has she in fact put that into her work or is she being overly pre-sympathetic of their religious sensibilities, especially given the propensity for insurgents to mingle with non-combatant worshippers at sacred sites?
I'm quite mindful that the "sacred spaces" in question could be generic sacred spaces for all Muslims that anyone should respect, but I want to put this question. Fair seems to be among those Realists who I find tend to minimize terrorism and work hard to be understand terrorists and Blame America First, judging from her timeline.
So how does that square with her Twitter rant — and what can we all do about people who think God is telling them to kill people — either single lunatics hearing voices like Alexis in the Navy Yard, or entire movements like the Taliban who have killed most of the people in the latest 10-year war in Afghanistan from which we're retreating?And I don't blame Twitter here for making it easy for people to spout. I blame a culture of nihilism and flippancy and arrogance in Thinktankistan first.
Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, recently gave a talk at Nazarbayev University on April 23 when he visited the region.
Watch it, it's interesting. For one, you can see the Administration seems to be a bit more foreward-leaning on human rights issues although it would be better if it were more robust.
Blake says in response to a question about the low level of press freedom in Kazakhstan and the closure of the independent newspaper Respublika (which now comes out on Facebook), that this is part of a regional trend of "more constraints for civil society as a whole".
All this work for years by the US in "nation'building" in Afghanistan and regional involvement — and this is what we get: a situation that Blake acknowledges is ""quite risky" at this "sensitive time" for what's happening in Afghanistan and in Russia.
"We have to reverse this trend," he says, although it doesn't seem at all clear how that could be done, and if more freedoms are allowed, in the long run this will be more stabilizing. He gave a nod to religious freedom as well as press freedom and freedom of association.
Blake says he "conveys privately and publicly in both Kazakhstan and elsewhere" US concerns about human rights.
Asked about whether there was a reluctance by US universities to partner with the state-run Nazarbayev University, apparently in reference to a magazine article (which I don't know), Blake insisted that the US favoured exchange.
"We strongly support these kinds of exchange programs,"he said and spoke of his own experience studying at university with foreigners with whom he remained in touch years later.
Although this meeting took place after the Boston bombing and the arrest of two Kazakh students, it did not appear — at least from this session where the case didn't even come up — that there would be any lessening of exchange opportunities for Kazakhs. If anything, Blake called out the Central Asian governments for curtailing opportunities for their students to go abroad, because they were afraid they would "bring back ideas to try to change their societies". "We will continue to strongly support and advocate for these programs," said Blake.
There's a huge fear and even hysteria around this issue — in part fueled by pre-anticipatory fear-mongering such as has come from Casey Michaels on Twitter. I've repeatedly challenged him on his claims that there is any kind of hateful stereotyping of Kazakhs as a result of these arrests. I just don't see it and I have no reason not to see it if is is there.
Even so, there is likely to be more careful checking of these applications for visas and the travel of Kazakhs as anyone else coming from any country associated even in a small way with terrorism, given that one of the students returned to the US even though he was expelled from his university for non-attendance and shouldn't have had a valid student visa.
With the arrest of two Kazakh students for obstructing the investigation into the Boston bombing, scrutiny has now moved from Dagestan to Kazakhstan. The two young men, age 19, from the University of Massachusetts, are charged not just with hiding evidence — a backpack and computer — related to bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; it has also been reported that they heard him brag about how to make a bomb a month before the marathon.
The following are various notes I've collected on the subject. I remain dedicated to open and intense debate on this subject, unhindered by concerns of political correctness. Of course there's nothing wrong with studying the Kazakh connection in this case because it is the post-Soviet culture of this space, funded in part by our government, that led to two people lying about evidence in a bombing in which 3 people were killed and 280 wounded, many with lost limbs.
The Kazakh angle in the story of the two Tsarnaev brothers, Chechens who had lived in the Chechen diaspora in Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan before emigrating to America, first surfaced in two places in the early days after the Boston Marathan Bombing:
1) In the business connections of Ruslan Tsarni, who is reported to have worked in the oil and gas business in Kazakhstan and also worked for Mukhtar Ablyazov, the prominent Kazakh banker opposed to the Nazarbayev regime who fled abroad — even giving testimony on his behalf in a London court. Joanna Lillis of EurasiaNet has provided the most detailed account of what these connections are and what they mean and ultimately pronounces them "tenuous". I agree that the connection at present appears attenuated, but that it is worthy of scrutiny and debate precisely because we still don't have confirmation of what actors where might have influenced the Tsarnaevs.
2)In the dorm mates from Kazakhstan with whom Dzhokhar was friends and with whom he hung out after the bombing in an apparent effort to make a semblance of normality. Their relationship to Dzhokhar discovered immediately by "the Internet" in his Vkontakte account, along with pictures showing them together, were intensely scrutinized, along with the account on Twitter and elsewhere of Junes Umarov, another Kazakh youth who does not appear to be a direct relation of the Dagestanti terrorist leader Umarov, as it is a common name in this region.
Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, both 19 and of New Bedford, were
charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice by plotting to dispose of a
laptop computer and a backpack containing fireworks belonging to bombing
suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the US attorney’s office said in a
statement.
This is certainly grounds for discussing any involvement of jihadist groups within Kazakhstan in the bombing, although at this point no links have been proven, there isn't much of a jihad in Kazakhstan, although it's still a significant challenge to the regime there. And as I've said throughout, rather than merely trying to extrapolate what we know from every other Islamist bombing and try to pin this on Islamism in the Eurasian region, which may not fit, we shouldn't discount another angle — revenge of business/crime circles close to the government unrelated to Islam, or perhaps using Islam as a cover — or even a craven motivation of large cash payments for performing a hit for some other criminal or extreme group.
The diagnosis of one anonymous Twitter commentator, "Lin," regarding these second-generation privileged children of Kazakh state businessmen is that they are "stupid, spoiled, irresponsible, immature princes playing jihad". Well, I don't know whether to call them sovki (the perjorative term sovok means dust-pan and also Sovietized dimwits loyal to the government) or zolotaya molodezh — the Soviet-era term "golden youth" for the children of parents in the nomenklatura, or Party approved list of top officials.
What I don't know is whether I can call "princes" young men whose fathers seem to run things mainly in…Atyrau.
Murat told Tengrinews.kz
that Dias and Azamat Tazhayakov, his son’s friend, that the only
violation his son could have committed was an immigration violation.
There was a connection between the two and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, according to Murat.
“They used to have common friends, they knew Tsarnaev and hang around together sometimes,” he said.
MOTIVATIONS FOR EURASIAN DICTATOR INVOLVEMENT?
So let's start from the top down to see if leaders in this region could have any reason to spite the US and be directly or indirectly responsible for this heinous act — a line of debate I think is merited given the considerable propensity of all four of these regional leaders – Putin, Kadyrov, Abdulatipov and Nazarbayev — for presiding over systems variously persecuting, torturing, jailing and disappearing their own citizens at home and even abroad.
The possible motivation of Putin-appointed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov for conspiring in the bombing could be his inclusion by the US Senate in the Magnitsky List of sanctions, although this angle is unlikely ever to be proven and does not have any evidence to back it up so far except a hunch. It's also possible he was letting nature take its course out of spite (also not yet proven as the Dagestani authorities were immediately responsible for letting Tsarnaev trough the cracks).
The motivation for Nazarbayev doesn't immediately present itself even with a contrived conspiracy scenario, although perhaps he was gaining revenge specifically against Uncle Ruslan for his support of one of Nazarbayev's main opponents — but it's a stretch why that would involve scripting a caper with Tsarni's nephews involving Kazakh boys that he doesn't appear to have any reason to harm to make some point about the need for a greater security state. There also doesn't seem to be a reason to set up these boys and have them participate in this anti-American act to get anything out of America; it already has plenty close relations with Washington and would likely not want to jeopardize them over something like this.
What's more important here is not finding some facile, direct mechanism of terrorism in a particular group or plot — which the FBI is going to be better at finding, hopefully — but understanding the overall post-Soviet milieu as dominated by Putin, and the role of him and his crony tyrants in Central Asia and the Caucasus in conflict generation, the seed-bedding of extremism, and corruption — all of which pose a threat to America at home and abroad. The violent and broken culture of the Soviet Union — the gift that keeps on giving 20 years later and will for generations to come — is what we have to counter both with public diplomacy and with realistic deterrence if we don't want these kinds of tragedies to occur.
AZAMAT'S FATHER, AMIR, BUSINESSMAN WITH NAZARBAYEV'S BLESSING
The Russian-language Kazakh press has published an account of one of the suspects and his father. According to newskaz.ru citing a local newspaper Ak Zhayyk and other sources, the suspect Azamat Tazhayakov was born in Atyrau and studied in Astana, now the capital. His father is Amir Tazhayakovich Ismagulov, chairman of board of directors of the Abylaykhan Group and a deputy of the local assembly in Atyrau. (Business and polics are often more openly connected in these countries).
Here it's also relevant to ask why 19-year-old Azamat is using as his last name in his passport not his father's last name, which would be the normal custom, but a version of his grandfather's first name, or patronymic, which is the patronymic of his father, Tazhayakov. Perhaps some Kazakh expert could explain this better, but usually the sons have the same names as their fathers, and their father's patronymic, which in any event is a Russian custom and is Russification of the Kazakhs. Unless I'm missing something, Ismagulov isn't such a famous name such as to require disguising. To be sure, I've seen Kazakhs be referred to as "grandfather's grandson" if they want to reference a rich ancestral history, but I await more precise explanation for this curiosity.
Lin (@dutt155) tipped me off to this article, commenting, "here's the rich little father" of the suspect. I'd never heard of him and while he may be wealthy, he doesn't seem to be oligarch material, and frankly, if he were wealthy, we wouldn't find him still in Atyrau going to assembly meetings in between hard days at the office of the Abylaykhan Group.
In an interview on April 26th apparently before he realized that the charges would be more serious than just overstaying a student visa, Ismagulov said, "Everything is fine with them. I'm flying to America and I will provide all details when I return back home to Atyrau." Yet I haven't heard of him having arrived in the US, or at least he's not talking to the press.
Another article from 2011 in the Kazakh press at caspiannews.kz throws some light on how these countries work — the president controls everything, or at least pretends to control everything as a populist maneuver, and is in the curious position of having to rein in his own considerable army of bureaucrats who savage the independent business sector, seeing it as a threat to Nazarbayev's power just to allow any business at all to succeed. Paradoxically, Narzarbayev had to relax the relentless inspections of business and let it thrive again, so that the kleptocratic state at least has something to rob. It's a bizarre situation at times, and this anecdote involving the father of a future suspect related to hiding evidence in the Boston Bombing, had this strange incident occur to him.
Nazarbayev made one of his "walkabout" visits in the country, where he and his retinue dramatically go about righting wrongs and improving roads or opening kindergartens and hospitals and helping the little guy against evils — evils that paradoxically come from the very system he presides over as iron ruler. The image is of Lenin and the petitioners or Stalin and the workers in numerous socialist realism paintings.
On a visit to a plant in Atyrau, Nazarbayev comes up to a group of small and medium businessmen, including, as it happens, Ismagulov, and says: "I'll make sure they don't touch Amir".
What that means is that if any bureaucrats try to use red tape or "the law" to harm his business, he will intervene personally. Too bad Navalny didn't have a friend in Putin like that when he did his perfectly normal lumber deal in Kirov, eh?
Before that, Amir ingratiated himself to his patron by thanking the tyrant for suspending inspections of businesses for a time (?), in order to allow business to thrive for awhile. This is a revelation both of the bizarre bureaucracies that thwart and heckle free enterprise in these countries, as well as an admission that normal regulation of business seems like something punitive that has to be periodically loosened to let business breathe, instead of being a core principle of good corporate behaviour>
When Amir Ismagulov, chairman of the board of directors of Abylaykhan Group began to thank the president of the country for his support and noted that the moratorium introduced on the inspections of subjects of entrepreneurship, which had given businesses the opportunity to develop, Nursultan Nazarbayev straightened the badge on his chest and pronounced with a smile, "Well, I'll tell them not to touch Amir." The president's quip drew friendly laughter from the entrepreneurs.
Amir is head of one of those ridiculously-long-named commissions of the perestroika-era sort that sound like they control more than they free: "The Permanent Commission on Issues of Ecology, Compliance with the Law, Law and Order, Glasnost, and Acceptance of Appeals from Citizens of the Atyrau City Maslihat".
Maslihat merely means "assembly," except a persistent phenomenon of these Eurasian countries I've found is to keep the name of their national congresses resulting from unfair and unfree elections by their name in a local language, which helps you realize that it is not exactly "a parliament" in the Western sense. (And to understand Kazakh culture, you have to follow how their kuraltai works, which is any group meeting that seems to start with riotous and chaotic democracy as everyone at the table, high and low, is heard, but which ends in dictatorship, as the group sense somehow gets identified and imposed by a few, and minorities silenced. It's a wonder to see in action.)
Amir, an engineer by training, is in the party called Nur Otan, translated as "the fatherland's ray of light," whose name and the fact that it is the largest political party in the country likely helps you understand its degree of, well, affiliation with Nazarbayev, if you didn't find the fact that the president himself leads it enough of a tip-off.
Despite his aspirations to turn his town into a "European level" city, and his fortuitous and possibly pre-scripted encounter with the president of the country, I don't think Amir amounts to a big fish in Kazakhstan, but I await information. I think he wanted to educate his son abroad for the prestige and clout factor, and now it has quite literally blown up in his face through no fault of his own.
NAZARBAYEV'S RELATIONS TO THE US: CAN HE CALL IN CHITS?
Does Nazarbayev's CONSIDERABLE influence with the United States now extend to him saying "I'll tell them not to touch Amir's son"? I wonder.
Certainly, the Kazakh government will try, especially having once made this publicized connection to this particular family — and for the good of the name of Kazakhs, as they will see it. They will want to do everything both to minimize the seriousness of the offense and maximize their willingness to fight Islamist extremism, which is exactly what they fight savagely and not successfully in their own country, sometimes renditioning people back to torture in places like Uzbekistan.
The Kazakh government has bought out think tanks, journals, and even congressmen in this country. This information isn't hidden, because those who take gifts or fees or grants from foreign governments have to reveal this information, and with all the sunshine gov 2.0 databases around, it's easy to find. There is an entire caucus in the Congress about which not much is known, but which includes above all Lyndsey Graham who has travelled to the region a number of times.
The US needs Kazakhstan not just for its oil and gas resources and some mineral wealth, and not just as a buttress against China, with which it is in competition in Kazakhstan, and not just as part of the alternatives to Russia these regimes seek and from which the US benefits, but desperately, right now, for the next year, for the Northern Distribution Network, the route OUT of Afghanistan for our heavy vehicles and troops which went IN to this region when the roads became blocked through Pakistan.
UNCLE RUSLAN'S FRIENDS IN FORMERLY HIGH PLACES
Now, some more background and thoughts on the Kazakh angle:
"Uncle Ruslan" as everyone has taken to calling him, the brother of the Tsarnaev's father, Anzor, who became memorable for his denuncation of his own nephews and the act of terror, an admirable distinguishing of individual responsibility from the entire ethnic community that was in fact helpful in avoiding the ethnic stereotyping inevitable in these types of events.
Tsarni is a Soviet lawyer by training who as a young man in the newly-independent Kyrgyzstan went to work at Price Waterhouse in Bishkek as a legal expert on governance issues
I say "Soviet lawyer" to stress that Ruslan, Anzor, who was said to work in the prosecutor's office, Zubeidat, who was also trained as a lawyer, and other relatives, including the sister's brother-in-law, said to work in the Interior Ministry (police) of Ramzan Kadyrov, were all part of the Soviet police state. This extended family were not Chechen rebels; they were part of the system.
But when it came to Uncle Ruslan, he became associated with elements of offialdom in opposition to Nazarbayev abroad, and therefore there might be there some sort of need on the part of the Nazarbayev regime for retaliation against him, or at least neutralization of his efforts on behalf of a very controversial figure.
As we know, Ruslan Tsarni was also married for a time to the daughter of a CIA chief, retired at the time of the marriage in 1996. This has fueled speculation that he could be a CIA plant and feeds the "false flag" narrative around the Tsarnaevs, but one could just as easily speculate that he was related to Kyrgyz or Russian intelligence, although neither of these "versions" seem very plausible. The CIA doesn't need to involve family members in operations in a country where the US has a military base and extensive ties to the government and security forces; in any event, Tsarni seems to have achieved his goals by getting to America soon after — not remaining in Bishkek — getting a law degree at Duke, and then breaking up his marriage and remarrying and pursuing business without his CIA family. By the same token, it seems that if the KGB were interested in having an asset close to the CIA, living with the daughter of a retired CIA agent in North Carolina wouldn't likely produce much useful intelligence that couldn't be gained by less obvious means.
Diagnosis: "on na yeyo vyekhal" as they say in these countries — he used her to get an exit visa from his country, and/or an entry visa to the US, then used her prestigious connections to get into law school, to pursue his own interests. It's a fairly normal and predictable trajectory from these countries, common in mixed marriages between the US and the FSU, and in fact is understandable, given how wretched these countries can be to live in if you are smart and ambitious.
PARTY SCHOOL
The other connection is of course the two Kazakh dorm mates who were picked out in the early days of social-media sleuthing as related to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, with whom he frequently partied and with whom he made a trip to New York, where the boys photographed themselves in Times Square, the same Times Square Dzhokhar and his brother planned to blow up later when they were escaping from Boston.
Some media blacked out the faces of these Kazakhs, believing they were irrelevant to the bomb case and shouldn't be tarred by association, but now they've been arrested for obstructing justice and attempting to conceal evidence. Dhozkhar's back pack, with fireworks from which the gunpowder had been removed, was found by the young Kazakh dorm mates and then thrown out in a dumpster along with his computer, when they sought to get rid of incriminating items from his room after finding out he was likely involved in the bombing.
There are texts and tweets to them during this time and it's not quite clear whether they are actual orders to get rid of the evidence, or just expressions of consent.
Hey, remember when "the experts" insisted that the foray of the Tsarnaevs to buy explosives in New Hampshire wasn't related to the bomb, that the set of tweets and pictures of them with fireworks weren't related to the bombs, and that it would be too time-consuming to extract that powders and wasn't worth it?
Well, it turns out that this backpack and its contents showed that in fact they *did* go through the painstaking effort of extracting the powder. Maybe this is proof of their "self-radicalizing" and "amateur" status if they couldn't even find bomb ingredients properly using the Internet; they also perhaps failed to realize they'd left a trail, and that the maker of the fireworks instantly cooperated with authorities and turned them in.
Which brings me to the nature of these Kazakh kids, and the intense desire of "progressives" to see them as small fry and innocents. And sure, they're young, and it's sad and their role is apparently not so great in the story, and comes after the bombing, and maybe they knew nothing of its beforehand.
A Greek leftist with a high following instantly tweets in a discussion about the youthful suspects "I guess we realize that arresting Tsarnaev's small time associates is not like dismantling Al Qaeda Central or something, do we?" A nice witty line typical of the contempt for which leftist or socialist Greeks and others hold America and its counter-terrorism programs, and I totally get where it's coming from. Indeed, I re-tweeted his remarks because it is important to remember that we didn't find any AQ footprint yet on this story.
Yet this points to a larger world vision of the European left, particularly in the distressed countries hammered by the recession, of blaming America for world economic woes and wars abroad, and minimizing terrorist forces by finding them justified. What, you think it's okay to hide the computer and backpack of a suspect in a killing of 3 people and maiming of some 280 people?! Why?! Why is that okay? Why do we have to disparage American law-enforcement trying to get to the bottom of this case in this fashion? What, because the suspects are young and foreign and appealing, we're supposed to just release them and pretend it's okay to hide your roomies stuff after he's involved in a terrorist act?!
There's no more basis for saying the Tsarnaevs acted alone than for saying they acted as part of an Al Qaeda conspiracy, quite frankly. For some time to come now, "progressives" and hard leftists will lean toward the former to maximize the "America's chickens coming home to roost" theory, and the conservatives and infowars types will emphasize the latter to invoke the weakness of the Obama Administration and the hysteria around world Islam's aspirations, although it is very diverse and disunited. Even so, at this point there's no reason not to look in Dagestan at Tamerlan's connections and any other connections that might turn up.
And as I've pointed out, these connections should also be look at in the sports world and the underworld of mafia crime, because in the former Soviet countries, intelligence, drug mafias, sports, and Islam can all be amalgamated or appear separately or in any mixture.
Laura Rozen tweeted that there was nothing stupider than a 19-year-old boy, remarking on the clumsy effort to get rid of evidence and then lie about it; leave it to Spencer Ackerman to comment that there was — a group of them — to imply that all of this is about the Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight.
It's important to understand why this happened, however, and it's not about youthfulness or stupidity; it's a culture of refusal to cooperate with authorities and lie up and down to protect one's own that has been nurtured for a century in Russia and its neighbours and has hardly been eradicated since the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago.
Had the Kazakhs behaved like a number of Americans in this story — the cab driver, the fireworks seller, the woman who received facials and others who came into contact with the Tsarnaevs and immediately called the police and FBI to help the investigation — they'd be heros now likely able to stay in the United States and continue their education on US-funded scholarships, instead of sitting in pre-trial detention now facing up to 5 years in prison.
That's really important to understand because it explains how everyone in and around the family could be lying, could be distracting, could be covering up — and we may never know. And they will be doing this as part of an intensively indoctrinated culture of the police state, where after decades of people being forced to inform on their neighbours and turn them in under pain of death themselves, a culture of antagonism and refusal to cooperate with the authorioties, even when the authorities are legitimate, creates an endless spiral of criminality and corruption. The more these regimes in Eurasia crack down on civil society in general and their political opponents within their own administrations in particular, the more this criminalized antagonism, distrust and non-cooperation grows and becomes an institution in itself. Where once, the Soviet dissident would consider it "zapadlo" (a base, unworthy act) to inform on innocent fellow citizens, and where once Solzhenitsyn advised his fellow citziens to "live not by the lie" and refrain from cooperation with the police state for reasons of democratic resistance, today, these concepts can just as well conceal crime that any police, Russian or no, would be trying to combat.
To see just how little of the hearts and minds the central Russian authorities have going for them in Dagestan, see this video of the surrounding of the home of Nidal, the 18-year-old Salafist who was in the armed resistance to the Kremlin's appointees and with whom Tamerlan Tsarnaev was said to be in touch (this hasn't been proven, but only stated by a Dagestani anti-extremism official and published in Novaya gazeta). In Kazakhstan, the armed Islamist resistance has only made a few attacks and is nothing like the Russian North Caucasus, yet popular resistance to the Nazarbayev regime is present, and accounts for the years of labor strikes at the state oil companies, some affiliated with Western companies like Chevron, which lead to a deadly massacre in Zhanaozen in 2011 in which several dozens workers were killed.
EVIL OIL COMPANIES AGAIN?
BTW, a word on nefarious oil companies. When Tsarni is described as working for the oil business, or Chevron seems to have some tangential relationship to strikes and a deadly massacre, the left automatically finds proof of guilt and complicity. But no one has ever been able to prove how kocal events related directly to economic grievances in a company run by Nazarbayev's son-in-law among other cronies (the son-in-law was even fired by the dictator after the Zhanaozen events) directly ties to Chevron. I have no ideological reason to discount any such connection if it is established, but nobody has been able to come up with it, other than to wave in the general direction of this US company doing business with state oil companies. Many people want to make oil companies responsible for the human rights violations of the regimes with which they do business. That's an admirable thing to do and they should keep trying to do this.
Yet the regimes are the original problem, and they're what need to be changed, not US companies that at the end of the day have domestic laws to control them on issues like taking bribes abroad
SHOULD WE STOP LETTING IN FOREIGN STUDENTS TO THE US?
What can we do about this? Should there be filtration or even an end to student exchange programs?
Of course not, in my view. The only hope we have of dealing effectively with difficult countries and helping promote their transformation to more democratic and accountable government which is what their own citizens seek is by helping with education of the next generation.
But we do need to include in this engagement more willingness to debate and challenge the world-views of these young people acquired in state indoctrination first in their own countries, then in their American settings.
There are zillions of such students in the US, from the former Soviet Union, China, all over. It has always been the strategy of the US in dealing with the world to encourage massive education, particularly of countries with which the US has difficult dealings — like Russia and China — of the youth, in the belief that things will normalize in the future after the next generation has a change to become exposed to Western values.
I think these programs are disasters now, not only because they might let slip through the occasional terrorist or various petty criminals, but because they are not working to improve attitudes toward America. While they left thinks "America's wars" do all their own bad advertising, what they can't explain is why people like these kids join "Free Jahar" movements on Twitter and root for terrorist suspects. Time and again, I've run across young people like this who admire Bin Ladn for fighting America in Afghanistan, which is next door to their countries. They have these kind of fractured consciousnesses; on the one hand, they admire or even envy America, and want to come here to study; on the other, they have been heavily indoctrinated in state-controlled media and leap from that heavily tendentious and censored milieu straight into the political correctness of a typical American campus, where their Marxist professors will only encourage them to put up Che posters and read Chomsky and Zizek.
No one ever debates them; they might get through their entire 2 or 4 of 6 years in America without anyone ever explaining to them that it's their friend Russia, and their own regimes unchanged since the Soviet era, who presided over the mass murder of one million Afghan citizens during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-1989, setting up the situation for terror and chaos in Afghanistan in these countries far more than any US funding of the Afghan mujahedeen back in the 1980s (much like the Syrian situation, where the lion's share of the problem comes from Assad and his Russian backing with a billion dollars in arms, and not the US belatedly getting into the conflict and funding some resistance, some of which is radicalized and related to Al Qaeda).
The sheer moral blindess of the left on first the Soviet realities and then the post Soviet realities and their obsession with America make them poor interlocutors with these young people from the stans who collect stipends and educations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American tax-payer, but never face a single challenge to their cramped and misguied world views.
This isn't an easy problem to fix, as a free society like the US can hardly start to engage in the kind of forced indoctrination that these countries still use as a staple, and the broadcasting they do with RFE/RL abroad is by law not supposed to be aimed those in the US — as part of an old concept of "blowback". Yet in the age of the interconnected Internet, this has to be revisted, and mainly the private sector and universities themselves have to begin to grapple with the issue of how anti-Americanism and even jihad are not being mitigated by the classic approach used for 50 years particularly during the Cold War (and which had some successes then), and have to start figuring out how to reach and debate with people we pay to learn in our country.
Everybody has done the Harlem shake — absolutely everybody, from the kid next door to the army to even the Uzbeks. Math brain Nate Silvers joked at the tech conference SXSW in Texas last week that 90% of the data in the universe has been produced only in the last decade, and 75% of it comes from Harlem Shake re-mixes. Just kidding!
But to do the Harlem Shake in Turkmenistan, you really have to be a mover and shaker — Youtube is banned, the government blocks it, and you'd have to even hear about it first in order to devise your own, pull it off under the watchful eye of all sorts of government minders who have cracked down on students in particular in recent years.
Then you'd have to upload it — well, it's a lot to go through.
Even so, Rusten T. reports on his blog that there is now a Turkmen Harlem Shake, that somehow has been put on Youtube. And not from inside the country — because of all those obstalces — but some Turkmen students studying abroad — from the looks of it, the fairly near abroad.
And it's already managed to piss off some in the community and apparently some watchful Turkmen Embassy minders abroad because it seems to "denigrate" the Turkmen nation when the dance is done in a room with the Turkmen flag in the wall — it "shames" the nation, you see. That it shames the nation more to shut off Youtube seems to escape such minders.
You can also get a glimpse of the flowery Central Asian pododeyalnik (I love those) and see how these particular students improvise — which seems to be with a lot of sheets in a zombie theme with some plastic bags — and the shelves of a refrigerator. No shaggy Turkmen hats were used, more's the pity.
I knew that when I was trying to find a picture to illustrate the Turkmen dictator's New Year's "clean-up," Pinterest — where I found this lovely old lady above — wouldn't disappoint. But regrettably, there is no photo credit — and paging through numerous re-links and even using Google image finder, I couldn't locate it, so if it belongs to someone, let me know.
With the long holidays over, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is now sweeping out his ministries once again — and terrorizing everyone into likely not doing their jobs very well, setting up the next round of sweeps.
EurasiaNet has the story about dozens of officials from the cotton industry to the Emergencies Ministry getting shuffled on or out in the Turkmen hierarchy
And gundogar.org reports (scroll down): Byashimmurad Khojamamedov, minister of the economy and development is "released" from his duties and transferred — to an unspecified other position. His deputy Babamurad Taganov is appointed in his place. The minister of public utilities Arslan Yagshimamedov is fired over "shortcomings" (maybe electricity shut-offs in this power-rich country?) and replaced by the hyakim (governor) of Balkan velayat (province). Meylis Mutdikov, chairman of the State Service for Sea and River Transport, is fired after the prosecutor uncovered "facts of gross violations of the law", failure to fulfill contracts and laxness. And a half dozen others.
But for some reason, EurasiaNet didn't cover the largest figure in the gas and oil shakeup: Yagshigeldy Kakayev.
Also shuffled is Turkmengas and the Ministry of Oil and Gas and Natural Resources.
Very little is known about Mukhammednur Khalilov (or you could spell it with his shorter name Muhhamet Halilov or probably about ten other ways), who has now been put in charge of Ministry of Oil and Gas, after his predecessor, Kakageldy Abdullaev, who was acting minister, was moved to Turkmengaz — when the head of Turkmengaz, Sakhatmurad Mamedov, was fired. I tried all the spellings in English and Russian for Khalilov/Halilov and found he had virtually no Google footprint. Yet. Poor fellow.
After digging around I am told by a very reliable source that he is a smart petroleum geologist who has spent his life in the state's Institute of Oil and Gas, then apparently later moved to the Institute of Geology where he was in the higher ranks, possibly the director.
He is said to be smart, honest, not from the big city although from a village near Ashgabat, and religious — and that he was tapped for this job and likely told to serve, i.e. he didn't evidently seek it. Apparently that happens a lot in Turkmenistan, and with heads CONSTANTLY rolling, people don't get a choice. So they are rushed to the capital and pushed into jobs where they don't have experience and networks precisely because the Protector (as the dictator is now known) constantly wants to break up networks and experience that he thinks might work against HIM.
Halilov is probably temporary although he wasn't designated as "acting".
In the Turkmen hierarchy, I've always been taught by people from Turkmenistan, that it works like this:
o State Agency for Management and Use of Hydrocarbons
o Ministry of Oil and Gas and Natural Resources
o Turkmengaz
Turkmengaz is a state-owned company and in another world, even in Russia, where Gazprom produced the president of the country, you might think of it as having a lot of its own power. But in Turkmenistan's top-down vertikal, it is very much subject to those other entities of the state. It's just the gas company, not a fulcrum of political power in the country and not a private company of course.
You would also think that an agency would be subordinate to a ministry, right? But in Turkmenistan. *that* agency has super-powers and is higher in the power chain than the ministry. However, I don't know exactly how their reporting chains work, and that may be something that Berdy disrupts and changes, too.
The "strict reprimand" notice for Kakayev has to be the longest one I've ever seen in the Turkmen media: "for improper performance of his official duties and violation of labour discipline, shortcomings permitted in work".
Usually, when "strict reprimands" are issued — and they're issued by the basketful constantly, every week or month — there is just a terse announcement: "in connection with shortcomings in their work" or something "severe shortcomings". Sometimes, there is an additional warning that they have 30 days to shape up. They might as well not bother writing that, as it is understood in the Turkmen ministries: if you have received a "strict reprimand," then you are likely to be fired or demoted in 30-60 days.
But here we've gotten considerably more — that there was improper performance or literally "inappropriate execution" of his job duties and also "violations (literally "non-compliance") with labour discipline".
So that means he exceeded the power of office, or disobeyed orders, or improvised in ways that his boss, the president didn't like. The definition of an innovative Soviet apparatchik was always someone who knew how to invent more ways to please their boss slavishly — so it can be easy to go off script, even at these towering heights.
I don't know what article of the labour code or internal labour discipline code that Kakayev might have "not complied with," but he may not even know himself.
Kakayev has held on since 2008. He is the person who has been at all the Oil and Gas Conferences Turkmenistan sponsors at home or takes part in abroad, and he is the person — after Berdy himself, of course –who actually negotiates with foreigners.
What on earth did poor Kakayev do to get this slam in the media — public humiliation and threat of dismissal?
Of course, nothing is said, and I haven't heard any rumours. When we last tuned in to some of the people who were in these jobs, they would be rumoured to be dismissed because they either told the real situation to foreigners, i.e. that maybe there weren't as large gas reserves as claimed, or didn't get foreigners sufficiently on board to invest in the promises of His Wonderfulness.
These post-Soviet countries still have enormous reservoirs of fear and hatred of foreigners and therefore obsequiousness and flattery as a tactic to deal with them.
You wonder what the scene was with this incredibly powerful official who had his hands on the pulse of billions of oil and gas dollars flowing into Turkmenistan and…not really accounted for much.
Was he seen drinking a beer with a foreigner late at night in a hotel bar, and therefore reported as "suspect" in this conservative country? Or, on the contrary, did he leave work on time to go to a Friday prayer service at the mosque because he was religious — in a country where you are not to be *too* religious or you will also be suspect? Or did he just come back from London or Singapore without a check in his pocket?
We can only speculate, but I'm going to take a wild-assed guess and say that Mamedov was fired and Kakayev was disciplined because they failed to get investors in TAPI after the roadshow.
This is a conclusion I draw from certain math: a) there was a roadshow b) there were no investors c) therefore someone is to blame.
Of course, what seems to be to blame, as we know from the Indian and Pakistani press, is more about Turkmenistan failing to pony up a piece of the gas fields to foreigners — cutting them into the gas deal seriously. Foreign companies want that kind of upstream ownership if they get involved in downstream construction, logistics, headaches.
And so far, in Turkmenistan, these production-sharing agreements have never been given to European, let along American companies, and only given to China, and I think the Malaysian company, Petronas. If you see RWE or other Western companies drilling, maybe they have a permit for exploration, or maybe they sell equipment for exploration, but they don't own a piece of the result.
In the Protector's world, you have to invest somehow in Turkmenistan before you can expect to harvest any profits from the gas. The Chinese understood this and laid out at least $8 billion, and probably more, to get the 30 billion cubic meters — now to be 50 — out of the ground and into their country ("the Great Chinese Take-out," as the late Roman Kupchinsky called it in a book by that name).
Petronas has just sponsored a new gas and oil institute for Turkmenistan, where the Turkmens, with Malaysian help, are going to educate their own people instead of having to export them to the Russian Gubkov Institute and have to deal with Russians which they don't want to do. They simply feel more comfortable building up that "multi-vector" foreign policy and trade with another smaller Muslim Asian state than Russia which has been historically nasty to them and even is suspected of blowing up their pipeline when it couldn't get the price deal it wanted.
This thorough shakeup and all the other "grandiose" reform efforts (that's actually literally the word the Turkmen state press uses) all seem like "enterprises of great pith and moment" but likely they, too, their "currents turn awry" and will "loose the name of action," as Hamlet put it.
Supposedly, Turkmenistan is now selling off state assets — which means likely some agencies controlled by the vertikal will simply have closer responsibility for them and still enrich the presidency; this sell-off does not include anything in the oil and gas industry, which is why my hierarchy above with Turkmengaz as the last point in the chain is likely to remain accurate for some time to come.
It's called "How Dare" — and what a bizarre and creepy message of…fomenting state-controlled dissent…it purveys.
The one before this, Round Run, was at least pretty — shot in ancient Bukhara — and vaguely dramatic — there was an assassin-like guy with a red scarf belt leaping from building to building and disappearing down stairways and into hidden courtyards. In that video, Gulnara was really a footnote — and sort of in the way, as really too obviously old for the guy leaping around, if the point was that she was having some sort of secret assignation with him in the tower. What was she, his mother? Even so, the video was still somehow "within the norm" of droony post-Soviet pop.
But the newest one is AWFUL. It shows this sly, modestly-dressed Uzbek woman — I suppose she is supposed to be the quintessential Tashkent hip but Muslim female — walked around town with a strange almost psychotic smile on her face. Who knows what evil thoughts could lurk in her mind — on which she has "a hundred things" as the song's jerky lyrics tell us?
This Muslim Mona Lisa meets up with her boyfriend, who is dressed in a raggedy shirt in deliberate tatters something like a gangster hipster, who is shown in various atrociously edited scenes in a chair turning into the Devil — like scenes left on the cutting-room floor of "Jeremy's Spoken". Hideous!
So this devil-pair go walking around, and what does the young thug do but smash a store window (!), steal a TV set, and then smash it on the sidewalk! All the while that the sultry-smiling long-dressed gal gazes enigmatically but approvingly, then looks up at the dark sky as red rose petals shower over her.
Now what the HELL is that message all about? Smash Western symbols? Smash media, which is poisoning young minds? Or just smash anything, so it might seem cool to youth? Is it face state-controlled iconoclasm? The lyrics, in bad English, and awkwardly fit to the tune:
You look fine but what's going on in your mind
how dare how dare how dare you can be so different how dare how dare you can do it how dare you can break the wall
Uzbekistan is the kind of place where the government strategically places controlled imams in the state newspapers periodically to rail against the evils of Western pop culture and how it is destroying young Uzbek minds.
What are they to make of this video promoting youth destruction?! There's a department in the government responsible for clearance of music videos in Uzbekistan — hip-hop bands which are very popular on Youtube there, singing Western-style urban black hip-hop type songs — only in Uzbek with local themes — and they are even told they have to scrub their lyrics through the government's censor. So how did GooGoosha get past the censors, with her nihilistic story of smashing stores and TVs, which are state-controlled in Uzbekistan, and therefore not to be smashed?
But you know, what's also puzzling is all the dust-up and Twit-fights around Gulnara this week, as Ashton has been going around Central Asia and not mentioning real problems in these countries, and mumbling about "women's empowerment" — which is a kind of placebo for real women's rights that Clinton has thought up for these countries, to enable her to pose with benign government-approved small business leaders when she tours these countries. I guess this video of a woman in the modest national attire smashing TVs is all about empowerment!
All the major human rights leaders who work on Uzbekistan — this is a tiny group of people, because most crusaders aren't dedicated enough, patient enough, and long-suffering enough to work on this sick fuck of a place — have been tangling with and retweeting @realgoogoosha this week.
Now why is that? They always taunt her, and some of them have been making fake spoof Twitter addresses, prompting her to make @realgoogoosha.
This week with the 20th anniversary of the Uzbek Constitution and independence, everyone is hoping (and probably in vain) for a release of political prisoners, and are making calls to this effect.
Andrew Stroehlein, media programme director at the International Crisis Group and a long-time severe critic of Uzbekistan's atrocious practices of torture, has been trying to talk up the dictator's daughter on Twitter. For years, she never answered. Now she did. He tried to get her to focus on widespread, systematic torture. And she answered — or rather, the intern they have at the Twitter account obviously:
“hellloooo!I just asked if I can have a firm report with only precise cases where could be the work done!!!!you missed my twi??”
Of course, there are ample numbers of reports with numerous details put out by all kinds of local and international human rights group like Human Rights Watch and the Central Asian Human Rights Association.
Stroehlein continued bravely trying to get some sort of validation out of Gulnara, and of course didn't. Here's my critique of this approach, for what it's worth: NGOs are too wrapped up in linguistic magic, in totemic symbols. They think if they can get a country to admit they have child labour or torture, they are making progress. Like they're in step one of a 12-step program for dictators, or something. Or if they can just get a company to sign a pledge they won't use cotton produced by forced labour in their garments, they are making progress.
But these are empty, rhetorical gestures, and don't serve that automagical goal of trying to induce Platonic virtue by Platonic articulations. It's much better, in my view, to focus on very specific cases with them. Free *this* journalist. Repeal *this* law. *Accredit these* journalists. And so on. Very, very specific. They will answer with word salad often, but you keep battering, and eventually you do get concessions. You will never get that face-losing totemic magic, however, and it's silly to think you've achieved something by demanding it. Even so, if that's the approach some groups want to take, I don't knock them, as Foust does; let them fight any way they please to address these chronic evils.
So, "dictator's daughter" is a phrase we can all use now ever since a brave journalist faced down Gulnara's sister, who tried to sue a French journalist for using the phrase about her in a French court — and lost. So I'm going to use it for that reason, and also because while I was at EurasiaNet, my editor told me to stop using it. I guess he found it repetitive. There is the strange mystery of why EurasiaNet first got all over Karimova constantly, incessantly, in ways that in fact were even embarrassing — I guess because it made good copy and could interest other hipster publications like Jezebel to write about the evil amazonka. Then they stopped.
Then Registan, which was infamously involved in harassing all the major human rights advocates on Uzbekistan — including me — for criticizing Karimova — suddenly switched 180 degrees as well. There was a time when Joshua Foust, the chief Registani twitterer, was brutally harassing human rights activist who criticized Uzbekistan and singled out Karimova. He was having apoplectic fits over the way the human rights and labour rights crowd were picketing Karimova during New York's Fashion Week as she had a show planned (which she was forced to cancel). They were doing it "all wrong". This sort of strange protectiveness of Karimova back then prompted some to speculate that Registan was funded by Karimova in some fashion. That was strenuously denied by Foust and others, and of course was silly — the Uzbek Soviet royalty might be stupid, but not that stupid as to fund some Western news and discussion site.
What I think was much more likely was that Registan was funded by some US military front group or defense contractor or thing like that which somehow was related, perhaps only tenuously for a time, to Karimova as Number One Daughter. And they needed her in some sort of business or contract capacity at least for a time — until the fix just didn't stay in, and they fell out with her. So while they were trying to court her, they tried to deflect criticism of her, and when they fell out with her, they sicced the mob back on her. Of course, this is just a hypothetical hunch, and I have no way of proving it and therefore cite it only as a possible hypothesis.
What also seems clear to me is that MTS, after it started losing its fix in Uzbekistan and falling out with Karimova, also began whipsawing all the social media networks and media it could and eventually these reached some of the tails that wag the dogs in Washington, and it was open season on Karimova for that reason, too.
Nathan Hamm at Registan turns in a strangely incoherent piece touching on all the latest iconic moments in Karimova's career lately but never really explaining why a) his site was so protective of her and Uzbekistan for so long and banned critics like me, while engaging in sophistic pseudo-criticism that was hardly persuasive; b) the switched to batting at her harder; c) yet still in fact writes incoherent pseudo-criticism to blunt the edge of what is justifiably criticized.
Maybe this is not such a big deal anymore though. Maybe the
government has lightened up a bit. Really, it is not that bad when you
think about it. It certainly is far worse to hang out with Muslim men
who wear impressively full beards.
Speaking of which… As that photo above shows, Gulnora does that
too. In fact, this gentleman not only has a suspiciously radical beard,
but he also is a Turk. And while every flavor of foreigner is suspect,
Turks are especially so given their interests in strong, direct cultural
ties with other Turkic peoples, funding education in other Turkic
states, and allowing the spread of Turkish Islamic through.
Sure, the Uzbek government cracked down on *some* Turks whom they believed were using their businesses to disseminate radical religious literature, and unceremoniously kicked out dozens of businesses.
But formally, they maintain ties with Turkey, do business with Turkey, and Turkey is part of their "international" world. So when Gulnara has an international culture week, it's not surprising that Turks will be there on the VIP list. It doesn't mean that suddenly, the government is more "relaxed" about the religious believers — they are still going to jail as strategically needed.
You don't have to get too academic to understand Gulnara's message in the video — the message of the Uzbek state these days. The message is: Dress modestly, you will be seen as pretty and strong by Uzbek men; look inscrutable; smash TVs, they are symbols of Western culture and commerce, although of course, we sell them and control them anyway.
Dink! My i-phone is telling me it's Michael Anderson again, posting directly on my wall about his new film on Uzbekistan — not content to just let his feed about himself come into my view as it may. I find that an annoying practice, posting on somebody's wall like that, don't you? Especially repeatedly, nudgingly, to demand that you "write something".
Indeed, I've been waiting to write about his much-discussed (well, at least in some small circles around Central Asia) film about Andijan until I could see the whole 80-minute work. But since I'd have to pay something like $25 to buy it online in a set-up that I'm not sure takes dollars (since the price is in euros), I'm going to give my opinion of it now — and wait to see if some organization holds a showing of it.
First of all, let me say that making a film about the massacre in Andijan in May 2005 is an extremely important task. Not enough people seem to know about this massacre of Muslims in a post-Soviet country and to be factoring it into their thinking about Central Asia in particular and about the war in Afghanistan and broader regional issues. The small circle of human rights activists know about it — few others do. In our world, preoccupation with the Israel-Palestine conflict, which hasn't produced as many civilians killed or imprisoned in one such incident in a long time, or preoccupation with more popular causes like Darfur and Sudan and then "NATO's wars" which the left frets about seem to overshadow the awfulness of Uzbekistan. Anything having to do with the former Soviet Union never seems to become popular, because popular social movements on the left have always had an ambiguous if not supportive attitude toward the anti-Western governments, starting with the Kremlin.
So in that sense, Michael Anderson's venture is to be widely welcomed — except that the sad thing is, he replicates all that anti-Westernism all over again on the way to telling the story, and distorts it terribly. It's emblematic of the infantile preoccupation with "blame America first" on the left, particularly the European left, and it's part of why the causes of justice in this region just never get far behind local groups and specialized international researchers — because they aren't credible in telling the story and leave so many questions unanswered.
And the main problem they suffer from, very common on the left these days, is an inability to be honest about the violence of Islamism and about the movements antithetical to universal human rights.
This is a problem that Meredith Tax explains much better than I could in an excellent piece in Dissent (which was always brave enough to criticize the Soviet Union in its day while remaining on the respectable left, and now isn't afraid to publish a piece taking on the human rights establishment over their coddling of Islamists). She accounts for this problem among "progressives" by their confusion around the nature of Islamism — categorizing it with national-liberation movements or decolonization, when in fact the nature of these violent theocratic oppressive groups is anything but liberating. I'd go farther than she, in calling out the national-liberation movements themselves based on Marxist theologies also antithetical to human rights and violent, so that the problem isn't just that the Islamic jihadists aren't good enough Marxists like Che Guevara, you know?
In any event, the problem isn't just the refusal to look the bad aspects of the persons victimized by the Uzbek regime in the eye squarely, the problem is the obsession with America or the Anglo-American Club or the West as somehow unprincipled and hypocritical if they are not perfect, and to blame for the violent persecution of the authoritarian states of Central Asia. This is absurd and distorted, as the nature of these regimes stems from the Soviet Union — and Russian dominance — and isn't the West's fault, whether they collude or not with the bad governments there. A really solid understanding of that essential nature of these regimes is missing in Anderson and many of his colleagues in this niche of researchers on Central Asia.
Like so many human rights groups addressing the appalling behavior of the Uzbek regime, in telling the story of Andijan, Anderson doesn't mention that FIRST a group of 23 business men were arrested and their friends committed a jailbreak, killing several policemen, and then took officials as hostages and human shields as they attempted to demand concessions from the government. Only after those horrible events unfurled, and the government attempted to negotiate with the hostage-takers, did the massacre ensue: people came out on the square in the mistaken belief that Karimov himself was going to come and hear their complaints of injustice, and government forces mowed them down.
Yet those profound acts of violence that started the Andijan events are simply ommitted. They are simply left out. They are simply not mentioned. In fact, I wonder if they are mentioned at all in the 80 minutes of Anderson's fil, and/or whitewashed there. But they certainly aren't mentioned in the trailer.
In the trailer, within 60 seconds of hearing about the cruel killing of innocent civilians who came to the square seeking justice *after* the jail-break and hostage-taking and murders that aren't mentioned — we get a scene with George Bush sitting down with Karimov and doing business with him.
Er, George Bush or America is to blame for Uzbek troops gunning down civilians after a jailbreak and hostage-taking and murders of policemen? No. Not at all. That's just shrill, ideological manipulation by the left — and in fact stops real progress. Because when the infantile left imagines that America can be different or "better" if it doesn't have "George Bush" and somehow is able to "stop" or influence the better these regimes (how? by force? By, uh, persuasion?) — all the while maintaining any military or trade distance and disengagement — they in fact prescribe a hegemonic and in fact neo-neo colonialist role for America. They goad America to be different and yet get involved righting wrongs everywhere, without explaining how they will do that without force.
But in fact it isn't America's "fault," nor should America "fix" things, and these leftists, if they are sincere and credible, should turn their laser-gaze always pointed one way to Washington over to Moscow and Beijing. They have much more investment and influence on these regimes these days, and the much-discussed Northern Distribution Network ferrying in military supplies to a dwindling war really can't be blamed for the nature of these regimes — even if it doesn't help, even if more can and should be done around it to try to gain leverage with these tyrants.
I know some people who considered showing this film because they believe in the cause of justice for Andijan, but seeing this tawdry tabloid-like anti-American opening to the trailer showing bloodshed and immediately blaming America, they simply re-thought their initial intention. And that's a shame.
Um, no, I don't believe that somehow my country should be exempt from criticism. But that isn't the problem in the world, yanno? What's really the problem is — as I keep saying — this infantile preoccupation with the US as somehow to blame for everything in a "unipolar world" — when in fact that world is long since multi-polar, and one of those poles — Moscow — with its $1 billion in armaments! — is presiding over and abetting the worst massacre in our time in Syria, where at least 20,000 have already been murdered!
Anderson wrongly portrays the US as not only to blame, but as somehow not even condemning the massacre. What a distortion of history! In fact, the whole reason the US lost its military bases there, leased after the terrorist attack in 9/11 to aid the Afghan war effort, is because they *did* denounce the massacre, and Karimov hated that, and then expelled them. That's amply on the record and reported accurately by even the human rights groups that tend to glide over the opposition's violence at the beginning.
Yet in the trailer, Anderson skips right to Craig Murray, an ambassador of conscience who did a lot to expose the complicity the West did have with this regime, but who in recent years in my view has become less credible as he has become wackier in the telling of the tale. In describing the infamous practices like boiling alive a prisoner, Murray claims in the film that "Western leaders looked the other way" and that "The West is responsible because it covered up the abuses." Well, I'm sorry, but that's just a patent lie. They didn't look the other way; they condemned the massacre and lost their bases. They didn't "cover up" the abuses but instead — to their credit — kept calling for an investigation. Not doing enough isn't the same thing as "looking the other way" or "covering up abuses" — and that's why Murray just isn't credible when he spouts nonsense like that. It does the cause a disservice.
"The West had sanctions, but soon dropped them," he says. His country, and the European Union, in fact kept them in place for a number of years. I'll be the first to point out that in fact trade seemed to go up in those years of sanctions for peculiar reasons and the EU didn't seem very serious. A scene in the Anderson's movie with a self-justifying Pierre Morel, the former EU Central Asian representative, is indicative of that weakness. But neither Anderson nor any other human rightsnik has an answer to Morel's wishy-washy whine: how did these sanctions bring justice to the victims? They didn't; sanctions never do, and they aren't perhaps the best method, but at least they prevent further collusion. In theory, they can break the back of the dictator, and we've seen them work, for example, on Lukashenka.
The problem is that the eternal European — and it's mainly Anderson's *Europe* that has this problem, *not* America –– debate around this makes the work against dictators ineffective. It's Anderson's own continent and its political structures that can't make up their mind whether to really break off from the authoritarian regimes of Putin and the rest and try to sanction their bad behavior — and that's been their problem, frankly, throughout history. They have a terrible myopia about their enabling and abetting of the Bolsheviks and all the subsequent bad regimes, unlike the US. That's maybe what drives them to obsess about America, to deflect from themselves. Indeed, Michael, why don't the countries of Europe have laws that at least sanction Uzbekistan and then stoop to waivers — at least the US does that much!
And a reason the West wasn't as full-throated as Anderson liked is contained right in the problem of Islamist violence — a problem he dodges, at least in the trailer and all the propaganda around the film.
Richard Boucher, the White House spokesman, said at the time, as we learn from Wikipedia:
"It's becoming increasingly clear that very large numbers of civilians were killed by the indiscriminate use of force by Uzbek forces. There needs to be a credible and a transparent accounting to establish the facts of the matter of what occurred in Andijon. At the same time I think it is clear that the episode began by an armed attack on the prison and on other government facilities. There are reports of hostage-taking and other claims that should be investigated. Nothing justified such acts of violence."[58] Craig Murray, the ambassador of the United Kingdom to Uzbekistan, criticized the US government's position, calling it a "sickening response."
Er, sickening, Craig? Really? Why isn't the violence involved in a prison break, murders, and hostage-taking as sickening to you?!
This is the central issue that I will keep pounding on every time this topic is raised. Because it is absolutely shameful for the left and the international human rights movement in particular to shy away from or even whitewash this.
I find this problem shockingly deep-rooted. I found a senior official at the Open Society Institute when I was there tell me sanctimoniously that I shouldn't raise any qualms about the violence used by the opposition around the Andijan events because the American revolution was bloody as well. Imagine! We are justify violence by harkening back more than two centuries to how a war of liberation against colonialism was fought, and not hold to modern standards of human rights?! We're to invert Thomas Jefferson's famous quote, often misused by Palestinians to justify terrorism, "The Tree of Liberty must be nourished by the blood of patriots" — as if it has to be nourished by murdered policeman and townspeople killed because troops were provoked by hostage-taking and human-shielding with officials! I find that morally reprehensible, and I'll keep denouncing it.
It is possible to do both — we can reject the violence used by this opposition group and we can reject the violence of the murderous Karimov regime in responding to the calls for justice of ordinary demonstrators. In fact, we really must do this if we want the outcome in Uzbekistan ever to be better and not become the cycle of violence that we see again with the Arab Spring and with revolutions in other countries. There really is no Tree of Liberty nourished by bloodshed, but only delayed and made dysfunctional in our time.
The businessmen who got into the dispute with local potentates aren't exactly freedom-fighters. They're the kind of power grouping that forms in the conditions of these unfree countries so antithetical to free enterprise and a free marketplace, without the rule of law. Businessmen making networks of people that they provide services and goods for in a kind of patronage system aren't exactly the open and free and fair society we'd really want to fight for and see come into being, is it? They appear because they live under the remnants of the Soviet totalitarian state. Some explanations of the backdrop of the Andijan event ascribe this to clan warfare and turf fighting over trade networks. No doubt that was part of it; it always is in these countries (think of the pogroms in Kyrgyzstan). Even so, there is nothing wrong with forming an Islamic businessmen's society and doing for their fellow Muslims — it's the way everything is run everywhere in the world. The reasons for it and the rights to it are understandable — but violence isn't justified, ever.
Strangely, revisionist researchers on these events like Sarah Kendzior, who has written a much-admired essay claiming that the businessman's association (Akromiya) doesn't exist, can't seem to square their notions with the accounts of emgires that say it did exist — but was innocent, i.e. not an extremist much less a terrorist organization. It's as if Kendzior can't hypothesize an Islamic religious business organization — a self-help network — that might be prone to criticism for extremism, and has to say it was all made up by frenzied "war on terrorism" bureaucrats.
No, Boucher got it right. Nothing justifies such acts of violence, i.e. prison-breaks, killing of guards, hostage-taking. Absolutely. And that's why the left and the international human rights movement is never, ever credible on Andijan when they cannot concede that this isn't just a side problem, this isn't just "understandable," this isn't just a "trigger" for events that others without arms got dragged into, it's the essential problem for the opposition.
It's not a problem cleared by Muhamed Salih and other opposition leaders shown in the film, because they don't grasp the nettle of either violence or fundamentalism Islam as possible negative trends for this regime. It's not politically correct, and doesn't play to their fawning lefty audiences, such as they are.
But if we are ever to deal with this country and others in Central Asia honestly and effectively, with the elites as they are, and not as we wish them to be, and the opposition as it is, and not as we wish it to be, we have to squarely reject violence and tell all of them that we won't support them in it. In fact doing so, we can maybe open up a world of other possibilities. Fanatical Islam is rejected by the secularists of Uzbekistan and that includes those propping up the regime. They don't see it as an alternative. To be sure, Karimov makes up all kinds of things and calls people extremist who are merely devout, and tortues all of them which is absolutely unacceptable.
But we as liberals need a plan for these 5,000 or 10,000 tortured and mistreated Muslims in Karimov's dungeons and their angry and suffering families — and we don't have one when we only see them as victims and not as future perpetrators of human rights violations of others. We can't make a solid case to the regime when we do that. Yet the movement only has silence on the question of violence and Islamic business, and an unwillingness to concede the White House spokesman's just words on these events.
That plan has to be calling for unconditional release for these people and justice for the victims of Andijan, but it can't be by embracing jihadism. It's just like the issue of Guantanamo, and the human rights wrongs there, and the Cageprisoners, who are all about advocating the violation of other people's rights. Celebrating victimhood status is not enough — we need to stake out the territory of what we would support in a free society — and it can't be violence and extremism.
Very few alternative figures in Uzbekistan do that. Galima Bukharbaeva, an eyewitness to the horror of Andijan is one of them. She is featured in the film — but not her critique of violence and Islamic fundamentalism which she has continued since those days, at great personal risk and to constant pressure from other opposition figures.
In Wikipedia's account of Andijan, she is quoted:
Galima Bukharbaeva, a journalist for IWPR, witnessed a "mass of dead and wounded. At first, one group of armoured-personnel carriers approached the [city] square, and then another group appeared. They opened fire without mercy on everyone indiscriminately, including women and children. The crowd began to run in all directions. We dove into a ditch and lay there for a while. I saw at least five bloody corpses next to me. The rebels who are holding the provincial administration opened fire in response. They intend to stand to the end! When we got out of the ditch, we ran along the streets into the neighbourhood and now we're looking for a place where there's no shooting. But shots can be heard everywhere…"[26] The Uzbek government disputes this and states that only terrorists were killed.[11]
She reports accurately that the rebels opened fire and intended to stand to the end. This was not just troops gunning down unarmed citizens. This was a firefight, a gun battle. All the many people who champion the cause of Andijan need to restore these unattractive facts to the narrative and condemn them, too. They should call on the West to do more to confront this tyrant, but cease their infantile blaming of foreign leaders for what the opposition caused, and which the authoritarian government is responsible for.
Yes, caused. Because they didn't have to use an armed jailbreak or other violent measures to press their actually just cause — the right to freedom of association, belief, expression. They became unjust and not our friends when they did that — and we need to make that clear, just like we need to have a plan to press for the release and rehabilitation of thousands of Muslim prisoners even as we say that we reject any extremism and armed jihad, should they chose that route. These things have to go together. They never do.
Did Karimov really negotiate with these people?
The armed men, including the 23 defendants, also took over the regional administration building in Andijan, and took at least twenty law enforcement and government officials hostage, including the Head of the Prosecutors Office and the Chief of the Tax Inspection Authority. The militants unsuccessfully tried to seize the National Security Service (SNB) headquarters in the city.[20] They demanded the resignation of President Islam Karimov.[21] Karimov's press office said that "intensive negotiations" proved fruitless. "The militants, taking cover behind women and children, are refusing any compromise," the statement said
How loathsome is the National Security Service, torturing people, and how loathsome Karimov! But nothing ever justifies taking cover behind women and children. That's all there is to it. Michael Anderson and every other do-gooder has to be called out on this.
More pragmatic students of Andijan highlight the business and local conflict nature of the story:
Melissa Hooper, a US lawyer in Tashkent who worked with the defense in the trial, said on 14 May, "This is more about [the businessmen] acquiring economic clout, and perhaps refusing to pay off the local authorities, than about any religious beliefs." Andrei Grozin, head of the Central Asia and Kazakhstan Department of the Institute of CIS Countries, said in an interview conducted by Rossiiskaya gazeta that authorities used the trial to "take away the business of several entrepreneurs under a clearly trumped-up pretext."[17]
But Anderson can't let go of his anti-American fairy-tale. He even conceives of this film with a structural morality-tale featuring America, as an interview with RFE/RL tells us:
Andersen likens the events in Andijon — and the Western world’s dealings with the Karimov government — to a literary work. The events in Andijon are where things start, Western sanctions ostensibly related to the violence are the middle, and the rapprochement of the last few years — mainly related to Uzbekistan’s rail link to Afghanistan — serve as the “bittersweet end.”
So, the fairy-tale is supposed to work like this: since our engagement "caused Andijan," why, we should only now put in sanctions, deal with Pakistan or Kazakhstan or Russia instead, or just leave the equipment behind instead of worrying how to get it out by the NDN, and everything will be fine?
Really, Michael?
I'm all for trying to wrest more out of Karimov and confronting the US to do more. But we can't have illusions that if we didn't deal with Karimov he would auto-magically change into a peacenik overnight. Come on, people, get a grip here. We are not at the center of the universe. And they are at the center of their own universe.
The Uzbeks will have to deal with their own internal contradictions and conflicts and we should bolster the forces for peaceful change and affirmation of universality and human rights against those who would justify taking hostages and killing even the henchmen of a murderous regime.
In the interview with Anderson by EurasiaNet — which also refrained from addressing the initial violence at Andijan and the problem of Islamism in any form, Ken Roth's quote from the film is mentioned:
“If I were an Uzbek citizen, I would feel abandoned by the West, as if my fate didn’t matter to the West.” It cannot be put better than that. And I am not in doubt – I know from thousands of conversations with Uzbeks – that they increasingly feel that way. I am sure I would. And some of these people will lose all hope in this “Western” idea of democracy. They will also lose hope that we are with them and not with their brutal ruler.
OK, rightly so. But you know something? Thousands of Uzbeks don't want to live under bands of armed men who take the law into their own hands and take live hostages, either. Do you think they transform into democrats and change their ways overnight? Not abandoning Uzbeks also involves condemning the violence of their opposition leaders and urging that the peaceful forces for change and human rights be strengthened — and helping them. The moral clarity has to resound here. That is the Western idea of democracy.
And this idea of blackmail — if the West doesn't help them, they get to be terrorists? Sorry, that's for the birds. You don't get to use terrorism, whether the West helps or not. And it will never really stand behind you if you do. So don't. That's how best to make the moral case to this imperfect West, which at the end of the day, only helps — it isn't the essential force for these societies, who must make their way on their own.
Says Michael Anderson:
We should ask ourselves: “Whose side are we on? The dictator’s or the people’s?” Ten years of Western cooperation with the Karimov regime leaves you with a very bad taste in the mouth – the taste of shame.?
No. The bad taste I have in my mouth is from the cowardly response to violence and extremism coming from the left and the human rights defenders who should have better principles and articulate them. I don't think the choice is as stark as "the dictator" or "armed men who kill policemen and take human shields." I won't make it that stark. The "people" is a Marxist abstraction. I'm for the rights of individual people, and achieving them peacefully, not through revolutionary violence.
