#2
Toronto Star
March 17, 2002
Corruption, repression rule in Central Asia
Cut loose from the Soviet welfare state, five new republics continue to founder
By Olivia Ward
EUROPEAN BUREAU
MOSCOW
CENTRAL ASIA is the crossroads of great civilizations and the burial ground of great ambitions.
The one-time citadels of Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane have long since crumbled. And in their gritty ruins, anger and violence breed a potential threat to the region and the world.
"After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Central Asians with democratic leanings had a feeling of hope," says Dodojon Atovullo, a Tajik journalist in exile.
"Unfortunately, they were disappointed. Repression and corruption have only increased. They will push people more and more to radical organizations."
After Sept. 11, the West's most immediate fear is that another Taliban-style movement will spring up in this fertile soil or that the region's remote, inaccessible mountains and valleys will become secret headquarters for the apocalyptic extremism of a new Islamic terror network.
But religious radicalism is not the only danger threatening to break loose in Central Asia.
The five mismatched republics that Joseph Stalin patched together in the 1920s and '30s to divide and conquer the region are potential flashpoints for ethnic violence, clan conflict and civil war, as their citizens grow more desperate from the poverty and despotism that make a misery of their lives.
From Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in the west to Kyrgyzstan in the east, Kazakstan in the north and Tajikistan in the south, Central Asia covers 6 million square kilometres, much of it desert, steppe and mountain.
It is the living bridge that joins Russia, Iran, China and Pakistan.
Its ancient Silk Road caravan routes revolutionized trade between East and West and its promise of riches sparked the 19th-century duel of empires known as the Great Game.
Ironically, most of the Central Asian countries have more economic promise than ever before, in the form of oil, gas, precious metals and minerals.
But their 60 million people have received few of the benefits and their leaders are nepotistic, power-hungry and grasping.
Turkmenistan is the world's second largest natural gas exporter and its oil and gas reserves equal 20 per cent of those in the Persian Gulf.
Uzbekistan's enormous mineral resources include gold, uranium and copper.
Kazakhstan, the largest and wealthiest of the republics, has more oil than Russia and large deposits of nickel, gold, cobalt and uranium.
Kyrgyzstan, bordering China, also has gold and uranium, as well as substantial supplies of coal.
The resources of the smallest and poorest country, Tajikistan, are largely unexplored, but its strategic geographical position makes it crucially important to the region.
Until the 19th century, Central Asia was a territory of tribal conflict and conquest by successive Eastern empires. The people were mainly nomadic, living off the land and the lucrative trade routes, while a minority migrated to a few splendid cities where wealthy rulers lived cheek by jowl with slaves.
But Russia's violent entrance into the turbulent region changed the political landscape and set the scene for the dangers that would surface again today.
By the dawn of the 20th century, Russian forces had swept across Central Asia, capturing one key town after another and subduing the Uzbek-dominated khanates that were the region's great powers. When the fighting died down, Russian colonists flooded into the vanquished territory, taking leading positions in new administrations.
Stalin was to complete the job of bending the region to Russia's will, but the rules set down by the early Russian military campaigners never changed.
"In Asia, the duration of peace is in direct proportion to the slaughter you inflict on the enemy," declared Gen. Mikhail Skobelev in the 1880s.
"The harder you hit them, the longer they will be quiet afterward."
During Stalin's reign, in the late 1920s, Skobelev's words reverberated with a vengeance. Forced collectivization of land sparked rebellion, famine and millions of deaths, as the food supply across Central Asia shrank to starvation levels. In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands more were killed, tortured and imprisoned, even as nationalist groups formed to oppose Soviet rule.
Borders were redrawn, merging sometimes-hostile ethnic groups and abruptly redistributing power and resources among them. The "stability" of the newborn republics was guaranteed only by Soviet military might.
But Moscow had not reckoned with the strength of cultural and religious roots that stubbornly refused to wither in spite of communist repression.
"The population were accustomed to being oppressed and tortured by the emirs," noted Fitzroy Maclean, an adventurous British diplomat who made his way to Central Asia in the late 1930s. "But they were not accustomed to interference with their age-old customs and their religion."
Moscow ordered thousands of mosques closed and made any outward sign of the Muslim religion illegal. But by the 1960s, Kremlin officials came to realize that Islam could not be entirely eradicated in Central Asia.
"Official Islam" was established, with a handful of state-supervised mosques and religious schools allowed to open and permission granted for a small number of Muslims to make the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
But in much of Central Asia, religion was still a covert activity, with local Communist party chiefs deliberately turning a blind eye to private observance of Islam.
"When I took a second wife," recalls a Tajik engineer, "the party boss came to the wedding and got very drunk. He knew it was strictly illegal, but nobody talked about it and instead of religious verses, he recited some phrases from (Soviet founder Vladimir) Lenin."
The most widely practised form of Islam in Central Asia was traditional Sufism, which stresses mysticism, music, poetry and tolerance and does not subject women to severe constraints.
While radical Islam spread elsewhere in the Arab world, Central Asia was cut off by an eastern Iron Curtain. It was not until the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, when the five states were declared independent, that Central Asians became aware of these ideas and ideologies.
As oppressive as Soviet rule was, it had provided an infrastructure and a basic living after World War II. Free education, health care, housing and utilities were available to the majority of people, in spite of steadily rising unemployment.
When the Central Asian republics were suddenly cut off from the Soviet welfare state, they had no experience of market economics, democratic government or civil liberties and were unable to feed their people or sustain fledgling governments.
The transition, for most people, was cataclysmic.
As the new nations were forced to adopt their own currencies, the value of their money plummeted. Hyperinflation made the cost of living unaffordable. Droughts destroyed crops, preventing farmers from living off the land. Electricity, heat and water were frequently cut off.
Industries collapsed, but cash-strapped Moscow called in old debts. The energy producers of Central Asia were forced to sell oil and gas to Russia at lower-than-market prices.
Although Western energy executives came flocking, lured by the estimated $5 trillion (U.S.) worth of oil deposits in Central Asia's Caspian Sea region, serious difficulties stood in their way.
"The Caspian," warned then-U.S. secretary of state James Baker, "is a geopolitical problem of the first magnitude."
But in spite of America's sudden worry about the stability of the region, neither Washington nor the European capitals did much to help Central Asia out of its desperate situation. Investment was deemed premature and aid pledges fell far short.
The leaders of the Central Asian states differed on how to govern their traumatized people, but, coming from the old communist system, they were united in having little tolerance for democracy.
The exception might have been Kyrgyzstan's President Askar Akayev, but he, too, ended up repressing all opposition when his country faced economic collapse.
Tajikistan fell into chaos and civil war immediately after independence, losing 50,000 people in bloody battles that raged across the small, mountainous republic. But unlike neighbouring countries, it emerged with an uneasy coalition government that included an Islamic opposition party.
Energy-rich Turkmenistan languished under a Stalinist-style leader, Sapurmurad Niyazov, who revelled in the title of Turkmenbashi, or Father of the Turkmen.
Uzbekistan's iron-fisted supremo, Islam Karimov, revived the worst of Soviet repression, jailing and exiling anyone who appeared to threaten him.
And in Kazakhstan, considered the potentially richest republic, President Nursultan Nazarbayev veered toward dictatorship, consolidating himself and his clan in power.
For the hungry and disillusioned of Central Asia — set adrift by Russia, ignored by the West and exploited by their leaders — the only thing freely available was religion, in the form of an Islamic revival.
Radical Muslims from such countries as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran poured into the region, bearing the Qur'an and their own brands of militant religion. Many veterans were of the 10-year war in Afghanistan.
Thousands of mosques sprang up, financed by the same neighbouring countries. Central Asia's cultural identity had been suppressed for most of a century and Islam began to fill the void.
In Tajikistan, the Islamic Renaissance Party led the way in militancy, with an extreme form of Islam aimed at introducing sharia law across Central Asia. The IRP's theology was not imported from the Arab world, however. It's a mixture of fundamentalist doctrines absorbed from a small Russian Muslim sect and the Deobandia, a fundamentalist sect from India.
Civil war was triggered after the party garnered more than one-third of the vote in the 1992 presidential election, which was won by a Communist candidate, Emmomali Rakhmonov. Ultimately, though, the IRP was absorbed into political life as a registered party, with some members joining the government. The IRP's dedicated militants aligned themselves with other movements.
Even so, Rakhmonov is deeply suspicious of Islamic organizations and keeps a firm grip on power by cracking down on any appearance of radicalism.
"In Tajikistan there's no criticism at all of the regime," says exiled journalist Atovullo. "There's the president's party and, in practical terms, it's the only party. There's only one truth and it's the president's truth. This is now a country that exists on drug business and loans."
Yet, Tajikistan is a model of democracy compared with neighbouring Uzbekistan, where severe repression has helped to incubate the most extreme Islamic movement in the region.
"You can clearly see the results of the Central Asian leaders' failure," says Vitaly Naumkin, president of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Centre for Strategic and Political Studies in Moscow.
"There are the roots of Islamic radicalism, social and economic crises, chronic underdevelopment, regional clashes and social problems. Despotic rulers have kept the populations from participating in political life, which is monopolized by the elites. All these are factors of great instability."
The case of Uzbekistan highlights the problems clearly.
There, a group of Saudi-backed young men adopted a form of Wahhabism similar to that followed by Osama bin Laden and vowed to spread the primitive religion across Central Asia, fighting a relentless jihad until their aims were accomplished.
Calling themselves the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), they set up headquarters in Uzbekistan's lush Fergana Valley, which is close to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In the early 1990s, they launched their campaign to overthrow the Uzbekistan government and replace it with one based on sharia.
Their demands outraged and alarmed Karimov, who had no intention of creating an Islamic state. The IMU leaders were driven out of Uzbekistan and regrouped in Tajikistan, where IRP members who preferred guns to political struggle swelled their ranks.
One of the IMU leaders, known as Juma Namangani, also forged links with bin Laden in Afghanistan, from where he launched attacks against Uzbekistan. The guerrillas spread their campaign to vulnerable Kyrgyzstan, whose small, under-equipped army could scarcely cope with the new threat.
"The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan has become the most powerful militant Islamic group operating in Central Asia today," concludes Pakistan-based writer Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the region's movements.
In his recent book, Jihad: The Rise Of Militant Islam In Central Asia, he warns that the IMU and its allies have the deadliest of aims: "They are obsessed with implementing sharia, (which) they see not as a way of creating a just society, but simply as a way to regulate personal behaviour."
This radical philosophy comes, in part, from anger and disgust with the corruption and repressive measures adopted by the Central Asian regimes. But radicalism and repression have fed on each other in the region, turning peaceful opposition into armed struggle.
"Religion is a big problem here," says Mikhail Ardzinov of the Independent Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan.
"Nobody advocates fundamentalism, but those who are religious should have the right to go to the mosque freely. There are a lot of fabricated cases against Muslims, who are framed by the police on serious charges like drugs."
Ardzinov, who was badly beaten by police in a 1999 raid on his Tashkent office, describes the situation in Uzbekistan as "total censorship, even worse than in communist times. There is absolutely no free speech. This is a real authoritarian regime."
Although Turkmenistan, on Central Asia's western flank, has so far escaped attacks from the IMU by keeping friendly relations with the Taliban and their allies, its paranoid president, Niyazov, has made the energy-rich country almost as isolated as North Korea.
With the demise of Taliban rule in Afghanistan and Turkmenistan's new economic links with the West, there are fears that conditions are ripe for insurgency.
"About 200,000 people have been arrested in the last 10 years," says Avdi Kuliev, an exiled Turkmen opposition leader and former foreign minister. (The authorities say the number arrested is 80,000.)
"I think that 90 per cent of population is against Niyazov. People live in dire poverty; their income is about $30 month. The police-state regime is so pervasive that people in the same family are afraid of each other. In Turkmenistan, even minor offences can land you in jail."
Kuliev was jailed in 1998 when he tried to return to his country but was released after pressure from the United States. Few of those who enter Turkmenistan's stifling, disease-ridden prisons are so lucky.
The rebirth of Islam in Central Asia has been complicated as well as painful, and the results defy easy description.
One of the most influential new movements, for example, is the Party of Islamic Liberation (Hizb ut-Tahrir), which continues to attract disillusioned young people in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan with dreams of restoring a medieval Islamic state of "pure" religion and extreme morality in which violence has no place.
However, Central Asia's autocratic rulers have often repressed its members as if they were violent extremists and the repression has only increased with the advent of the American-led war on terror.
Using security as an excuse, some of Central Asian leaders have imposed ever more draconian crackdowns on religious Muslims or dissidents.
"The feeling of impunity is now widespread," says Natalia Ablova, director of the Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law in Kyrgyzstan, once considered a regional leader in democracy. "The rulers feel that the West needs them, because they allowed them into their military bases. They think they are in position to do as they please.
"This is what they call security. For our country, it is very dangerous."
Hysteria over religious extremism has spread, she says — a pattern that appears to be spreading through Central Asia.
Another activist deeply worried about the effect of the anti-terrorism campaign is Ninel Fokina, of Kazakhstan's Almaty Helsinki Committee.
"After Sept. 11, the human-rights situation has worsened," she says. "Before, the population was frightened mainly by warnings about Wahhabism and religious extremism. But officials have started to threaten them with the spectre of terrorism, too.
"Now, for example, many organizations can't register with the state to get legal status. The officials always try to make out that (the groups) are linked with terrorism. It's like a massive refusal to recognize religious organizations and others who are carrying out peaceful activities."
In Tajikistan, says Atovullo, the government is also using the war on terror to crack down on opponents. But he adds that "many people are now working underground and I'm afraid that radical organizations will benefit. They will especially attract the young who supported the Taliban."
As the U.S. and its allies show signs of moving on to new "terror" centres such as Iraq, analysts say it is essential that Central Asia not be forgotten.
The region's poverty, and the corruption and repression that have perpetuated it, are the recruiting tools of future global terrorist organizations, they warn. And unless the West is willing to take on the massive job of attacking all three, the war on terror will ultimately be lost.
The time is critical, they say, for putting pressure on Central Asian regimes that want to enjoy closer ties with the West and gain international status and economic benefits.
"Central Asian countries have economies that are very dependent on the West and Russia," says Vitaly Ponomaryev of Memorial, the Russian human-rights organization.
"It's very important that the West will continue relations with these countries, aiming at improvement in human rights as well as economic reform. This should be the main goal. There must be a strong connection between economic relations and human rights."
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