More handshaking with the devil: Uzbekistan
It's a cliche these days for foes of the Bush Administration to keep pointing out how much Bushie and neocon rhetoric about freedom and the need to crackdown on authoritarian regimes differs from the messy realpolitik of the War on Terror. In addition to the recently-revealed cozy relationship between the CIA and the Sudanese intelligence agency (whose head just finished up overseeing another season of genocide in Darfur and can safely turn his attention to other things during the rainy season while disease and lack of humanitarian access wipe out a few hundred thousand more of the refugees in the camps), there's also the matter of Uzbekistan -- a frequent destination for CIA-supported extraordinary renditions and the site of a U.S. airbase servicing Afghanistan.
Over the weekend, troops representing Uzbek president Islam Karimov's regime killed about 500 protesters in the city of Andijan near the border with Kyrgyzstan and about 200 more in towns along the Uzbek-Kyrgyzstan border according to the most recent report. The details are murky since press access is limited in the hotspots, but the violence apparently began with a protester-led jailbreak of 23 Islamic dissidents, as well as over a thousand other prisoners, from a state prison in Andijan on Thursday. On Saturday, after negociations between the protestors holding the prison and government authorities broke down, the protesters fled the prison with hostages, and government troops opened fire on them.
Naturally, Karimov claims the government never ordered the troops to open fire, but it's more likely that the shooting -- which a large and growing number of observers claim was gratuitous -- was intended to discourage further protest and, specifically, to keep the demonstrations from becoming a repeat of the March protests in Kyrgyzstan that led to the fall of the government there. In fact, the crackdown seems to have failed as further unrest has bubbled up in several Uzbekistan-Kyrgyztan border towns, in some cases with citizens trying to reopen the border to trade. One report from Saturday night held that 6000 people tried to cross into Kyrgyzstan but were turned back. CNN reported that roughly 500 people have made it across the border on Sunday.
According to the most recent report from News24, "If the reports of more than 700 deaths since Friday hold true and if Uzbek forces were behind the killing - as most reports indicate - it would be some of the worst state-inspired bloodshed since the massacre of protesters in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989."
Neither are there clear signs that the violence is abating.
Perhaps the least surprising part of the story (from the CNN report)is this:
"Karimov on Saturday blamed the violence on the Islamic radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir and said their goal was to establish an Islamic state and to destroy the current constitutional system."
For many in real time, but surely for most in retrospect, the Cold War was a blight on the modernism of the 20th Century. Even discounting the Khrushchev-Kennedy nuclear brinkmanship in 1964 and the twenty years of nuclear fear that followed it, the percieved threat of Soviet, of communist, world domination led the liberal West to intervene in civil and regional wars it should never have gotten involved in, and to support regimes it should have shied away from, in response to a threat that was largely, and in many cases obviously to those who weren't blinded by ideologically-inspired fear, chimerial. Soviet military power was always grossly overestimated by the Pentagon, increasingly so through the 70s and 80s. The ideological draw of socialism was never what the West feared it to be and it too only weakened as the century wore on. But for thirty years, the U.S. would throw its weight behind almost any regime, however cynical, that nominally stood against the great red threat. Remnants of that strategy, that worldview, still exist of course in the Bush White House, whose foreign policy establishment is so dominated by the old Cold Warriors.
Which is one reason why the examples of Uzbekistan and Sudan are so upsetting, beyond simply the matter of cozying up to ruthless dictators. Here are two regimes the U.S. shouldn't be supporting, whose cooperation is embarrassing, whose domestic records are appalling. But the governments of both regimes claim to be under duress from "Islamic extremism" -- to be metaphorically in the same boat as the U.S. on that score. I don't write this to suggest that Islamic fundamentalism isn't a global threat, that, like communism, it isn't scary in its ideological draw as well as its physical, military threat -- although it's worth keeping in mind that both the ideological and the material threats are a lot bigger in the devoloping world and the more newly indusrialized countries that border it, than in North America and Northern Europe. But there are a lot of global threats, intertwined, self-reinforcing. And when one of them becomes the justification for all foreign policy decisions, its opposition an all-purpose excuse for tyranny among allies, things have gone very awry and the consequences, if history is any indication, can be devastating in the long run. In a Friday press conference, Scott McClellan was mealy-mouthed in discussing the developments in Uzbekistan but essentially repeated the Karimov line about "the outbreak of violence, particularly by some members of a terrorist organization that were freed from prison".
Not surprisingly, former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan and Blair opponent Craig Murray takes the cyncial view in an editorial in Monday's Guardian. But even if his materialistic analysis of the U.S. and U.K.'s support for Uzbekistan is off, even if it really is about the War on Terror and a commitment to fight radical Islam at any ethical cost, Murray's detailing of the hypocracy and the risk in associating so freely with regimes who deal with dissent in the way Karimov's (who, ironically enough, is a former communist) does is worth its weight.
Over the weekend, troops representing Uzbek president Islam Karimov's regime killed about 500 protesters in the city of Andijan near the border with Kyrgyzstan and about 200 more in towns along the Uzbek-Kyrgyzstan border according to the most recent report. The details are murky since press access is limited in the hotspots, but the violence apparently began with a protester-led jailbreak of 23 Islamic dissidents, as well as over a thousand other prisoners, from a state prison in Andijan on Thursday. On Saturday, after negociations between the protestors holding the prison and government authorities broke down, the protesters fled the prison with hostages, and government troops opened fire on them.
Naturally, Karimov claims the government never ordered the troops to open fire, but it's more likely that the shooting -- which a large and growing number of observers claim was gratuitous -- was intended to discourage further protest and, specifically, to keep the demonstrations from becoming a repeat of the March protests in Kyrgyzstan that led to the fall of the government there. In fact, the crackdown seems to have failed as further unrest has bubbled up in several Uzbekistan-Kyrgyztan border towns, in some cases with citizens trying to reopen the border to trade. One report from Saturday night held that 6000 people tried to cross into Kyrgyzstan but were turned back. CNN reported that roughly 500 people have made it across the border on Sunday.
According to the most recent report from News24, "If the reports of more than 700 deaths since Friday hold true and if Uzbek forces were behind the killing - as most reports indicate - it would be some of the worst state-inspired bloodshed since the massacre of protesters in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989."
Neither are there clear signs that the violence is abating.
Perhaps the least surprising part of the story (from the CNN report)is this:
"Karimov on Saturday blamed the violence on the Islamic radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir and said their goal was to establish an Islamic state and to destroy the current constitutional system."
For many in real time, but surely for most in retrospect, the Cold War was a blight on the modernism of the 20th Century. Even discounting the Khrushchev-Kennedy nuclear brinkmanship in 1964 and the twenty years of nuclear fear that followed it, the percieved threat of Soviet, of communist, world domination led the liberal West to intervene in civil and regional wars it should never have gotten involved in, and to support regimes it should have shied away from, in response to a threat that was largely, and in many cases obviously to those who weren't blinded by ideologically-inspired fear, chimerial. Soviet military power was always grossly overestimated by the Pentagon, increasingly so through the 70s and 80s. The ideological draw of socialism was never what the West feared it to be and it too only weakened as the century wore on. But for thirty years, the U.S. would throw its weight behind almost any regime, however cynical, that nominally stood against the great red threat. Remnants of that strategy, that worldview, still exist of course in the Bush White House, whose foreign policy establishment is so dominated by the old Cold Warriors.
Which is one reason why the examples of Uzbekistan and Sudan are so upsetting, beyond simply the matter of cozying up to ruthless dictators. Here are two regimes the U.S. shouldn't be supporting, whose cooperation is embarrassing, whose domestic records are appalling. But the governments of both regimes claim to be under duress from "Islamic extremism" -- to be metaphorically in the same boat as the U.S. on that score. I don't write this to suggest that Islamic fundamentalism isn't a global threat, that, like communism, it isn't scary in its ideological draw as well as its physical, military threat -- although it's worth keeping in mind that both the ideological and the material threats are a lot bigger in the devoloping world and the more newly indusrialized countries that border it, than in North America and Northern Europe. But there are a lot of global threats, intertwined, self-reinforcing. And when one of them becomes the justification for all foreign policy decisions, its opposition an all-purpose excuse for tyranny among allies, things have gone very awry and the consequences, if history is any indication, can be devastating in the long run. In a Friday press conference, Scott McClellan was mealy-mouthed in discussing the developments in Uzbekistan but essentially repeated the Karimov line about "the outbreak of violence, particularly by some members of a terrorist organization that were freed from prison".
Not surprisingly, former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan and Blair opponent Craig Murray takes the cyncial view in an editorial in Monday's Guardian. But even if his materialistic analysis of the U.S. and U.K.'s support for Uzbekistan is off, even if it really is about the War on Terror and a commitment to fight radical Islam at any ethical cost, Murray's detailing of the hypocracy and the risk in associating so freely with regimes who deal with dissent in the way Karimov's (who, ironically enough, is a former communist) does is worth its weight.
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