Russia and Eurasia Programme paper: 2012/02
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- The Uzbekistan comparison
REP Programme Paper: Averting Violence in Kyrgyzstan: Understanding and Responding to Nationalism www.chathamhouse.org 19 But it was periodic debates about the status of the Uzbek language in Kyrgyzstan that raised most heckles. In 2004 a Kyrgyz NGO official – who enjoyed an international reputation as a champion of human rights, and was considered a liberal internationalist by foreign donors and had received substantial amounts of funding from them – privately told me that he thought Osh Member of Parliament Davron Sabirov’s aim was to make Uzbek a state language and then join Osh to Uzbekistan. Sobirov was accused in 1999 of inciting inter-ethnic hatred in an election video, but later acquitted by a court. A 2006 demonstration by supporters of Jalalbad MP Kadyrjon Batyrov in support of better treatment of Uzbeks and official status for the Uzbek language likewise raised Kyrgyz fears of an attack on the unity of the state. At a meeting in 2006 with the OSCE High Commissioner for Ethnic Minorities, Rolf Ekeus, Kyrgyzstani State Secretary Adakhan Madumarov said Uzbek could not be granted official status because ‘we are a unitary state’ and other minorities might demand similar rights. 66
The idea that using Uzbek in the workplace, wearing a headscarf, listening to Uzbek music or raising the idea that Uzbek language could be granted some official recognition could be interpreted as sinister plots to dismember Kyrgyzstan by seeking autonomy for an ethnically- Uzbek Osh can only be understood in terms of the profound insecurity of Kyrgyz nationalism explained in the previous section. 67 Osh, with its complicated history of urban coexistence and conflict, became the focus for all these concerns. The Uzbekistan comparison In Kyrgyz narratives, as seen in section 2, it is striking how often the perceived wealth and privilege of Osh Uzbeks are sharply contrasted to the supposedly parlous state of Kyrgyz in Uzbekistan. In 2006 the Kyrgyz newspaper Agym blasted the head of the OSCE office in Kyrgyzstan, Marcus Müller, for a statement that was seemingly sympathetic to Kyrgyzstani Uzbeks demonstrating for language rights. Whereas ‘the Uzbeks are occupying a large financial and economic niche in the southern region’, the paper wrote caustically, ‘it is known that ethnic Kyrgyz people in Uzbekistan have ten times more problems with their culture and language than the Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan.’ 68
elements of the Kyrgyzstani Uzbek population is because the Kyrgyz government is too weak to silence them and they would not get away with that in Uzbekistan. A senior Osh Kyrgyz policeman put it to me in 2009 that ‘here Uzbeks are free, they have every opportunity – universities, schools, television channels, and supermarkets; but Kyrgyz in Uzbekistan have nothing.’ Kyrgyz felt that whereas they had once dominated the Ferghana Valley, they had been treated unfairly in both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. They thus needed ever to be vigilant against Uzbek intentions and designs on their state, and be suspicious of their foreign supporters in Western governments and organizations like the OSCE who might use the excuse of human rights as pretext to attack and dismember a state by supporting a separatist minority, as they did in Kosovo in 1999.
66
Kyrgyzstan: How Real Are Uzbek Minority Concerns?’ Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Reporting Central Asia, No 451, 7 June 2006.
67
It is worth considering why the idea of ‘autonomy’ was so alarming: after all, in many contexts autonomy is a way to preserve the unity of the state as an alternative to separatism. Kyrgyz fears that autonomy would be a step towards the fracture of the state are informed by post-Soviet comparisons. Many of the secessionist or irredentist wars on (post-) Soviet space were for a change in the political status of territories that already enjoyed some degree of formal autonomy – Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, South Ossetia, Abkhazia etc. Julie George argues that these autonomous regions provided mobilizing infrastructures for separatism, and the lack of such structures in the Ferghana Valley meant that ‘Long-term separatist goals and extensive nationalist mobilization have been conspicuously absent.’ George, Julie. (2009), ‘Expecting ethnic conflict: The Soviet legacy and ethnic politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia’, in Wooden, Amanda and Stefes, Christoph, The Politics of Transition in Central Asia and the Caucasus (London: Routledge); p.88ff
68 ‘Kyrgyz paper blasts OSCE for meddling in internal affairs’, Agym, 23 June 2006. BBC Monitoring CAU 11 July 2006.
REP Programme Paper: Averting Violence in Kyrgyzstan: Understanding and Responding to Nationalism www.chathamhouse.org 20
The policy responses of the Kyrgyz government and local authorities to the Osh events will be considered in the next section, but at this point it is worth noting that much popular reaction and comment followed the lines established before the violence, albeit with unprecedented (and often unchecked) vitriol. An extended essay by Kalen Subanov, provocatively entitled ‘Southern Kyrgyzstan: Caliphate or Uzbek state?’ identified a three-fold Uzbek threat to Kyrgyzstan.
The first was the Islamist group Hezb-ut-Tahrir, proscribed in both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and whose supporters in Osh are in the popular imagination (and probably in reality) identified primarily as being Uzbek. The second is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which has attacked Kyrgyzstan at various times since 1999 but was largely neutralized by the US military in Afghanistan. Subanov dwelt on the third, which he claimed was the operations of Uzbekistan’s security services to monitor and control drugs routes and thus consolidate their position in Kyrgyzstan. 69 Similarly, an article in the newspaper Alibi in late June 2010 moved seamlessly from invective against Uzbekistan for allegedly attempting to seize Kyrgyz border territory to invective against the Uzbek minority for not learning Kyrgyz and loyally identifying with the state. 70 The same paper claimed that the most essential factor for the unity of the nation was language, and that the only ethnic group one would fight for was that with which one shared a language. Therefore, ‘the only guarantee that we can preserve the Kyrgyz state’ is to employ in state service only people who know and can speak pure Kyrgyz. 71
These are familiar themes. The profound threats to the survival of Kyrgyzstan arising from disunity, geopolitics and language are brought together in Osh’s Uzbeks (or at least their leaders), who are disloyal, a vector for the actions of hostile Uzbekistan, and who refuse to learn the language or identify with proper Kyrgyz culture. The violence of June 2010 is thus read as simply the latest Uzbek attempt to dismember Kyrgyzstan; but this time, one that needs to be met with a tougher and more concerted response. It is this understanding that frames policy responses in Kyrgyzstan, as the next section explores.
69
state?], Alibi, 11 June 2010 (part I) and 15 June 2010 (part II).
70 Rakhmankulov, Mashakbay, 'Otkondu tapancha menen atsan... Ozubek ketip oz kaldyk’ [If you could shoot the past with a gun... Uzbeks left, we stayed by ourselves].
71 ‘Ichki integratsia kuchotulmoiuncho, mamlekettegi birimdik bekemdelbeit’ [State unity cannot be consolidated unless internal integration is strengthened], Alibi, 21 June 2011.
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