- Kill the victim and go to his funeral. Is NATO poised
to move into the heart of Central Asia, even as its war in Afghanistan
implodes, marvels Eric Walberg
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- Kyrgyzstan joined the rank of failed states this month:
its central government lacks legitimacy and depends heavily on external
aid, with the US base looming large, while the people are largely destitute,
harassed by local thugs and drug barons, and looking to Moscow for a way
out.
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- Clashes in the south are worse than earlier reported,
responsible for more than 300 killed, mostly Uzbeks, and setting off a
massive wave of refugees, with 100,000 people crammed in camps on Kyrgyzstan's
border with Uzbekistan and tens of thousands more displaced. The clashes
are almost certainly the result of a provocation organised by the clan
of ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
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- The issues at stake are the referendum next Sunday to
legitimise the interim government, and the drug trade, which Bakiyev's
clan still controls and is loathe to give up. Heroin comes from Afghanistan
via Tajikistan and is repackaged in Osh before being transported west to
Uzbekistan and north to Kazakhstan and Russia, according to the UN. The
killing two weeks ago of Aibek Mirsidikov, one of the drug kingpins in
the area, threatened the Bakiyev clan's control. The rest is history.
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- Jalalabad province commandant and first Deputy Chairman
of the Kyrgyz State National Security Service Kubatbek Baibolov charged
that a group of Tajik citizens, hired by the Bakiyev clan, opened fire
indiscriminately on both Kyrgyz and Uzbeks sparking the riots. Former Kyrgyz
president Askar Akayev told RT.com that Bakiyev's brothers Ahmad and Janysh
paid criminals and unemployed youths "in suitcases of cash to start
bashing people up and set everything on fire." Bakiyev had cleaned
out the banks and the Finance Ministry when he was ousted in April. Days
before the current uprising unemployed youth were suddenly flush with cash,
said Akayev.
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- The ex-president's son Maxim's indictment by Italian
investigators is what sparked his father's overthrow in April. That the
US was not the culprit this time (as opposed to the Tulip Revolution in
2005) is suggested by the fact that the new government continues to threaten
to close down the US airbase -- this time, if Britain refuses to hand over
Maxim, who was arrested Sunday at Farnborough airport when he arrived by
private plane, fleeing an Interpol arrest warrant on charges of corruption
and misusing state funds. He is of course seeking political asylum in Britain.
"England never gives up people who arrive on its territory. But since
England and the US fight terrorism, and the arrangement with the airbase
is one of the elements of that fight, then they must give over Maxim Bakiyev,"
warned Azimbek Beknazarov, deputy leader of the interim government.
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- This is not just a tragedy for the normally peaceful
Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, but also an alarming development for the entire ex-Soviet
space. Russia is now faced with the worst post-Soviet political crisis
in its "near abroad", where it insists -- rightly -- that it
has special claims, having millions of Russians scattered throughout those
countries, with intimate economic and cultural links from centuries of
both imperial and state socialist development. But where there are claims,
there are also responsibilities.
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- This is no better illustrated than the call by both sides,
Uzbeks and Kyrgyz alike, for Russian peacekeeping troops to be deployed
as disinterested mediators who understand the region and can communicate
with locals, unlike NATO forces in Afghanistan. The spectre of Russians
policing the streets of Osh raises none of the loathing and fear that US
and NATO troops patrolling, say, Marja, prompts. The peoples of virtually
all the ex-Soviet quasi-states (except the Baltics) would rejoin a Soviet-type
union in a flash as opinion polls continue to confirm two decades after
its ignominious "collapse". When Kyrgyzstan twitches, Russia
feels it, and vice versa.
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- Trying to put Humpty-Dumpty together again is impossible
at this point. Instead, the Russian strategy since Yeltsin has been to
do everything possible to keep these quasi-states stable, whatever their
political leanings. Even the Georgian bete noire Saakashvili was left in
place during his war with Russia in 2008. But this hands-off approach has
left a vacuum that the US has been filling, with its "democracy building",
colour revolutions and bases, oblivious to the fact that the new states
it helped give birth to in the first place are more like premmies
-- fragile and needing careful nurturing, always in danger of dying.
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- Russia's approach amounts to propping up dictators no
matter how ruthless or bloodthirsty, as long as they acknowledge Moscow's
interests. The nicest of the lot, Kyrgyzstan's ex-president Askar Akayev,
was overthrown in the US-inspired 2005 coup, which the US now surely regrets,
leaving one tolerable one -- Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, with Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan frozen in a very nasty timewarp.
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- Can Russia act as "an agent of change, as a force
for genuine modernisation, cautiously nudging the local authoritarian regimes
to transform, democratise and broaden their socio-political base?"
asks Igor Torbakov of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. If
Russia keeps referring to this crisis as merely an "internal conflict,"
it risks losing face, prestige and the right to claim the leading role
in the post-Soviet Eurasia.
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- Recent weeks have witnessed several other signs of a
Russian retreat in foreign policy. It failed to respond to the Brazil-Turkey
proposal to defuse the Iranian crisis, voted for sanctions, and cancelled
the S-300 missile deal with Iran, admitting to US pressure.
-
- The Arabs have a saying about the rascal who kills the
victim and then goes to his funeral. US involvement in Kyrgyz affairs exemplifies
this well: destabilise the state and now, like former US ambassador to
Russia James Collins and Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Programme deputy director
Matthew Rojansky, call for NATO and the US to "immediately engage
with regional partners to help restore security." There are no lines
to read between here: NATO should expand even further eastward through
its Partners for Peace. Collins/Rojansky magnanimously acknowledge that
this is "a responsibility NATO must share with the CSTO and the OSCE".
They blandly call for "the United States and Russia to put aside outdated
stereotypes and focus on their fundamentally shared interests in Eurasian
security".
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- Considering the disarray of the Collective Security Treaty
Organisation (CSTO), it is hard to fault the US for using this window of
opportunity to move further into the region. This crisis has shown that
the CSTO is not a serious regional organisation. The squabbling and suspicious
"stan" dictators, Russia, and China have little in common other
than their proximity. The CSTO's response, according to its General Secretary
Nikolai Burdyuzha, is to send "specialists who know how to plan and
organise an operation to prevent mass disorder, which would unmask its
instigators and localise bandit groups who provoke the situation."
-
- Is the OSCE an intermediate option, with its 56 member
states, including both NATO and CSTO members? Hardly. Russia is the main
actor here, with the other Central Asian states also having a pressing
need to try to salvage a viable statelet from this tragedy. The NATO quagmire
in Afghanistan needs no farcical replay. So the Collins/Rojansky call is
really just a call for NATO expansion, pure and simple.
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- Another possibility is for Turkey to step in. Kyrgyz
and Kazakh are both Turkic peoples, whose languages are mutually intelligible.
Kyrgyz territory was, in the khanate past, once one with that of the Kazakhs
-- the entire region was known as Turkestan. During a visit to Kazakhstan
this week, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and the Kazakh president
supported Kyrgyz plans to proceed with the referendum next Sunday. Davutoglu
said, "Immediately after the referendum, we plan together with Kazakhstan
to prepare joint actions to show our assistance to Kyrgyzstan."
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- If all else fails, there is China, though its presence
is problematic, given its suppression of the Uighurs across the border
in Xinjiang. But Beijing's self-confidence and massive economy inevitably
give it an outsize influence, especially if Russia and the West continue
to flounder.
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- ***
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- Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/
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