When The West Wanted Islam To Curb Christian Extremism

Russian and Ottoman forces battle in 1788 over a port on the Black Sea. (Wikimedia Commons)

Islam and those who practice it were not always perceived to be such a cultural threat. Just a few decades ago, the U.S. and its allies in the West had no qualms about abetting Islamist militants in their battles with the Soviets in Afghanistan. Look even further, and there was a time when a vocal constituency in the West saw the community of Islam as a direct, ideological counter to a mutual enemy.

Turn back to the 1830s. An influential group of officials in Britain -- then the most powerful empire in the West, with a professed belief in liberal values and free trade -- was growing increasingly concerned about the expanding might of Russia. From Central Asia to the Black Sea, Russia's newly won domains were casting a shadow over British colonial interests in India and the Middle East. The potential Russian capture of Istanbul, capital of the weakening Ottoman Empire, would mean Russia's navy would have free access to the Mediterranean Sea--an almost unthinkable prospect for Britain and other European powers.

And so, among diplomats and in the press, a Russophobic narrative began to emerge. It was ideological, a clash of civilizations. After all, beginning with the Catherine the Great in the late 18th century, the Russians had framed their own conquests in religious terms: to reclaim Istanbul, once the center of Orthodox Christianity, and, as one of her favorite court poetsput it, "advance through a Crusade" to the Holy Lands and "purify the river Jordan."

That sort of Christian zeal won little sympathy among other non-Orthodox Christians. Jerusalem in the 19th century was still the site of acrimonious street battles between Christian sects, policed by the exasperated Ottomans. Russian Orthodox proselytizing of Catholics in Polandinfuriated European Catholic nations further west, such as France.

Baron Ponsonby, the British ambassador to Istanbul for much of the 1830s, decided the job of thwarting Russian expansionism was a "Holy Cause." An article in the "British and Foreign Review" pamphlet, circulated in Britain in 1836, saw the Ottomans as "the only bulwark of Europe against Muscovy, of civilization against barbarism." Russia represented, insome accounts, a backward, superstitious society where peasants still labored in semi-slavery and monarchs ruled as tyrants, unchallenged by parliaments and liberal sentiment. The Ottomans, who were embarking on their own process of reform, looked favorable in comparison.

David Urquhart, an enterprising agent who served a spell with Ponsonby in Istanbul, became one of the most energetic champions of the Ottoman cause and Islamic culture in British policy circles. His writings on the threat of Russia shaped the opinions of many in Britain at the time, including a certain Karl Marx. And Urquhart's time spent among the tribes of the northern Caucasus set the stage for decades of romantic European idealizing of the rugged Muslim fighters in Russia's shadow.

Urquhart returned from his travels in Turkey and elsewhere convinced that the Ottoman lifestyle was better for one's health. "If London were [Muslim]," he wrote, "the population would bathe regularly, have a better-dressed dinner for [its] money, and prefer water to wine or brandy, gin or beer." He would later launch a largely unsuccessful movement to bring theculture of Turkish baths to the cold damp of Victorian Britain.

Casting his eye to the territories the Ottomans controlled, Urquhart praised the empire's rule over a host of Christian communities and other sects -- for example, the warring Druze and Maronites in the Levant, or feuding Greek Orthodox and Armenians. In a passage cited by the historian Orlando Figes in his excellent history of the Crimean War, Urquhart credits Islam under the Ottomans as a specifically "tolerant, moderating force":

What traveler has not observed the fanaticism, the antipathy of all these [Christian] sects – their hostility to each other? Who has traced their actual repose to the toleration of Islamism? Islamism, calm, absorbed, without spirit of dogma, or views of proselytism, imposes at present on the other creeds the reserve and silence which characterize itself. But let this moderator be removed, and the humble professions now confined to the sanctuary would be proclaimed in the court and the military camp; political power and political enmity would combine with religious domination and religious animosity; the empire would be deluged in blood, until a nervous arm – the arm of Russia – appears to restore harmony, by despotism.

Flash forward to 2014, and the conversation has curiously flipped: Pundits bluster about the centuries-old war between Sunnis and Shiites. Christians are a persecuted, beleaguered people in the Middle East. Without ruthless strongmen aligned with the West, we're told, the Muslim world would descend into a chaotic bloodbath where terrorist organizations would gain sway.

The history lesson above is not meant to denigrate the Russians... But it goes to show how much the politics of an era shape its conversation about cultures and peoples. That's no less true now than it was almost two centuries ago.

By Ishaan Tharoor

From Russia With Hate

Submitted by "Sayf Maslul" 

Current TV's Christof Putzel investigates a growing movement in Russia where neo-Nazi groups are brutally attacking immigrants and spreading their hate by posting violent videos online.

Caucasus Is Threatening To Become Russia's Iraq

Russia has been increasingly frustrated by the situation in the volatile northern Caucasus, where neither warfare nor economic investment has proven effective. Instead, the violent separatist insurgency has spread.

January 25, 2011
Courtesy Of "Deutsche Welle"

With Moscow investigators reportedly searching for a trio of Chechens in connection with Monday's suicide bombing at Domodedovo airport, attention has once again turned to the volatile North Caucasus, where Russia has been battling a stubborn insurgency for years.

The area has been troubled since Russian troops marched into Chechnya in 1994 following the state's unilateral declaration of independence. After the initial war and reoccupation of the capital city Grozny, the soldiers returned in 1999, starting what has become known as the second Chechen war, which ended with Russia's unstable military occupation of the province.

Guerrilla war ensued, and Russia frequently referred to its own "war on terror" - against an insurgency that became increasingly Islamist as the past bloody decade wore on. Finally, in April 2009, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared that that the trouble in Chechnya was over. He appointed the former businessman Alexander Khloponin as a new plenipotentiary to the North-Caucasian Federal District a year later, a new man who arrived offering to give the region an image overhaul.

"The Caucasus is not a nuclear bomb and not a powder keg, on which we sit. It is a strategic territory for Russia," Khloponin told journalists in May 2010. This explained why "that amount of money is invested into Northern Caucasus; and so many armed forces are kept there."

Putin's 'Mission Accomplished' Moment

But the army has remained, and troops have kept getting killed one by one. Analysts say the carrot and stick policy of economic investment and targeted attacks on separatist leaders has merely suppressed rather than eradicated the insurgency.

"I think that over the past year the Kremlin has been experiencing something akin to Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' moment in Iraq," Ben Judah, policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), told Deutsche Welle

While Chechnya itself has become relatively peaceful compared to five years ago, violence has stirred in the neighboring regions of Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria. "The situation has clearly been increasing in intensity, but also in scope," said Judah. "This has taken the Kremlin by surprise."

Putin declared the Chechen war over nearly two years ago

As a whole, the region is far from pacified. The Russian military has said they're losing as many as six interior ministry troops a day, and last year Russia lost more of her security forces in North Caucasus than the US lost in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in the first nine months of 2010 the number of attacks linked to separatist violence quadrupled to 352 compared to the previous year.

Economic Investment Lost To Bribery

Khloponin's drive to promote investment in the region is therefore coming under increasing doubt. Uwe Halbach, researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), thinks the airport bombing will not do his cause much good. "This well-meaning reform strategy is being questioned more and more," he told Deutsche Welle. "In the light of the precarious security situation in the region, companies that support tourism in North Caucasus will lose confidence."

It is almost impossible to say which of Russia's many problems is the worst. On a basic level, Judah believes Russia's endemic corruption is compromising security for its population. "According to Transparency International, Russia is as corrupt as Congo or Papua New Guinea," he said. "The fact that the state is increasingly corrupt means that the state isn't functioning efficiently, and is exposing normal Russians to dangers."

"The latest estimate is that bribes swallow up to 20 percent of the entire Russian GDP," Judah added. This is clearly also affecting North Caucasus. "The Russian government is always announcing that large amounts of funds will be dispatched to the region," said Judah. "But the question is, with corruption, how much is actually getting there?"

"Even though corruption is such a problem in Russia anyway, there's almost no region in Russia that is so affected by corruption as North Caucasus," agreed Halbach. But this is just one of many problems. "It's everything," the researcher continued. "It's the state of the regional authorities, the official security organs and the government organs. There's Islamist mobilization, there are mafia organizations. There are just so many different sources of violence."

Russian investment in the region has failed to buy stability

All these factors fuel separatist groups. "Human rights abuses, poverty, economic difficulties, and the fact they don't see themselves as being control of their own destiny. All these things foment separatism," said Judah. On top of this, "there are large ethnic tensions in Russia, which cause a lot of discontent in the Caucasus region. People in Moscow call people from the Caucasus 'blacks.'"

Degrees Of Separatism

The complexity of the discontent in the region is reflected in the way separatist impulses are expressed. The situation in North Caucasus is a lot more complex than is perhaps appreciated in the rest of the world, or even in Moscow. No single separatist group holds sway - while jihadism has certainly grown over the past few years, Islamic extremism is far from being the dominant rallying point for disgruntled people in the area.

"It depends who you mean by separatist," said Judah. "There are people who would like the region to have more autonomy, but are not willing to risk their lives or their livelihoods for it. Then you have people who used to be separatist, when they were young, or when the situation was different, but who are now making money out of Russian investment in the region. Then you have people who will help separatists without being directly involved, then you have a variety of separatist splinter groups - some Islamic extremist, some more nationalist."

The two civil wars in Chechnya have left a legacy of hatred that Russia's economic policies in the region, hamstrung by corruption, have done little to assuage.

Author: Ben Knight
Editor:  Rob Mudge

Russia's Empty Empire

Russia’s Neo-Imperialist Ambitions Founder On The Rocks Of Reality

Jun 24th 2010

Courtesy Of "The Economist"

SO MUCH for Russia’s “zone of privileged interests” and the West’s worries about it. The phrase was coined by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, in the aftermath of the 2008 war with Georgia, when Russian rhetoric reached shrill levels. The events of the past two weeks in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan have provided a humble reality check and exposed the hollowness of Russia’s neo-imperialist ambitions among the states that once made up the Soviet Union.

Russia has long wished to keep the West away from its backyard. Now that America and the EU are tied up with their own problems, Russia has had its wish partly granted. Left to its own devices, however, it has shown little leadership, vision or sense of imperial responsibility in its vaunted “zone”.

A spat over gas with Belarus has exposed the fragility of the embryonic customs union between Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, put forward by Moscow as the nucleus of a new Russia-dominated economic club. The bloody pogroms in Kyrgyzstan (see article) reveal the Collective Security Treaty Organisation—a post-Soviet military alliance of Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Belarus and Armenia—to be a chimera.

Related Items

• Kyrgyzstan's humanitarian crisis: Sad homecomingJun 24th 2010

In its dispute with Belarus this week Russia started to cut gas supplies to its supposed close ally, claiming it was owed some $200m. The debt stems from Belarus’s decision to pay last year’s price of $150 per thousand cubic metres of gas, ignoring a Gazprom price increase. Alyaksandr Lukashenka, Belarus’s maverick leader, upped the stakes by ordering a cut in transit shipments of Russian gas to the EU, arguing it was also owed money. On June 24th Gazprom resumed full supply but Belarus maintained its claim.

This is not the first spat between Russia and Belarus, and it will not be the last. But, as Fyodor Lukyanov, the Russia editor for Global Affairs, argues, this time the row has a political flavour. For all his authoritarianism and anti-Americanism, Mr Lukashenka is disdained by Russian officials for reneging on his promises and dragging his feet on agreements. He has skilfully managed to extract large subsidies from Russia while poking it in the eye and playing it off against the EU.

Last year the Belarusian president refused to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway Georgian territories over which Russia had warred with Georgia. That was followed by a Russian ban on Belarus’s milk products. More recently, Mr Lukashenka has decided to shelter Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the overthrown authoritarian leader of Kyrgyzstan, who is loathed by Moscow.

Mr Lukashenka has also sabotaged the customs union with Kazakhstan and Russia, demanding that Russia scrap its export duty on oil and oil products, which would allow Belarus to buy them at Russia’s domestic prices and to re-export them at a profit. (Russia wants to keep oil out of the union for now.) Russia’s response is to reach for its favourite weapon: the gas taps.

In its relations with its neighbours, Russia has mostly relied on coercion. Consider its response to Mr Bakiyev’s fall and the subsequent pogroms in Kyrgyzstan. The Kremlin shed no tears for Mr Bakiyev, whom it saw as two-faced and greedy. Last year Mr Bakiyev extracted a $2 billion aid package from Russia in exchange for a promise to close an American military air base in Kyrgyzstan, as Russia insisted. He then raised the rent for the American base and allowed it to stay.

Solve Your Own Problems
 
When, earlier this month, the Kyrgyz clashed with the Uzbek minority in the southern Kyrgyzstani city of Osh and the interim government appealed to Russia for military help, the Kremlin stood back. To the outside world it looked like the opportunity Russia had been waiting for to show that it dominates its backyard. To Russia it was a nightmare that evoked memories of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Russia’s official line was that it could not interfere in Kyrgyzstan’s internal affairs (a statement that sat oddly with Russia’s war against Georgia).

In fact, Russia has neither the capacity nor the will for such intervention. As Alexander Golts, an expert on Russia’s armed forces, argues, the Russian army—which largely consists of unskilled recruits and is plagued by bullying—is not equipped for the sort of peacekeeping operation they were asked to carry out in Kyrgyzstan. Besides, Russia’s “allies” in the CSTO, particularly nearby Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, have no desire to see Russian troops setting a precedent by sorting out the internal affairs of a neighbouring state.
Russia’s intervention would be unpopular at home too. Xenophobia towards migrant workers from Central Asia and memories of Afghanistan would make any sacrifice of Russian lives in Kyrgyzstan unacceptable to most Russians. Yet, if Russia was right not to send troops to Kyrgyzstan, it was wrong to claim the country as part of a zone of privileged Russian interest.

When ethnic clashes broke out in Osh 20 years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev sent in Soviet troops. Today’s government, for all its Soviet nostalgia, seems to feel no such obligation. What Russia’s response to Kyrgyzstan has made clear, Mr Golts observes, is that “Moscow bosses imitate imperial ambitions in the same way they imitate democracy.”

'Kyrgyzstan Is On The Brink Of Collapse'

Unrest In Central Asia

June 17, 2010
Courtesy Of "Der Spiegel Online"

Photo Gallery: 12 Photos

AFP

With hundreds dead and tens of thousands of refugees, ethnic violence has brought chaos to Kyrgyzstan. Central Asia policy expert Andrea Schmitz told SPIEGEL ONLINE about the history behind the attacks on the Uzbek minority and the wobbly transitional government.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The news from Kyrgyzstan is deeply disturbing. Officially, 170 people have been killed during the angry unrest over the last week and other sources put the death toll above 700. What is the current situation?

Schmitz: Official figures probably understate the number of dead, which is likely to be considerably higher. I do not have the exact numbers. The situation at present is so chaotic no one can reliably count the dead.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Reports say almost all the dead belong to the Uzbek minority.

Schmitz: That appears to be correct. However, it's also said that those behind the unrest have tried to turn Kyrgyz and Uzbeks against each other. But the violence has clearly focused on the Uzbek minority.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Some speculate that the ex-President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was toppled in April, is behind the unrest. Do you consider this plausible?

Schmitz: I do not think that Bakiyev, from the distance of his exile in Minsk, is in a position to pull the strings. But I am firmly of the belief that parts of his network and his followers -- possibly in conjunction with protagonists from organized-crime circles -- may have instigated the violence. It has become clear that supporters of the former president are not prepared to let anyone take either power or resources. In addition, there is some evidence that revenge has played a role. Some of the Uzbek "strong men" said to have drug trafficking connections have made the mistake of positioning themselves in the power struggle, supporting the interim government and standing against the followers of Bakiyev. I expect that Bakiyev supporters have not forgiven them for that.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In addition to vengeance, is the unrest also about undermining or even overthrowing the transitional government of Roza Otunbayeva?

Schmitz: Absolutely. This was clearly about creating chaos and preventing the referendum on a new constitution, planned for late June. The problem of the transitional government is that it has no legitimacy and is hardly in a position to calm the situation.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: At the moment the situation seems to have calmed slightly.

Schmitz: But the danger has not yet passed. I assume the perpetrators of the pogroms have retreated to discuss how to proceed.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Aid agencies are working on the assumption that hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks have fled. But Uzbekistan has not open its borders. Why?

Schmitz: At first Uzbekistan did open its borders, but after up to 80,000 refugees entered the country, Uzbekistan is apparently unable to accept more. That is not implausible.

Part 2: 'Russia Plays a Sorry Part in This Conflict'

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What is Russia's role? The transitional government asked Moscow to intervene, but that has not happened.

Schmitz: Russia plays a very sorry part in this conflict. Right now one has the impression that Russian crisis-management exists as a pretense, not as reality. This is also evident from the debate within the regional security body, the Collective Security Treaty Organization. It's dominated by Russia, and it could not agree to send a peacekeeping mission. I can explain this only by saying there is a lack of deployable forces, a lack of political will and lack of responsibility. It's becoming more and more clear that in emergencies, you can't rely on Russia as a crisis manager. Moscow wants power and influence, but it's not prepared to accept responsibility.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What are possible reasons for Russia's restraint?

Schmitz: Resistance to an intervention looks equally strong in the parliament, the leadership and the public at large. Part of the reason is fear of a second Afghanistan. Another part is the complexity of Kyrgyzstan's predicament. The risks are considered too large to take on.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Who else can help?

Schmitz: If others can't help, it normally falls to the United Nations to play fireman. If the situation doesn't ease, a peace mission under UN mandate would be probably the wisest step. The EU is also needed, at least for humanitarian assistance.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How would you assess the risk posed to neighboring republics?

Schmitz: The risk is currently not very high, but by definition it does exist because of the ethnic instability in Kyrgyzstan. One worrying speculation is that those behind the escalation may enter an alliance with Islamist terrorists in the region. That would be disastrous.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What are the realistic measures you believe should be taken?

Schmitz: First, humanitarian assistance for refugees, the injured and the traumatized. In addition, food and medical assistance and effective protection of the population. The Collective Security Treaty Organization has promised to bring supplies to help stabilize the area -- fuel for example. Let's hope it happens. Kyrgyzstan needs all the help it can get.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Can the referendum be held as planned?

Schmitz: The transitional government lacks legitimacy and control over substantial parts of the administrative apparatus. At the moment Kyrgyzstan doesn't even have a parliament. The referendum, scheduled for late June, should relieve the situation. But under current circumstances, the referendum could turn out to be unrepresentative. Participation, especially in the south, will be too low, meaning there would be no point to hold a referendum. So it might be wiser to postpone and to put emphasis on restoring the functioning state. After all, Kyrgyzstan is currently on the brink of collapse.

Interview conducted by Yassin Musharbash

Why Isn't Russia Intervening In Kyrgyzstan?

By Simon Shuster
Wednesday, Jun. 16, 2010
Courtesy Of "Time Magazine"

The Russian president appeared before the cameras on Monday night with bloodshot eyes and a grave decision to make. Armed gangs were slaughtering the Uzbek community in the south of Kyrgyzstan — a region that Russia still considers part of its geopolitical backyard — and the interim Kyrgyz government was pleading with Moscow to send in troops. Its leaders said that many of the ethnic Kyrgyz soldiers were refusing to shoot at their own people, allowing the marauders to systematically kill Uzbeks and burn their homes. But President Dmitry Medvedev has refused to intervene. Russia's cherished claim to being the big brother in the former Soviet Union is badly tarnished, and experts say that the nation's other allies could now start questioning the point of their relationship with Moscow.

For the hundreds of thousands of Uzbek refugees who have fled the violence, Russia's inaction is little short of betrayal. "The people are screaming for someone to help them," Felix Kulov, the former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan, told reporters by phone from Bishkek on Wednesday. "They are scared to return home and try to rebuild, because it's impossible to know who will attack them and whether the police will protect them. We need outside peacekeepers, and only the Russians make sense for this crisis." If neighboring Central Asian countries sent in peacekeepers, he added, the troops would likely take sides in the ethnic clashes, while western forces wouldn't be much help because they have no experience in the area and don't know the language. (See pictures of ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan.)

The hope that Russia might intervene stems from the precedent of 1990, when Moscow sent in troops to the same area in Kyrgyzstan to stop clashes between the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks that cost 300 lives. That was in the final years of the Soviet Union, when Kyrgyzstan was still one of Russia's vassal states. Recently, however, Russia has been struggling to regain some of the influence it lost after the Soviet collapse. To this end, it created the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in 2002, a military alliance of seven ex-Soviet countries, including Kyrgyzstan. In 2005, the organization even created a rapid-reaction force, which is funded and equipped almost entirely by Russia to deal with sudden flare-ups of violence and natural disasters. And, yet, Russia and the other CSTO members are reluctant to send their troops into the fray.

"Now we see the main problem with this force — the political squeamishness of the CSTO's leadership, meaning above all Russia," says retired General Leonid Ivashov, former head of foreign military cooperation at Russia's defense ministry. "[Russia] has shown indecision, wavering at an absolutely critical time, when urgent action is needed to save lives and restore order," he tells TIME. The Kremlin did not even respond to the violence — which began on June 10 — until Saturday, when around 80 people had already been killed and two Kyrgyz cities were in flames. Then it announced through a spokeswoman that the killings were an internal Kyrgyz matter and that Russia "saw no conditions for taking part in its resolution." (See pictures of the April uprising against Kurmanbek Bakiyev.)

Medvedev did call an urgent meeting of the CSTO to discuss a joint aid mission, but by the time he learned of its outcome in a televised briefing on Monday night, the situation had grown much worse. The official death toll had reached almost 150, and the threat of a cross-border conflict was growing as tens of thousands of refugees fled to Uzbekistan, where there is a large Kyrgyz minority. "This situation is intolerable," Medvedev told the officials who had come to propose an aid package. "People have died, blood is still being spilled, and there is mass unrest of an ethnic nature, which is extremely dangerous in Central Asia. So we need to take absolutely all measures to stop these kinds of actions, measures that are in line with the law but tough."

He took a long pause before giving his orders, which turned out to be not so tough. He said the members of the CSTO should vote on whether to send humanitarian aid and military equipment, such as helicopters and personnel carriers. "If the situation gets worse, I don't exclude the possibility of having the CSTO meet again to draft new proposals…or even calling a meeting of the heads of state of the CSTO," Medvedev said. No mention of sending in troops was made and the leaders of the CSTO member states are still considering the President's proposal to vote.

Reached by TIME on Wednesday, CSTO spokesman Vladimir Zaynetdinov brushed off claims that Kyrgyzstan, as a member of the alliance, deserved to get a peacekeeping mission when its country was on the brink of civil war. "Our actions do not violate our charter or any of our other agreements," he said. He declined to comment on how quickly the members would be able to vote to approve the aid package, or whether the alliance would finally intervene if the clashes spilled over into Uzbekistan: "Let's not talk about hypotheticals. For now we are waiting."

But the international community is getting impatient. The Obama Administration's top Central Asian diplomat, Robert Blake, will be traveling to Kyrgyzstan on Friday to assess the need for assistance. Meanwhile, the death toll continues to climb, reaching 187 on Wednesday, according to the Kyrgyz Health Ministry. The Red Cross insists the number of dead is much higher, and the United Nations refugee agency says around 275,000 people have already fled the violence. (See more on whether Kyrgyzstan violence will draw in Russia or the U.S.)

So what is holding Russia and the CSTO back? Some analysts believe the young military alliance is just not ready to take on its first international peacekeeping mission, and in any case, Russia knows it would have to foot the bill and provide most of the troops. An intervention could also be hugely unpopular for Russia at home, as it risks getting the military enmeshed in protracted conflict. An online survey conducted on Monday by the Ekho Moskvy radio station suggested that vast majority of Russians want to keep their troops out of Kyrgyzstan. But for Russia's traditional partners in the region, this crisis could be a rude awakening. It suggests that Russia is happy to buy up oil and gas from Central Asia, or team up on issues of mutual benefit. But when things go wrong, its neighbors are on their own.

(See why Kyrgyzstan remains in crisis.)

Kyrgyzstan: Bloodstained Geopolitical Chessboard

"Kyrgyzstan is Washington's military outpost in a region where the interests of several major nations - Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran among them - converge. U.S. stratagems in the nation, whether attempts at the maintenance of a permanent military presence or rotating governments through the use of standard "regime change" maneuvers, will have consequences far more serious than what the status of the diminutive and impoverished Central Asian nation may otherwise indicate."

By Rick Rozoff
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Courtesy Of "Media Monitors"

Events in a remote, landlocked and agrarian nation of slightly over five million people have become the center of world attention.

A week of violence which first erupted in Kyrgyzstan's second largest city, Osh, in the south of the country, has resulted in the deaths of at least 120 civilians and in over 1,700 being injured.

More than 100,000 ethnic Uzbeks have fled Osh and the nearby city of Jalal-Abad (Jalalabad) and three-quarters of those have reportedly crossed the border into Uzbekistan.

A report of June 14 estimated that 50,000 were stranded on the Kyrgyz side of the border without food, water and other necessities. [1]

Witnesses describe attacks by gangs of ethnic Kyrgyz against Uzbeks with reports of government armed forces siding with the assailants.

The following day the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that 275,000 people in total had fled the violence-torn area.

On June 14 the deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Osh, Severine Chappaz, was quoted as warning: "We are extremely concerned about the nature of the violence that is taking place and are getting reports of severe brutality, with an intent to kill and harm. The authorities are completely overwhelmed, as are the emergency services.

"The armed and security forces must do everything they can to protect the vulnerable and ensure that hospitals, ambulances, medical staff and other emergency services are not attacked." [2]

The government of neighboring Uzbekistan had registered 45,000 refugees by June 14, with an estimated 55,000 more on the way. United Nations representatives said that over 100,000 people had fled Kyrgyzstan, mainly ethnic Uzbeks to Uzbekistan, by June 15.

According to a news account of the preceding day, "Kyrgyz mobs burned Uzbek villages and slaughtered residents on Sunday, sending more than 75,000 Uzbeks fleeing across the border into Uzbekistan. Ethnic Uzbeks in a besieged neighbourhood of the Kyrgyz city of Osh said gangs, aided by the military, were carrying out genocide, burning residents out of their homes and shooting them as they fled." [3]

Accounts of hundreds of corpses in the streets and a hundred bodies buried in one unmarked grave have also surfaced.

The government of acting (unelected) president Roza Otunbayeva (the nation's first ambassador to the United States in the early 1990s) called up all reservists under 50 years of age and issued shoot-to-kill orders in the affected areas.

On June 13 Russia deployed a reinforced battalion of as many as 650 airborne troops to the Kant Air Base in Kyrgyzstan where Russian air force units have been stationed since 2003. (Russia had also sent 150 paratroopers to the base after April's overthrow of Otunbayeva's predecessor Kurmanbek Bakiyev.)

On June 15 two chartered planes repatriated 195 Chinese nationals from Kyrgyzstan, flying them into the adjoining Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. By the following day almost 1,000 Chinese had been rescued.

India, Pakistan, Turkey and Russia also evacuated citizens from the nation.

Both the Collective Security Treaty Organization consisting of Russia, Kyrgyzstan and five other former Soviet republics and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of China, Russia and all Central Asian nations except for Turkmenistan have addressed the Kyrgyz crisis.

This month's bloody rampages were an aftershock of those following the overthrow of President Bakiyev in early April [4], following which at least 80 people were killed and over 1,500 injured. At that time Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that "Kyrgyzstan is on the threshold of a civil war." [5]

The current violence in Kyrgyzstan, which may prove to be terminal for the 19-year-old Central Asian state, is a continuation and inevitable culmination of that of April. The latter in turn occurred five years after the overthrow of the government of President Askar Akayev by a coalition of opposition forces led by Bakiyev, Otunbayeva and Felix Kulov, a coup that was widely celebrated in the West at the time as the high point of an inexorable wave of what were characterized as "color" and "rainbow" revolutions in the former Soviet Union and beyond.

Two months after the 2005 putsch in Kyrgyzstan, U.S. President George W. Bush was in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi where he crowed: "In recent months, the world has marvelled at the hopeful changes taking place from Baghdad to Beirut to Bishkek [the Kyrgyz capital]. But before there was a purple revolution in Iraq, or an orange revolution in Ukraine, a cedar revolution in Lebanon, there was a rose revolution in Georgia." [6]

Bush's statement, his transparent endorsement of the "color revolution" model of extending U.S. domination over former Soviet states and Middle Eastern nations, has been echoed by former U.S. national security advisor and self-ordained geostrategic chess master Zbigniew Brzezinski who was quoted by a Kyrgyz news source as saying, "I believe revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were a sincere and snap expression of the political will.” [7]

The ringleaders of the 2005 violent, unconstitutional takeover in Kyrgyzstan divided up top government posts, with Bakiyev becoming president, Kulov prime minister and Otunbayeva acting foreign minister.

Regarding the "hopeful changes" that Bush and Brzezinski acclaimed, it is worth recalling that the only two elected presidents in the young nation's history are wanted men forced into exile. The "shock therapy" privatization of the nation's economy in the 1990s, as disruptive as it was abrupt, laid the groundwork for subsequent destabilization, but that buildings are flammable is no defense for an arsonist.

The Pentagon opened the Manas Air Base (also named the Ganci Air Base by the U.S.) near the Kyrgyz capital in December of 2001, two months after the invasion of Afghanistan to support military operations in that nation.

The base, since last summer called the Transit Center at Manas, has seen hundreds of thousands of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization combat troops pass through in the interim.

Washington's civilian hit man for the expanding war in South Asia, which is the largest and most deadly war in the world currently with hundreds of thousands of troops involved and millions of civilians displaced on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, is Richard Holbrooke, appointed Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan after the new administration was installed in Washington in January of last year.

This February he visited Kyrgyzstan and the three other former Soviet Central Asian republics it borders: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Shortly after returning to Washington, "Holbrooke said that the United States would soon renew an agreement to use the Manas airbase, where he said 35,000 US troops were transiting each month on their way in and out of Afghanistan." [8]

Afterward Major John Redfield of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said that during the next month, this March, 50,000 American troops had passed through the Kyrgyz base to and from Afghanistan, and the new commander of U.S. operations at Manas with the 376th Air Expeditionary Wing, Colonel Dwight Sones, recently disclosed that "55,000 servicemen were airlifted to Afghanistan via Manas in May." [9]

That is, 20,000 more troops a month over a three-month period and at a rate of almost two-thirds of a million annually.

In February of 2009 Kyrgyzstan's parliament voted 78-1 to close the U.S. air base at Manas and President Kurmanbek Bakiyev signed a decree to do so.

The U.S. was given "180 days to withdraw some 1,200 personnel, aircraft and other equipment." [10] The following month Kyrgyz deputies also voted to expel military personnel from Australia, Denmark, Italy, Spain, South Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Turkey and France, all nations providing troops for NATO's International Assistance Security Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.

Popular internal opposition to the presence of U.S. and NATO forces in the country had been mounting as the Afghan war dragged on interminably and especially after the killing of a Kyrgyz civilian, Alexander Ivanov, by an American soldier in December of 2006 and the dumping of 80 tons of fuel into the atmosphere by U.S. military planes the year before. Many Kyrgyz also fear that the use of the air base at Manas for an attack against Iran could pull their nation into a second and far more catastrophic armed conflict.

The situation was made worse in August of 2008 when "A major depot with weapons and ammunition" was "found in a private house in Bishkek rented by U.S. nationals in an operation by Kyrgyz police....According to law enforcement officers, six heavy machine guns, 26 Kalashnikov assault-rifles, almost 3,000 cartridges for them, two Winchester rifles, four machine gun barrels, two grenade launches, four sniper guns, six Beretta pistols, 10,000 cartridges for a nine-millimetre pistol, 478 12-millimetre cartridges, 1,000 tracer cartridges and 123 empty magazines were found there.

"Police said the house belonged to a Kyrgyz national, who had rented it to US nationals.

"They also said there were several staffers of the U.S. Embassy to Kyrgyzstan having diplomatic immunity, as well as ten U.S. military in the house during the search." [11]

The U.S. claimed it had government permission to store the above-described arsenal in a private residence.

Last year Russia negotiated an extension of its military presence at the Kant Air Base for 49 years and offered the Kyrgyz government a $2 billion loan.

In June of 2009 the outgoing U.S. commander at Manas, Colonel Christopher Bence, "said the facility had started to wind down operations" and "has started to shut down and will close by mid-August." [12] He added "that over the past year alone 189,000 troops from 20 countries had moved to and out of Afghanistan via the Manas base" [13] and that "we have started shipping equipment and supplies to other locations and those shipments should be finished by August 18." [14] (Recall that 55,000 Western troops passed through the base last month alone.)

However, earlier in the month President Barack Obama sent a personal appeal to his Kyrgyz counterpart urging him to reverse the decision to expel U.S. military personnel, some 1,300 permanently assigned to the base, and "Kyrgyzstan showed more flexibility on the matter after receiving the letter...." [15]

On July 2 President Bakiyev signed an agreement to extend U.S. military presence at Manas after Washington offered $180 million a year for the use of the base, thereafter referred to as a transit center. "Rent for the land is $60 million as compared to $17.4 million Kyrgyzstan received for hosting the airbase." [16] In early August U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent a letter to President Bakiyev commending him for overriding the near-unanimous decision by his country's parliament, including his own party's deputies, to close down Pentagon operations, instead simply renaming the Manas Air Base while activity there was scheduled to increase.

A Russian report on the transition, a change more formal than substantive, said that "Many experts on Central Asian politics speculated that Bishkek was simply angling for more money and was not intending to close the base." [17]

It is in part a struggle over the $180 million in U.S. funds as well as the $2 billion in Russian aid pledged in February of last year that precipitated April's phase two of the so-called Tulip Revolution.

Complementing the new arrangement with the Pentagon, last December Kyrgyzstan authorized the establishment of a NATO representative office in its capital. A spokesman for the nation's parliament said at the time, "Until recently, the NATO representative office was located in the city of Astana, Kazakhstan." Kyrgyz Defense Minister Bakyt Kalyev stated: "NATO recently started to pay special attention to Central Asia in light of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

"The relocation of NATO's official to the territory of Kyrgyzstan will proceed as part of the Partnership for Peace Program. One of the key reasons behind the transfer of the office from Astana to Bishkek is the fact that the territory of the republic houses the International Transit Center." [18]

Richard Holbrooke met with the Kyrgyz president this February to solidify plans for the Manas base.

This March it was announced that the Pentagon is to set up a "counter-terrorism" special forces training base in Kyrgyzstan.

General David Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command, visited Kyrgyzstan and met with its president in March. "The visit [came] a day after US diplomats confirmed Washington would provide US$5.5 million to the Kyrgyz government toward the construction of a counter-terrorism training center in southern Kyrgyzstan." [19]

The day after this April's uprising began a Pentagon spokesman said of the operations at Manas that "Our support to Afghanistan continues and has not been seriously affected, and we are hopeful that we will be able to resume full operations soon." [20]

A week later the government of then interim prime minister Roza Otunbayeva extended the lease for the Manas base another year. The next month a record number of Western troops passed through Kyrgyzstan in support of the war in Afghanistan.

On June 10 Robert Simmons, NATO's Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, arrived in the Kyrgyz capital to further military cooperation with the new regime. "Simmons visits Kyrgyzstan each time the existence of the Transit Center at Manas, called Manas Air Base until 2009, is threatened. The high-ranking diplomat's first visit to Bishkek took place in May 2005.

"Then, Washington was concerned about the base's future after the March 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan that overthrew President Askar Akayev. Simmons paid another visit to the republic in February 2009, or two weeks before President Kurmanbek Bakiyev announced his intention to close the base. This time, Simmons met with Roza Otunbayeva, head of the Kyrgyz interim government, and acting Finance Minister Temir Sariyev, who is responsible for budget income." [21]

In addition, "Kyrgyz media say Washington has paid $15 million in first-quarter lease payments ahead of schedule and promises to transfer the second tranche to the cash-strapped Kyrgyz budget soon." [22]

On June 8 EurasiaNet, "operated by the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute," [23] ran a feature entitled "Pentagon Looks to Plant New Facilities in Central Asia," which included these excerpts:

"The Pentagon is preparing to embark on a mini-building boom in Central Asia. A recently posted sources-sought survey indicates the US military wants to be involved in strategic construction projects in all five Central Asian states, including Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

"According to the notice posted on the Federal Business Opportunities (FBO) website in mid-May, the US Army Corps of Engineers wants to hear from respondents interested in participating in 'large-scale ground-up design-build construction projects in the following Central South Asian States (CASA): Kazakhstan; Kyrgyzstan; Tajikistan; Turkmenistan; and Uzbekistan.'

“'We anticipate two different projects in Kyrgyzstan. Both are estimated to be in the $5 million to $10 million dollar range.'” [24]

On June 14 Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan told CNN that "the refueling and troop transport operations at the U.S. transit base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan, continue 'unabated' by ethnic riots in the southern part of the country....Refueling operations had been halted while the United States negotiated new fuel contracts with the interim government...but late last week refueling started again." [25]

An analysis recently appeared on the website of the German international radio broadcaster Deutsche Welle which provided insightful background information regarding the current crisis in Kyrgyzstan:

"Bakiyev's installation as president in 2005 with US backing may have provided Washington with a friendly government with whom to do business with but it also gave the US a significant foothold in a country that some strategists believe is paramount to its plans for regional dominance."

"The inclusion of Kyrgyzstan and three other central Asian states in NATO's Partnership for Peace program in 1994 was seen as a major step toward increasing US military presence in the region which eventually led to the US base at Manas, outside Bishkek in the north, being established."

"While Manas remains a key hub for US operations in Afghanistan, it is also used as a NATO base - a situation which angers and concerns Russia which fears the eastern enlargement of its former Cold War opponent, putting Kyrgyzstan at the center of a power struggle for regional influence....Russia is also concerned about the possibility of being encircled by NATO member states should the alliance go ahead with its provocative eastern enlargement."

"The Chinese see increasing US influence as not only a threat to its plans for Eurasia, which along with promoting its emerging market policy also includes energy security and supply, but also a threat to the People's Republic itself....Beijing [is] more concerned that the porous nature of the border is allowing US intelligence agencies to run covert destabilizing operations into the strategically vital and politically fragile [Xinjiang] province. Beijing believes the flow of people across the border gives US operations a perfect cover." [26]

Small and seemingly insignificant Kyrgyzstan is the country most vital to U.S. and NATO for the reinforcement and escalation of the war in Afghanistan, even more than Pakistan where NATO supply convoys are routinely attacked and destroyed.

The transit center in the country is the only base the Pentagon has in Central Asia after it was evicted from the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan five years ago.

Kyrgyzstan is Washington's military outpost in a region where the interests of several major nations - Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran among them - converge. U.S. stratagems in the nation, whether attempts at the maintenance of a permanent military presence or rotating governments through the use of standard "regime change" maneuvers, will have consequences far more serious than what the status of the diminutive and impoverished Central Asian nation may otherwise indicate.

Notes:

[1]. Itar-Tass, June 14, 2010

[2]. UzReport, June 14, 2010

[3]. Daily Times (Pakistan)/Agencies, June 14, 2010

[4]. Kyrgyzstan And The Battle For Central Asia, Stop NATO, April 7, 2010
http://tinyurl.com/2f6en3l

[5]. Russian Information Agency Novosti, April 14, 2010

[6]. Agence France-Presse, May 11, 2005

[7]. 24.kg, March 27, 2008

[8]. Agence France-Presse, March 4, 2010

[9]. Interfax, June 15, 2010

[10]. Russian Information Agency Novosti, February 20, 2009

[11]. Itar-Tass, March 6, 2009

[12]. Reuters, June 15, 2009

[13]. Voice of Russia, June 17, 2009

[14]. Stars and Stripes, June 16, 2009

[15]. Reuters, June 11, 2009

[16]. Russia Today, June 23, 2009

[17]. Ibid

[18]. Interfax, December 29, 2009

[19]. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 10, 2010

[20]. U.S. Air Forces in Europe, American Forces Press Service, April 8, 2010

[21]. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, June 15, 2010

[22]. Ibid

[23]. http://tinyurl.com/25aqxfq

[24]. EurasiaNet, June 8, 2010
http://tinyurl.com/2bakmjx

[25]. CNN, June 14, 2010

[26]. Nick Amies, Kyrgyzstan unrest adds new edge to global powers' regional rivalry, Deutsche Welle, June 14, 2010

All Roads Lead To The Caucasus

Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia

By Eric Walberg
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Mar 10, 2010, 00:22
Courtesy Of The Online Journal

The Russian Federation republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Ingushetia have experienced a sharp increase in assassinations and terrorist bombings in the past few years which have reached into the heart of Russia itself, most spectacularly with the bombing of the Moscow-Leningrad express train in January that killed 26.

Last week police killed at least six suspected militants in Ingushetia. Dagestan has especially suffered in the past two years, notably with the assassination of its interior minister last June and the police chief last month. The number of armed attacks more than doubled last year. In February, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev replaced Dagestan president Mukhu Aliyev with Magomedsalam Magomedov, whose father Magomedali led Dagestan from 1987-2006. Aliyev was genuinely popular, praised for his honesty and fight against corruption, but was seen as too soft on terror.

President Magomedov has vowed to put the violence-ridden region in order and pardon rebels who turn in weapons.”I have no illusion that it will be easy. Escalating terrorist activity in the North Caucasus, including in Dagestan, urges us to revise all our methods of fighting terror and extremism.” He vowed to attack unemployment, organised crime, clan rivalry and corruption.

Violence continues to plague Chechnya as well. Russian forces have fought two wars against separatists in Chechnya since 1994, leaving more than 100,000 dead and the region in ruins, inspiring terrorist attacks throughout the region. Five Russian soliders and as many rebels were killed there at the beginning of February. According to theLong War Journal, in February, Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB) killed a key Al-Qaeda fighter based in Chechnya, Mokhmad Shabban, an Egyptian known as Saif Islam (Sword of Islam), the mastermind behind the 6 January suicide bombing that killed seven Russian policemen in Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala. He was wanted for attacks against infrastructure and Russian soldiers throughout Chechnya and neighbouring republics.

Since the early 1990s, militants such as Shabban have operated from camps in Georgia’s Pansiki Gorge, and used the region as a safe haven to launch attacks inside Chechnya and the greater Caucasus. The FSB said Shabban “masterminded acts of sabotage to blast railway tracks, transmission lines, and gas and oil pipelines at instructions by Georgian secret services.”

This is impossible to prove, but Georgia was the only state to recognise the Republic of Ichkeria when Chechens unilaterally declared independence in 1991 and Shabban’s widow, Alla, has a talk show on First Caucasus TV, a station located in Georgia and beamed into Chechnya. Interestingly, from 2002-2007, more than 200 US Special Forces troops were training Georgian troops in Pansiki, though neither the Americans nor the Georigans were able to end the attacks on Russia.

Medvedev said last month that violence in the North Caucasus remains Russia’s biggest domestic problem, arguing that it will only end once the acute poverty in the region and the corruption and lawlessness within the security organs themselves are addressed. He has undertaken an ambitious reform of security organisations and the police throughout Russia with this in mind.

Sceptics may point to the parallel between the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and Russian policy in the north Caucasus. Yes, there is a Russian geopolitical context, but the comparison is specious. These regions have been closely tied both economically and politically to Russia for two centuries, which Abkhazian President Sergei Bagpash shrewdly decided to celebrate last month in order to ensure Moscow’s support.

The patchwork quilt of nationalities of the Caucasus has survived under Russian sponsorship and now has the prospect of prospering if left in peace. Politicians like Bagpash make the best of the situation, as do sensible politicians throughout Russia’s “near abroad.” To alienate or try to subvert a powerful neighbour and potential friend, as does Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, is plain bad politics.

The other Caucasian conflict is the long running tragedy of Nagorno Karabakh, which unlike the other conflicts pits two supposed NATO hopefuls against each other. The war occurred from 1988-94, dating from the dying days of the Soviet Union, when Armenia invaded Azerbaijan, carving out a corridor through the country to seize the mountain region populated for over a millennium largely by ethnic Armenians. A ceasefire was finally achieved leaving Armenia in possession of the enclave and a corridor, together consisting of almost 20 per cent of Azerbaijani territory. As many as 40,000 died, and 230,000 Armenians and a million Azeris were displaced.

A Russian-brokered ceasefire has been followed by intermittent peace talks mediated by the OSCE Minsk Group, co-chaired by the United States, France and Russia. But it is clear that Azerbaijan will not rest until its territory is returned. “If the Armenian occupier does not liberate our lands, the start of a great war in the south Caucasus is inevitable,” warned Azerbaijan Defence Minister Safar Abiyev in February. “Armenians must unconditionally withdraw from our lands. And only after that should cooperation and peace be established,” said Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev last week. Armenian and Azerbaijani forces are spread across a ceasefire line in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, often facing each other at close range, with shootings reported as common. Last week an Armenian soldier was killed.

Russia, culturally closer to Armenia, is resented by Azerbaijan as biased, and indeed there has been no commitment by any of the peacemakers or Armenia to return the territory. But the playing field changed dramatically after Georgia’s defeat in its war against Russia in 2008, setting in motion unforeseen regional realignments throughout the region.

First was rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia, which at first set off alarm bells in Baku, relying as it does internationally on the support of Turkey, which closed its borders with Armenia in 1993 in response to the Armenian occupation. Turkey established diplomatic relations with Armenia last year in keeping with the Justice and Development Party’s “zero problems with neighbours,” but says ratification by parliament and a full border opening will not happen until Armenia makes some concessions to Azerbaijan.

Moscow has also been pursuing a charm offensive with neighbours in recent years, and was successful in getting both Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents to sign the Moscow Declaration in November 2008, though the warring sides subsequently have managed only to agree on procedural matters.

Key to all further developments throughout the region is the role of the US and NATO. Until recently, it looked like NATO would succeed in expanding into Ukraine and Georgia. It is also eager to have Azerbaijan and Armenia join. Not surprisingly, these moves are seen as hostile by Russia. If the unlikely happens, this would mean the US has important influence in all the conflicts in the Caucasus. But would pushing Armenia and Azerbaijan, two warring nations, into the fold help resolve their intractable differences?

Though both have sent a few troops to Afghanistan, the very idea of warring nations joining the military bloc is nonsense, and noises about it can only be interpreted as attempts to curry favour with the world’s superpower. Azerbaijan has much-coveted Caspian Sea oil and gas, but Armenia is Christian and Azerbaijan Muslim, and Armenia has a strong US domestic lobby which will not go quietly into the night. Any move by Washington to meddle in the dispute without close coordination with Moscow is fraught with danger for all concerned -- except, of course, the US.

As an ally to both countries, and with important historical and cultural traditions, Russia remains the main actor in the search for a solution. Including Turkey in negotiations can only improve the chances of finding a regional solution which is acceptable to both sides. Such a solution requires demilitarising the conflict, hardly something NATO is expert at. As both countries improve their economies, and as long as ongoing tensions do not erupt into military conflict, they can -- must -- move towards a realistic resolution that takes the concerns of both sides into consideration.

Since 1991 a new Silk Road has been opened to the West, stretching as it did a millennium ago from Italy to China and taking in at least 17 new political entities. All roads, in this case, lead to the Caucasus, and US-NATO interest in this vital crossroads should surprise no one. US control there -- and in the Central Asian “stans” -- would mean containing Russia and Iran, the dream for American strategists since WWII.

The three major wars of the past decade -- Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) -- all lie on this Silk Road. The US and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance had no business invading any of these countries and have no business in the region today. Rather it is Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, Turkey et alia that must come together to promote their regional economic well being and security.

War breaking out in any one of the Caucasus disputes would be a tragedy for all concerned, for the West (at least in the long run) as much as for Russia or any of the participants. But the forces abetting war are not rational in any meaningful sense of the word. After all, it was perfectly “rational” in Robert Gates’s mind to help finance and arm Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1979. The planners in the Pentagon or NATO HQ argue “rationally” today that their current surge in Afghanistan will bring peace to the region.

And if it fails, at least the chaos is far away. Such thinking could lead them to try to unleash chaos in any of the smoldering and intractable disputes in the Caucasus out of spite or a la General Jack Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 “Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” a film which. Unfortunately, has lost none of its bite in the past four decades.

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach him at ericwalberg.com.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal

Chechnya: Conflict and Resolution

"Mr. Putin may not agree, but repression and political machination and installing puppet regimes in Chechnya will not work in the long run. He may recoil from a political solution now but in the end Russians will have to sit on the other side of the table and talk to Chechens about a political settlement, possibly a referendum monitored by international election observers. If the majority of Chechens vote for independence, Russia should concede and accept the will of the Chechens, and it should be internationally recognized immediately."

By Abdul-Majid Jaffry
(Thursday, April 8, 2010)
Courtesy Of Media Monitors

The tough talking Russian leader Vladimir Putin may drag the militants “out of the sewer” and “rub them out in the latrine”, however, the recent blasts in Moscow and Dagestan are grim reminder of the Russia's failure to preserve control over Chechnya - a volatile tinderbox of ethnic tension and secessionist movements. Despite Russia’s two devastating wars against the Chechnyian separatists that killed tens of thousands of militants and civilians in the massive ground and aerial attack, Russian armed forces not only failed to quell the separatist movement but faced humiliating defeat. The continuing saga of violence and death underscores the impossibility of a purely military resolution of the conflicts in the restive North Caucasian republic; it calls for a political settlement, but the Russian leaders want to keep the region subdued through military occupation and local henchmen.

The North Caucasus is a broad isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian, crisscrossed by high mountains. The region is array of semiautonomous republics, many of them Islamic. The mountainous expanse is home to some 5 million people of several diverse ethnic groups with each having its own distinct language, customs, costumes, and architectures. The region fell prey to many invaders in the distant past, and after the Caucasian War of 1817-1864, also known as Russian conquest of the Caucasus, it was conquered and forcibly incorporated into the Russian Empire. The aggressive expropriation of land, Stalin’s attempt to cleanse the North Caucasus of the natives, deportations and forced exile bore the bitter fruit of everlasting resentment of all things Russian. Kremlin’s attitude towards the region has ensured that North Caucasians, especially from Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia, have no love lost for their Russian master.

Chechen tribes and other ethnic groups of the region never acquiesced to Czarist, Soviet or Russia’s acquisition and rule over their land. From the early days of occupation to today, foreign domination is resented and resisted. After several low-key resistances, full-blown guerrilla war against the Russian occupation started in 1824 that lasted for over 30 years. An Islamic state in Chechnya and Dagestan was established in the aftermath of the guerrilla war; however, it was short lived. The guerrilla war and the subsequent resistances were responded by Russians with fierce brutality that came close to genocide. Joseph Stalin accused Chechen of collaborating with the Germans during the Second World War and dissolved the republic, dispossessed them of all their properties, deported the entire Chechen and Ingush population to Kazakhstan and Siberia, and their land was redistributed among the neighboring peoples, Thousands of deportees died from the cold, hunger and fatigue and thousands disappeared while on route or after arrival. After Stalin’s death the republic was reestablished and survivors of exiled camps returned home.

During the Soviet Union period, Chechnya was designated as an autonomous region - a notch below an autonomous republic in the Soviet hierarchy of different regions. Most of the autonomous republics, such as Ukraine and Uzbekistan, were allowed full independence after the Soviet break-up. Autonomous regions were denied independence. However, Chechen President of the time Dzhokhar Dudayev declared Chechnya an independent nation in 1991. In Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that Russia would take "harsh measures," including breaking off diplomatic relations, against any country which recognized Chechnya. Indeed, no country, including Muslim countries, with the exception of Afghanistan under Taliban and neighboring Georgia recognized Chechnya’s independence, lest it angers the mighty Russia.

Chechnya’s declaration of independence put Russian Federation in peril; the Kremlin feared a "domino effect" in which other autonomous republics would copy Chechnya’s demands. In Lieven’s words, Chechnya was becoming the tombstone of Russian Power. Chechnya’s secession not only had political consequences – challenge to territorial integrity - but it also had the potential to economically impact Russia. North Caucasus is a corridor for the lucrative Caspian Sea oil pipelines and also provides important access to sea trade routes. It was these two considerations that made Russia to fight back and keep Chechnya in its fold.

For three years, from the time Chechnya unilaterally seceded from Russia in 1991 and Russian invasion in 1994, tension with Russia steadily grew as Chechnya asserted its independence and took step to build a national army. Moscow first tried to unseat Dudayev through coups to undo the declaration of independence. After Kremlin inspired coup attempts failed, in December 1994, Russian troops marched into Chechnya, and thus the first Chechen war of independence started. After an estimated ten of thousands people died, and the 1996 ceasefire agreement, Russia withdrew its troops, and granted Chechnya significant autonomy but not full independence, only to return in 1999 for the second round of the war.

The second war ended in 2000 with complete destruction of Chechnen capital Grozny, compared only to the horrific annihilation of Dresden in the second world war. For three months Russian forces bombed Grozny everyday until it was totally destroyed. The end of the second war saw the fall of the pro-independence government and the restoration of the Kremlin’s authority over Chechnya. The two wars brought unspeakable death and destruction to the tiny republic with little over a million population.

After Grozny capitulated and independent fighters were subdued, just as the Czechs capitulated in 1968 when the Soviets entered Prague, Russia installed pro-Moscow regimes under men reviled by Chechens as a traitors. These men, with the blessing of the Ruusian government, ruled the country with their own reign of terror – for Chechens acts of terror remained the same, only the actors changed.

Embittered by the scars of two hundred years of Russian campaign to deny them the right to run their own country, suffered by the prolonged and hopeless conflicts and fearful of political annihilation and economic servitude, largely consisting of guerrillas who fought Russia in 90’s and thereafter Moscow installed regimes formed a group of underground fighters and militants. These militants taken over by the feelings of anger, grief, humiliation and eventually, desire for revenge, conveyed a grim message to the Rusian leadership that the resistance against Russian occupation continues, taking ever more insidious, and underground forms.

Jerry Muller (Us and Them, The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism) writing about the ethnic nationalism, says, "Whether politically correct or not, ethnonationalism will continue to shape the world in the twenty-first century.” The breakup of the Yugoslavian Balkan states into separate ethno-nationalist entities is point in case. He further argues, “The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.” Russian-Chechen forced political marriage is an example where “politics is apt to remain ugly.”

When we search for any commonality between the giant Russia and tiny Chechnya, we find none. Russians and Chechens are two distinct people divided by religion, language, customs, culture, architecture and the great economic disparities between the two have further fuelled the divide. Chechnya never enjoyed equal weight with the equitable claims in the Russian system of government or even given a staus of a junior partner in the affairs of the federation. The ground reality is that Chechnya has been politically mutiliated and humiliated under the Russian colonial rule since the Czars took over the mountainous region; Chechens are mere pawns caught up in the Russian pursuit for the Caspian Sea oil.

Mr. Putin may not agree, but repression and political machination and installing puppet regimes in Chechnya will not work in the long run. He may recoil from a political solution now but in the end Russians will have to sit on the other side of the table and talk to Chechens about a political settlement, possibly a referendum monitored by international election observers. If the majority of Chechens vote for independence, Russia should concede and accept the will of the Chechens, and it should be internationally recognized immediately.

Source:

by courtesy & © 2010 Abdul-Majid Jaffry

The Kyrgyz Great Game

Posted by ROBERT DREYFUSS
On 04/14/2010 @ 09:18am
Courtesy Of The Nation

The Great Game for influence in Central Asia, pitting the United States against Russia (with China as a more-than-just-interested observer) has taken a sharp turn in Russia's favor, in the wake of the Russian-induced regime change in Kyrgyzstan.

That small, out-of-the-way nation, a former member of the USSR, has assumed importance because of its role as facilitator for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan's Manas air base, which Centcom says is critical for the war effort, is up for grabs under the new regime, which says it will continue to allow the United States access to the air field until the current contract expires this summer. What happens after that isn't clear.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation notes glumly that Russia is scoring points in Central Asia and the Caucasus region:

"In the last couple of years, Russia has scored some points in its 'roll-back' of George W. Bush's Eurasian advances. First, the Georgian war and the European reaction to it all but froze Georgia's chances for NATO membership. Second, Mr. Yanukovich's victory in the Ukrainian presidential elections moved Kiev from a pro-Western orientation to neutrality. Now, the U.S. presence in Central Asia, and in Eurasia as a whole, may be at stake."

Despite its seeming neutrality, it's clear that Moscow largely orchestrated the palace coup that ousted President Bakiyev last week. Last year, Russia offered Bakiyev $2 billion in aid on the apparent condition that he close the U.S. base at Manas, but after Bakiyev collected more than $400 million in Russian aid he decided to accept a U.S. offer to triple the Manas rent, angering Prime Minister Putin of Russia. The Russian media carried out a well-orchestrated campaign attacking Bakiyev, accurately, as a thieving kleptocrat, and they compared him to Genghis Khan. (In some countries that would be taken as a compliment, but it wasn't meant that way.) Then Moscow used its economic muscle to build momentum for popular opposition to Bakiyev. According to the Washington Post:

"After the opposition announced plans for nationwide protests, Putin provided a final spark by signing a decree March 29 eliminating subsidies on gasoline exports to Kyrgyzstan and other former Soviet republics that had not joined a new customs union.

"When the tariffs kicked in April 1, Russian fuel shipments to Kyrgyzstan were suspended, said Bazarbai Mambetov, president of a Kyrgyz oil traders association. Within days, gas prices in Bishkek began to climb, enraging residents already angry about sharp increases in utility fees.

"As the Kremlin leaned on Bakiyev, it also consulted the opposition, hosting its leaders on visits to Moscow, including in the days before the protests."

Rather hyperbolically, Russia's President Medvedev, speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, warned that Kyrgyzstan is facing civil war and could become a "second Afghanistan":

"As I understand it, Kyrgyzstan is on the verge of civil war now. ... All the forces in Kyrgyzstan should realize their responsibilities towards the Kyrgyz nation, the Kyrgyz people and the future of the Kyrgyz state."

In fact, it appears that the situation is not nearly as risky as that. The new government seems to be establishing its writ in most of the country, and the ousted president is reportedly negotiating a deal to leave the country with his person (and his bank accounts) intact. The United States, making the best of a bad situation, is making nice to the new regime and crossing its fingers that it can hold on to Manas later this year. The new president, Rosa Otunbayeva, has suggested that the U.S. lease on Manas will be extended automatically for a year beyond its current term, but no doubt both Russia and Kyrgyzstan will want to the keep the U.S. presence in the country on a short leash.

Kyrgyz opposition leaders, no doubt encouraged by Moscow, accuse the United States of turning a blind eye (or worse) to the blatant corruption of the former regime, as long as it allowed Washington to use the facility. A few years ago, the United States lost access to another important air facility in Uzbekistan, whose leaders also were not exactly paragons in defense of human rights. According to the Times, the new leaders of Kyrgyzstan have joined in:

"They accuse the United States of having used that system [of corruption] to curry favor with the ousted president in order to hold onto the air base, the only remaining Amerian military refueling site in Central Asia after Uzbekistan closed a base in a dispute with the United States over human rights."