Unconscionable Story

Ted Rall is really not a person who should be discussed on this blog, but I can’t let this story go unpunished.  If you’ve read the tripe he calls Central Asian analysis in Silk Road to Ruin*, you probably already know what’s coming.  I’m going to do my best to tear it limb from limb.  Bear with me.  I’ve already said that it’s probably premature to pull the G-work in regards to the violence in Osh.  I think it is premature because I have a set definition of Genocide in my head, which may be incorrect.  A Genocide (with or without the big-G) is a planned action by a figure/institution whose aim is the extermination of a population as defined by race/ethnicity/religion.  If you want to tell me that Osh was just an exceptionally poorly planned genocide, then we can argue.  I view “Ethnic Cleansing” as a troublesome phrase because it mixes what people think of Genocide with the idea of Nationalism and Racial Purity and Miscegenation, especially depending how closely you read the “Cleansing” element of the phrase.

Rall begins the article with a damning accusation that many of the deaths in Haiti following the earthquake were directly the fault of the United States.  I will not speak to that because I do not have any background in the topic, certainly no more than anyone else with a vague knowledge of Haiti’s extreme poverty.  But that is just precursor to this line.

Now it’s Kyrgyzstan’s turn to fall apart as the result of American malfeasance.

Wait.  Huh?

The images coming out of Osh, a culturally diverse Silk Road city in the Ferghana Valley that recently celebrated its 5000^th anniversary, are reminiscent of the collapse of Yugoslavia.

WHOA.  Hold on.  If you know the city at all, you’d know they recently celebrated their 3000th birthday, similar to other cities in the region with archaeological evidence stretching back to before Alexander the Great.  But once you pass 4000 years old, you’ve actually passed Ruhnama territory, so you know you’re in crazy-land.  And the collapse of Yugoslavia was a very, very different ball of wax.  I say that with, again, only a passing remembrance of the war years.  And yet I think that, if I had studied it a bit more, the resemblance would be even harder to come up with.  Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs are essentially similar in their language and culture – but are divided along religious and economic lines, each harkening back to a different “Golden Age” when their group was in charge.  And that’s my Risk-board history lesson.  Osh is NOT like that!  When you teach a class on Bosnian language, you’re also teaching them Serbian and Croatian.  In the case of Osh, Kyrgyz and Uzbek are… not so close.  And unlike Yugoslavia, they are actually united along lines of religious identity.  I’ll stop there.

Ethnic Kyrgyz, resentful over the recent ouster of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and angry about an economy that always seems to get worse, have murdered hundreds of ethnic Uzbeks because they support the new interim government. Kyrgyz rioters burned Uzbek-owned homes and businesses, prompting tens of thousands of Uzbeks to flee across the border into Uzbekistan. Buildings spray-painted with the word “Kyrgyz” were spared.

Let’s see some proof, Mr. Rall.  I’m not saying it wasn’t the case, but I don’t know.  Nobody knows, as far as I know, which some of us have stated in more philosophically-sound retorts.

Even by the never-a-dull-moment standards of Central Asia, this is worrisome. When feuding neighbors like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have a dispute, they bring in Kyrgyz mediators due to their reputation for wisdom and levelheadedness.

Huh?  Which situation are you referring to, specifically?  Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are pretty independent of Kyrgyzstan, and unlike the other Central Asian States, have settled almost ALL of their differences.  Border disputes?  Settled.  Water/Gas disputes?  Settled.  Free Trade?  LONG Since Settled.  Naturally, I don’t want to paint a picture of peace and harmony between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – I merely want to point out that Rall has no idea what he is talking about.

U.S. news consumers following the Kyrgyz crisis are repeatedly reminded about America’s airbase near the capital of Bishkek, used to supply NATO forces occupying Afghanistan. The base, they say, is what we should care about. As for the recent violence, U.S. state-controlled media implies, this is more of the same in a region where tribes are constantly at one another’s throats. “In 1990,” reminded the Associated Press, “hundreds of people were killed in a violent land dispute between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh, and only the quick deployment of Soviet troops quelled the fighting.”

You’re quoting other people, so that’s fine.  Good enough.

But the base isn’t why Kyrgyzstan really matters.

Ok!  We totally agree.  But what sentence follows that perfectly sane assertion?

The big effect is that the events in Osh mark the beginning of a new surge of anti-Americanism with long-term repercussions.

What?  Non-sequitur?

Sadly the voices of the most reliable experts on Central Asia, people like Ahmed Rashid and Martha Louise Alcott, are missing from an Ameri-centric narrative cut-and-pasted from wire service stories and neoconservative commentators.

Seriously.  Ahmed Rashid is a very intelligent person, with great analysis in places, but is definitely been known to grind axes against Uzbeks.  His work has been covered on Registan before.  Martha BRILL OLCOTT [Who Rall MEANT to say instead of screwing up her name with Louisa May Alcott] is a political scientist that wrote the book on the Kazakhs.  More than one, really.  I’m not going to go into how disappointed I am that his list of experts includes those two people above everyone else because I don’t think he’s actually read their books.  Maybe reviews of their books?  Maybe little articles they’ve written?  I don’t think they share any of the blame, and his bringing them up just makes them look bad.  They’re NOT bad.  But both should be accepted as scholars with flaws like the rest of us.  Olcott, so far as I know,uses very few Kazakh-language materials in her scholarship, for example.  She doesn’t claim to be able to read Kazakh, so the sources she used I assume were translated.  Pretty big piece of the puzzle missing if you’re writing the book on Kazakhs, don’t you think?  But I digress.

True, Osh can be a tense place. In August 2000 my drivers were detained by Kyrgyz cops on suspicion of being Tajik. Hours later, I was forced to flee when hundreds of guerillas of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a radical Islamic group allied with the Taliban and based in Tajikistan, swarmed into the city.

Yeah.  What do we make of this?  The IMU and Jihadists from Tajikistan swarming like the nasty little insects they are into Osh.  I wasn’t even sure the IMU was really real anymore.  But, hey, maybe they’re the one’s to blame for all of this, right?

Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom is wrong. This latest outbreak of violence represents something new.

Oh, good.  Never mind, then.  What is this new thing?

First, it’s worse: bigger and more widespread. Second, as most Central Asians know, it’s delayed fallout from George W. Bush’s misadventures in regime change.

Which “misadventure” are you talking about?

Bush’s military-CIA complex had more than Iraq and Afghanistan on its collective mind. Over the course of six years, they toppled or attempted to overthrow the governments of Venezuela, Haiti, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine–and, yes, Kyrgyzstan.

Hmm.  You’re losing the non-conspiracy-theorists, but let’s see where the crazy-train stops next.

In March 2005 a CIA-backed (and in some cases -trained) mob of conservative Muslim young men from Osh drove up to Bishkek and stormed the presidential palace. President Askar Akayev, a former physicist who had been the only democratically-elected president in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, fled into exile in Russia.

You know what’s great about a blog?  You can link to stories that give more information about What in God’s Name you’re talking about.  I really want to see what links Rall would be making here.  Oh, I see.  There’s no corroborating evidence?  Damn.  Akayev was pretty cool, but it’s not like everything was wine and roses back before 2005.  Have the Kyrgz no agency of their own to elicit change?  Of course not, right?  Only the CIA can help them change leaders, whether through rigged elections or rigged revolutions.

Akayev, considered a liberal reformer throughout the 1990s, had turned more autocratic during his last years in power. Still, he had nothing on neighboring dictators like Uzbek President Islam Karimov, known for boiling political dissidents to death,…

…sensationalize much?

…or Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had his two main political opponents tied up, shot, dumped on the side of a road–and declared suicides shortly before a presidential election. As of 2005 Akayev held exactly one political prisoner in custody.

I guess this is the story to which he’s referring.  Again, I’m not saying he’s just describing events with no relation to reality.  It’s just that they have a very distant relationship with reality that he hides through his style of confident, take-no-prisoners, demagogic prose.

Anyway, Akayev’s real mistake was crossing Bush. After 9/11 the U.S. demanded an airbase at Manas Airport, paying nominal rent. Reconsidering after the fact, the Kyrgyz government demanded more money: $10 million a year, quite a chunk of change in a country with an average salary of $25 a month.

Bakiyev, the Osh-based leader who replaced Akayev, was supposed to be more accommodating. Instead, he threatened to kick out the Americans unless they raised the rent again. Which they did, from $17 million to $63 million.

And now he’s in exile too.

Obama learned a lot from Bush.

WHOA, Wait, WHAT?  First, you’re saying BUSH exiled Akaev?  And Obama exiled Bakiev?  Please, please, please tell me you have logical reasons for this.  Or don’t.  Just move on to the next barrage of stupidity.

Just two weeks ago, on June 2nd, Obama’s Air Force was again at odds with the Kyrgyz over money–this time over jet fuel prices. The post-Bakiyev interim government of Acting Prime Minister Roza Otunbayeva wants to close the base – but, as the residents of Okinawa can attest, the U.S. military is harder to get rid of than crabgrass.

Ok, seriously.  We’ve been over this.  Part of the REASON for the events back in Spring was the sudden increase in fuel prices.  Might that have had something to do with the lack of fuel at the airbase?  No way, right?  It’s much cooler to dream up a scenario where our Evil Empire is secretly pulling all the strings in every situation… even when we’re doing it so poorly that it boggles the imagination why we would even bother.

Kyrgyzstan was never a lucky country. Surrounded by neighbors with vast energy resources and other natural resources, the Kyrgyz have little but water and rocks. But it enjoyed a strategic location. Under Akayev, people were poor but the country enjoyed relative stability.

This is the relative stability you were enjoying when chased out in August of 2000, right?  I’m not disagreeing with you.  You are.

Since then there has been political disintegration, with southern provinces turned into de facto fiefdoms run by brutal for-profit warlords. Neither Bakiyev nor Otunbayeva, both brought to power by mobs, has enjoyed legitimacy or full acceptance. This is the real story: political and economic chaos masquerading as ethnic cleansing.

Oh, so it isn’t really ethnic cleansing after all.  It’s just chaos.  I think we can agree on that.  Yes, together we can say that the situation in Kyrgyzstan this past week or so has been chaotic.  Phew, I’m glad someone finally said it.  Really the big hulking Uzbek in the room, if you get my drift.

Once again–as in Haiti–it’s largely our fault.

What a horrible, sad analysis of events.  The guy has been called worse things in the past, but all I’ll say is this: How sad is the state of Central Asian analysis and studies in the English-language world when this clown can be taken seriously?  I’ve seen reviews of his crazy Silk Road book where people have written, “You know, I hated his other stuff, but in Central Asia he really seems to know what he’s talking about.”

Often these reviewers admit their own ignorance of the region, yet seem unfazed when asked to give an opinion of the book’s illustrations and descriptions.  It’s that fallacy (whose I name I forget) that I think is attributed to Michael Crichton.  It has to do with newspapers.  It goes something like this:

Why is it that, when you read a newspaper article about something in your field, you come away thinking how superficial and useless, if not stupid, the article was and how ineffectual it was at informing the reader.  And yet, when we turn the page, we’ll happily read the next story about something with which we are unfamiliar and accept every word from the journalist, because “they were there.”  That is why Ted Rall can pass as a Central Asia expert.

* A book so full of inaccurate and ungrateful renderings of events in Central Asia, only those truly ignorant of the region can call the book “accurate and timely.”