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rfmcdonaldThe ongoing anti-Uzbek pogroms in Kyrgyzstan, originally located in the country's second city Osh in the southwest but spread to its hinterland, is a straightforward case of ethnic cleansing with origins that seem to be pretty much what this anonymous Guardian<'s editorialist noted.
Absolute numbers might be relatively small as these things go--only a bit more than a hundred confirmed dead and hundreds more suspected, "only" tens of thousands of refugees confirmed as having crossed the border--but it's still quite early and already percentages are quite high: if a hundred thousand Uzbeks did flee Kyrgyzstan within the past week, that's the equivalent of two percent of the country's population. (Uzbeks form 15% of Kyrgyzstan's population, and almost half of the population of Osh and its province.)
Osh has seen Kyrgyz-Uzbek violence before, in the 1990 riots for instance, and one commenter at the blog Registan stated from his personal observations that there was quite a lot of interethnic hatred, complete with vicious stereotypes of the other ethnic group and any number of people looking to stock up on weapons before something happened. The fighting spread from Osh's downtown into the residential districts of the city; it's fierce. It doesn't help that the military and police forces sent to stop the rioters might be ignoring or actively helping the pogromists.
Who knows what the consequences of this will be? The idea of a Russian intervention echoing the 1990 Soviet intervention has been put foward by Bakiyev in his Belarus exile and by the Kyrgyzstani provisional government, and though publicly rejected but who knows what is going on behind the scenes. The United States and the West is involved since the country's Manas air base supports NATO operations in Afghanistan. What this will do to the internal development of Kyrgyzstan, or to the relationship between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, can only be imagined to be negative.
What's the proximate cause? It seems to be the sorts of frustratingly vague rumours--someone hurt someone, some people killed other people, details to be later verified--that commonly lie at the origins of any communal riot.
What are the ultimate causes? One essayist argued that the 1990 Osh riots were triggered by competition over scarce resources--land and public utilities like education were cited--and elements of that are certainly present in post-Communist Kyrgyzstan. The country is very poor, and the previous tensions between the Kyrgyz and the relatively more urbanized Uzbeks certainly haven't been helped by the global financial crisis that deprived the country of the remittances sent by many of the hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers from Kyrgyzstan living in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Despite this poverty, there are suggestions that Kyrgyzstan's wealth relative to Uzbekistan has created a certain amount of net immigration, with Uzbek migrant labourers successfully competing in the labour markets of southwestern Kyrgyzstan via almost obscenely low wages. Combine these socioeconomic issues with the perception--by enough people in both communities--of profound communal differences connected to primordial ethnicity, and with the ongoing political tumult in Kyrgyzstan with revolution after revolution, and there you go.
Why have these rumours and these prejudices led to this violence? As Christian Breuer wrote at Registan, none of these things would have happened if the people responsible in Osh didn't want it to happen. And these people are ordinary people, people who were willing for whatever reason to go and do horrible things one day and then go back home and be the good people their loved ones have known them to be the next.
Will there be 2030 Osh riots, I wonder?
Uzbeks, who constitute about one-third of the population in southern Kyrgyzstan, are being burned out of their homes by mobs of Kyrgyz armed with automatic rifles, iron bars and machetes, while the local police stand by and do nothing. Not only Uzbeks, but ethnic Russians and Tartars also find themselves in the eye of the storm.
The provisional government of Roza Otunbayeva has lost control and is only now starting to mobilise its armed forces to stop the civil violence. More than 100 people have been killed in the last five days, but the final death toll will be probably much higher. Ethnic Uzbek enclaves are burning, and more than 70,000 people have fled for their lives across the Uzbek border. What is missing is any coherent international reaction.
Those who persist in seeing Moscow's hidden hand behind every outbreak of unrest in the former Soviet space are being disabused of their illusions. The Kyrgyz mobs burning Uzbek homes are, for one thing, on the wrong side. If anything, they are supporters of the former so-called pro-democracy leader Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the man whom Moscow was accused of helping to oust. If the mob violence is anything, it serves as a prime excuse for Russian intervention, as clear a reason as the Georgian attack on South Ossetia was. Soviet troops were sent by Mikhail Gorbachev to quell ethnic unrest in Osh in 1990, so there is even a precedent. But Russia refused to intervene, despite an appeal by the provisional president of Kyrgyzstan. Nor was there any evidence that Russia played anything other than a secondary role in Bakiyev's ousting, as the International Crisis Group reported.
Bakiyev, whose rule descended into autocracy, repression and nepotism, denies fomenting the anti-Uzbek riots. But he and his family have a dark history in the south of his country, which is harder to shrug off. Undoing his predecessor's policies of fostering community relations, Bakiyev relied on his brother, the security chief, to suppress minorities. The departure of the Bakiyev clan triggered a competition for resources in the south. The Uzbeks, who ran the local markets, were accused of a political power grab, and a weak government in Bishkek – a coalition of opposition forces – could do little to prevent the resulting explosion.
Absolute numbers might be relatively small as these things go--only a bit more than a hundred confirmed dead and hundreds more suspected, "only" tens of thousands of refugees confirmed as having crossed the border--but it's still quite early and already percentages are quite high: if a hundred thousand Uzbeks did flee Kyrgyzstan within the past week, that's the equivalent of two percent of the country's population. (Uzbeks form 15% of Kyrgyzstan's population, and almost half of the population of Osh and its province.)
Osh has seen Kyrgyz-Uzbek violence before, in the 1990 riots for instance, and one commenter at the blog Registan stated from his personal observations that there was quite a lot of interethnic hatred, complete with vicious stereotypes of the other ethnic group and any number of people looking to stock up on weapons before something happened. The fighting spread from Osh's downtown into the residential districts of the city; it's fierce. It doesn't help that the military and police forces sent to stop the rioters might be ignoring or actively helping the pogromists.
Who knows what the consequences of this will be? The idea of a Russian intervention echoing the 1990 Soviet intervention has been put foward by Bakiyev in his Belarus exile and by the Kyrgyzstani provisional government, and though publicly rejected but who knows what is going on behind the scenes. The United States and the West is involved since the country's Manas air base supports NATO operations in Afghanistan. What this will do to the internal development of Kyrgyzstan, or to the relationship between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, can only be imagined to be negative.
What's the proximate cause? It seems to be the sorts of frustratingly vague rumours--someone hurt someone, some people killed other people, details to be later verified--that commonly lie at the origins of any communal riot.
What are the ultimate causes? One essayist argued that the 1990 Osh riots were triggered by competition over scarce resources--land and public utilities like education were cited--and elements of that are certainly present in post-Communist Kyrgyzstan. The country is very poor, and the previous tensions between the Kyrgyz and the relatively more urbanized Uzbeks certainly haven't been helped by the global financial crisis that deprived the country of the remittances sent by many of the hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers from Kyrgyzstan living in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Despite this poverty, there are suggestions that Kyrgyzstan's wealth relative to Uzbekistan has created a certain amount of net immigration, with Uzbek migrant labourers successfully competing in the labour markets of southwestern Kyrgyzstan via almost obscenely low wages. Combine these socioeconomic issues with the perception--by enough people in both communities--of profound communal differences connected to primordial ethnicity, and with the ongoing political tumult in Kyrgyzstan with revolution after revolution, and there you go.
Why have these rumours and these prejudices led to this violence? As Christian Breuer wrote at Registan, none of these things would have happened if the people responsible in Osh didn't want it to happen. And these people are ordinary people, people who were willing for whatever reason to go and do horrible things one day and then go back home and be the good people their loved ones have known them to be the next.
There is an oft-repeated tendency to blame criminal groups for carrying out the violent attacks and to blame politicians and/or deposed leaders for the manipulation of these groups. Basically, blaming criminal groups and power figures absolves the teenagers and young men from the neighborhood. Certainly they would not rape, steal, mutilate and kill? Must be criminals, right? Wrong. Regular people kill. Criminals kill. And they can be killing at the same time. People have been murdered by their neighbors all over the world at various times throughout history.
[. . . ]
At times the violence results from local and/or national power figures mobilizing and transporting their supporters to certain locations, and sometimes conflict breaks out at unpredictable times during normal, everyday interactions. Sometimes criminals are involved, sometimes not. But usually, regular people do horrific things to other regular people. Sometimes, academics and journalists want to believe the best about the people without power, and will attempt to shift the blame to criminals and politicians, thereby absolving the little guy who uses the situation as an occasion to loot, rape and kill (sometimes even denying steadfastly that, just possibly, in this one case ethnicity may be the overriding consideration). And usually, politicians will blame anybody but themselves and will continue to avoid addressing the structure of the political/social environment that allows for such violence to erupt so quickly and with such ferocity.
Will there be 2030 Osh riots, I wonder?
