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| Author: | Lionel Beehner |
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June 26, 2006
An uprising last year in the Uzbek city of Andijan has had far-reaching consequences for American interests in Central Asia, a region fertile in Islamic extremism. Shortly after the event, Tashkent asked the United States to vacate an airbase made available to American forces in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Now, more than one year after the Andijan attacks, a video has surfaced that sheds new light on the reported massacre, but also calls into question the tone of Washington's response in condemning the crackdown by Uzbek authorities (Tashkent called it a 'counterterrorism operation'). Meanwhile, a regional security body, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, just concluded its conference, with the focus on combating "extremism, separatism, and terrorism" in Central Asia.
During the Cold War era, the Soviet authorities suppressed Islam and closed mosques in the region. Once the Soviet Union split up, unemployment soared as the region's elite fled abroad. Over 60 percent of Central Asia's population was under the age of twenty-five. Given these factors, as well as its proximity to Taliban-run Afghanistan, the region emerged as a feeding ground for Islamic fundamentalism. The rise of terrorism coincided with the rise in refugees, weapons, and drug smuggling, particularly heroin imported across the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. "The same channels for smuggling drugs can be used for moving terrorists around," says Daniel Kimmage, an expert on Central Asia at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. A number of al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked terrorist organizations sprouted in Uzbekistan's densely populated Fergana Valley as well as elsewhere in the region.
The arrest of twenty-three Uzbek businessmen, most of them factory and shop owners who also were members of Akramiya, prompted protests in Andijan and a subsequent siege of the prison. After releasing the businessmen along with hundreds of other prisoners, armed men seized control of a nearby government building. Uzbek security forces and the armed men soon clashed, as the crowd of unarmed protesters swelled into the thousands. "The regime had lost control," says Martha Brill Olcott, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "That doesn't speak to defend the Uzbek [authorities'] response but [the film] gives me a strong sense there was a security threat." In total, hundreds of Uzbeks were massacred—it is unclear by whom. Human rights and pro-democracy groups accuse the police of shooting indiscriminately on unarmed demonstrators. The Uzbek government accuses the gunmen of holding the unarmed demonstrators as hostages and opening fire on them. Regardless, "it is clear excessive force [by the government] was used," Olcott says. "Whether they were malicious or incompetent, we simply don't know." Also, the video proves, as Kimmage puts it, "this was not a case of nonviolent protesters with flowers in their hair getting gunned down."
By launching a country-wide crackdown against non-governmental organizations (NGOs), experts say. "There was a sense [in Tashkent] the country was attacked and [the authorities] would take the harshest methods to stamp out future attacks," Kimmage says. Olcott adds that because a number of foreign-funded organizations used Andijan as a pretext to push for regime change, Tashkent targeted all NGOs. "I think they were really scared by the loss of control," she says. "If the choice is between civil liberties and another Andijan, they will push the other way and are not going to take any chances." In the wake of Andijan, human rights groups accuse the Uzbek authorities of carrying out unlawful arrests and torture, among other offenses.
China says its main terrorist threat comes from the Uighurs, an ethnically Turkic minority of some 8 million Muslims primarily based in the northwest province of Xinjiang. Efforts by Uighurs to separate from China stretch back over fifty years. China accuses Uighurs of receiving training in Afghanistan and funding from terrorism networks in the Middle East. China created the SCO (then called the Shanghai Five) in the late 1990s, Starr says, "to neutralize its western neighbors as bases of operations for émigré Uighurs and promoting the civil rights of Uighurs in Xinjiang." Yet experts say Beijing's treatment of its Uighur minorities has been heavy-handed and unlawful. "The Chinese are quick to use the word 'terrorism,' but refuse to acknowledge there is a question of minority rights they will eventually have to deal with," Starr says. The latest incident involves five Uighurs, detained by U.S. forces over four years ago in Afghanistan and sent to the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. They now remain in legal limbo as political refugees in Albania (which offered to house them) because U.S. officials suspect they would be executed or tortured if sent back to China.
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