Martha Brill Olcott of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was once again kind enough to be interviewed by neweurasia. Previously, we asked her about Carnegie’s new website Central Asian Voices. This time, Dr. Olcott answered questions on everything from Islamic extremism to democratization to the Tulip Revolution.

Update: Thanks to Carnegie, this interview is now available on their site in Russian (Благодаря Carnegie интервью теперь доступно на их сайте на русском языке).

Islamic Extremism

neweurasia: Could you say a little bit about your current research on the roots of radical Islam in Central Asia. What are your plans for future publications?

Martha Brill Olcott: Well, the current paper will be accompanied by another paper that will be posted in a couple weeks. It’s all done; it’s a portrait of Muhammad-Sodiq Muhammad-Yusuf.

ne: Are these papers the lead-up to a book?

MBO: I do plan to do a book on Islam in Central Asia that focuses on the Islamic Renaissance in Uzbekistan and tries to place it in a global perspective. It will look at Islam over the past 200 years and how it is both its own world and relates to the larger global community. I focus on Uzbekistan as the “heart” of Central Asian Islam, look at the combination of internal and external influences on Islam, historically, and through to the present. What I’m trying to do is get the most archival, in a sense, or detailed research out in a public space and that will free me to write a book that is somewhat more general.

ne: In your paper, you mention that one of the originators of Islamism thought in Central Asia, Muhammadjan Hindustani actually derided the extreme views of his students like Abduhlavi qori as “Wahhabi.” Why did more violent views nevertheless gain broadbase support (or have they)?

MBO: Hindustani is a representative of what I call the edges of mainstream Hanafi Islam, but he accepts that you have to be guided by the Hanafi experience. It is traditional [that students tend to take more extreme views than their teachers], and not just in religion, but just in life.

In my various papers, I talk about some of the explanation simply lying in the reality of the times. That Hindustani lived in a period of much greater repression against religion, and they [Hindustani’s students like Abduhlavi qori] don’t have patience for the shutters, in a sense, that Hindustani had put on his own world by virtue of being a Stalin-era survivor. These are people [Hindustani’s students] who didn’t live as anything other than young children through the greatest periods of repression (and that is the later period of Stalinist repression, not the earlier period), and what they understand as possible in Soviet space goes way beyond what [Hindustani] sees as possible, so their understanding of what a true believer should do is different from what his understanding is. It’s hard to know if they would have come to the same doctrinal positions that they did if they had grown up in an earlier period. But one of the things that a later paper talks about is the presence of a Salafi tradition way back into the 19th century, so there are people who are intellectual precursors even to people like Abduhlavi.

[The existence and significance of a Central Asian Salafi tradition dating back to the mid 19th century] is an issue that scholars are really divided on, and I can’t be sure that what I’m doing will stand the test of time. Hopefully other people will come along and do some more archival research, and perhaps reach a different conclusion on this balance historically between Salafi and Hanafi Islam in Central Asia. What I am trying to do is raise these questions for the first time to a broader audience.

ne: Can you say a little bit more about Abduhlavi qori, since your paper notes that his teachings were inspired leaders of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)?

MBO: Abduhlavi qori discovered Salafi ideas through Said Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood. So you have a constant Salafi trend in Central Asia, and then you have people who discover Salafism from outside. He is one of two local theologians that influenced the movement (the IMU), probably the strongest one because he does provide formal Quranic commentary, he does offer his tafsir. Now, there are some people who spend their entire lives studying the Quran and writing commentary. [Abduhlavi] writes some commentary, which puts him in a different class than most of these other people, but how serious a theologian he would be, or how serious a theologian Said Qutb is (Abduhlavi models himself after Said Qutb and his commentary) is open to debate.

ne: How big a threat is radical Islam in Central Asia? How broad a base of support does the Islamist rhetoric enjoy?

MBO: I think that is a really important question. We have to talk about what we mean by “threat.” I think the potential of terrorist attack in Central Asia poses a threat to the stability of some of these states. That is different from saying radical Islamic groups pose a threat. But I think that some radicals who have taken their inspiration from some of these people [like Abduhlavi qori] would be willing to use force to come to power. And what makes a particular threat is the weakness of the states themselves. As we saw in Andijon, a small group people with a small number of arms was capable of really destabilizing a situation and provoking the excessive use of force in response to that. So what people feel threatened by is shaped by the weakness of the states. The same size group [of Islamic radicals] could be in the United Kingdom, you know when they diffused that airline threat, and nobody talked about this bringing down Great Britain; even if they had succeeded in taking down those planes, the British government would have survived. But it is not clear to me that the Uzbek government would survive nine planes being hijacked. So the threshold of what constitutes a threat varies widely by state.

The second point is a much less subtle definition of threat; what people feel threatened by; here I am talking about a widespread fear that officials are responding to, and what causes such problems for human rights groups working in the region. People feel that these [Islamist] groups pose a threat to their way of life, that if they are allowed to exist in an unmanaged fashion – just allowed free reign, to be legal, spread their ideas as they wish, free access to the media, free access to the meetings – that the kind of secular society advocated by the elites would simply not occur. And that is a sense of threat to people.

ne: Do you think that sense of threat is legitimated by widespread support of secular ideas in Central Asian society?

MBO: What we call secularism is what they called atheism under the Soviet regime. Soviet-style secularism went much, much further in Central Asia than it did in neighboring countries because of what the Soviets did, not just because they arrested people, but because they had universal literacy, high rates of high school graduation, and some of the very highest rates of college graduation in the Muslim world. Since those trends occurred forcibly, the continuation of those trends would be at risk [without some continued state intervention].

That doesn’t necessarily justify the way [Islamic groups] are treated, but there is a sense that secular groups are being besieged. And yes, I do think that in a completely democratic society in Central Asia – in Uzbekistan, parts of Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan as well – Islam would play a much greater role, and would be contesting for political role. That is not to say necessarily that is a bad thing, but for people who do not want religion to occupy a great deal of public space, in that sense there is a threat. But the use of a loaded word like “threat” implies the right to take strong action against it.

ne: What is your take on the accusation that the Islamist threat in Central Asia has been largely concocted by the state governments.

MBO: I hope that these papers diffuse that argument. What I am trying to show in these papers – and they are not a justification of government policy at all – but I firmly believe that there are strong roots for this religious revival, and that a natural role for Islam in Uzbekistan would be a much larger part [in government]. What the relationship of government policy is to people who go to arms in opposition to the state is a different question. But this return to Islam and the embracing of a form of Islam that is not particularly supportive of secular values (though it does not target them for elimination) is not a function of the policies of [Uzbekistani President] Karimov at all. The popularity of some of the more nontraditional groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir is filling a gap that state policies toward democracy and religion may have helped create. But the kinds of things I am talking about in these papers are absolutely a product of Uzbek history, and are what I would call a natural phenomenon.

Heads of State

ne: In a recent live story you write about a recent meeting with former Kyrgyzstan President Askar Akayev. What is he like as a person?

MBO: I’ve met him many times before, that’s why I was able to meet him again. I always jokingly said that, if I had to choose a Central Asian leader to invite to dinner, it would be him. And I did. He really is a person that you feel you can go up to and have a normal conversation with. In that sense, and I don’t mean this as an insult, he is the least presidential of the Central Asian leaders. And it was because of that approachability that Alexei Malashenko and I felt we could call him and say that we would like to have him speak when he was ready.

ne: So you have personally met many of the Central Asian heads of state?

MBO: I’ve met all of them but [current Turkmenistan President] Berdymukhamedov. But I’ve known Akayev since practically the beginning of his presidency.

ne: You don’t have to answer this, but was Niyazov [recently deceased president of Turkemenistan, AKA Turkmenbashi] actually crazy, or did he have a strategy underlying his apparent madness?

MBO: I don’t know that he had a strategy. He was very strange and complicated. I hadn’t seen him for several years before his death. Boris Shikhmuradov, the former Foreign Minister who is still in jail, has really wonderful material on Niyazov. In a Carnegie speech he described Niyazov as already going kind of nuts. Boris talks about how he was always afraid of going to work on Mondays because when Niyazov had the weekend alone, [Boris] didn’t know what was coming. You had to make sure to get in by early Monday because by Tuesday things could be law if you didn’t talk [Niyazov] out of something.

When I saw [Niyazov], I didn’t see that. It was still early in the days of his hardening of the arteries. I don’t think I saw him in the last ten years of his life. The three times I met him were between 1993 and 1997. He wasn’t crazy [then]. He was peculiar. But he wasn’t crazy. The first thing I noticed about him was that he had monographed shirts with “SM” for Saparmurat Niyazov, so I doubt that he had “super-bash” underwear or anything like that .

ne: That’s going in the interview.

MBO: Fine. So in that sense, he was telling us really dirty jokes. I mean, they were embarrassingly unpleasant. There weren’t punch lines that were obscene, but for example, one of the members of our delegation was a very well-known American, and he was offering this person “a second wife” to take home. His behavior was inappropriate for a state leader. In fact, what many Central Asian leaders used to privately complain about was the inappropriateness of Niyazov’s behavior.

Kyrgyzstan’s Revolution

ne: In the Kyrgyzstan live story you argue that the situation there would actually have turned out better if Akayev had been allowed to finish his term of office. Does that mean you think he would have been the first Central Asian ruler to voluntarily relinquish power?

MBO: It’s always tough dealing with alternate histories, so we can’t know what would have happened. A lot of people did not trust that he was going to leave. But there was no evidence that he wasn’t going to leave, and he had talked often about planning to leave.

I think that he probably would have left if got the guarantee of protection for his family. And I think that he would have gotten those guarantees, because any successor like Bakiyev would have wanted those same guarantees for his family as well. That would have made Bakiyev less popular at the beginning, but he has had trouble sustaining his popularity now anyway. But I think the precedent of leaving would have made Akayev more legitimate than he is ever going to be.

I still believe that the March Revolution got out of control. Most of the leaders of the opposition were happy to take power, but I don’t think there was the expectation before things started to get out of hand in early March that they would be able to take power. I think what they were originally doing was trying to get some of those second round elections overturned, posing questions about some of the first round elections, and putting Akayev on notice that he had to leave power at the end of his term. But they weren’t going to turn down a chance to take power. I think for the long-term stability in Kyrgyzstan, [the revolution] really created no basis of legitimacy even with Bakiyev winning that resounding victory. The most important part of that article is really what we should be striving for in transition.

Democratization in Kazakhstan

ne: Changing subjects a bit, what is the point of rigging an election that a ruler would have won anyway?

MBO: Well, I don’t know how much the Kazakh election was rigged. The problem with that election was that even the exit polls showed [Nazarbayev] getting 80% of the vote. But I understand what you are saying, why bother rigging an election that is a sure thing? Part of this is just cultural and systemic. The president tells his people, “I want you to make sure there is a good return for me. And when he says that, he means a lot of things. He doesn’t mean, “Go out there and falsify results.” He also means, “Go out there and run a campaign I’d be proud of and win a lot of results for.” But the way that local officials understand “showing” that they’ve [run the campaign] well is oftentimes by producing a high return within their individual districts.

I have often said that the only way you are going to get democratic elections in Central Asia is if the presidents behave in an undemocratic way. They would have to make it clear to their subordinates that they want this election clean, and that [all the subordinates] have to convey the message that doing a good job means doing a clean job. That’s a very hard message to send to an elite that instinctively feels that doing a good job and showing loyalty means a certain thing.

I think the Kazakhs have come the furthest. They have the most sophisticated understanding of elections and have done a pretty good job of overhauling the bureaucracy that runs elections. I’m not saying that they have run free and fair elections, but they have the greatest growth and capacity, and understand the difficulties of running elections. They are fighting over things now like, “Are electronic ballets democratic,” some of the same things we are wrestling with here. But it’s very hard to get local officials to keep their hands off.

Also, Central Asian leaders want to get a high enough percentage to demonstrate that they are really loved by their people. Then you are really a powerful figure. Everybody is trying to produce a overwhelming show of popular support. There is a sense of, “How can I be such an important figure if 45% don’t like me.”

ne: What do you think about the argument that Central Asian officials rig elections because, even though they enjoy widespread popularity, their successors might not, and ensuring free and fair elections might jeopardize a dynasty?

MBO: I think succession in Central Asia is very problematic, especially with family. It’s not about forging ballots. It’s about convincing the elite to accept a candidate in many of these countries. Any of these men are capable of manipulating the electoral machinery to transfer power to a child, but that’s not the key. The key is to ensure that the political elite of that country supports that child.

The State of Academia

ne: What are your views on the state of the Academy and research on Central Asia? Do you think that there is a lack of academic voices in Central Asian studies? If so, what are your thoughts on the impact of new media is on this dialogue?

MBO: The question is why do you want to influence academia? If it’s because of a lack of plurality of views, than the internet and blogging can change that. By targeting academia, however, you have to ask yourself why you are targeting academia. Academia plays by its own rules, in a sense. If you are interested in creating more voices, just speak loudly and coherently. It can be hard to influence academia though, because it is influenced by its own incentives and rewards.

ne: Do you think the debate is particularly divided and heated in Central Asian studies in comparison with other fields of inquiry?

MBO: (Laughs). Read some of the stuff in Middle East studies.

The Andijon Insurrection and Massacre

ne: I guess I am thinking of the particularly vitriolic controversy over the Andijon massacre.

MBO: I think there is a debate about the role of political reform in the region. There were at least two different agendas that came into question over the Andijon incident: What should be our policy in Central Asia, and how does the international community when something happens in a part of the world we care about that we find appalling. I think that those two different debates became conflated. The division over Andijon was to be predicted, and speaks to some of the basic problems in handling the region: What should be the role of outside actors? How do you go about promoting political change? Should you even promote political change in a region that is not your own.

The disagreement in Andijon wasn’t that people weren’t appalled with what occurred; everybody was. The question is what do you do about being appalled? What comes next?

[How big the loss of life was] is a different question. That raises the topic of how you gather information and what constitutes truth. Any time there is a demonstration or loss of life there is a huge fight over how many people died. I mean, there is a huge fight right now over how many people have died in Iraq. They are using some sort of United Nations generated statistic, but that’s precisely what it is, a generated statistic based on figures of how many bodies end up in a certain number of mortuaries. So, how do you know what really happened some place? In a sense you are making a leap of faith accepting one version or another, and you make that judgment deductively, usually. But in some cases you make it non-deductively and say, “I’m just not going to believe anything the government says. They lie. Period.” So some of the higher figures were from someone who couldn’t substantiate it, who said, “I interviewed this many people and they said that there were hordes of dead.” But no one can prove those figures, they were arguing deductively based on other information they had. They rejected of government figures by definition – you know, arguing that the government would definitely lie.

I personally believe those high figures were wrong. They didn’t pass my test based on both deductive and inductive reasoning.

ne: Could you explain your take on the Andijon death count a little bit more?

MBO: I really believe that the number of people killed was closer to 300 some odd people, which is much closer to the government figure than say 3,000 or even 700. One reason I feel that is true is because that the year after the incident we would have known if there had been 3,000 deaths. 3,000 people in mourning on the anniversary of the massacre would have been something we could not have missed.

There are plenty of people I could never convince because they were told by people they trusted that, “This mortuary attendant said that he counted the 700th toe label that day.” You can’t convince people that some of this is always going to be false. You are going to take the figure or the version that confirms your preexisting bias.

But that disagreement is less important than the question of what should be the reaction. One is a reporting problem, and the other is a policy issue.

ne: So what is your take then on what the international reaction should be or should have been? What do you see as the two main sides on this issue?

MBO: There was a side saying that we had to make an example of Karimov and modify his behavior. The other side said that his behavior was not going to be modified and there was some justice in what he did, even if not complete justice. Killing unarmed civilians was not justified [the second side argues], but the state was under threat, so he had to respond even if he did so inappropriately.

ne: Do you fall on either one of those sides?

MBO: I feel that there was some justice in his response and he responded inappropriately. But I don’t think we gain anything by making an example of Karimov, and what bothers me is that he has become the poster child of what is bad in an environment with a lot of bad people and bad things. He is the one that made us mad by not modifying his behavior. I would argue that we never made the right crack at modifying his behavior, that we never incentives the situation enough. That’s a very controversial viewpoint a lot of people say that you can’t incentivize the situation enough. (This is pre-Andijon, not post-Andijon.) In the end, the consequences for [the United States] are as bad as they are for him. This is a common discussion when talking about sanctions in general, who pays more of a price? It’s been very hard to find positive ways to engage with the Uzbeks when they are under a sanction or partial sanction regime and there is the potential security risk for the whole region of not engaging with them.

I certainly was strongly in favor for a non-partial international commission at the time [to investigate the Andijon massacre]. But I think that now, two years later, we need to move on agenda wise. So I don’t think this is a meaningful thing to keeping holding up. Yes, it’s fair to say that there are things we want to change in the Uzbek human rights environment. But to keep Andijon as the flag bearing issue for the US-Uzbek or EU-Uzbek relationship is not in our own interest anymore.

Political Reform in Central Asia, Kazakhstan and the OSCE

ne: Can you think of any countries that have been successfully pushed to reform by the international community? Are there any successful examples that might be relevant in Central Asia?

MBO: I think countries only reform when they are ready to. You can incentivize them to a certain extent. Kazakhstan and the OSCE is a perfect example of exactly where the tension is. Kazakhstan wants to chair the OSCE. How do you support long-term democratic reform in Kazakhstan? Do you give them the OSCE chairmanship when their record is still not optimal and hope that they have made some progress to get this and will continue to make progress in the two years up to the chairmanship and while they are chairman and afterward? Or do you say, “No, you have to have the reform first and we are going to totally embarrass you by saying no now”? Which is going to get them to reform?

I think this is an even better example of the challenge of trying to get these countries to reform than the case of Uzbekistan, because in the Uzbek case you are talking about moving people a lot further and having a lot fewer things to offer. In the Kazakh case you are talking about moving them some and having something tangible that they want. How do you use this? It’s very difficult to create incentives for people to do something they are not so keen on. You have to really convince them that it is in their interest.

Challenges Facing Turkmenistan

ne: What do you see the main challenges for Berdymukhamedov in Turkmenistan? It seems like he has a pretty standard set by his predecessor, but that does not mean his job is going to be easy.

MBO: Yeah, he could be a better reformer than Niyazov just by getting up in the morning and not changing the days of the week. The question is: Does he have the economic vision and political clout to prevent economic stagnation and social crises in Turkmenistan. It’s not whether he will be a tepid reformer not, but does he have the capacity, either intellectually or in terms of implementation, and will he get the international support he needs if he does choose that path?

I don’t see how the opposition could create popular unrest. But the opposition would be capable of taking advantage of popular unrest. In a sense, though, it is irrelevant whether the opposition exists or not because popular unrest creates huge problems for Turkmenistan with or without opposition. So the unrest is the key, not the opposition. Say the opposition comes to power they will face the same challenges as Berdymukhamedov. Both the government and the opposition are untested on [the challenges facing Turkmenistan].

ne: In that vein, what would be a policy that could have a chance of facing the challenges in Turkmenistan?

MBO: Berdymukhamedov needs to move fast enough in economic and agricultural reform. That’s what his plenum is going to be on at the end of this month. He has to have an economic reform plan for agriculture that creates incentives for farmers to see through another year or two. The question is: Is Turkmen gas and cotton to fund such a reform plan. And that’s not clear. The issue is not just political reform, but technology. Would there be international support and expertise available quickly? Is anybody even thinking about the depth of the economic problems that they confront?

ne: Do you have an initial assessment of Berdymukhamedov’s will and ability to reform Turkmenistan?

MBO: We will have a much better idea in a couple weeks. It’s unclear now. I wouldn’t want to face the tasks he faces. We shouldn’t presume he can’t do it, but it’s not going to be easy. He will send out signals to us and to his own population to indicate whether he is capable of what I would call revolutionary changes in policy. And this is very different from political openness. Political openness is not going to solve these problems. You need more political openness to sell the Western community on participating, but political openness without economic reform is just not going to solve anything.

ne: So what do you think of the strategy advocated fairly openly by the Kazakh government of economic reform first and political reform more gradually.

MBO: Political reform without economic reform can by you time in places – and it bought some time in Kyrgyzstan early on, it bought them a lot of time in the early 90s – to do some economic reform. But there are times when political reform without economic reform will not buy you time. It’s not clear to me that [political reform] will buy time in Turkmenistan right now.

ne: Some criticize the aid organizations in Central Asia for focusing to exclusively on human rights issues at the expense of economic issues. Do you have any thoughts on that?

MBO: I think that you can’t understand how to reform a polity if you don’t understand the economy of that polity. My criticism of some of the political reform people is that they don’t understand the relationship of political reform and economic reform. The two go hand in hand. If the two are disconnected, that’s a recipe for instability.

The “Ask the Expert” series is intended to be part of a dialogue between the online community and Central Asia specialists from policy and academia. If you there are any questions you would like to see asked in future conversations, please email info[at]neweurasia[dot]net.