Articles tagged with: Osh uprising June 2010
The view over the river through the broken window panes of a burnt out choixona in Osh bazaar. Photograph by neweurasia's Mary Pole (CC-usage).
Editor’s note: With five formal inquiries into the violence that erupted in southern Kyrgyzstan last year, one would think that some kind of consensus would be emerging about what exactly happened. However, according to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR)’s Dina Tokbaeva, “all the investigative work done to date has tended to confirm existing prejudices rather than encourage a desire to learn new facts and take alternative views on board, with a view to building reconciliation.” Re-published from IWPR at the request of Dina.
Now that not one but five formal inquiries have filed reports about the causes of ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan last year, one would think a generally-agreed version of the truth would be starting to emerge.
Yet the Central Asian nation seems further away than ever from reaching a common understanding of what happened, who was behind the violence, and what it means for the future of the country.
Few people have read the published findings of the various inquiries, and most have instead seen only the highly-charged media reports about them. Biased readings of the reports are of more than academic importance, since are already colouring the political debate ahead of a presidential election set for October. (For an example of this, Kyrgyzstan Debates Rival Ethnic Policies.)
The result, analysts say, is that all the investigative work done to date has tended to confirm existing prejudices rather than encourage a desire to learn new facts and take alternative views on board, with a view to building reconciliation.
Editor’s note: To commemorate the June 2010 events in Osh, neweurasia is re-publishing this brief but sad photo essay by Samat, which he published during the height of the violence.
I took these photos only a month ago. It’s heartbreaking to think about what has happened to this city in so short a time. If you want an idea about how multiethnic this city once was, read this article by Hamid Tursonov:
Ethnic mixing is nothing new in Osh. Kyrgyz historians believe that the country’s second-largest city is 3,000 years old. Certainly, it is the most ancient in the Ferghana Valley, the geographical basin crisscrossed by the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. And, like the Ferghana Valley, Osh has always been a meeting point for civilizations and nations.
The variety of peoples here has always been exotic, even if one does not believe the Osh residents who claim that the ancient Jews came here. Myth or no myth, though, the people of Osh are clearly proud to think that King Solomon and his army camped in the area. They call the mountain around which Osh nestles either Solomon’s Mountain (the Kyrgyz name) or Solomon’s Throne (the Uzbeks’ choice).
… What was a multiethnic city is now a largely bi-ethnic one, populated mostly by Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks. Figures can be misleading – Osh’s mayor, Jantooro Satybaldiev, puts the population at 300,000 people; unofficial sources say it has 450,000 people – but they still tell a clear story. Ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks each now account for 44 percent of the total population. The remaining 12 percent are primarily Russians, Tajiks, Tartars, Kazakhs, and Koreans.
Screen capture from video of unrest in Osh from neweurasia's Mirsulzhan Namazaliev.
Editor’s note: It has been one year since the terrible events in southern Kyrgyzstan, particularly Osh. neweurasia’s Marat reviews what he sees as a year of avoidance and wrongful finger-pointing. “I believe [reconciliation efforts] will not work until someone legibly explains the disproportion in the numbers between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz of those killed, raped, shot, tortured, convicted and forced to flee,” he says. “I’m sorry, but my countrymen must confront this fact.”
That the June 2010 events would leave a deep scar on Kyrgyzstan’s face was clear from the very first days after the clashes, no matter who started it and who responded. But it was not clear how neighbors — far and near — would respond to it.
The first response was Tashkent’s permission to let tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbek refugees fleeing rape, arson and killings to enter Uzbekistan for a brief period of time. Then came a statement from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and later from Moscow, the “verdict” of which — “it is Kyrgyzstan’s internal affair” — dashed the last hopes people had that the superpowers would intervene and put an end to the atrocities.
After the initial “fog of war” settled by early July, the power centers in Osh and Bishkek sent contradicting messages. While one side would blame the ousted president and his supporters for staging an “act of revenge” for his eviction from power, nationalist figures put the blame squarely on shoulders of “separatist Uzbek” citizens of Kyrgyzstan. Most of the blame was (remains) advanced against the self-exiled business figures of Uzbek ethnicity.
But if there is one thing politicians in both power centers agree upon, it’s that everyone else but themselves are guilty. For some reason, nobody talks about the dire economic situation in the region where unemployment is high; nobody talks about the tensions that were present between the two ethnic groups; nobody talks about how the government has mismanaged the national economy or how local officials mismanaged interethnic relations.
Editor’s note: Osh’s bazaar, located on the left bank of the Ak-Bura river, has changed dramatically over the decades, but never so much as when violence swept through the city this past June, destroying almost all the infrastructure of the bazaar. Guest blogger Mary Pole reports, writing, “A former thriving hub of commerce is now a shell of destroyed livelihoods and lost hope,” with heartbreaking photos at the end of the post.
Firoza smiles at me revealing her gold teeth so characteristic of Central Asia. A seventy- five year old ethnic Tajik, she has worked in Osh Bazaar since she was twelve years old. At the front of an abandoned section of the bazaar Firoza arranges her selection of black mashi, a unique type of boot, on the wooden slats of her stall. As she holds them out to me with her henna painted fingernails, her husband sits beside her, amused at our conversation and her attempts to sell a Central Asian necessity to a Westerner.
Osh Bazaar, located on the left bank of the Ak-Bura river, has changed dramatically during the sixty-three years that Firoza has worked there. The violence that ravaged the city of Osh in June this year destroyed almost all the infrastructure of the bazaar — a former thriving hub of commerce is now a shell of destroyed livelihoods and lost hope.
Editor’s note: Osh and Jalalabad are rebuilding, and neweurasia’s Ekaterina is there to photograph the process. “Of course, it is obvious that the joint efforts of the government and international organizations are not enough to return people’s lives to normal,” she writes. “But it is good to see the happy faces of those who now have a roof over their head and can start to work on making their lives normal once again.” [This is a translation of Ekaterina’s original post (RUS).]
On October 19th and 20th, representatives from Kyrgyz and international media visited Osh and Jalal-Abad provinces. The trip was organized jointly by the State Directorate for the Reconstruction and Development of Osh and Jalal-Abad, the Presidential Administration and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Even now that the cities of Osh and Jalal-Abad have been partially restored, it is still frightening to see demolished or burnt-down houses and hastily erased nationalistic slogans on the walls. In private conversations, residents say that Osh is still not quiet, and that they are afraid to leave their homes after dark. Read the full story »
Editor’s note: In the ruins of Osh, the meaning of June’s terrible events are contested not only at the level of voting and rhetoric, but on the very walls. Guest blogger Mary Pole reports on the battle being fought through graffiti for the heart and soul of a torn city. “A glaring reminder of the violence is painted on walls in and around Osh, despite recent attempts to paint over the markings,” she writes.
As reconstruction picks up pace, winter approaches and June’s conflict is described publicly as ‘war’ or more commonly ‘unrest’, collective remembrance of the events takes on a different tone.
A glaring reminder of the violence is painted on walls in and around Osh, despite recent attempts to paint over the markings. An examination of this and writing and drawings painted in the months following the events in which as many as 4000 people may have died reveal the contested narratives of conflict.
This is a follow-up to my post yesterday about genocide. I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to a report made by 24.kg on 19 October, which shows that there’s at least one Kyrgyz journalist who is trying to show the real picture of Kyrgyzstani society.
Daniar Karimov raises concerns over the situation in the country. He writes that “after the events of June, the Kyrgyz elite is often mentioned in conjunction with the genocide. Perhaps, those responsible for ethnic cleansing are really among key officials, including famous politicians. The only difference is that the genocide is not directed against any particular Diaspora, but against the whole nation and, first of all, against the ethnic Kyrgyz group, who were thrown back into the Middle Ages due to efforts of their own political leaders.”
During and after the June events, international media people and human rights activists started using the word “genocide” to describe what happened.
As expected, the majority of Kyrgyz, from the government to journalists, deny that genocide is what happened, despite lots of reports made by their international colleagues and human rights activists. Indeed, they feel that there has been a “the media war” against their nation.
What’s missing is a discussion in the Kyrgyz media of just why the international community would be convinced that genocide did indeed happen.
Photograph of the view from Bishkek by Flickr user zsoolt (CC-usage).
Editor’s note: As Central Asia waits anxiously for the results of Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary elections, neweurasia’s Annasoltan offers a reflection on the meaning of Kyrgyzstan’s journey this year for her own nation, Turkmenistan. “Idealism is not enough to solve problems, but that we shouldn’t turn to the cynicism of dictatorship,” she writes. “I believe these elections could keep Kyrgyzstan’s ‘island of democracy’ afloat, [and] the hopes of my countrymen.”
As of this writing, the region is anxiously awaiting the results of Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary elections. So, I’m taking the opportunity to share a reflection, the view from Turkmenistan, following in the footsteps of neweurasia‘s Marat’s review of the rest of the region. I’ll start with a remark made by the Hill International Crisis Group’s Central Asia director, Paul Quinn-Judge, during the height of the tragic events in southern Kyrgyzstan:
“The same unrest could theoretically happen in many of the states in the region. [...] Authoritarian regimes are very unreliable allies. They only look as if they were stable. They only look as if they can come true with their promises.”
I’ve written a lot about illusion and reality in Turkmenistan, where there’s so much more the former than the latter. I admire Kyrgyzstan because, for all its problems, it’s a very real place. And her neighbors know it — that’s why the governments and peoples of Central Asia been watching events there with great interest and concern. But there’s also a crisscross depending on who’s doing the watching: the more change occurs in Kyrgyzstan, if it goes sour, the more hopeful Ashgabat gets and the more crestfallen become the Turkmen people, but if it blossoms, then the opposite.
Initially, Turkmen were stunned by the quick overthrow of the Bakiev regime, which was widely perceived as corrupt. I blogged about how some even saw a warning in those stunning events for the Turkmen authorities, as our nation was reminded exactly of how much they had fallen behind the other post-Soviet nations. Indeed, when Kyrgyzstan was experiencing its second grassroots revolution, Turkmenistan was experiencing its second personality cult, this time under Berdimuhamedov. A Turkmen student and friend asked me,
“How long are we going to endure one-man rule in our country when the Kyrgyz have taken fate into their own hands and are moving forward on the way to democracy and freedom?”
But everyone here soon became frightened by the chaos and ethnic bloodshed that broke out in Osh. An odd contradiction appeared: on the one hand, the official media reported about the unrest, but on the hand, it did so without comment, most of all from Berdimuhammedov.
Logo of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.
Editor’s note: This is a cross-post from guest blogger Bruno De Cordier, a scholar at the University of Ghent specialized in Central Asian insurgent groups. He argues against the claim that Islamism had a role to play in the tragic events in southern Kyrgyzstan.
Shortly after the communal violence in Osh and Jalalabad which left, according to source, 300 to 800 dead, Kyrgyzstan’s intelligence chief Keneshbek Duishebayev claimed that relatives of deposed president Kurmanbek Bakiyev met in Dubai with Islamist militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) and paid the latter up to 30 million dollars to destabilize southern Kyrgyzstan. Later warnings about the threat of extremism by UN Special Envoy Miroslav Jenca and US Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake suggest that at least part of the international community implicitly endorses the line an ‘Islamist hand’ in the unrest. This, at once, reconfirms that the specter of ‘extremism’ remains a prime alibi for foreign governments and organizations to maintain a high degree of influence and presence in Kyrgyzstan.
On the grounds though, few people really buy into the line or remain cynical, not in the least because the intelligence agencies did not come up with the evidence they pretended to have. Besides, practices like fabricated evidence, forced confessions and the reflex to bring any violence back to an extremist plot even if they later show to be of common criminal rather than of political nature, are prevalent in the region’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The Tajik- and then Afghan-based Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan first made headlines when its fighters appeared in Batken, along the Kyrgyz-Tajik border, in 1999 and 2000. After the death of its leader Juma Namangani and the demise of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, where it had its bases, in 2001, remnants of the group moved to the tribal areas on the Afghan-Pakistani border where they and its offshoot, the Islamic Jihad Union, are still based and operate as part of a wider Taliban network. Recently, a number of IMU and IJU guerrillas have relocated to the Afghan provinces of Zabul and Kunduz.
For all they have done at other times, fanning or using ethnic hatred has been neither an ideological line nor a shown practice of either the IMU or the IJU. Both groups are largely anti-nationalist and, though numerically dominated by Uzbeks, have a multi-ethnic composition that also includes Tatars, Uighurs, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs and Turkmens. Even at it zenith in 1999 and 2000 when the IMU appeared in Batken and held some territory there for a number of weeks, there is no credible evidence that its fighters ever raped, looted or committed any atrocities against a particular ethnic group. The question is also to what extent present IMU leader Tahir Yuldash still has real designs in Kyrgyzstan and the wider Ferghana area at all. At present, he and his group are mainly involved in fighting the American occupation forces and their proxies in Afghanistan, which is a much bigger and much more prestigious cause in global Jihadi circles.
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