[THS] Ted Rall: Ethnic Cleansing in Kyrgyzstan

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25739.htm


Ethnic Cleansing in Kyrgyzstan
More American Chickens Come Home to Roost

By Ted Rall

June 16, 2010 "UExpress" -- NEW YORK--Believe it or not, I don't scour the headlines
looking for tragedies and atrocities to blame on the United States.

But that's how it often works out.

When the big earthquake ravaged Haiti earlier this year, it would have been a relief
to look at the resulting pain and despair and see nothing more than the terrible result
of tectonic movements. It would have been nice to be able to blame nature. Or
France.

But France's crimes were over a century old. The freshly spilt blood in Haiti was and
remains on the hands of the Americans who raped the Caribbean nation throughout
the 20th century, and opened the 21st by keeping relief supplies and rescue teams
out of the disaster zone so long that the people trapped under the rubble had bled
or starved to death.

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

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

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.

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."

But the base isn't why Kyrgyzstan really matters. The big effect is that the events in
Osh mark the beginning of a new surge of anti-Americanism with long-term
repercussions.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once again--as in Haiti--it's largely our fault.

Copyright 2010 Ted Rall, Distributed by Universal Uclick/Ted Rall