Central Asia

Uzbekistan's borders are artificial, having been carved out by the Soviets in an attempt to divide up the Islamic cultures of the Asian heartland. Its political order is also artificial, perpetuating a classic party-state police dictatorship almost undistinguishable from the Marxist-Leninist order that preceded it.

Because it is remote and little-known, Muslim authorities and Western states alike have made significant mistakes in dealing with the Karimov government. Soon after the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001 Uzbekistan was accepted as a worthy partner of the U.S.-led coalition in fighting radical Islamist terror.

Westerners noted the role of the now-defunct Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in the al-Qaeda front. The U.S. Defense Department took over the Karshi-Khanabad or K-2 airfield as a base for operations against the Taliban.

But the IMU was annihilated in Afghanistan. It had never struck roots among the Uzbek people; rather, it recruited a small number of poor and misled Uzbeks for combat in such other countries as Tajikistan, in addition to Afghanistan.

Karimov and his stooges could have taken pride in the failure of IMU to stir support among their people. Uzbekistan could have gained credit with the world as an exemplar of moderate, Sufi-oriented, Hanafi-Sunni Islam. Instead, however, Karimov followed the example of Russian demagogue Vladimir Putin in preferring to exaggerate the threat posed by the IMU and various other marginal Islamist groups.

The massacre of Andijan and more

For Karimov, there can be only one strategy: to proclaim all opposition and even criticism of him as jihadist. Merchants and other disaffected elements protested against the interference of Karimov's repressive system with commerce in the Ferghana Valley town of Andijan in May 2005. The Uzbek ruler responded as Tsar Nicholas the II (a.k.a. Nicholas the Bloody) did in 1905 in St. Petersburg and as Stalin dealt with recalcitrant peasants during the forced collectivization of the early 1930s. Ordinary people in Andijan were massacred in the hundreds and then falsely-labeled as Islamist radicals.

Soon after that, Karimov compelled the United States to carry out a decision that the Pentagon had pondered for two years: the K-2 airbase was closed.

But until Andijan the reactionary and brutal policies of Karimov were little understood in the West. Wahhabi agitators from Saudi Arabia conned Western human rights gadflies, whose ignorance of Central Asian Islam was and remains painfully obvious, into believing that failure to accept Wahhabi infiltration of Uzbekistan was a violation of Muslim religious rights. At the same time, because Uzbekistan possesses a uniquely rich Islamic heritage, some Muslims in the West were fooled by the Karimov regime into thinking that public money spent on the restoration of tombs was an affirmation of Islamic spiritual revival. Both perceptions were distorted, and each mirrored the other. Uzbek Islam did not need Wahhabism to make it authentic, and official concern about Wahhabi “missionization” was justified. Calls by Western NGOs for dialogue between Uzbek authorities and Islamist radicals were absurdly misconceived.

But neither did Uzbek Islam require lavish expenditure on elaborate monuments to encourage the rebirth of Sufism, much less public relations efforts by Western Sufis and their acolytes to make Karimov appear a defender of traditional Islam.

Western democrats, Muslims everywhere – but especially those interested in Sufi spirituality – and representatives and friends of the Turkic heritage in the Islamic world should agree on one thing: There is no justification for defending the Karimov dictatorship, which is merely a pawn of Putinism. And Muslims who allied with him and other neo-Communists will find much to regret when they are called on to reflect on their errors.

*Stephen Schwartz is author of “The Two Faces of Islam” and executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism [islamicpluralism.org]. He visited Uzbekistan in 2003 and 2004.

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CIP In the News: Executive Director Schwartz on Bodansky and Chechens, New York Post, December 23, 2007

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12232007/postopinion/postopbooks/reality_chech_592076.htm

REALITY CHECH

By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ

Chechen Jihad

Al Qaeda's Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror by Yossef Bodansky (HarperCollins)

 December 23, 2007 -- The global confrontation brought about by the rise of radical Islam had its culminating moments on 9/11, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the sudden appearance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the obsessed dictator of Iran and in the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

This worldwide upheaval has produced hundreds of new books focused on differing aspects of the challenge. In the broader history of present-day Muslim extremism, the wars between Russia and the Chechens, a long-obscure people originating in the Caucasus, represent a significant but minor element.

Yossef Bodansky, who has contributed some of the most influential, if flawed volumes to the Western discussion of radical Islam, has now taken on the Chechen problem. The result is neither authoritative, nor reliable, nor does much credit to him or his publisher.

There are many defects in Bodansky's account of “the Chechen Jihad." First, the author has leapt into the risky waters of prediction, declaring that the Chechens, who are barely known in the West, represent “the next wave of terror." Yet Bodansky nowhere answers the simplest question about the Chechens: why should they be considered a universal threat, rather than, simply, enemies of Russian nationalism?  

Their battle against Russian power was, for many years, moderate in its aims, and the majority of them remain peaceful in their aspirations. Their efforts were corrupted by the incursion of Saudi-backed Wahhabis into the Caucasian mountains, but the Chechen nation still has many supporters in the United States, chiefly members of the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (ACPC). These include national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski, former secretary of state Alexander Haig, and diplomat Max Kampelman.  

These and other individuals have concentrated on gross human rights violations by the Russian authorities in Chechnya, as well as the role of the Caucasian conflict in the aggrandizement of current Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bodansky is openly dismissive of such issues. He has chosen instead to highlight what he calls “Chechenization," defined as the radicalization and Arabization of traditionally moderate Muslim societies.

Bodansky identifies regions where “Chechenization" is present, including “Iraq, the Palestinian Authority and Indonesia, as well as several Muslim communities in both Central Asia and the Balkans." Yet he fails to observe that in Iraq, Islamist extremism has yet to win a clear victory, while any victory claims among the PA are obviously premature. As for Indonesia, ex-Soviet Central Asia (excluding Afghanistan) and the Balkans, none of them has produced a significant jihadist upsurge.  

The author's method, however, consists of treating any incident or even implication of radicalism, regardless how limited, as a major assault. Further, he is unapologetic in his pro-Russian orientation. He defines “Chechenization" as “mobilizing a country, or a region, against the West," but who says fighting Russia is the same as attacking the West? Of course Putin and his cohort drape themselves in the banner of defense of the West against the jihadist hordes, but one can hardly equate Russia, with all its accumulated abuses of ethnic and religious rights, with Western democracy.  

The author uses history to justify his theories, rather than presenting a factual account of the Caucasian tragedy. He treats, in passing, the most devastating event in modern Chechen history - the deportation of the entire Chechen people to Kazakhstan at the order of Joseph Stalin - as something brought about by Nazi intrigues. But numerous Russian politicians, historians and journalists long ago refuted the argument that Stalin's terrible act - which legitimized the reappearance of Chechen nationalism as the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s - had anything to do with fighting the Germans. Stalin deported the Chechens because he hated them as a Muslim people resentful of Russian domination. Russian rulers have repeatedly sought to use the Caucasian wars as a pretext to manipulate and suppress their own people.  

“Chechen Jihad" is filled with apparent facts, rumors, allegations, reported interviews and conversations, none of which are footnoted or otherwise sourced, piled on to a point where even an expert reader is confused. In the real world, Chechens have never been involved in attacks outside the former Soviet Union and, allegedly, Afghanistan, and in Chechnya itself the bloody contest between Russian agents and Wahhabi interlopers has dwindled. Bodansky acknowledges this reality and even credits it to disillusionment among Chechens with the meddling of foreign jihadists, but his final argument is repellent as well as simplistic: that the West should learn from the Russian authoritarian tradition how to deal with Islamist radicals.  

This book therefore ends up as little more than a propaganda item for the ambitions of the new Muscovite tyrant, Putin. To Bodansky, American lives sacrificed in Iraq have been wasted, and the West would do better to adopt the Putinesque strategy of forcibly subordinating Muslims to “modernity."  

Unfortunately for Bodansky and his friends, Putin and his methods enjoy little or no support in the West. This book has been undone by the most elementary aspect of Russian sociology: the persistence of brutality and tyranny that makes Russian solutions to radical Islam worse than the problem they are claimed to address.  

Stephen Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism.

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