Abstract
Almost 14 years after its independence from the Soviet Union, the tiny Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan is struggling with challenges to its democratic growth, including the expansion of Islamic extremism and an increase in terrorist activities.
On October 22, 2004, the State Department issued a public announcement to citizens living in and traveling to Kyrgyzstan: “Extremist groups, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a terrorist organization with links to Al Qaeda, may be planning terrorist acts targeting U.S. government facilities, Americans, or American interests.”
Terror warnings are nothing new for Americans in Kyrgyzstan. In 2001, I was a second-year Peace Corps volunteer in Amanbayevo, a tiny Kyrgyz mountain village in the remote Talas province, where electricity is a luxury and indoor plumbing unheard of. I spent my days in the village school, teaching English to teenage students. Then 9/11 happened, and although I felt safe and didn't think it was necessary, the Peace Corps evacuated me and the other volunteers working in Kyrgyzstan back to the United States.
Nearly 75 percent of the population in Kyrgyzstan is Muslim, and another 20 percent are Russian Orthodox. For the people I encountered–friends, coworkers, students, hosts–religion was not a big deal. The vast majority of Kyrgyz people are what might be called “nominal believers,” that is, their religious practices are derived mostly from tradition and cultural identification–an observation confirmed by the findings of the State Department's 2003 International Religious Freedom Report.
This past summer I returned to Kyrgyzstan to volunteer for the United Nations Development Program, in the office of the Poverty Reduction Program, in the capital of Bishkek. The city, with its internet cafes and open-air bazaars remains, like other population centers in Kyrgyzstan, multiethnic and peaceful. Although city life in Kyrgyzstan was a far cry from the Kyrgyz countryside, one thing is similar–religious tolerance. But this might be changing.
The nascent radical movement
After September 11, 2001, the United States moved quickly to strengthen its relationships with several Central Asian countries, including Kyrgyzstan. A December 2001 U.S.-Kyrgyz agreement allows the United States to use a base at the country's main airport outside Bishkek. About a thousand coalition troops are currently in Kyrgyzstan, which in 2003 the United States called “a dependable and outspoken ally in the global war on terrorism.” Unlike in other countries, the U.S. presence in Kyrgyzstan has not met with much controversy.
The October State Department warning was likely spurred by a trio of terrorist bombings on July 30, 2004, in Uzbekistan. The IMU took credit for the attacks, which targeted the U.S. and Israeli embassies and the prosecutor general's office in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, killing at least two people. On November 11, authorities in Kazakhstan announced the arrests of 17 members of Jamaat Muhajideen, a terrorist group they said has ties to Al Qaeda and was training women to become suicide bombers. According to Kazakh officials, the group is also active in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
At times in the 1990s, Tajikistan's civil war and Uzbekistan's battle with an Islamic insurgency spilled over into Kyrgyzstan. In 1999, rebel fighters in Tajikistan crossed the border and kidnapped Japanese geologists and American mountain climbers. The rebels, believed to include IMU members, eventually released the hostages. In 2000, IMU fighters raided Kyrgyz border villages, and in 2001 engaged in skirmishes with Kyrgyz forces.
The IMU, which has been on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations since 2000, aims to establish an Islamic caliphate in Central Asia, starting with Uzbekistan. It has some support in the Ferghana Valley–an impoverished region that straddles parts of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan dealt the IMU a serious blow–many key IMU leaders were killed in the fighting, according to the State Department, which estimates the group's membership has dropped to around a thousand since the war in Afghanistan–about half of the previous estimate.
A third-grader in rural Kyrgyzstan practices his Russian using Soviet-era textbooks at the Chingiz Aitmatov School in Amanbayevo.
In early July 2004, Tokon Mamytov, deputy chairman of Kyrgyzstan's National Security Service, told parliament that a new terrorist organization had incorporated members of the IMU and other groups. “The information that Islamic radicals acting in various parts of the region decided to unite into a new clandestine organization, the Islamic Movement of Central Asia, is alarming for Kyrgyzstan,” said Mamytov (Interfax-AVN, July 1, 2004).
Chinara Urustemova, a specialist in conflict prevention with the U.N. Preventive Development Program, works daily in southern Kyrgyzstan, a region that, since independence, has seen both ethnic clashes and violent government suppression of opposition. The attraction there to fundamentalist Islam, Urustemova told me, results from the government's lack of concern with rural areas. Rural residents, especially in the south, are disillusioned with the Kyrgyz style of democracy and are reorienting to a stricter reading of Islam.
“It all depends on the government and the people's prosperity. If people have fewer problems, they won't be interested in changing their religion,” Urustemova said.
Mira Karybaeva, Bishkek director of the Konrad Adenauer Fund and one of the foremost advocates for democracy in Kyrgyzstan, told me that a rise in fundamentalism would make her work more difficult. “We can't exclude the return of religion,” she said. “The influence of the West and the influence of religion [on Kyrgyzstan] are equal, but Islam would make the democratization process more difficult.”
Progress stalled?
“Kyrgyzstan is by far the most promising case of a democratizing society in this part of the world,” Ambassador Stephen Young told me in an interview at the embassy in Bishkek. In its first years as an independent republic, Kyrgyzstan joined the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, and established its own currency, the Kyrgyz som. Askar Akayev, a former scientist, was elected Kyrgyzstan's first president in 1991 and guided the government as it drafted and approved a sound democratic constitution. But Akayev is frequently characterized as an authoritarian and has been a disappointment to the West. As the Council on Foreign Relations put it, his reputation has “been tarnished by his government's lack of respect for democratic practices and human rights. Akayev's regime suppresses internal dissent, arrests political opponents, and censors the media.”
In March 2002, a protest against the jailing of a local official in the rural area of Aksy turned deadly after police fired into a crowd, killing five. The deaths resulted in a wave of condemnation, and many people placed the blame squarely on Akayev; protesters at a June 2002 rally demanded his resignation.
As in other former Soviet republics, Young told me, in Kyrgyzstan there exists “a tension between government that wants to limit the role [of citizens] and increasing impatience on the part of the people.” As Akayev completes his third five-year term and the country enters another election cycle in 2005, tension has only increased. Parliamentary elections will take place in February, and the switch from a bicameral to unicameral legislature promises contested races around the country. In October 2005, Kyrgyzstan will hold its fourth presidential election, and all eyes are on Akayev to see if he will run again or instead put his weight behind a handpicked successor.
Sources in international organizations and nongovernmental organizations in Bishkek told me they believed Akayev's public assurances that he will not run for another term. But the political map took an interesting turn in fall 2004 when Akayev's wife, daughter, and son all announced plans to run for parliament in three different regions of the country. This represents a significant challenge for opposition parties because although Akayev and his family are not terribly popular, many voters remain unsure of the opposition's ability to effectively challenge the established order. “Opposition here means [only] to be against,” one source at an international organization in Bishkek told me. “The problem is lack of vision.”
Kyrgyzstan's difficulties in making the full transition to democracy stem from its Soviet legacy, Karybaeva believes. “It is necessary to understand–this is Asia. There's no civil society, and during Soviet times, the idea of the individual was meaningless. Since then, the system has changed, but the people didn't,” Karybaeva said. “The Communists became democrats, [so] democracy has become a discredited idea. The people stopped believing.”
But at the embassy, Young is optimistic about Kyrgyzstan's chances for democratic progress. “These things don't get decided by one election,” he said. “If the February elections are conducted in a free and open process, [it will] enhance the chances that October will be free and fair. There's no reason this country should become less stable as it goes through the electoral process and beyond.”