The Specter of Terror

In October 2014, Canadian information security expert Rafal Rohozinski told the audience at an information security conference in Astana, Kazakhstan that the 4000 Central Asians fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq posed a serious risk for the region.

“The big challenge for Kazakhstan is that these guys will go back to their homeland because IS today isn’t something that only happens in Syria and Iraq. This is about the creation of a caliphate, which Kazakhstan should become part of as well,” he said, according to Tengrinews.

Rohozinski’s number was widely circulated. It overshot previous estimates by thousands and fell in line with a common theme: hyping international terrorism as a future domestic threat in the former Soviet states of Central Asia.

The persistent worry throughout Central Asia is that international terrorism will manifest locally. As yet, there has been no sign that it has. The fears reached a high over the last decade of war in Afghanistan to the south, only to explode once again as ISIS marched across the Syrian desert.

As the war in Afghanistan churned on, Central Asian autocrats seized on the general fear that terrorism would spill over into the region. They stepped up their crackdowns on opposition movements, human rights, and religious activities. Participating fully in America’s global war on terror, the autocrats of Central Asia earned a pass for their own domestic oppressions. But even religious repression, such as a 2011 law in Tajikistan prohibiting children under the age of 18 from attending Friday prayers, have not produced a response from would-be radicals.

Proximity to the war in Afghanistan has had little effect on terrorism to the north. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD), an open-source catalogue of information on terrorist events around the world, contains 52 attacks in the five states of Central Asia between 2001 and 2013. Of that number, only four are attributed to the best-known terrorist organization from the region, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. For South Asia during the same time period, the database lists over 20,000 incidents. A query of eastern Europe turns up 277, mostly in the Balkans. Surely, not every terrorist incident has been recorded in the GTD, but the difference is notable between the regions.

Western analysts and the region’s self-interested leaders continue to breathlessly hype the idea that Central Asia is a powder-keg primed to explode. In a January 2015 report, dramatically titled “Syria Calling: Radicalization in Central Asia,” the International Crisis Group notes under the heading “A Growing Jihadi Problem” that Central Asian states have struggled to accommodate the growth of religion and that religious organizations have filled “a void created by the lack of credible governance and social insecurity.” The report says that the call of ISIS fills this void.

An earlier report, released in November 2014 by Chatham House and authored by John Heathershaw and David W. Montgomery, tackles the myth of post-Soviet Muslim radicalization in Central Asia, including the idea that authoritarianism and poverty necessarily lead to radicalization. The authors tackle what they label as several widely-held misconceptions that contribute to the overall myth of radical Islam in Central Asia, arguing that “a relatively small number of Muslim individuals and groups committing violent acts in Central Asia in the name of Islam do not constitute a broader trend, nor does it establish a causal relationship.” It is entirely reasonable to argue that authoritarianism and poverty contribute to political unrest, but they do not, especially in the Central Asian context, necessarily lead to radicalization. Neither of Kyrgyzstan’s revolutions, 2005’s Tulip Revolution and the untitled 2010 revolution, were driven, or even co-opted, by extreme Islamic ideology.

While the ICG report posits that “ideological commitment to jihad, the idea of holy struggle to advance Islam, is for many the main reason Central Asians are drawn to IS,” Heathershaw and Montgomery, however, highlight the fact that the manifestation of Islam in Central Asia has rarely come into conflict with state secularism.

The region’s only legal Islamist party, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT, also abbreviated according to the Tajik initials as HNIT), has not developed a theocratic policy platform, according to the Chatham House report. The IRPT was banned in 1993 and fought with other opposition parties against the government during the country’s devastating civil war. The party was re-legalized in 1998 after signing peace accords with the government and, aside from boycotting the 2006 presidential election, which observers called “flawed and unfair but peaceful,” it has remained quiet. The IRPT, however, is consistently targeted by the state as a potential threat.

On February 11, Jamoliddin Mahmudov, a party leader and member of Tajikistan’s Central Election Commission, was arrested in Dushanbe. Security officials said that two pistols and ammunition were found in the home of another IRPT member, allegedly given to him by Mahmudov in 1996. Further details, as of writing, are few. Perhaps not coincidentally, parliamentary elections in Tajikistan are scheduled for March 1.

The Chatham House report notes that the “danger of post-Soviet Muslim radicalization is repeated ad nauseam by the region’s governments” with the aim of dismantling all political opposition and seeking foreign assistance for what is essentially domestic regime security.

 Uzbekistan suffered few recriminations from the 2005 Anjian massacre, but Washington did impose a ban on the transfer of military equipment from the U.S. A decade later, that ban has been lifted, with no accompanying improvement in the country’s human rights record. Daniel Rosenblum, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia, announced in January that Uzbekistan would be receiving 308 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs) and 20 Armored Recovery Vehicles, as part of the U.S. government’s Excess Defense Articles Program for use in counterterrorism and counternarcotics. Contrary to common assumption, Rosenblum noted that “these MRAPs were at a number of different locations. None were in Afghanistan, by the way.”

Sidestepping questions of human rights, Rosenblum’s comments in an interview with Voice of America underscored the fact that the true locus of the relationship between the U.S. and Uzbekistan is security, and always has been. As long as the myth of radical Islam in the region, as laid out in the Chatham House report, dominates the conversation, all other concerns will fall to the wayside.

Depending on whom you ask, the threat – whether from ISIS or radical Islam in general – is anything from a clear and present danger to a politically expedient rhetorical construction used by Central Asia’s strongmen to keep their fists tight on the reins of power. The truth cannot be both, but it is likely to lie somewhere in the middle. For now, the ghosts of future terror in Central Asia guide the region’s leaders and their partners around the world at the expense of human rights and political freedom for the people of Central Asia. Continued repression of free speech and religious expression may not necessarily lead to cheers for the Caliphate on the streets of Tashkent and Dushanbe, but the unyielding grip that Central Asia’s leaders retain on power may still foment mass discontent.