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Overview
Central Asia

A Kazakh Tree in the Digital Woods

Technological progress, freedom of information, and the danger of lost digital memory.

By Catherine Putz

Central Asia perfectly demonstrates both the power and the limitations of the digital revolution. The information age has enabled many millions to draw on the accumulated knowledge of humanity flowing through the Internet. As Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales wrote recently, “Knowledge is no longer shared exclusively with the strong and powerful as a tool of control, but widely distributed, acquired and shared globally by the general public.” Moreover, where once history was recorded by the elite few, technology has enabled a much larger and more diverse section of humanity to write, and presumably preserve, their history.

Freedom, but New Chains

Wales commented that “sharing information makes us stronger as a society and weakens the dominance and control of the traditional power centers.” But he went on to note that “for that reason, many oppressive regimes devote expanding efforts to restricting the free flow of information.” The digital revolution has given autocrats new reins with which to harness and control their populations.

The example Wales cited? Kazakhstan.

Wales could have chosen any of the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, or any number of regimes around the world, but chose Kazakhstan to illustrate how some measures of technological progress are misleading and how such progress can be co-opted and corrupted by the powerful. The choice was appropriate. Kazakhstan has been increasingly lauded by some in the West for its progressiveness, its democracy; meanwhile, its government controls the flow of information and dissenters self-censor for fear of reprisal.

Kazakhstan doesn’t have the worst record in the region with regard to freedoms – information, press, rights, and so on – but as the region’s preeminent state, its failures are all the more glaring in light of perhaps undeserved praise.

Flattering, but ultimately misleading, statistics distort our ability to assess the actual level of freedom of information in the countries of Central Asia. Conflating progress in technology with improvements in governance clouds some Western judgments, particularly when it comes to Kazakhstan. For example, Kazakhstan, on average, has faster broadband download speeds than Australia, a fact celebrated recently in the Kazakh press. According to the Net Index, a project run by Ookla, a broadband testing and network diagnostic company, the average broadband download speed in Kazakhstan is 18.90 Mbps, compared to 16.69 Mbps in Australia.

More and more Central Asians are online, but censorship, propaganda, and the very real danger of expressing a dissenting opinion mar technological success. Uzbekistan, for example, ranks 38th in terms of Internet users with 11.9 million. Kazakhstan isn’t far behind, at 43rd with 9.8 million Internet users in 2014. Both have seen double-digit growth in the number of Internet users within their borders over the past year, as have Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan.

“This is without doubt a step forward,” Wales writes, “however, such achievement must be viewed in light of the expanding censorship and governmental control over the Internet under the current Kazakh regime.”

During the most recent presidential election in Kazakhstan, numerous Central Asia analysts noted on social media that there didn’t seem to be much of a campaign. Major Kazakh news sources – such as the Astana Times and Tengrinews – had scant coverage of the election. Meanwhile, President Nursultan Nazarbayev was covered extensively in his official capacity. In its preliminary report the day after the election (which Nazarbayev won with 97 percent), the OSCE election observation mission noted that:

While there are many media outlets, there is a general lack of independent media outlets offering diverse viewpoints. Numerous sanctions, including closures of media and the blocking of websites, contribute to a stifled political discourse

The observers also noted that restrictive laws similarly stifle dissent. The Kazakh constitution may enshrine freedom of expression and prohibit censorship, but the criminal code still lists defamation and insult as illegal. Additionally, special protections exist in the legal code for the president and other public officials. The campaign season in Kazakhstan, legally mandated to last no more than 30 days, included no opposing platforms. The incumbent's two opponents essentially endorsed Nazarbayev and offered no differences in opinion as to how the country ought to be run.

Wales astutely points out that “private bloggers and opposition activists have been practicing self-censorship to evade government reprisal.”

There is an old philosophical thought experiment that can illustrate the vacuum into which dissent in Kazakhstan has fled. If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The question is one of observation and reality: Does the unobserved still exist? If there is a dissenting opinion, but no one hears it, does it exist at all?

History Eroding into Digital Dust

Although fear may prompt some toward self-censorship, the Internet has nonetheless allowed many to record their version of history. In places where reality differs so wildly from the official state-sanctioned version of history, this matters tremendously. Nowhere was this more evident than in the months after the 2005 Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan, which left hundreds of protesters dead in the streets at the hands of security forces.

In a New York Times op-ed commemorating the 10th anniversary of the tragic events, Sarah Kendzior wrote that Uzbeks who fled the country “banded together online, creating blogs and forums that served as safeguards of forbidden narratives of Andijan. Thanks to the Internet, exile ended up facilitating the very political interaction that it was supposed to prevent.”

Witnesses to the violence posted firsthand accounts. Citizens uploaded photos. Poets commemorated victims in verse. And forums filled with commentary, as Uzbeks both inside Uzbekistan — where all news of the massacre was censored — and outside the country traded information, trying to make sense of the tragedy. Scattered around the world, Uzbeks developed an immunity from the censorship and persecution of the state — at least, for a time.

But digital records are still at risk. Google Vice President Vint Cerf recently said that “piles of digitized material – from blogs, tweets, pictures, and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct.” Cerf warned that we face a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century.”

The digital revolution brought with it freedom, new chains, and the danger of losing history to a series of incomprehensible ones and zeros. Digital erosion, Kendzior noted, has taken much of what exiled Uzbeks painstakingly recorded. One by one forums shut and pictures disappeared. Meanwhile, on the 10th anniversary of Andijan the Uzbek government released Traitor, a film about an Islamist plot in Andijan. The government, and filmmakers, deny the allusion to the 2005 events, but the film nonetheless was interpreted by state media as “a bid to make fresh sense of the origins of the tragic events in Andijan, which were initiated from abroad.”

Kendzior commented that while Cerf was referencing data loss in democratic societies, the scourge of digital erosion hits autocratic societies much harder. “When censorship rules the homeland, the Internet is often the only alternative. When you lose digital data, you lose the memory of a nation.”

Technology has enabled more people than ever before in human history to not only seek out information, but to contribute to their own historical record. Both these processes – seeking information and recording it – are complicated by state control and digital erosion. Central Asia, in particular, serves as cautionary tale that digital progress does not necessarily lead immediately to democratic progress.

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The Authors

Catherine Putz is the special projects editor at The Diplomat.
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