Who Are Central Asia’s Real Enemies?

If Central Asia’s leaders are to be believed, bands of foreign-funded terrorists and “malevolent forces from abroad,” are to blame for successive and wide-ranging waves of unrest in the region. This isn’t a new phenomenon. In both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, relatively new leaders this year carried on the tradition of tapping into narratives pioneered by their predecessors warning of nefarious external actors instigating “color revolutions” or otherwise aiming to overthrow the state.

The alleged external actors are rarely named, the suggested conspiracies never fully explained.

Why does the foreign boogeyman, instigating trouble, pop up again and again in Central Asian political discourse? The simplest explanation is because it continues to be expedient to blame unrest on external actors. In Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – which have all experienced violent unrest this year – the political arena is sparsely populated and the government tightly controlled by a small elite. Regional leaders have long offered “stability” and “unity” as core ideals; internal unrest, as such, illustrates a dangerous lack of both. And so, regional leaders in Central Asia look to explain away unrest in their countries by pinning blame on an external actor.

Bruce Pannier put it well in a recent article for Eurasianet: “Blaming outsiders for creating domestic unrest is… also coercive, since it implies the population is sufficiently content that no one would think of protesting unless a devious foreigner or foreign power manipulated them into doing so.”

Furthermore, the overall conspiratorial narrative fits well into regional history, replete with actual active meddling by foreign powers, namely the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.

How has this standard narrative played out recently?

Anecdotally, there seem to be fewer direct references to “color revolutions,” a term that harkens back to anti-regime protests in the early 2000s, including the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan. Broadly speaking, when the phrase “color revolution” is used in Central Asia, it’s a reference to presumed American meddling – building off both Russian and Chinese propaganda around the term.

In 2016, for example, in the face of massive protests sparked by proposed land code changes, then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev warned of a “color revolution” seeking to exploit the country’s “liberal public policies and laws.”

“We all know that the so-called ‘color revolutions’ use a variety of different methods and begin with contrived rallies, murder and the desire to seize power. These methods have manifested themselves in our country. In countries where these revolutions succeeded, there is no longer a working state and stability, only rampant poverty and banditry that create conditions for the emergence of extremists and terrorists. The economies of these countries have gone backwards by many years.”

Amid the unrest of January 2022, current Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and his administration claimed local protests were hijacked by “local and foreign terrorist groups.” Tokayev ludicrously claimed there were 20,000 terrorists and bandits, with “extensive training abroad,” in Almaty. He said the violence was an attempted coup orchestrated by a “single center” – he never named the country allegedly responsible. Nor did he mention a “color revolution” directly, though such language was used in plenty of press coverage, especially Chinese reports and Russian coverage of the subsequent Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) deployment.

In May 2022, when protests erupted in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO), the government in Dushanbe responded with a “anti-terrorist operation.” Although the protests were distinctly local, with their genesis in the long-running tension between GBAO and Dushanbe and the proximate cause the killing of a local man last November, which the government failed to investigate, the Tajik government followed the usual script. The following month, President Emomali Rahmon delivered remarks in which he claimed that foreign-financed terrorists with the goal of revolution necessitated the military’s actions in GBAO.

Last month, protests exploded in the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, a part of Uzbekistan, after the revelation that the draft constitution President Shavkat Mirziyoyev hopes to push through soon included the revocation of Karakalpakstan’s constitutional ability to hold an independence referendum. After walking back the changes referencing the region, Mirziyoyev nevertheless blamed “certain forces” for “trying to shake up and destabilize the situation in Uzbekistan” on account of their “own selfish purposes.” He urged citizens in Karakalpakstan not to “succumb” to the “provocations” of “external hostile forces.”

Interestingly, whereas in the case of Kazakhstan in January the Russian response highlighted those aiming to foment a “color revolution,” the Kremlin’s response to the trouble in Karakalpakstan in July referred to it as a “domestic issue.” Of course, one major difference is that Kazakhstan is a member of the CSTO and Uzbekistan is not. It was expedient for Kazakhstan to label the unrest as foreign because it opened the door for CSTO intervention, and the successful CSTO deployment – the organization’s first in 30 years of existing – was a desirable outcome for Russia.

2022 is barely half through and three out of five Central Asian states have experienced dramatic scenes of protest and unrest, not to mention ensuing violent government crackdowns. Presidents in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan continue to deflect blame onto unnamed external actors, just as their predecessors (in the cases of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, at least) often did. But when it comes down to it, Central Asia’s enemies are not external forces but the internal dynamics that prioritize dogmatic devotion to stability and unity without genuine commitment to foster the conditions necessary for real stability and unity to take root.