The strongmen’s benefactors The Temptations of Tyranny in Central Asia by David Lewis

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, much of Central Asia has been ruled by a set of brutal feudal patriarchs reminiscent of the despotic Khans of Medieval times. These resilient authoritarians run countries like personal fiefdoms, inscribing “first family” control over the media, political parties and businesses, and unleashing repressive security apparatuses on impoverished people. Cults of personality, megalomania and exacting restrictions on citizens’ freedoms mark these regimes as particularly egregious dictatorships that have few parallels in the world.

In this new book, based on thousands of interviews in the region between 2001 and 2005, British scholar David Lewis explains the international and domestic factors that allow Central Asian tyrants to successfully hold sway. His account of autocratic survival abetted by foreign patrons uncovers complex political realities of a scantly understood part of Asia and exposes the double standards and myths of Western “democracy promotion”.

Lewis commences his story with Uzbekistan, where the former communist strongman Islam Karimov has reigned with an iron fist for the past 18 years. The US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 reduced the threat of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and brought hundreds of millions of dollars in multilateral aid to Karimov in exchange for the Khanabad air base. Western diplomats began a charade of portraying the sadistic Uzbek president as a Southeast Asian-style “authoritarian modernizer” with whom one “could do business with”. (p 18)

The European Union went to the extent of relaxing its sanctions in 2007 at the urging of Germany, which was eager to retain its Termez military base on Uzbek soil. Lewis summarizes the American failure in Uzbekistan as a casualty of “simplistic military-led geopolitics that undermined promoting democracy and economic reform”. (p 73)The author then moves to Turkmenistan, where another communist-era narcissist, Saparmurat Niyazov, eliminated all rivals with clinical ruthlessness and anointed himself president for life. To produce a politically compliant and educationally backward population, Niyazov deliberately restructured the national education system by cramming the syllabus with self-glorifying propaganda, thereby deskilling the country’s youth. Narrow Turkmen nationalism was promoted endlessly to the detriment of Russian and Uzbek minorities, as part of an “official policy of racial purity and ethnic cleansing”. (p 97)

Niyazov’s foreign policy of “neutrality” was a guise for rejecting Turkmenistan’s obligations under international law. Russian ambassadors  ambassadors were obsequious to him on account of the enormous natural gas reserves that Turkmenistan exported to their country.

Niyazov’s death in December 2006 transferred power to a cabal of his loyalists, who continued to court Western and Russian interests by dangling gas pipeline deals. As in Uzbekistan, international greed put paid to meaningful domestic political change.

Lewis devotes the next chapter to Kyrgyzstan, where Askar Akaev - head of the local communist party during the Soviet Union era - took power after independence in 1991. Unlike Karimov and Niyazov, Akaev was relatively liberal and allowed party politics to exist in Kyrgyzstan. By the year 2000, significant political opposition to him had built up as he tried to gather more powers to the presidency.

Lewis identifies the absence of “a concept of nation” as a crucial weakness in Central Asian state-building. Alternative sub-state (tribal and clan) and super-state (Islamic) identities were stronger than nationalism in the region, making it easier for despots to develop personalized neo-feudal regimes. Tajikistan is the best example of a feudal state under President Emomalii Rahmon, who has governed like a king with a court of fawning aristocrats. Rahmon survived a violent civil war in the early 1990s and went on to eliminate political opposition with the cunning of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong

After the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US, Rahmon’s star shone as Western powers realized that the closest access to invade Afghanistan was through the Tajik capital, Dushanbe. International recognition and support gave him “a new sense of confidence” (p 172) to embark on a fresh round of political purges of old allies and enemies.

Western-funded counter-narcotics projects enriched the very forces in the Tajik feudal pyramid that they were intended to stop. Lewis maintains that international assistance led to a “stable paralysis” in Dushanbe which made Rahmon difficult to unseat for fear that the whole state structure would collapse if he fell.

Constant exaggerations by regional governments of the “Islamic threat” and misuse of counter-terrorism for clamping down on legitimate opposition have thrown a blanket over the reality of radical Islam in Central Asia. Lewis pierces through it and argues that Saudi and Pakistani-inspired Wahhabi groups do operate in the region. Factions of the IMU are allied with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and have been involved in planning terrorist actions on a global scale.

The Hizb ut-Tahrir is far more popular than the IMU as it has eschewed violence as a political tactic. Its goal of reviving the utopian Islamic caliphate has won it a wide following among lower middle class youths in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Though not a pacifist organization, Hizb’s alleged involvement in the Tashkent bombings of 2004 is not certain because of the complicity of state agent provocateurs in the attacks. Apart from IMU and the Hizb, Pakistan’s missionary movement - Tablighi Jamaat - is also recruiting heavily among prison inmates and former criminals in Kyrgyzstan. The author remarks that Western governments lack independent intelligence to distinguish Islamist terrorists from peaceful political opposition, leaving them captive to the disinformation of the region’s tyrants.

Russian-inspired mistrust of the US was ever-present in Central Asia but it was compounded by the hypocrisy of American foreign policy, which “geopoliticized” values like democracy and human rights. Lewis quotes Uzbek democrats wondering “why the US was so supportive of their oppressors when it was so critical towards governments in, say, Belarus and Ukraine”. (p 228) Washington was never interested in answering the real problems of ordinary Central Asians and added one more sordid chapter to its record of abetting tyranny.

One need go no further than this book to appreciate the link between neo-imperialism and ruination of people’s lives. The West’s machinations in the region were the worst of all as they paralleled sloganeering and posturing about promoting “democracy” and “freedom”. Russia and China had their share of blame, but they at least had no pretensions of being on civilizing missions. Washington and Brussels loudly proclaimed liberal intent but caused greater damage than Moscow or Beijing by propping up Central Asia’s savage strongmen.

BY REVIEWED BY SREERAM CHAULIA