 Good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you're joining us from. My name is Gavin Health and I'm a senior expert on Central Asia at USIP. I'll be moderating today's very interesting discussion. I'd like to thank all of you as well as our panelists for taking time out of your busy summer schedule to be with us for this very timely discussion. I'd also like to thank our co-hosts for today's discussion, our friends at the AUXTA Society for Central Asian Affairs. A little bit of logistics. We invite all of you to take part in today's discussion by asking questions using a chat box function located just below the video player on the USIP event page. We ask that you please include your name and specify where you are joining us from in your questions and you can engage with us and each other on Twitter today with the hashtag at USIP Central Asia. As many of you know, USIP was founded by the US Congress 35 years ago as an independent non-partisan national institute with the goal of preventing, mitigating, and resolving violent conflict. Our work in Central Asia is organized under the US State Department C5 plus 1 initiative and provides a format for dialogue and a platform for joint efforts to address common challenges faced by the United States and the five Central Asian Republics. From DC, we've reduced timely analysis and convened discussions like this on the key drivers of conflict and stability in Central Asia. Today's discussion has really come from, I think, an observation that many have made in the last few weeks looking at events in Central Asia over this year, which have seen an unusual wave of protests popping up in places that we don't typically see them in calm and stable Central Asian states. In January, Kazakhstan erupted with widespread violence and in recent weeks, both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have seen popular protests in formerly autonomous regions of their countries, which surprised observers and prompted governments to cut off internet access, prevent outside media from covering this story, and led to some harsh crackdowns. This spate of incidents appears to stem from regional leaders' failure to anticipate popular reactions to simple policy changes, a string of what some have called unforced errors by Central Asian governments followed by harsh overreactions in putting them down. Today's event will try to pierce the veil of secrecy around some of these recent events in Central Asia. We have an excellent panel of scholars with us to share their perspectives on these protests and to try and understand more broadly why governments in the region are suddenly struggling to keep things under control. Suzanne Levy Sanchez is a non-resident fellow at American University School of International Service and a retired associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. She is the author of a number of publications, including the Afghan Central Asian Borderlands, the state and local leaders, and field works as a craft for practical guide to doing research in the real world. Ivan Quiche is a Polish Mexican doctoral candidate at the University of Tartu in Estonia. He holds an IM from the University of Glasgow in an MA from his current institution and is studied both in Moscow and Mexico City. He's also offered expert commentary on Russia's foreign policy and Central Asian international affairs to media such as BBC, France 24, and RFEL. Anastel Tutumlu is an associate professor at Near East University specializing in political economy and regime leadership in Central Asia. So Suzanne and Ivan have a personal experience working in both Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan and Karakal-Pakistan in Uzbekistan, respectively, and will first offer us some background and insight, hopefully, into how these missteps, protests, and crackdowns came about. I know that especially when things started to happen in Karakal-Pakistan, a lot of us who study Central Asia sort of looked at each other and said, you know, what's going on? Who knows anything about what's going on in Karakal-Pakistan? So hopefully, we'll get a little bit of insight into the background of these events, and then Asel is going to help us understand what's going on with these governments and these systems and why things might be going the way they are. So first, we'll go around and do a round of presentations, and I'll start with Suzanne, please. The floor is yours. Thank you so much, Gavin. I'm honored to be here among such great scholars, and I'm honored to be here with USIP. Thank you so much. First, I want to just acknowledge the many brave Pamiris, both locally and in the diaspora, who have stood up in various ways in a very difficult situation, and many have died or been arrested as a result of this, and many probably would be better being here in my position, but they can't be for fear of their family, or some of them who are speaking up have mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and cousins being harassed, detained, tortured, and looted. So just saying that right off the top, because I think it's important, because it has been pretty intense. Second, I want to say one book that Gavin didn't mention is my newest book, and this book is only relevant because it actually has eight case studies on informal organizations in Gorna Barakshan and Afghanistan, and all of the informal organizations were studied as a means to understand how a vibrant civil society functioned within an authoritarian state. Most of them during these recent protests and crackdowns have been either killed, wiped out, or they're no longer existent. So it's important to understand that this book of many years of study is now almost erased, but it's worth reading because it helps to understand the, and I'm not trying to sell my book, but I think it is very relevant here, because it does explain what the government is doing and why it's cracking down. So now, just briefly, I'm going to start, I have so many details floating in my head, I was trying to sort this out, so I wouldn't, I somehow often go into the weeds and then it becomes, you know, people don't know what I'm talking about. So I'm going to try to be succinct. The crack, the recent protest started after Gulbadeen, Ziyobekov, was killed in November, November 25th, I believe, and then there were four days of protest after that, but why did they kill Ziyobekov at that time? So this is in Gorna Barakshan, that Ziyobekov had beat up a prosecutor, the local prosecutor a year before, and that he had beaten them up because he harassed a local girl, local young woman, and I want to say that that's sort of traditionally what has happened. So this is, you know, these types of beating up and even minor protests to harassment of women in particular or various injustices have been occurring, it's very common there, it's just never reported. So that's nothing new. And so everybody kind of, this whole, you know, they knew Ziyobekov might get arrested, etc. But then there was a change in the governor of the province from Yadgar Faisov to Mirzon Nabarov. And why does that matter? Because Faisov was stopping the arrest of Ziyobekov. But Mirzon Nabarov, the new governor, decided, no, we're going to go after him, and we're not going to allow this to happen. And he went after him and he let the prosecutor who had been beaten up arrest him. And there are many reports of the prosecutor shooting Ziyobekov in the head in the car. So that started these protests because a lot of people witnessed that. And there were four days of protests, the government cracked down, and then things calmed down, which they usually do. Because there were, you know, there were protests and government local conflict in 2012, 2014, 2018, and then this one. So again, that's nothing new. It sort of bubbles up, the government tries to take control, and then there's civil society and the government. The usual chain of events is the government and the civil society come to some sort of agreement about whatever has been brewing, which is what everybody thought was going to happen here. So the local organized a group called Group 44 of local civil society leaders. And the government of Tajikistan allowed a commission that included some of those members, so that they were going to investigate the killing to see if it was justified or not. Because the Tajik government was saying he fought back with a gun, and the locals were saying he didn't. So they were going to investigate that. But they never really investigated it. And then the prosecutors closed the case. So the internet was closed and shut down during this time. There were roadblocks between most of the little neighborhoods in Harouk, and people were getting more and more upset. Eventually they turned on a very slow version of the internet a couple months later. And they still hadn't investigated it. They were arresting various people, harassing people. And so there was a new planned protest against these injustices. And that was announced May 14, and then they did it May 16. And Tajik government shot into the crowd. It got pretty out of hand. It was a peaceful protest that turned into a violent crackdown by the government. And then the Tajik government called in reinforcements. And those reinforcements drove through Vama Roshan, which is the neighboring district. And the Roshanis tried to block the road. There are many protesters then, and Roshanis historically have not gotten involved. They stay out of it. They don't. But the injustices that were happening in Harouk inspired a fairly large protest there, and the government cracked down. The government has given figures of between eight and 21 that were killed. And the locals have said it's 40 or more that were killed. And then there were also numbers of 120 hostages taken. There was looting. The security forces went door to door. And there were 17 cars taken from locals. It kind of went from there. Then the government decided, well, I guess we're going to go all in, which they had never done before. They always, for years, for at least 12 years, they wanted to take sort of the autonomous status away from the region. And they wanted to have full control. They had been unable to. And just as a sidebar, part of the reason they'd been unable to is the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous OBLAST, the autonomy of the region, was actually existed before the state of Tajikistan. So it was in, Tajikistan was part of Uzbekistan at first as an ASSR, an autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which is and ended, when the Soviet Union ended, is what Karl Pakistan remained an ASSR. Whereas Gorno-Badakhshan, once Tajikistan was separated and became its own state no longer an ASSR, Gorno-Badakhshan kept its autonomous status as a province within the new Tajik SSR. Now, why is that? It's important as a sidebar because the delimitation of the entire Soviet Union was based, you know, all the borders of the post-Soviet space are based on those borders. So you change any of them, all of these little border disputes between countries, you really question all of them. So it's not that easy for these dictators to just take it away because it changes a lot of different things. So back to the protest. So then after May 16th and after the massacre at Roshan, and I'm calling it a massacre because killing that many civilians in a protest is pretty extreme, then they went after the most influential local leaders in Hurok and they killed them. They killed them. The first one commander, Colonel Bulkir, on May 22nd, his full name is Mama Bulkirov, and then they killed two others. And then they began arresting journalists, human rights leaders, civil society leaders, business leaders, and they also nationalized most of the larger, if not all the large, businesses in the region. The region is, which I probably should have said right at the top, is populated by Pamiri Ismailis, and they are a different religious and ethnic group than the center of Dushanbe. So they destroyed the Ismaili flag and they have replaced it with a welcome president, Rahmone, the president of Tajikistan, and they have also closed down the Ismaili summer camps for children, and they have been slowly weaning away at the various religious, you know, they've arrested local scholars who study Pamiri languages and culture, et cetera, et cetera. So after all of this and the mass arrests, the roadblocks, they're also, to add into this, and I'm almost done, is China gave Tajikistan surveillance equipment and drones for this recent crackdown. And so Tajikistan, as far as I know, and my sources have said, began to scoop up information. And the information that they would scoop up from conversations, because there were cameras and all the surveillance, led them to begin to arrest lots of people that were in conversations or they felt were any sort of threat. So basically they've stripped civil society of the autonomy that is promised to the Tajikistan Article 6 of the Constitution, and that was an agreement after the Tajik civil war. And from here, moving forward, right now, the area is somewhat leaderless. They are, they've given out mass eviction because they want to build new buildings. They are nationalizing the bizarre businesses, anyway, all the, many of the businesses are being nationalized, and they, I guess, what used to be a way for the Pamiris to assert justice was not perfect, but it was, you know, if they harassed or raped a young woman or whatever, they would beat up that person. And that's kind of the way the justice was meted out. Now there actually is, there's no higher level leaders, there's no civil society leaders left, and the youth are beginning to have less access to education. And, you know, on top of all this issue of the Taliban takeover, there's been switching around of the drug trafficking, sort of who's controlling what, there's one main drug trafficking route that is now open, and that goes through going about, and then there's the interest of China and Russia. China wrote open, they want that area secured because of the Uyghurs, and Russia views that area as part of the greater Russian space. So they are happy the West is out, and they're happy that the trade and traffic is now without Western intervention. So I think that the future is pretty bleak that I think the diaspora is, the Pamiri diaspora is organized, and it's so the leadership is kind of switched to the intellectual elite and activists within the Pamiri diaspora. And I think, you know, they will continue from there. And I think the youth, the fear is that the youth would, you know, if they have a lack of access to opportunities, education, et cetera, and you have this multi-billion dollar drug trade on the other side along with all kinds of stuff, you know, and there's no access to justice mechanisms. It doesn't bode well for the youth. So I have a lot more to say. I'm sorry. I hope I didn't go too long. That's okay. I mean, we'll leave some for the question. Sir, but that was a great introduction to those tragic events. Now, I want to turn to Yvonne, you know, the other ethnic territorial unit in Central Asia inherited from the Soviet Union is Karakalpakistan in Western Uzbekistan. Yvonne, we, a lot of us, I think a lot of us have been to maybe Karakalpakistan, but usually in connection with climate change and ecology and the RLC, and maybe, you know, not really absorbed, you know, what was going on politically. So I'd like to turn to you for a little bit of background and insight into what you see as sort of behind the events there. Certainly. And also, I want to echo what the Sun said, first my gratitude to be part of this panel, this excellent panel, and also echo my sentiment also that it would be fantastic for there to be voices from Karakalpakistan, be it from the diaspora, from the exile or from the region itself, but of course, scholars, researchers and activists in that area are under enormous pressure and have been for decades. So nevertheless, I hope to contribute to this discussion. With one caveat to the starting, I approached the topic of Karakalpakistan and the Central Asian autonomy through my research on territorial autonomy in general. Because my interest has been to try to understand what is territorial autonomy in non-democratic regimes. And Karakalpakistan is a fascinating case because, well, for starters, there has been a very wide gap in the literature about what is territorial autonomy in Karakalpakistan's case. Because the few accounts that we have of the political situation in Karakalpakistan are they point very succinctly to this territorial autonomy being a sham, being superficial, being not giving effective autonomous decision making faculties and rights for the authorities of Karakalpakistan in relation to Tashkent. To say in other words, Karakalpakistan does not have to govern itself autonomously from Tashkent. Many of the laws are handed down from Tashkent and I can go on about why this is the case. The leadership is selected from Tashkent and so on. This is a big contrast from other cases of territorial autonomy. Just to point one, the Orland Islands in Europe, this is a case where you see what can we expect from an autonomous territory. In the case of Karakalpakistan, we don't see that. What we do see, however, is the symbolic weight and power that the symbols of autonomy have in Karakalpakistan's case. Karakalpakistan has its own flag, it has its own legislative authority and its own government system that is in fact different from Tashkent. It's a parliamentary and a government in while Uzbekistan is more of a presidential system. These are points to keep in mind. Now, Karakalpakistan, like other territorial autonomies of the region, they were created to a great extent as a form of minority rights protection for the peoples living in that territory. In the case of Karakalpakistan, that's the Karakalpak people. This is an important point because they are, like Uzbeks, they are Turkic speakers, but they speak a different branch of, it's a different sub-family or family of language. It's closer to that of Kazakhstan while Uzbek language is closer to Uighur language and other languages. There's a degree of difference there. This I give as a general background, so we're all on the same page with the territorial autonomy status. Now, the current juncture happened because the president of Uzbekistan, Mr Jolyov, he has pursued a style of government through reform. Some have characterized this as authoritarian upgrade, authoritarian modernization, and I emphasize here the point that it's authoritarian because while there has been a facade of creating a new Uzbekistan that is more democratic and more open, decision-making remains very strongly concentrated in Tashkent and in the president's authority. There have been some substantive improvements in human rights and political rights, but political power remains in the hands of the president of Uzbekistan. This is very visible in Karakalpakistan, and this was very visible in the recent juncture where the president, having been given a new mandate, decided to continue this style of governing through reforms and in this case, through the process of constitutional reform. Now, what happened immediately is that in order to create this image of a new Uzbekistan and new more democratic decision-making processes, the constitutional reform has been, there have been some processes of protocol to call the opinions of the population for them to have a say and supposedly to pitch ideas to how to change the constitution, whether that process is faithful to the suggestions made. That's a different question. Nevertheless, this means that there has been a degree of transparency and a degree of openness that maybe would be different in a different time. That would not have been the case maybe in a different time. The immediate trigger of the protest that we saw recently was the publication of many of these changes in the Uzbek constitution. These changes were visible and substantive in two specific areas, one in the potential removal of term limits for the president and the other on the diminution of Karakalpakistan's autonomy and the dilution of its autonomous status at the constitutional level. Once this became public, the information that we have of what happened specifically on the ground of Karakalpakistan is not known exactly. Very few journalists have been able to go in and actually find out what is happening. What happened, what I have heard and read is that there were large spontaneous gatherings that formed once this information became public. There were figures that emerged that as kind of taking leadership, so to speak, of this otherwise spontaneous movement of protest against this constitutional change and it was cracked down. There was no that we know of. There was no attempt of dialogue of reaching out to this leadership or this spontaneous movement. There was no attempt of negotiation or any kind of dialogue. It was instead just shut down. At the same time, however, the constitutional amendment regarding Karakalpakistan at least, the president of Uzbekistan was very open in saying that it's not going to go forward. What has happened since is that Uzbekistan is, sorry, Karakalpakistan is cut off from the internet. There are some indications that maybe it is slowly coming back recently, but it's a matter of less than four hours maybe. There remains a lot of uncertainty about what precisely happened on those days. I should mention why the protests were so important. I mentioned already the symbolic element, but I would be remiss if not mentioning very real grievances in Karakalpakistan that have been brewing for many years now. I would just mention too, like Gavin mentioned, the environmental element here is absolutely critical. The RLC disaster has been shaping the lives of people in Karakalpakistan ever for decades and decades, even before independence. The certification comes with many, not only social and economic consequences, but also health consequences. Tuberculosis is rampant in Karakalpakistan. This topic has been most neglected by the authorities. They have some measures here and there, some international cooperation, some adjustments assisted by the authorities, but for the most part, people are on their own. This is one important source of grievance. The other important source is that Karakalpakistan was incorporated into Uzbekistan on the political arrangement that has been in place between Karakalpakistan and Uzbekistan comes from the 1990s, from the early 1990s. There's a lot of this unknown about this arrangement, but what is known is that in 1993, Karakalpakistan gave up any ambition of having a full autonomy or maybe even independence from Uzbekistan in exchange of having an autonomous territory and autonomous rights within Uzbekistan and a referendum of independence to happen 20 years in the future. 2013 came and no such referendum was made. There are some reports that suggest people remembering it, and that's also one grievance in the background. Just as a final thought, why now this reform? I mentioned the second mandate of Missouri and I think that's an important element, but I think also one point is that Karakalpakistan Autonomy is known to be ineffective in the terms that I already mentioned, and I imagine that Tashkan thoughts that people won't mind if we take it away, that people know that this is sham, so what if we just happen to diminish it? That's a conjecture on my part, but I think it's also important to think about it, so thank you. Thank you, Yvonne, and actually that, your last statement that the government just thought nobody would notice or pay attention, leads into the question that I want to ask a cell to address, which is going back as far as the end of 2020 in Kyrgyzstan with manipulated elections leading to public protests and an overturn of the existing Constitution in Kazakhstan with the increase in liquid natural gas prices in December leading to protests and then everything else that followed, and then in Gona Badaqshan and in Karakalpakistan, I mean, that's four of the five countries of Central Asia where we've seen a real miscalculation on the part of what we thought were pretty smart governments that would be able to predict these things, so I want to ask you to address the question of, the broader question of what's going on in terms of this post-COVID stumbling that's happened in the region that we've seen in these cases, so thank you so much, Kevin. Thank you again for inviting me and I'm also very, very happy to be on the panel and to offer insights on basically how authoritarian politics is organized within the region, and what's interesting is that we are talking about regimes that are very different in nature, more controlling, more oppressive, less oppressive, but at the same time what was puzzling is that the way they handled the protests were very much similar, the internet was cut off, then there was so to say the chistka, the cleansing, the putting the tortures, putting opposition into prisons or killing them, and basically then opening up and inviting some international observers, some media to basically say that here we are, now everything is nice and well, and to me, and I'm coming into this topic as a political scientist of regime theory, to me it was also puzzling but at the same time not as much, so I want to start with the division, I think a very important distinction between regime and the state, because I think this is very important to understand that the security of the state is the security of the regime actually, and as a result of that we need to understand how the regime actually operates, how regime uses state institutions, what is its relations with the with the population, and as a model of analysis or as a perspective, I think Balin Magyar's book with a very colorful name called Mafia State that described the politics in Hungary actually fits nicely here, he describes the mafia state as a regime where concentration of political power and expansion of wealth of the so to say adopted political family is the purpose of governance, and we also see that the whole structure of bureaucratic organization and the state institutions is established and controlled by certain kinship and loyalty connections, and it creates a kind of a division of in the pyramidal fashion, it creates it creates divisions of labor or we would say access to resources, and so in contrast to the previous interpretations where we simply blamed the post-Soviet rulers for corrupt decision making for very kind of selfish decision making, instead Mafia State actually offers us a very kind of purposeful legitimate participation of special interests in legislative measures and governments, and so therefore he calls and I quote here the mafia state is the privatized form of a parasite state, and it was intriguing to me and interesting simply because the tactics that are used both to govern, to distribute resources, to deal with the opposition are actually very similar, and the reasons why the tactics are so brutal because these regimes have a lot to lose, so if we take a look the way how domestically they're organized, the political economy of these particular regimes, but only that they're in tier states or they're based, they're deriving their income from rents, but actually what they're doing is that they are securing power and loyalty by putting certain people into the income streams, and when these income streams are controlled by these loyal people in exchange obviously for not only loyalty but for the distribution of rents and distribution of support and participation in different other mechanisms, we have that the situation becomes very dire for people who are not participating or who are not getting access to these income streams, and particularly I think that was the reason why in Kazakhstan there was such a strong Ante-Nazarbayev rhetoric saying that the old men get out, again because everyone was very much tired of that situation, the insular ruling elite that pretty much controlled most of the assets, and it's happening in relatively similar manner with different degrees of political control in most of the countries of Central Asia, and so then we have the activists who actually try or the people who try to voice their opinions, they are facing this mafia-like tactics against the people, so the activists are basically you know put in prison, have the administrative fines, they are co-opted, and as a result of that politics itself becomes highly performative, so even if people are speaking on behalf or raising these issues, there is such a strong distrust among the people against these particular individuals because the skepticism runs very high and there are no other institutions, and so it was interesting to see in the case and hear that in the case of Tajikistan there were people at least who were very vocal, they may not have carried political very strong political messages, but at the same time they were leaders, but in in Kazakhstan events they there were no leaders and we can see the same that it was very difficult to identify in Karakal-Pakistan a person who would actually embody this public trust and public voice, so to say, and so as a result of that we have this system that operates in a way that the politics is merged with economic financial and industrial groups and you have very loyal bureaucrats who are governing actually the country, and so in this sense the mafia state remains in operation and secures the apparatus of governing or the power and also the political economy, the access to rents and it's a very difficult way to in this system that insulates and isolates people away from the governing regime, we also see a very strong asymmetry of information, so nobody really knows at the top whoever governs at the top, nobody really knows what actually is happening at the local level and that information asymmetry creates certain impediments for reacting or pre-empting let's say different atrocities, so particularly the people at the bottom, people who are governing at the local level who actually possess the whole information, they are the ones who are framing how to think of the story to the people about in hierarchy and so you have this, what we notice is not necessarily maybe a personality cult in the sense of Hitler, Stalin or Putin but what we see is that it establishes a system in which the president becomes the only decision-making authority but all of the bribes, corruption, violence and so on is actually happening at the local level and so they shift the responsibility from their own actions and practices to say that well the president basically allows us to engage in something like that and this asymmetry of information also results in the fact that the regime doesn't really know what are the problems and here I actually agree with Ivan very much so that nobody really, the regime in Tashkent, Mirzio probably didn't even know what exactly is the life like in Nukuz for people who are living not only under strong environmental pressure but also very isolated economic links as well so it's a very difficult place to live in general and same thing about Gordy Badašan which is also very much isolated and from the rest of the country and also possesses a large territory in the comparative terms and you also have the internal informal practices at the local level that are really undermining the people's benefits or people's rights, people's aspirations to better life in general because there's constantly these opportunities for extortions, there's pressure both formal and informal and there is very strong insecurity so all of that I think puts the situation in a way that the regimes may have or may think that they have relative control over the population by eliminating leaders, by eliminating opposition, by controlling the courts, by controlling the army and the police but in practice what happens is that these leaderless people they continue to organize in some way and when the understanding of injustices reaches a certain level then it becomes very difficult to control and the regime becomes very surprised because they have no opportunity to hear these voices in advance, to be able to prevent, accommodate and actually not to include for example that clause that wipes out the the autonomous status of Kyrgyzstan for example so all of that gives us an impression that in times when the information asymmetry is so difficult and so so vast the regime does the only thing they know best is to repress so that's what explains in my mind the the the tactics that were relatively similar despite the differences in the structure or the nature of oppression in these authoritarian regimes. Thanks Essel. I just want to remind everybody that you can participate in today's discussion by asking questions in the chat box function located below the viewing window and we'll try to get to those if you've got good ones. Let me first ask kind of in a round robin it's interesting Essel because in some cases we've heard terms like the listening state which would sound a little bit different than than what you've described and I would say you know what you're describing isn't new in 2022 you know this has been true since perhaps even you could even apply that in the Soviet Union I think you know whether you're looking at you know replacing Kunaya with Kolban back in 1986 you know again a regime that's not aware of what's going to get it in trouble but we've seen I think in Central Asia a usual approach that also includes being smart about buying off discontent when it appears you know if people are striking because of economic problems you give them a small raise and you know hopefully that will improve it or build a stadium or you know do something so I'm curious and I want to throw this out to everyone. Has something changed in the in the math around what people's reaction is going to be? Has something changed on the on the population side? We've seen events like this in Kyrgyzstan several times where economic revolts turn into political change but this is very this is pretty rare in in in the rest of Central Asia so I want to throw that out is there is there something about the popular reaction that's a different math than before? Assel, do you want to take a shot at that first? Sure so yes we definitely see the societal changes particularly if you look at the Oxford sorry Oxford's tracker protest tracker you do we do notice a very strong and significant rise of protests in 2019 and most of them were actually in Kazakhstan. I haven't seen the research that actually puts the nature of protests and the types of protests with the amounts of money that was distributed among the people through different state programs but we could definitely say that in the 2000s and 2000 early 2010s there were many more state programs to support to support the people and slowly they were taken away one by one so we have had for example programs that would support mothers that gave birth to children programs that would support with housing young families with housing so there were many different things that were available and slowly these programs became less accessible so there were still many in nature but they were less accessible and suddenly the on top of that most of the population acquired debt and so this indebtedness and the lack of opportunities with what were considered to be the basic needs of such as housing education for example healthcare that became suddenly unaffordable was also the result of the fact that people were simply angry because they compared their life and their future to people who were belonging to this internal cycle circle so to say getting tons of money I mean we have a situation where I think it was KPMG who the agency that said that 162 people control 50% of Kazakhstan's wealth so obviously that became so atrocious that no longer the control over resources was no longer enough for these people but they were actually interfering with the lives of the average average people and medium-sized businesses which didn't happen before before I think when I was I was doing my PhD research for example in 2000s the top so to say you came to the radar if your business made five million dollars and now you come to the radar when your business makes only a hundred thousand dollars a year so that means slowly we are getting into a situation in which it is indeed very difficult to make a living and where this threshold stands in particular it's very difficult to tell but there was a realization a very strong one that this is not how we want to live and this is not how we want where we want to go Suzanne thanks for those great presentations Yvonne and myself incredibly informative I you know I commented a very different angle than I saw in particular because I study informal organizations and the positive impacts on the state in particular and how informal organizations provide a buffer between civil society and the state when civil society is co-opted by the state as an arm of the security services or an authoritarian reach so my years of study was looking at how these different groups could function within that and so I think different from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan for me it's not about oh these protests are new it's more about oh the protests have been there but the crackdowns and the reaction by the government is radically different and so when I look at that well why is the government so radically different in the crackdowns in this region so I'm just going to say because I should have right at the top Gornabad Afshan is almost half the territory of Tajikistan it only has three percent arable land it only has 250,000 people of the nine million population it is mountainous it is hard to get to an extremely cold in the winter when I've been there and so it's often been an area in which the Tajik government is kind of like we want to control it but it's over there but after the civil war there were agreements between various leaders throughout the country as reconciliation that they would have a say in the government and there was a shared space so the Tajik government slowly whittled away at that and killed various leaders in different regions and then it attempted to do that officially for the first time in 2012 in Gornabad Afshan and that's that's the first time they tried to kill Commander Bukir and they killed another leader Iman Nazara. I say that because those crackdowns were attempts by the government to strip the area of what was promised after the civil war as well as a low sort of soft de-autonomization of the region that did not occur so with autonomy you know Iman was talking about what rights the autonomy was given for Kalapakistan in Gornabad Afshan the rights are that there was sort of a unwritten agreement that the local leaders could have a certain percentage of the trade and traffic that came through the region and then they would redistribute it to the population and then those would be renegotiated over time so in 2014 when one of the fights happened two of the leaders were called and that was a renegotiation of the terms and instead of a renegotiation they killed and shot at the local leaders two of them died and one with hospital IP is now arrested so why now I you know this is my own analysis and speculation but I think now you have the Taliban takeover you have you have there was a meeting between Putin and Ramon that occurred right before the major crackdown historically there has been within the FSB in Russia a sort of quiet support of the Pamiris on one level because Russia often plays both sides and somehow there was a discussion and from what I understand and I have several sources saying this that there was a green light given to go full tilt in there there's also the issue of China wanting that road the Pamir highway which goes through the region and is the main route both to China and to Osh to be cleared and controlled and so in order to do that they had to strip the area of the autonomous region without doing it legally and the way to do that is to really purge all of the activist leaders anybody that might be able to lay claim to that at this point I think what Esau says in terms of the leaderless youth and eventually something's going to happen there they're going to grow up who knows what's going to happen so but I do think that there's all these sort of intervening variables the last thing I'll say is that Bakken is another trafficking route so there's two main trafficking routes coming through to Jikistan and because of the Kyrgyz Tajik fighting that one trafficking route has shifted we also have Rustam Imam Ali who is the president's son who's being groomed to take over and he became in charge of the Gorno-Barakhan route and since that became a primary route they also needed to clear it not only for China but also for the drug trafficking into Osh and no Osh is part of Kyrgyz Tajik but they have separate agreements on that side of the country so it's still going so those are all very important reasons for the crackdown a lot of them economic actually sorry for the long winded again. Yvonne do you have any you have any thoughts on sort of the the population side of the question and whether the math has changed? I think I can only echo the points on the on the economic situation part of the news Bakistan government messaging is that the country will not rely on or not our key and the oppression and highly centralized power but more on rising living standards or its legitimation that plan kind of was began to be very effective in the very first years with so very high GDP growth but then Covid impeded a lot of that growth which was a big rebound in 2021 and now again it's in question whether that promise can be kept so I think there was there may be a play as a kind of raising expectations at the very least when it comes to the people wanting the government to match its lofty rhetoric about economic growth and standards of living so I think that that is one one factor potentially at play also that pushed people into into protesting. So we've got a lot of questions which actually point to another aspect of this which is this is obviously happening in a context a strategic geostrategic great power competition context that's really changed a lot in the last year one of the things interestingly nobody's mentioned in all of these cases in in addition to cutting off the internet and getting you know keeping journalists out and and repression was also a very quick response to blame external forces you know well-trained external forces from outside unnamed but you know maybe those external forces are also part of what's what's happening in terms of you know Russia and the war in Ukraine the diminution of Russian military presence and influence the return of the Taliban and fears about what's happening in Afghanistan and I wanted to throw that out you know how do you think those events in Russia and in in in Afghanistan and then also obviously China is increasing concern about security issues is is is playing into this anyone every can I jump in yeah I think when it comes to Pakistan I haven't really made up my mind what's the weight of this contextual international factors but I can mention a couple of things that are to be kept in mind when it comes to this case in particular there's the exile opposition the Karakalpaka position that would like autonomy to be real or maybe even independence of of Karakalpakstan and this movement had a second a second breath of life in 2014 in fact following the Russia's annexation of Crimea because they were in fact some of them at least were asking for repetitioning or kind of advocating for Russia to to incorporate Karakalpakshtan which sounds outlandish given that there's no contiguous land border but Karakalpakshtan was briefly in the 1930s part of the Russian socialist Soviet republic that was within the context of within the framework of the broader Soviet Union so they were kind of advocating for that I don't think this really makes them kind of pro-Putinist or pro-Russia in that sense necessarily I think just a path that they saw as as viable back then I don't think today with the tarnished image of Russia because of its war of aggression against Ukraine I think that that path is closed for now so that's one factor to consider the other factor is that Karakalpakshtan was also at some point part of what what became today the state of Kazakhstan and like I mentioned in my presentation the ethnic Karakalpakshtan are closer linguistically to Kazakhs than to Uzbeks plus there is also very substantial Kazakh population in Karakalpakshtan so these are all factors that are probably present at least in the background of Tashkan's decision-making when it comes to Karakalpakshtan that there could be a latent conflict with the northern neighbor so but again how this plays into the into the current juncture I haven't made up my mind and frankly I don't see it having a direct impact but these are things to consider. Asel or Suzanne? Asel? Yeah I can go through. To me it's also I mean I'm speaking also from the from the perspective of Kazakhstan government what happens in Ukraine obviously is the similar scenario that Russia used pretty much for Transnistria from for Georgia and it's a tool to keep the regime loyal and I think it was it was important or me as well I like Ivan I haven't actually made up my mind for sure about it but it's also potentially important to consider that having a unified state may be more important for the existing regimes because if they have these divisions even the legal ones even if in practice they do not necessarily mean anything Russia can use that against against them by supporting certain speakers supporting certain cultures and basically taking out territories. This may not necessarily be as important for Kazakhstan but we have an opposite situation we have the majority of Russian speakers are in the north and Slavic speakers the Slavic ethnically Slavic Kazakhstanis they live in the north but they don't have official autonomy and so then but but in both ways I mean in both situations you may have official autonomy without actually a de facto rights or you may have differences ethnic differences without the official autonomy in all these both of these solutions in both of these situations I think all Central Asian regimes are highly vulnerable to that type of instruments that Russia uses to discipline the near abroad regimes. Suzanne did you have anything on that that you wanted to talk about? Yeah trying to sort out my thoughts on the geostrategic overwhelm in the region at the moment so you know okay I think in terms of Ramon's regime and and Gorno-Barafshan and then the larger political situation I think I think Ramon president Ramon probably tried to come convince Putin in the past to support a more intense crackdown in Gorno-Barafshan but did not have the support but I think with Ukraine as well as a paranoia about potential instability that he couldn't control in Central Asia because of all these protests and all these things Ramon was able to finally convince both that Aga Khan Foundation Western organizations were going to come back if it was unstable and he had to crack it down to keep things under control and that's one thing the second thing is when the West left the drug trafficking routes and you know this is some speculation but from years of research on this topic the drug trafficking sort of geostrategic involvement shifted so that means Russia had a piece of the pie in Afghanistan there was support from China and Russia for the Taliban to be a stable government even though Tajikistan said we're supporting the Tajiks there was quiet cooperation with the Taliban because the drug trafficking and other types of trade and continued and from what I understand actually trade increased after a bit so there's all of that and then I think that China because of the western withdrawal and the desire to control what it views as the greater Chinese space that includes Uighurs on down through the Wachan and all of that territory which I you know there's conspiracy theory among the Pamiris that all of that land is going to be given to China as to pay off the current three billion dollar debt that they owe I personally do not think that's what's going to happen I think what's going to happen is that Tajikistan is going to allow access and increase in trade routes and increase in whatever I do know that as soon as the crackdown finished and as soon as many of the leaders were taken out there was 200 million dollars given for infrastructure by the Chinese government to revamp the Pamir highway with aka the heroin highway which is the highway that goes to China and Osh so China's involvement is not no longer as invisible as it once was and then there's new bases from China so I'd say in a nutshell Russia wants the area to become stable because it has economic interests as well as political ideas about Central Asia and then and so that supported the regime in this recent crackdown and then China also while hasn't been public about it has provided surveillance equipment drones and other things to make sure this actually happens so that and there's sort of this also the ethnic and religious persecution part of this which is going on in the Uyghur areas as well so so there you go and I think that the protests which occurred will not be able to happen anymore like they have those the the civil society has been stripped of that part of its independence in the region in my opinion but I do think that they given that they've had decades of sort of this undercurrent of hidden civil society agency they they there is a likelihood that they will find a different way if that makes sense I hope that answered the question I actually you know I I take the point of the the the sort of Chinese techno authoritarian nature of some of these crackdowns that it echoes certainly what we've seen in in Xinjiang as well and not in a pleasant way the other weird echo that I want to throw out is you know I'm for for some of us who are old Sovietologists we all remember that these these autonomous territorial units were created in the Soviet Union they were part of you know Vladimir Lenin's de-imperialization of the of the Tsarist regime which was a unitary state it didn't have a Ukrainian it had regions and the regions had different people living in them but they were territorial units as part of the state Vladimir Putin in February on the eve of of his invasion of Ukraine basically argued that that was illegitimate that you know the creation of those ethnic territorial units like the Ukraine as a as a union republic was an illegitimate importation of western ideology and that that they were illegitimate as the basis of of independent states that seems to be you know a negation of the entire basis on which the Soviet Union fell apart and the the successor states were created but do you think that what's happening here with the two autonomies of of central Asia is some kind of an echo of that you know the the you know how does that how does that fit into what's going on go ahead I'll take a crack at that one um I was anecdotally in 2014 in May after the the fighting and whatnot there was a group of women that had a petition and they were walking around and the petition was to secede from Tajikistan and have Gorno-Badakhshan join Russia and that was that when Russia went into Crimea during that whole period so there was a very active Russian campaign to sort of what belongs to Russia and the local commanders threatened to kill them and said are you kidding we're not separating from Tajikistan and joining Russia so ironically it was the local leaders that stopped this uh secession petition and I think that um now uh if I look back on that um you know Russia supported that and viewed Gorno-Badakhshan as part of Russia and not as an autonomous region and so I do kind of wonder now um is Putin's larger narrative of this all belongs to Russia um part of this and did Ramon President Ramon play on Putin's fears that there might be sort of a secession or some kind of separation I don't know it's all speculation but I do I mean that's that what he said on February 23rd um again completely negates what is understood about how the Soviet Union was formed that all this current state it's just kind of what what and and so you know I do wonder if that's why suddenly the the turnabout of support for cracking down on any forms of autonomy provides a legitimacy for his operations in Ukraine I mean I do wonder that I don't have evidence of it but you do have to wonder and I think I think on top of that I just say you know China's doing the same thing China's cracking down on the Uyghur Taiwan you know every area that is not fully incorporated into China China's cracking down and you kind of wonder if you know you look at Turkestan way back when and there was the division between China and Russia back then I mean during both sort of at the beginning of the great game and I just wonder are they looking at the borders and deciding almost like a mosaic peacock you know you get this area and you get this area um because that's kind of what it's looking like you know in my opinion Ivan I want to give you a chance to respond to that since this is your particular area of study I think at this point I can also only speculate it would be fascinating to to be a fly on the wall so to speak when the fateful decision was made to in Tashkent to close down the Karakal-Pakistan autonomy what were what were the the arguments raised what were the points raised is there an echo of Putin's narrative of gathering the lands also at Spain and Uzbekistan when it comes to Karakal-Pakistan kind of a sense of possession and entitlement saying that this territorial autonomy and these statuses are hindrance for unifying the our country it could be something along those lines I think my personal would lean through different explanations but I do wonder I do wonder okay and finally Yussel do you have any any thoughts on that well I just want to say that the Soviet Union itself had a very imperial tactic of divisions and as a result of that I think Putin is basically reviving the similar type of imperial with similar imperial attitude is trying to revive the the opportunities to reconsider or question the existing territories by claiming that Russia basically created the states created the stunts civilized them modernized them created so to say modern roads and production processes and so on so the the the Soviet Union was already it's it's planted the seeds of unrest already I mean we can look at the enclaves we can look at the water energy nexus that existed before long ago ethnic ethnic grounds as well as the idea of titular nation and the titular nation implies that all of these particular units the Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan should have certain people who should be in charge and as a result of that it already gave opportunity to four titular majority to basically say that we are here we are you are in our house you are a guest basically in our house to most of the minorities and if minorities didn't like it obviously there was this attitude that you are free to go that you don't belong so within the Soviet division both the territorial division but also nationality policy the the conflict was already embedded and I think what we're seeing is this result or unresolved of the conflicts of that historical era okay well we're right at time I want to thank all of you my panelists for what was a really interesting and broad-ranging discussion I think we might have stimulated some some thought around these issues that will be important going forward and to all of the participants and those of you who ask questions we want to thank you for joining us today and we'll see you next time have a good summer thank you so much