© CABAR - Central Asian Bureau for Analytical Reporting
Please make active links to the source, when using materials from this website

Where are the “pitfalls” in the post-conflict border settlement?

Expert on Central Asia for the U.S. Institute of Peace Dr. Gavin Helf discusses the impact of the border conflict between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, shares the context of geopolitical picture and anticipates future ethnic clashes in an interview, exclusively for CABAR.asia


Follow us on LinkedIn


Dr. Gavin Helf

Dr. Gavin Helf is a senior expert on Central Asia for the U.S. Institute of Peace where he works on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Dr. Helf worked as a senior democracy and governance advisor in the USAID Asia and Middle East bureaus, covering democracy promotion and countering violent extremism portfolios. Dr. Helf graduated with a bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate in political science from University of California at Berkeley. He has taught Russian and Soviet foreign policy, comparative politics, and security studies at Notre Dame, Cornell, The George Washington University and Moscow’s International University. He was also a guest lecturer at the National War College, The U.S. Military Academy and The Foreign Service Institute, among others.

The acute phase of the conflict is over. In your opinion, what common points can Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan find in order to more effectively and smoothly continue the process of negotiating borders? Where are the “pitfalls” in the post-conflict settlement?

I have a very political model of what’s going on. I don’t think that the problem is necessarily one that the government can’t solve if they wanted to. I think both sides are using the conflict for domestic political reasons, so what is driving the conflict is what’s happening inside each country rather than the fact that the Kyrgyz people and Tajiks woke up one morning and decided that they do not want to be neighbors anymore. The kinds of conflicts that we see popping up in the enclaves are absolutely not new and everybody knows that they’ve been going on since the lines were drawn in the 1920s and 1930s.

In fact, last week we saw a border conflict in Sokh between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, so these are not unusual. What is unusual is that somebody wants to take advantage of these for internal domestic political reasons. As long as that’s the case, I think it’s more about the motivations than it is about the technology of delimiting the border.

There is a version that such a conflict contributes to the consolidation of societies around their political power. Can we talk about this, or is the situation in Kyrgyzstan different? How has the Kyrgyz-Tajik border conflict affected and will affect domestic politics in both countries?

I think it may be the other way around. The differentiation of the peoples happens before politics, not the other way around. If we go back to the early 1990s just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the distinction in Central Asia between the different peoples was less well-founded in reality. There were efforts by all five countries in Central Asia to create national identities over the last 25 years that are more solid.

What we’re seeing now is a couple of things. Firstly, People on both sides of the borders have started to internalize those distinctions: we are Kyrgyz, not Soviets who happened to be of Kyrgyz nationality, we are Tajiks and we are different from people across the border. This might have been very artificial in 1994, it is much more real now, especially with the younger population. If you take the first generation born after the Soviet Union, people who are in their twenties now and younger, for them Kyrgyz and Tajiks are their first language or their native language. Russian language might only be a second language. That was different in the 1990s and in the 1980s where people’s language would have first been Russian. Those national identities are a lot stronger now.

Secondly, I also remember how open the borders used to be between the countries in Central Asia and you would have relatives living in Tajikistan or in Kyrgyzstan. It was very artificial, but now it has become less true. More and more of those borders are militarized, they’re blocked off. Those borders have meant that people don’t have that connection. For example, if you think of a place like Korea, where after the first few generations personal relationships become less and less. So, it’s easier to objectify people on the other side of that border. In reality, the people have grown apart from each other and I think that drives the politics, not the politics creating the division.

As you have mentioned, there is an increase in militarization, and could military cooperation with other countries acquire a new meaning?

One of the things that surprised me about this conflict was the intensity of military operations and the geography of military operations. It is very typical over last decade that people on the one side of a border will get into a community conflict and start a fight. You can also see the border guards who are 18-year-olds with rifles, who see other people on the other side really different. They also get overexcited and start to shoot at each other. What is different about this conflict is that you get additional things: an intensity of fighting that includes mortars, helicopters, even aviation and then it gets hard to tell what really happened because of fake news. That level of intensity is not just a young man with a gun saying I’m going to shoot across the border to teach them a lesson.

That’s organized military escalation that somebody at a higher command has ordered.
 If that’s not true then we’ve got a real problem with command and control in the military forces on both sides.

The other thing is the geographic escalation. If you get a little a border skirmish and then suddenly Tajikistan has troops on the road to Vorukh and it spreads all around the border. This means it is systemic and that somebody’s ordering it. Again, I go back to the usual way that it is used to be solved.  Something would happen spontaneously and the political leadership and the leadership of the border guards and maybe the ministries of Defense would work to make it go away, which is the usual course of it. In this case, that didn’t happen, and somebody decided this is something we have to react to on a national level. I don’t think it’s a question of we have to have more happy hours between the Tajik and the Kyrgyz border guards. That might help but it’s not going to solve that larger problem about political motivation.

I wrote it in my recent piece, that the reality is that the new government in Kyrgyzstan,  Japarov and Tashiev have been looking for ways to get public support. It has been a couple of bad months for them with demonstrations, with covid-19 cases, remittances and a number of things that are not going well for them internally. The easiest thing to do is to say: well let’s find somebody outside, as an external enemy, that we can blame and get people to rally around.

I can see a pattern for Japarov, he has struck out at the AUCA in Bishkek and has obviously put effort to getting a quick win with enclaves and borders.  Whe that didn’t work out well, he suddenly picked a fight over the nationlaizaiton of Kumtor. It looks like he is looking for external enemies and picking things like borders, enclaves and gold mining that people are going to get excited about it. What’s interesting about it is that he seems to have moved the attention away from the enclaves in the border conflict to the Kumtor conflict, so is looking for the things that are going to be easy wins.

On the Tajik side, it’s a little less clear. I was surprised at the extent to which Rahmon was interested in picking this fighting and continuing it. Usually for people who have been on power for a long time there is no particular reason he needs to pick a fight with Kyrgyzstan. But by going to Vorukh and making a personal stand and saying that Vorukh will always be Tajik, he is appealing to his larger population as well.

The last thing that is really different this time around to me is social media.

I was very surprised that the conflict on the ground ended rather quickly and in social media is still going.
  It was sort of the social media equivalent of one of those cows crossing the border. I started to get targeted on both sides with all kinds of fake news and memes that were, I could tell were probably not true and designed to make me, or the Kyrgyz, want to defend their nation. I would identify social media as an entry point for an organization like the U.S. Institute of Peace: how do you contain the conflict in social media, how do you build a bridge? We’ve been having problems globally with fake news, disinformation and bad news moving quickly through social media. It really stood out to me in the case of this conflict that what happened on the ground of the Golovnoy water intake was much less important in this whole story than what happened on Facebook and social media. I could see, in the case of Kyrgyzstan, people that I knew were liberal opposition to Japarov in real life, people who were willing to go out and protest the Constitution and protest Bishkek local elections or whatever, suddenly, I could see them picking up these pro-Kyrgyz nationalist memes, which is exactly what we’re talking about in terms of the mobilizing support.

Russia is considered an important foreign policy partner of both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Will there be any foreign policy adjustments in terms of cooperation with Moscow?

I can’t speak for Russia, but it occurs to me that Russia at least since the October events in Kyrgyzstan has been trying to keep things under control in Central Asia. But I would say on a strategic level Russian is very busy. It has got issues with Belarus and Ukraine, has become involved in Armenia and Azerbaijan and has Syria. I don’t think that Russia has an interest in trying to do anything but seek stability I Central Asia.

Japarov has picked a side. He’s been very aggressive against the United States and Canada and in some ways he has been very accommodating towards Russia.

One thing I do believe is that it is a really bad idea for Central Asian countries to try to “play” the Russian, the American or China “card.”
When you play one of those great power cards, it generally ends really badly for the Central Asian country. I think that the multivector foreign policy of Kazakhstan that tries to keep balance and not playing one side against the other worked out very well in comparison to those cases, where someone’s trying to play Russia against Turkey or Russia against the United States.

I don’t see anybody trying to exploit the situation or an outside hand in this. I see domestic politics, social media and low-level community conflicts being behind what’s going on, and not outside powers.

What is China’s position in such conflict situations? Is there a possibility that the SCO will somehow start to get involved or look for the ways to resolve this issue?

This conflict doesn’t impinge on Chinese core interests in the region in any meaningful way. It’s not presented with a dilemma about partnership, investment and economic investment, which is China’s primary interest. I think this conflict doesn’t threaten those interests and it doesn’t impact on their core concerns about Xinjiang and Uighurs. They’re also not interested in getting themselves involved in something that they don’t have to get involved in, but again I can’t speak for China. But if Russia is disinterested and doesn’t want to play a role, potentially there’s a role that China can take. However, I just don’t think that I see China taking on those security questions and issues in Central Asia unless there’s a compelling reason, and I don’t see any of their interests threatened by this. It is going to be interesting to see how Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan think about the CSTO and SCO after this, considering they were largely irrelevant in solving this crisis.

Has the role and importance of Uzbekistan and / or Kazakhstan increased after this conflict?

Both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan showed an interest in providing mitigation but I don’t see a lot of receptivity on the part of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan for that. I would rather see Central Asian countries dealing with their problems than trying to invoke Moscow or Ankara or Beijing or Washington. I think it’s a good thing that both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have offered to partner with the two countries to try to solve the problem and not take one side against the other. I think that’s a good sign. The countries of Central Asia when they work together represent a much more substantial force in foreign policy. I’ve already said that the United States, Russia and China right now don’t have any particular reason to try to exploit the situation, but if they did, inviting them in to help solve the problem would be a way to invite them to exploit the situation. It’s always better to set a precedent of solving the problems within the region. I think Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan would take the attitude of “we’re here to help but if you guys can solve that problem on your own that’s fine”.

What are the risks for the conflict outbreak or interethnic clashes?

I think the risk of ethnic conflict in Central Asia is 100%, it is inevitable, we’ll see it again.  Most of the violence in Central Asia has been ethnic violence whether it’s Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan or Dungans in Kazakhstan – we’ll see it again. The question is who will take advantage of that and how will it be exploited. The response to an ethnic conflict is that it is unacceptable and trying to address the underlying issues, which is mostly what we’ve seen in the past. Politicians, nationalist extremists, or organized criminal groups, can take advantage of that. We’ve seen examples of all of those things. It is inevitable that there will be ethnic violence in Central Asia. It is inevitable that it’s going to rain on my house, the question is do I have a hole on the roof or not. We know what happened in 2010, when there were mix of organized crime, nationalists, politics, ethnicity and political transition that broke out in a great mess on Osh and Jalal-Abad.

Who takes advantage of this is a political question. On the local level, to a certain extent there are things such as community building and trust building efforts to put a human face on the people across the border. It’s not true that the people over there are my cousin any more. Increasingly they are separate, and it’s difficult to build trust between those communities and build familiarity or thinking about ways of putting in place conflict resolution mechanisms when somebody’s cow crosses the border or the kids on a Saturday night get drunk and start fighting with each other. How do you respond to it?

There are good local solutions to this that I have seen in the case of what happened in Osh and Jalalabad in 2010. Community leaders were getting in there and trying to solve the problem. A lot of things were mitigated by community leaders, some of whom who had trainings from conflict resolution programs that the United States or Europeans conducted over the years. There are ways to put such mechanisms in place. You can’t just go and tell the border guard to stop shooting. But again, you can decrease the number of conflicts on the local level.  But there will be conflicts across borders in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and between ethnic groups. The question is who tries to exploit that and to what purpose.


This material has been prepared as part of the Giving Voice, Driving Change – from the Borderland to the Steppes Project. The opinions expressed in the article do not reflect the position of the editorial board or the donor.


 

If you have found a spelling error, please, notify us by selecting that text and pressing Ctrl+Enter.

Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: