Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [53]
By early May 2010, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev—the pro-Western, free market “reformer” of the Tulip Revolution—had fled south to his hometown, Osh. The opposition had assumed power, and the new president, Ms. Roza Otunbayeva, promised to reduce utility tariffs and provide more aid to the poor. But there was no law and order. Neighborhoods erected barricades; militia formed. Amidst the looting, ethnic violence began—Kyrgyz against Uzbek and some of the opposite. The economic suffering of the people and their resentment of the kleptocrat overclass were quickly mutating into ethnic hatred. The murder and rape of ethnic cleansing drove many thousands of terrified Uzbeks to flight toward the border—but Uzbekistan was sealed closed.5 President Otunbayeva called for Russian military intervention. The Kremlin declined.6 As the rampaging slowly subsided, Kyrgyzstan seemed on the verge of bloody ethnic fragmentation.
On June 10, the violence flared again, this time in the southern city of Osh. A minor fight between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in a casino quickly escalated into pogroms. This time, Kyrgyz elements of the state security forces were involved in hunting down Uzbeks. Historically, the southern towns had been home to sedentary Uzbek traders and farmers, while the mostly nomadic or seminomadic Kyrgyz moved with their herds. But forced collectivization in the 1930s ended that pattern as ethnic Kyrgyz settled in the valleys among the ethnic Uzbeks. Competition for water and land emerged. As a Human Rights Watch report explained, “The problems became more acute as the population grew. Grievances over land and water distribution increasingly took on an ethnic dimension during the perestroika and glasnost era in the mid-to-late 1980s, as ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identities became stronger.”7 Southern Kyrgyzstan saw interethnic rioting in the 1990s during the breakup of the Soviet Union. In 1990, Kyrgyzstan’s Uzbek minority tried to gain autonomy and join neighboring Uzbekistan; the intercommunal violence that followed took 1,000 lives. In 2010, more than 350 died and thousands were left homeless.8
. . . and Water
The sudden spasms of violence reflected, at first glance, a rebellion against a corrupt, self-dealing president and the reignition of allegedly age-old ethnic conflict. But there is an environmental issue at the heart of the trouble. It was, in fact, the catastrophic convergence playing out as ethnic rampaging. In Kyrgyzstan, neoliberal economic shock therapy, imposed after the Soviet Union’s implosion, and the political-military blowback of Cold War proxy fights meet the incipient crisis of climate change.
As noted above, a key grievance of the Bishkek protesters was the price and scarcity of electricity, and that was due to the long Central Asian drought. The dry weather plus bad management had crippled Kyrgyzstan’s hydroelectric power plants. From the spring of 2008 onward, Kyrgyzstan suffered rolling blackouts.9 In some areas, ten-hour blackouts everyday were the norm. Then, in 2009, Uzbekistan made things a bit worse by pulling out of the regional power grid built by the Soviet Union.10
Ninety percent of electricity produced in Kyrgyzstan comes from hydroelectric power stations; the largest single source of its electricity is the hydroelectric dam at the base of the Toktogul Reservoir on the river Naryn. In fact, the Toktogul power station is Central Asia’s largest. A monument to Soviet modernism, it was built between 1975 and 1982 during the Brezhnev heyday of high oil prices, the peak of Soviet prosperity. The drought, however, meant low water levels in the Toktogul Reservoir, thus reduced power production.
Drought was not the only form of