Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [56]
No place embodies these stresses more than the heavily populated Fergana Valley. Here, the boundaries between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan bend in a convoluted pattern of political fragmentation. The area’s economic infrastructure, however, follows the natural logic of the landscape. The drainage of the Syr Darya River links the three states and peoples. The river offers a Ratzelian logic of economic integration: the water and valley offer the promise of combined hydropower, agriculture, and transportation links. But the post-Soviet chaos, ethnic nationalism of political bosses, and economic suffering brought by neoliberal shock therapy have devastated the Fergana. Today, it incubates violent combinations of political Islam and ethnic irredentism.
We can see the future of Fergana Valley insecurity in its past. As early as 1917, local mullahs, landlords, and clan leaders in the valley and across Central Asia mounted an anti-Bolshevik resistance. These traditionalist, protomujahideen—called Basmachi, meaning “bandits,” by the Soviets—described themselves as standing for Islam, Turkic nationalism, and anticommunism. One of these bands of Muslim rebels was led by Enver Pasha, the former Young Turk, Ottoman minister of war, pan-Turkish utopian, and early abuser of Armenians who had left Turkey to fight further east. Various Basmachi forces used northern Afghanistan as a sanctuary, and those led by Ibrahim Bek were not finally crushed until the early 1930s and only then with cooperation between the royal Afghan military and the Red Army.23
When war again broke out in Afghanistan during the 1980s, radical Islam also churned in Soviet Central Asia. An estimated thirty-five thousand Muslim fighters from all over the world passed through the Afghan war to fight for the mujahideen. Thousands more studied in radical madrassas in Pakistan.24 Through this circuitry of jihad the volunteers flowed, concentrated in the war zone on the border, where they absorbed military skills and radical ideas. Among them were Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz from the Soviet republics.
In 1987 some mujahideen from Afghanistan—elements of the fanatic Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami—crossed into Soviet Tajikistan, attacked border guards, and rocketed the city of Panj.25 At the time, the US press wrote, “The guerrillas announced March 24 that about two weeks earlier, they had fired rockets across the Amu Daryu River into Soviet territory, killing up to 12 people.” On April 8, two Soviet border guards were killed during a second attack.26
Five years later the region imploded. The worst and most intense civil war of that decade was the Tajik conflagration. As many as sixty thousand people were killed, and Human Rights Watch described massive ethnic cleansing campaigns. At the end of the war, elements of an Islamic resistance party joined the extremist IMU and made incursions into Kyrgyzstan’s portion of the Fergana Valley, parts of which are also controlled by Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In 1999 and 2000, joint Kyrgyz-Uzbek military operations pushed the IMU into Afghanistan and then Pakistan.27
By the summer of 2010, with Kyrgyzstan smashed by its climate-induced unrest, the IMU was rumored to be moving back into the Fergana Valley. The Kyrgyz government had lost control of much of the South of the country. As the head of the International Crisis Group, writing in the Independent , warned, “No one should underestimate the potential for large-scale ethnic violence to spread throughout the Ferghana Valley.” The region was primed for crisis.
The drought in Kyrgyzstan finally broke in 2010. The same weather patterns that brought Pakistan to its knees brought reprieve for hydropower-dependant Kyrgyzstan. By August 2010, heavy rains had restored the water levels in the Toktogul reservoir.28 However, the Kyrgyzstan story is not over. The country remains divided, armed, and desperate. And the weather patterns upon which its hydro-dependent economy relies are increasingly eratic and very likely will become even more so as climate change