BHHRG

“The worst is not; so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’”
Shakespeare, King Lear (IV, I, 27)

The universal clamour for “something to be done” about Uzbekistan reaches from the serried ranks of proponents of the invasion of Iraq to find its elusive WMD and overthrow Saddam Hussein to that crusade’s fiercest critics. Ironically, those who doubted every jot of the Bush Administration’s claims about the nature and weaponry of Saddam’s regime are as gung-ho for intervention in Uzbekistan as Washington’s hawks. Unanimity like this among opinion-makers ought to make observers’ queasy. Even if they were right in their analysis of what happened in Andijan, are there solutions not naively optimistic in thinking that Western intervention will necessarily promote a solution which makes matters better for Uzbeks?
Remember Mobutu’s Zaire, for instance. Before his downfall in 1997, everyone agreed there too that nothing could be worse than that regime’s kleptocrat. Well, 3 million dead later, perhaps it is time for human rights activists to prepare for the worst case consequences of their own success. Yet Mobutu is still trotted out as simply an example of American hypocrisy during the Cold War when he was backed as an anti-Communist, rather than seeing the unanimous Western governmental and media campaign to remove him in 1997 as a classic example of short-sightedness on the part of the moral indignation brigade.[1]
Does anyone need reminding of the romantic enthusiasm widely-published in the West in the 1980s about the Afghan mujahidin’s democratic and peace-loving intentions before their victory led to brutal civil wars and the Taliban takeover in the following decade?
Yet not everyone has an interest in peace and progress. Misanthropic forces may mask their need for war and chaos from which they benefit behind all sorts of sweet words and flowery principles.
Sadly, too many human rights NGOs also depend on calamity for their fund-raising: the worse the better seems the secret sous-texte of the NGO activist community. War and chaos do profit some people, including the well-funded activists but war and chaos make life hell for ordinary people. Sadly, ordinary people are merely the statistics juggled in the press releases and propaganda of interventionists. Intervention has its price and it is too often higher than the evil it is supposed to cure.[2]
The first commandment for doctors is: Do no harm. NGOs and journalists would do well to heed that injunction. Parroting demands for military action may satisfy psychological urges to aggression on the part of do-gooders and hacks punching keyboards rather than people but they show little understanding of the consequences. Worse still the urge to punish perceived evil seems to override genuine concern about doing good and not harm. Punitive human rights rhetoric, for instance, in many of the blogs about the events in Uzbekistan gives the impression that the urge to “kick ass” is stronger than any charitable motive.
Now the regional “experts” are moving in for the kill, promoting externally sponsored change as the road to a good life for Central Asians.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Central Asian specialist, Martha Brill Olcott, told the Inside-the-Beltway readers of The Washington Post “the scores or hundreds of deaths can serve as a wakeup call, if not for the Uzbeks, then at least for the United States and its allies. The situation in this strategically located Central Asian state can no longer be answered with platitudes about Islamic threats or empty exhortations to democratic reform. If the Uzbek regime can't or won't fix its problems, then the world community will soon face the choice between intervention and chaos.”[3] The possibility that intervention might cause chaos never seems to enter the establishment-analyst’s head. Iraq might serve as an example of where overthrowing the tyrant made life worse not better for far too many people.
To bring the wheel full circle from Timisoara to Tashkent, Ms. Olcott can even envisage a Romanian-style coup as the outcome to the Uzbek crisis: “Uzbekistan's powerful ministers -- of internal affairs, state security and defense -- help keep a distance between Karimov and the closet reformers who serve him. In theory, these ministers could be strong enough to oust the president, à la Nicolae Ceaucescu in Romania.”[4]
Some kind of Western-sponsored coup may well be the most likely outcome of the current situation in Uzbekistan. Any post-Karimov government will probably buckle under to the West’s demand for free trade but whether political freedom or prosperity will follow is in doubt. In so many other parts of the ex-Soviet Union the imposition of economic liberalisation has had the effect of destroying the economic basis for genuine civil society. The mass unemployment and impoverishment that follow “shock therapy” destroy the material basis for an active citizenry. Instead foreign-funded or oligarch-backed NGOs usurp the role of an autonomous public. Ordinary citizens have no echo chamber abroad at Human Rights Watch and in I.W.P.R.’s extensive web-sites. Only people with an umbilical cord to Western patronage have a voice in such situations. Patronage – however well-intentioned or wise – is not democracy. Since some of the patrons of post-Communist “civil society” have business interests across the region, any faith in uninterested assistance would be naïve.
No doubt if a Western or US-sponsored coup takes place with all the concomitant economic and social consequences, a great phalanx of Karimov’s critics will decry the negative side-effects too late, but by then more blood will have been spilled and the prospects of life for ordinary people made worse. If only a few advocates of intervention would visit the sites of “successful” interventions and study the socio-economic and ecological consequences, their belated bleating about not having supported this particular type of intervention could be avoided. If there is to be intervention – covert or overt – the decision will be made by power-politicians and no-one else. However, those who advocate such interventions must face their moral responsibility. Their cacophony of indignation provides useful moral cover for power politics.