What It Takes to Avert a Regional Crisis: Understanding the Uzbek Government’s Responses to the June 2010 Violence in South Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

Uzbekistan played an important role during the June 2010 interethnic violence in South Kyrgyzstan by tightly controlling borders, allowing thousands of Kyrgyzstani refugees to cross into Uzbek territory, assisting in the shipment of international humanitarian assistance to Kyrgyzstan, and collaborating with the osce in the investigation of the causes of the violence. What explains Uzbekistan’s approach to the unrest in South Kyrgyzstan? Some scholars suggest that Uzbekistan’s response was shaped largely by external actors such as Russia. Others posit that domestic pressures account for the response. This article advances an alternative explanation: Tashkent’s response was largely a result of a consensus achieved at two levels: international and domestic. In explaining the impact of domestic level, the article emphasizes the role of bureaucratic politics—competition among various government agencies.

Authoritarianism, Ethnic Management and Non-Securitisation: The Kyrgyz Minority in Uzbekistan

“…On the first issue, a government insider told me in an interview in 2015 that Karimov spoke on the telephone to Roza Otunbaeva, the interim President of Kyrgyzstan, and acceded to her request that the border be sealed to prevent vigilante intervention, in return for guarantees of an independent investigation, that the perpetrators of violence would be brought to justice, and that the rights of minorities would be fully respected in the future. Although there is disappointment in Tashkent on all these fronts, as Alisher Khamidov argued Uzbekistan managed to 'avert a regional crisis' (Khamidov, 2015). The government's swift and effective humanitarian operation in supporting the refugees, and its openness to deal with international organizations and even foreign media which it traditionally kept at arm's length, was warmly welcomed.…”

Illiberal peace? Authoritarian modes of conflict management

“…China's campaign against a low-level Uighur insurgency in Xinjiang also relied on authoritarian mechanisms and state coercion (Odgaard and Nielsen, 2014). Authoritarian dynamics were also evident in state responses to recent internal conflicts in Burundi, Ethiopia, Egypt, Myanmar, Rwanda, Sudan and elsewhere, and in moves to prevent conflicts occurring, as in Uzbekistan's June 2010 operation to pre-empt the spread of ethnic-based violence from neighbouring Kyrgyzstan (Khamidov, 2015). Angola, Cambodia and Tajikistan all experienced internationally mediated peace negotiations in the 1990s, but quickly developed non-democratic regimes, which managed further internal conflict or unrest through authoritarian practices (Heathershaw, 2009a;2009b; Soares de Oliveira, 2011) Against this backdrop, an internationally brokered peace agreement with the Farc rebel movement in Colombia in November 2016 appeared to be an exception rather than a reversal of a wider illiberal trend.…”

Bottom-up peacekeeping in southern Kyrgyzstan: how local actors managed to prevent the spread of violence from Osh/Jalal-Abad to Aravan, June 2010

“…Plenty of studies critique the project of liberal peace in Central Asia (Bichsel 2009;Heathershaw 2009;Ismailbekova and Sultanaliev 2012;Megoran et al 2014;Reeves 2014), but few explore alternative mechanisms of conflict management. David Lewis and Alisher Khamidov look at alternative "illiberal" conflict-prevention mechanisms used by strong central states in responding to the 2010 violence (Khamidov 2015;Lewis 2015). From a different perspective, Madina Akhmetshina (2012) considers women's domestic sheltering during the same events, and Aksana Ismailbekova (2013) identifies neighborhood strategies for avoiding conflict in their aftermath.…”