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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Fears of Kyrgyz extremists misplaced |
| 2005-03-26 |
| Islamic extremists may be a force in parts of Central Asia, but they are unlikely to profit much from any void in Kyrgyzstan following the collapse of the government in Bishkek, experts say. They said Islamic militants from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries were unlikely to try to set up base in Kyrgyzstan or win over most Muslims there. "Why would they give up Waziristan, the northern border between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and go to Kyrgyzstan?" asked Alex Vatanka, the Eurasia Editor at Jane's Sentinel Security Assessments. "Somebody like Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, they've been such a success hiding there for so long," Vatanka told AFP. "Unless that area becomes totally unavailable to them, why would they go to totally new territory where you don't have the kind of connections with the clans and the warlords they've had in the past?" he asked. Kyrgyzstan's regime under president Askar Akayev fell apart Thursday after opposition protesters took over the seat of government and the presidency in a dramatic escalation of rallies against a disputed parliamentary election. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) is weakened. Its military leader Juma Namangani probably died in Mazar i-Sharif, Afghanistan in 2001, during the US-led war that toppled the Taliban and drove out bin Laden's Al Qaeda, while IMU political leaders were believed to be hiding in Waziristan, he said. Nor is Kyrgyzstan particularly fertile ground for Islamic extremism, according to both Vatenka and Oksana Antonenko, a specialist at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Antonenko doubted that Hizb-u-Tahrir, which is the only organised Islamic group with declared political ambitions, would emerge as a "unified force" across the country following the collapse of the government in Bishkek. Hizb-u-Tahrir has also described itself as non-violent. With a possibly chaotic transition period, "it is possible that on some regional level, particularly in the southern part of Kyrgyzstan, some of those organisations will be able to recruit perhaps even more members," she said. "But it's very hard to see the Islamic forces actually playing a substantial role. I don't believe that they are in any way leading that opposition," Antonenko said. Vatenka agreed, saying opposition in Bishkek appeared secular, akin to the popular movement for democracy that toppled the government in Ukraine. Vatenka also told AFP that Kyrgyzstan simply did not have the widespread conditions to breed the puritanical brand of Islam embraced by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, unlike in neighbouring Uzbekistan. "The Kyrgyz, being nomadic, don't have ties to mosques, mullahs and so on. The Uzbeks sitting there in Bukhara, in Tashkent and so on, they do listen to the mullahs," Vatenka said. "If you do find radical Islamism in Kyrgyzstan, it's not among ethnic Kyrgyz, it's among ethnic Uzbeks who live in Kyrgyzstan who make up 15 percent of the population and who live in the southwest of the country bordering Uzbekistan." Rene Cagnat, a former French military officer who specialises in Central Asia, thought Islamic extremists might be able to "infiltrate, organise" if chaos lasted but Washington and Moscow had mutual interests to re-establish order. Washington, which used an air base outside the capital Bishkek for missions in nearby Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks, says its interests would be best served by "a stable, prosperous and democratic Kyrgyzstan." In the words of Stephen Young, the US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, on CNN, "you could say Kyrgyzstan was a long way from home but we realised that unstable societies anywhere in the world can come back to threaten American stability and stability generally around the world." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |