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Remaking Central
Asia
By Ramtanu Maitra
Most major media outlets have spelled out
with a profusion of details the "exact" events
that led to the death of what some claim to have
been hundreds of people in the eastern Uzbekistan
town of Andijan on May 13. Led by British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw, the world media condemned
much-maligned Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov
for yet another bloody and ruthless suppression of
"public dissent". Yet, all the details so far
provided do not explain who the real players were
or their end objectives.
It is certain,
however, that the puzzle cannot be solved unless
the London factor is understood. The answers lie
in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Liverpool. The
old British colonial establishment, with former
intelligence officer Bernard Lewis as its mentor,
appears to have set in motion a series of events
that will bring endless bloodshed to Central Asia.
London's objective would appear to be to keep both
China and Russia under an open-ended threat. At
this point, there is no one who can better serve
this "Lewis Doctrine" than Muslims nurtured in
Britain - the Hizbut-Tehrir (HT).
Ferghana Valley's importance
The
most significant aspect of the violent incident in
Andijan is that it occurred in the Ferghana
Valley, a confluence of three former Soviet
republics - Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Andijan is located about 25 miles (40 kilometers)
west of Osh, Kyrgyzstan, where the seed crystal
for the March uprising against Kyrgyz president
Askar Akayev was planted. Within a span of 48
hours after the uprising began in Osh, Akayev was
gone.
Andijan is also about 25 miles east
of Namangan, the hotbed of the Saudi-funded
Wahhabi form of Islamic extremism. Juma Namangani,
now dead, was the leader of the movement that
began in Namangan. The Ferghana Valley's 7 million
inhabitants make it the most densely populated
region in Central Asia. In other words, Andijan is
in the heart of Ferghana Valley, and is the key to
controlling it.
For years, Central Asian
governments have pointed to the valley as a hotbed
of Muslim extremists aiming to set up an Islamic
state in the region. Largely ethnically Uzbek, the
valley is split between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan in a confused patchwork of Soviet-era
borders that often leave enclaves of one country
surrounded by the territory of another. In
general, Uzbekistan holds the valley floor,
Tajikistan holds its narrow mouth and Kyrgyzstan
holds the high ground around. Though the valley
mouth is narrow, the actual valley is vast at
22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles), and
the Pamir and Tien Shan mountains that rise above
it are only dimly visible, but they are the main
source of the water that fertilizes the valley.
During the Soviet era, the valley was a
major center of cotton and silk production, and
the hills above are covered by walnut forests. The
valley also has some oil and gas. That scene has
not changed much. What has changed significantly
since the1990s, following the collapse of the
Soviet Union, is its integration with the "free
world", and that process has made Central Asia
economically decrepit and turned it into a hotbed
of transnational Islamic militants, controlled and
funded by outside forces. Recently, the Kyrgyz
media reported of personnel of the country's
border control services saying that the illegal
entry of foreign nationals and individuals without
any citizenship into Kyrgyzstan was on the rise.
What is important to note is that these militants
were not parachuted out of airplanes: they are
coming through Afghanistan and Pakistan. It could
very well be a ticking time bomb for India, China
and Russia.
Footsoldiers of foreign
powers
Apart from various Islamic
preachers, two major Islamic groups function in
the Ferghana Valley, whose common objective is to
change the regimes in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. These are the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the HT. While the
IMU openly thrives on violence, the HT is strongly
promoted by the United Kingdom, where it is
headquartered, as peaceful. But records indicate
that that the IMU and the HT work hand-in-hand.
Most of the IMU recruits are from the HT,
according to Rohan Gunaratna, an expert on world
terrorist outfits. Gunaratna claims that Khaled
Sheikh Muhammad, the alleged mastermind of the
September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the US, and
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian of Chechen
origin who has remained active in the Iraqi
insurgency against the US occupying forces, were
both once members of the HT.
The
relationship between the Taliban and the IMU
pre-dates September 11. In September 1996, after
the Taliban had captured the Afghan capital,
Kabul, Juma Namangani and Tahir Yuldashev -
long-time adversaries of Karimov and considered
the founders of the IMU - held a press conference
in the city to announce the formation of the IMU.
Namangani, who had served as a Soviet paratrooper
in Afghanistan in the 1980s, became the group's
leader (or amir) and Yuldashev its military
commander. Their aim was to topple Karimov and
turn Uzbekistan, and ultimately the whole of
Central Asia, into an Islamic state. The Taliban
provided them with a place to shelter and train,
and to plot against Karimov. It is also said that
Yuldashev developed contact with Osama bin Laden
in Afghanistan and the two became supportive of
each other. Although Karimov is a target of the
IMU, in recent months he has identified the HT as
the greater threat. Following the Andijan
incident, Uzbek authorities again blamed the HT.
Unlike the IMU, which has concentrated its
role in Central Asia, with the Ferghana Valley as
the focus, the HT is an international Islamic
movement. It is headquartered in London, but also
has a strong organizational presence in
Birmingham, Liverpool and Bradford. The UK group
was co-founded by Omar Bakri Mohammed, who went to
the UK after being expelled from Saudi Arabia in
1986. The HT's present leader is an information
technology professional from the Indian
sub-continent, Jalaluddin Patel.
The HT
was established in 1953 in Palestine by a
well-known religious figure, the judge of the
appellate Sharia court in Jerusalem, Takieddin
al-Nabahani al-Falastini (1909-1979). According to
available reports, the group's first UK-based
website was hosted by the London Imperial College
- but following complaints to the college
authorities, the site was closed down until a new
host could be found. The group now posts in its
own name as Hizbut-Tehrir.
Although
portrayed as non-violent by British authorities,
Bakri's links to bin Laden are widely known.
Excerpts of a letter to Bakri from bin Laden, sent
by fax from Afghanistan in the summer of 1998,
were published in the Los Angeles Times. Bakri
later released what he called bin Laden's four
specific objectives for a jihad against the US:
"Bring down their airliners. Prevent the safe
passage of their ships. Occupy their embassies.
Force the closure of their companies and banks."
Many of those who follow HT activities are
intrigued that the group is not more discreet. For
instance, its website in 2003 carried "A Cry of
Imam from the Muslims of Uzbekistan." In that
article, the "imam" gave the call "to destroy
Karimov" . Similar calls have been issued to oust
the Jordanian and Turkish authorities. These are
not empty threats. The HT is a huge organization.
Some claim it has at least 10,000 footsoldiers in
Central Asia. A few thousand more are lurking in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. HT also has a strong
presence in North Africa.
As one Indian
analyst pointed out, Osh and Jalalabad, the cities
that spearheaded the regime change in Kyrgyzstan,
happen to be HT strongholds. HT is making huge
gains in an entire belt stretching from the
Ferghana provinces of Namangan, Andijan and Kokand
(contiguous to Osh and Jalalabad) to the adjacent
Penjekent Valley (Uzbekistan) and Khojent
(Tajikistan).
The Lewis Doctrine
Writing for the Jamestown Foundation Journal
(Vol 2 Issue 4), Stephen Ulph, in his article
"Londonistan", seemed intrigued by that fact that
scores of violent Islamic movements remain
anchored in London. He writes:
It [London] is also a center for
Islamist politics. You could say that London has
become, for the exponents of radical Islam, the
most important city in the Middle East. A
framework of lenient asylum laws has allowed the
development of the largest and most overt
concentration of Islamist political activists
since Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Just ask the
French, whose exasperation with the indulgent
toleration afforded to Algerian Islamic
activists led them to dub the city dismissively
as "l'antechambre de l'Afghanistan". They
certainly have a point. Many of bin Laden's
fatwas [religious edicts] were actually
first publicized in London. In fact, the United
Kingdom in general seems to differ from other
European states in the degree to which it became
a spiritual and communications hub for the jihad
movement ... Ulph does not, however,
ask why it is that London remains an "Aladdin's
Cave", chock-full of Islamic dissidents. Britain
is no longer a military or economic power of
substance. In order to be an almost-equal partner
in the Atlantic alliance, Britain has two
important ingredients to offer to the United
States: first, its ability to undo the Middle
East, North Africa, Central Asia and parts of the
Indian sub-continent through the use of people
living in London's Aladdin's cave; and second, its
control of world currency movements through the
City of London.
The West's policy - in
other words, the policy of the Anglo-Americans, as
the European Union does not have a policy worth
citing - toward the Middle East has long been
formulated by Bernard Lewis. The British-born
Lewis started his career as an intelligence
officer and has remained in bed with British
intelligence ever since. Avowedly anti-Russia and
pro-Israel, Lewis reaped a rich harvest among US
academia and policymakers. He brought president
Jimmy Carter's virulently anti-Russian National
Security Council chief, Zbigniew Brzezinski, into
his fold in the 1980s, and made the US
neo-conservatives, led by Vice President Dick
Cheney, dance to his tune on the Middle East in
2001. In between, he penned dozens of books and
was taken seriously by people as a historian. But,
in fact, Lewis is what he always was: a British
intelligence officer.
To understand the
"Lewis Doctrine", one must read the statement he
made in Canada recently while discussing his
article, "Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle
East" (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005). "During
the Second World War, Nazi Germany and the allies
had all sorts of odd friends," Lewis said on that
occasion. "When [Prime Minister Winston] Churchill
was asked in the House of Commons about Britain's
new ally, Russia, he replied that if Hitler would
invade hell, 'I would find occasion to support the
devil'. In this way, there is nothing odd about an
alliance between Saddam [Hussein] and al-Qaeda."
Or, one might be expected to conclude, between
London and the Hizbut-Tehrir.
In 1979,
when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over power
in Iran and the West was in a quandary, Lewis
sucked Brzezinski into his notion that "Koranic
evangelism" could be a very useful political tool
against Russia in the long term. His Time magazine
story at the time, "The Crescent of Crisis", ended
with the following telling observation:
In the long run there may even be
targets of opportunity for the West created by
ferment within the crescent. Islam is
undoubtedly compatible with socialism, but it is
inimical to atheistic communism. The Soviet
Union is already the world's fifth largest
Muslim nation. By the year 2000, the huge
Islamic populations in the border republics may
outnumber Russia's now dominant Slavs. From
Islamic democracies on Russia's southern tier,
zealous Koranic evangelism might sweep across
the border into these politically repressed
Soviet states, creating problems for the Kremlin
... Whatever the solution, there is a clear need
for the US to recapture what [Henry] Kissinger
calls the "geopolitical momentum". That more
than anything else will help maintain order in
the crescent of crisis. The recent
developments in Uzbekistan have all the hallmarks
of the same process. This time the objective is to
weaken China, Russia, and possibly India, using
the HT to unleash the dogs of war in Central Asia.
It is not difficult for those on the ground to see
what is happening. The leader of the Islamic Party
of Tajikistan, Deputy Prime Minister Hoji Akbar
Turajonzoda, has identified HT as a
Western-sponsored bogeyman for "remaking Central
Asia". He said: "A more detailed analysis of HT's
programmatic and ideological views and concrete
examples of its activities suggests that it was
created by anti-Islamic forces. One proof of this
is the comfortable existence this organization
enjoys in a number of Western countries, where it
has large centers and offices that develop its
concept of an Islamic caliphate." It is evident
that Turajonzoda has seen through this game. But
he has little capability to stop the juggernaut
once it has been unleashed.
It is not a
lack of understanding on the part of American
neo-conservatives associated with the Bush
administration, but their keenness to use the
"Lewis Doctrine" to achieve what they believe is
justified that promises untold danger. How
important a brains-trust is Lewis to the
neo-conservatives? Just read the words of Richard
Perle, a leading neo-conservative who remains a
close adviser to Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld: "Bernard Lewis has been the single-most
important intellectual influence countering the
conventional wisdom on managing the conflict
between radical Islam and the West."
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