Ethnic Tension on the Silk Road
At least from the fifth century BCE, Osh has been a crossroads city, a trading center attracting people of many races, religions, and cultures. It lies in the east of the largest and richest agricultural region in Central Asia, the Fergana Valley, where the Ak Burra River, flowing out of the Pamir Alay, emerges from its gorge and flows into the once-mighty Syr Darya, on its way to the Aral Sea. Osh was on a branch of the Silk Road that ran east along the Fergana Valley, crossing the Pamir Alay to Kashgar in China. From as early as the eighth century, Osh was known as a center for silk production and for its huge bazaar. According to archaeological data, the city with its citadel and mosque was surrounded by a fortified wall with three gates. The Mongols razed the city in the thirteenth century, but because of its strategic location Osh soon revived. By the sixteenth century, it was a religious and trading center with mosques and madrassas, markets and wealthy merchant homes. As the tsar’s armies advanced through Central Asia, Osh was annexed in 1876. In the Soviet era, it was the administrative center of an oblast (province) in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), and its demographics began to change. Like other trading cities in the Fergana Valley, most of its population was ethnically Uzbek. From the 1960s, as the Soviet Union began building textile and other industrial plants in the south, authorities encouraged ethnic Kyrgyz to move from the countryside to take factory jobs. The growth in the Kyrgyz population contributed to social tension with the Uzbeks. As long the Soviet authorities maintained tight control over the region, tensions remained largely dormant. When the empire began falling apart, they exploded.
By the late 1980s, economic disparities between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz populations were becoming sharper. The Uzbeks, traditionally traders and arable farmers, benefited from the market conditions of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The Kyrgyz, most of whom were animal herders, suffered as the collective farms were broken up and they lost their jobs and housing. Uzbeks feared for their future in an independent Kyrgyzstan where ethnic Kyrgyz would dominate politics; although Uzbeks accounted for over a quarter of the population of southern Kyrgyzstan in 1990 (and about half the population of Osh), they held only 4 percent of official posts. In the spring of 1990, an Uzbek nationalist group petitioned the oblast government for greater representation and freedom for Uzbek-language schools, publications, and culture. Meanwhile, a Kyrgyz nationalist group called for the redistribution of land from an Uzbek collective farm. The authorities decided to reallocate most of the land to Kyrgyz farmers with little compensation to the Uzbeks.
Clashes between gangs of Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, many of them young and some intoxicated, began on June 4, 1990, in the town of Uzgen, and soon spread to Osh, thirty-five miles away. The local militsiya (police) stepped in, sometimes with excessive force; some policemen supported their own ethnic group by taking part in the riots. In the countryside, Kyrgyz herders on horseback terrorized Uzbek farmers and attacked chaikhanas, the traditional Uzbek teahouses. Under orders from Gorbachev, army units moved in to Osh and Uzgen, and closed the border with the Uzbek SSR to stop Uzbeks joining the conflict. Official estimates from the three days of fighting put the death toll at more than 300, although unofficial estimates claim it was closer to 1,000. In 1991, the government of newly independent Kyrgyzstan held trials for 48 accused, most of them ethnic Kyrgyz, on charges of murder, rape, arson, destruction of property, and other crimes; 46 were convicted and sentenced.
Despite their symbolism, the trials did not mark a new phase in ethnic relations in the south. Under President Askar Akayev, ethnic Kyrgyz dominated both the national government in Bishkek and the regional and local administrations in the south, including the police and the tax authorities. Although Uzbeks remained dominant in business and trade, they suffered along with the Kyrgyz and other ethnic groups in the economic collapse of the 1990s. In such a volatile situation, government-owned and private media outlets had a crucial role to play. If they succumbed to nationalist or ethnic rhetoric, they could exacerbate tensions. If they served as a voice of reason, they could help build bridges between the ethnic groups. The 1990 riots had unnerved Western governments who feared that Central Asia could descend into the kind of ethnic and religious conflict that wracked the former Yugoslavia. Foreign aid came flowing in to Kyrgyzstan—to develop a market economy, to privatize state-owned property, to draft laws and train legislators and judges, to build civil society, and to support media and raise professional standards in journalism. The Osh Media Resource Center was one of these initiatives.
Let’s Make a Deal
Kuban and I spent two days visiting newspapers and TV stations. The media owners were concerned about staying in business: the economy was in a slump, businesses were not buying advertising, and local government officials and the mafia were squeezing them for payoffs. The journalists were concerned about poor pay and working conditions. Most earned less than $50 a month, and needed two or three jobs to put food on the table. Both groups welcomed opportunities for training, agreeing that standards in the profession needed to be raised. Everyone said it was important for Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Russian media to work harmoniously together. Memories of the June 1990 clashes were still vivid.
After Kuban left, I hired a student from Osh State University as my interpreter and began planning for the center. The library director, Ismailova Ibragimovna, was proving to be a tough negotiator. The library’s budget had been slashed, and she was struggling to pay the staff and maintain the building. There was no money for books and newspaper and magazine subscriptions. A new center with computers, radio equipment, satellite TV and—perhaps most exciting of all in 1995—an Internet connection, promised to bring in new patrons and raise the profile of the library with the oblast administration. UNESCO and USIS had agreed to fund the newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I expected Ibragimovna to enthusiastically support the project.
Instead, she held out for more. Perhaps she thought the donors had deep pockets; perhaps she thought she could play hardball with a green Westerner on his first job in Central Asia. The agreement with USIS and UNESCO was not in writing, and did not specify the size or location of the room for the center. Ibragimovna started by showing me a windowless second-floor room, not much larger than a broom closet. She claimed all other rooms in the library were occupied. Even a casual visitor would have concluded otherwise because several rooms were, if not exactly unoccupied, at least underused. When you opened the door, a couple of staff members invited you to join them for tea; there were no shelves, typewriters, and certainly no books in the room. I decided to call Ibragimovna’s bluff and said that the room she offered was unsatisfactory. The center had to be located in a larger room with windows on the first floor. The donors would pay for repairs and painting, new desks and furniture, and install a security system.
Ibragimova thought for a moment. “Maybe I can find such a room,” she said. “But it will not be easy. I know you need to hire a manager for the center. My daughter needs a job.”
I suppose I should not have been shocked, but this was the first time I had come face-to-face with an attempt to parlay influence into a job. And the request needs to be put into cultural context. In Kyrgyz society, kinship ties are the ones that really bind. Your family comes first, then your tribe or clan. In a traditional nomadic society, there’s a duty to help a family member who falls sick or loses livestock in a winter storm. However, when this value system moves from the yurts and mountain pastures to the city, to government agencies, universities, and private companies, it can breed corruption and nepotism—jobs, government contracts, and sweet business deals for relatives, bribes for university admission and diplomas, and payoffs to officials and the police. In the city, the extended family grows to include political supporters and business associates.