http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GE17Ag03.html

Islamic blame game
B Raman

A new Central Asian futuristic hell awaits the US into this 21st century as preplanned by our Neocons and GOP corporate bastards who are inside these countries playing around.

Who do you see as the good guys in this article? I just have to ask, because I read it too, and it reminds me of the Nepal fiasco, which has nothing to do with the USA. If you HAD to choose sides, which side would you choose, and why?

I dunno about good guys, but I'm going with the HT as BAD GUYS:

"After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Islamic fundamentalism made its appearance in the region through Pakistani organizations such as the Tablighi Jamaat, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and through the HT, which came from the UK via Pakistan. This led to anti-Jewish feelings on the one side and anti-Slav feelings on the other. The Pakistani organizations spread the Wahhabi ideology, which led to the republics becoming a hotbed of jihadi extremist/terrorist activities in pursuit of the objective of an Islamic caliphate.

The deterioration in the economic conditions consequent to the collapse of the USSR also led to inter-ethnic tensions among Muslims themselves. In 1989-1990, there was a massacre of Meskhetin Turks in the Ferghana Valley area of Uzbekistan. There were frequent instances of anti-Armenian and anti-Jewish violence in Andijan and there were violent clashes between Uzbeks and Kirghiz in the Osh region.

As a result of these developments, there was a decrease in the Jewish population from about 150,000 in 1989 to about 22,000, of whom about 12,000 were in Uzbekistan, 8,000 in Kazakhstan, 1,500 in Kyrgyzstan and the remaining 500 in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan."

Sound like BAD GUYS to me.

I myself choose who the bad guys are... our NEOCONS who has pushed our involment into this fiasco! Halliburton, Enron and other major oil companies from the US has us places where we do not belong! This action all falls within the plans of the PNAC. Just follow the US bases and money in this intriguing little Central Asia episode and watch who gets tagged as the bad guys.


http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1752

As the number-one oil field services company in the world, Halliburton has an active interest in positioning itself to exploit the newly-opened oil and gas fields in adjoining Uzbekistan, where the US Army's 10th Mountain Division already occupies a base.

The Bush Administration's chief corporate interest is in advancing the fortunes of the energy industry. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice is a former board member of Chevron, which has been operating the Tengiz oil fields in neighboring Kazakhstan through the past decade. Commerce Secretary Don Evans is the former chairman of the Denver-based oil firm Tom Brown Inc. Houston-based Enron, whose phenomenal implosion has recently brought critical attention, was the single biggest contributor to the Bush campaign last year. Halliburton's nine-year troop-support contract falls under the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP, which provides "the warfighter with additional capabilities to rapidly support and augment the logistics requirements of its deployed forces." The company is required to deploy within 72 hours of notification and install forward operating bases for some 25,000 troops within 15 days. The base camp services Halliburton will provide include mess hall, food preparation, potable water, sanitation, laundry, transportation, utilities and warehousing.

Through the past ten years, Halliburton has built bases to support troop deployments in Somalia, Haiti and the Balkans. During the Vietnam War, the company (then as Brown & Root Services) built roads, landing strips, harbors and military bases throughout the areas under US military control. "They drop these boys in and they construct a town," relates retired Special Forces operative Stan Goff. "In no time at all they'll have barracks and latrines. Then they'll put in a club that serves alcohol, soccer fields, and baseball fields."

Can't you answer the quesiton I asked? Yes, we know you hate the neo-cons, but that's easy to see...now back to the question...who do you think are the bad guys or good guys between the government of the Uzbeks and the people who are arrested and their supporters?

The supporters, why simply becourse the govement couldn't care less what people do as long as they dont rock the boat to much, while the opposition will go into peoples homes and tell them how to act and how to feel, and make no mistake they WILL kill if they don't get it presiesly as they want too, so you will be force into a burka Heart, wether you are a muslim or not.
It is like Iran. SAVAK was feared and hatet by everybody, but it's replacment after the mullahs took over makes them seem downright benign and misunderstood (SAVAK that is)

In a region filled with so many different types of ppl who are of different beliefs it's simply too hard to determine heart. Are these localized incidents? Has one group of ppl declared war on another group, or is there basically a mix of incidents between some who are considered a certain nationality or religious sect?

Who do you consider the good/bad guys? On what basis do you consider who is bad and who is good in these foreign regions?

.......... and when our presence in such foreign countries are causing additional rif among these ppl, I am sticking with the fact that the US govt is someplace where they do not belong! This turmoil all about the presence of such US bases to gain control of the Caucasus region for profits!




http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/18/opinion/edrubin.php

Turmoil at the heart of Central Asia

Barnett R. Rubin International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2005
NEW YORK The slaughter of hundreds of civilian demonstrators in the Uzbek city of Andijon by U.S.-trained troops on the personal orders of President Islam Karimov raises fair questions about the Bush administration's claim to be advancing democracy or human rights in the region.

After an initially lukewarm reaction, the State Department has finally started calling for political reform in the country. Before that, the U.S. military's operational need for bases and the CIA's desire to continue the "rendition" of terror suspects to Tashkent appeared to trump all political considerations.

No one should be deceived by Karimov's claim that these demonstrations constituted an Islamic extremist uprising.

Andijon is only a short drive from Osh and Jalal-Abad, cities in southern Kyrgyzstan with a majority of ethnic Uzbeks where the cousins (literally in some cases) of the demonstrators in Andijon spearheaded a democratic revolution two months ago.

The demonstrators in Andijon raised the same slogans and used the same tactics that had succeeded across the border, to the applause of the United States. Only a few days earlier, in a speech in Tbilisi, Georgia, President George W. Bush had lauded the courage of those demonstrators.

Yes, there are Islamic extremists in Andijon. But as experts on the region have been arguing to policy makers since before the Central Asian states became independent in 1991, these militants are only the most extreme manifestation of a much broader and deeper anger in the region over pervasive poverty, repression, corruption and political exclusion.

Andijon is one of the major cities of the Ferghana Valley. Lying at the heart of historical Central Asia, the valley includes only 5 percent of the region's territory but 20 percent of its population. The Soviets split Ferghana among three states - Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan - in part because it was a bastion of resistance to Soviet rule.

As the Soviet system began to collapse in the late 1980s, unemployment grew and the peoples of Ferghana revived their history of Muslim and national activism, which sometimes led to violent clashes with the state or among ethnic groups.

Hundreds were killed in such clashes in 1989 and 1990 in parts of the Ferghana Valley in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In 1991, after Uzbekistan declared its sovereignty, an Islamic movement called Adolat (Justice) took control of parts of Namangan Province, in northeastern Ferghana, not far from Andijon.

After the militants occupied some buildings, the government cracked down and arrested many of them. The rest fled to Tajikistan and Afghanistan, where they eventually formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and linked up with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The movement was battered in the U.S.-led military operations launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But wiping out one group did not end resistance, and Tashkent proceeded to impose harsh rules against the free practice of religion, especially (but not only) Islam.

Any expression of faith outside government control was repressed. Torture was commonly used, to the point that one suspected Islamic activist was boiled to death as part of his "interrogation." When his mother protested, she was arrested.

Yet since 9/11 the CIA has sent captured terrorist suspects to Uzbekistan, even while Bush denied that the United States would turn over detainees to countries that used torture.

The events in Andijon grew out of concerns in Tashkent that the growth of cross-border commerce threatened to create some independence in society.

After the three republics sharing the Ferghana Valley declared independence in 1991, the resulting barriers to trade created great hardships. Making matters worse, Uzbekistan resisted efforts by its neighbors to facilitate border trade and instead planted land mines along its borders, causing many civilian deaths.

This year, Karimov's government imposed even harsher trade restrictions. According to the Asian Development Bank, "Incomes of small businesses and retailers fell, as they were unable to adjust to trade restrictions and regulations."

The police then arrested 23 small merchants who had achieved some local success, charging them with adherence to a local Islamic group with no known terrorist connections. Local people believe they were arrested mainly because their profits made them slightly independent of the government. It was their trials that touched off the demonstrations.

In the end, the group responsible for the crisis was the government of Uzbekistan and its U.S.-trained troops, which used indiscriminate violence to slaughter peaceful demonstrators.

If Washington does not want Central Asians to believe that such repression is the true face of the war on terror, it must condemn the repression, press for genuine political reform, terminate the rendition of suspects to Uzbekistan and demand access to the area for international humanitarian groups and news organizations.

Washington must also support the longstanding efforts by the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to promote regional cooperation in Central Asia.

Thus far the United States has done nothing to overcome the resistance of the Karimov regime to even the mildest requests, like one several years ago to send a UN fact-finding team to the Ferghana Valley.

Democracy in action!!!!


Most Iran Reform Candidates Disqualified


Iran's hard-line Guardian Council has rejected all reformists who registered to run in presidential elections, approving only six out of the 1,010 hopefuls, state television reported Sunday.

The approved candidates for the June 17 vote included powerful former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, seen as a front-runner in the race. The others were former police chief Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, former radio and television chief Ali Larijani, Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former parliamentary speaker Mahdi Karroubi, former head of the elite Revolutionary Guards Mohsen Rezaei.

Former Culture Minister Mostafa Moin, who was the sole candidate of Iran's largest reformist party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, was among those disqualified.

Think they were communists ?

There might have been a few. Seems like some people just won't accept that communism is a failed philosophy and hang on to it.

If there were it probaly wasn't the reason they are being excluded from the democratic, or in the case of Iran the theocratic, process.

In all likelyhood their beards weren't long enough.

Uzbekistan has a population of around 26.9 Million, with a Muslim's accounting for 88%, most of whom are Sunnis. An article posted earlier said the Fundy movement HT had some 20K members, 7k of which are in prison, so the 13k left represent only 0.05% of the population,that leaves the other 99.95% to bear the brunt of the oppressive regime we presently support. When they want to use the lame excuse of a small group of extremists as cover for the murder of peaceful demonstrators, amongst other atrocities, including being one of the nation's that does the dirty work of torture the US can not do at or own oh-so-humanitarian venues at Gitmo and Abu-Ghraib.

And this from the Christian Science Monitor

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0523/p07s01-wosc.html


So, who are the bad guys? Our “friends”,the Government of Uzbekistan, not the 0.05% of the population of the country they use as an excuse for the abuse we finance.