Rights Activists Worried Some Post-Soviet Regimes Using Coronavirus as Occasion to Repress Opposition

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 24 – Crude Accountability, an independent environmental and human rights group based in the US, is concerned Baku is using the coronavirus crisis as the occasion to crack down on opposition figures, a concern that activists in many of the post-Soviet states have (crudeaccountability.org/azerbaijani-authorities-should-immediately-release-opposition-leader-tofiq-yugublu/).

            Indeed, in an article in The National Interest yesterday, activists Melinda Haring and Doug Klain argue that “autocrats love the coronavirus” because they are “constantly searching for scapegoats, working to rile up the fears of their populace and trying to tighten their grips” (nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-autocrats-love-coronavirus-135947).)

            But the situation in Azerbaijan is both emblematic and, thanks to Crude Accountability, particularly well-documented. Five days ago, it reports, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said he may “isolate” opposition leader during the pandemic “not for health reasons but because ‘we cannot allow the anti-Azerbaijan forces, the fifth column, to take advantage of this situation.’”

            He has been as good as his word: three days ago, Azerbaijani police arrested Tofiq Yugublu, a member of the Musavat Party and of the National Council of Democratic Forces in Azerbaijan, on trumped up charges that he had beaten two people during an automobile accident. In fact, they attacked him but were not arrested.

            Yugublu’s lawyer was not allowed to meet with him, and an Azerbaijani court has ordered him held for three months in pre-trial detention. If after that time, he is convicted of “hooliganism”, he could be sentenced to as much as six years in prison (contact.az/ext/news/2020/3/free/politics%20news/ru/122583.htm and turan.az/ext/news/2020/3/free/politics%20news/en/122593.htm.)

            Crude Accountability calls on Western governments to “urgently raise this case with the Azerbaijani authorities and call for Yugublu’s immediate and unconditional release.”  All people of good will should join in this appeal and also keep careful track of how some rulers in the post-Soviet region and elsewhere are exploiting the pandemic rather than fighting it.

Beijing’s Repressive Policies in Xinjiang Slowing Creation of a ‘Pax Sinica’ in Central Asia, Umarov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 24 – “It is impossible to imagine” the future of Central Asia without the involvement of China, Temur Umarov says; but “the more actively Beijing broadens its efforts at influence there, the stronger will be resistance” especially given what the Muslim countries of the region see as China’s repressive policies against Muslim peoples in Xinjiang.

            In a major and heavily footnoted study published by the Moscow Carnegie Center, Umarov, a specialist on China and also Central Asia, says that “at first glance,” the Chinese strategy in Central Asia intended to produce a Pax Sinica there has remained unchanged (carnegie.ru/commentary/81265).

            That strategy has been based on “three primary rules: non-interference in the internal affairs of these countries and their relations with each other, a stress on economic cooperation, and efforts to improve its own reputation.”  But now, Umarov says, “Beijing’s behavior is changing,” in response to threats from Afghanistan and opposition to its investments in the region and actions in Xinjiang.

            China has begun the construction of a base for Tajik forces on the Afghan border to block the movement of Islamist fighters from there into Xinjiang. It has stepped up its joint military maneuvers with the armies of the Central Asian countries, and it is training more Central Asian officers in Chinese military academies.

            Beijing has long faced resistance to its involvement in the region by populations who see its presence as a kind of neo-colonialism from a new direction, the scholar says; but now, that resistance has been growing because of China’s repressive policies in the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous District.

            That should not have come as any surprise: Within Xinjiang currently live “about 1.5 million ethnic Kazakhs, 180,000 Kyrgyz, 50,000 Tajiks and 10,000 Uzbeks, many of whom have been swept into the re-education camps Beijing has set up to try to pacify this long restive Muslim region. And that has sparked anti-Chinese protests in Bishkek and Nur-Sultan.

            It is too early to suggest that Sinophobia is sweeping through Central Asia, but there are growing groups willing to protest with some figures in the opposition in Kazakhstan taking the lead in doing so, basing their complaints in many cases on the testimony of Kazakhs and others who have fled Xinjiang. (350,000 ethnic Kazakhs returned from there between 1991 and 2015.)

            The governments in Central Asia mostly remain friendly to China, and that has created a split which may widen between pro-Chinese regimes and anti-Chinese populations, Umarov suggests. But the negative attitudes of the population divide as well, between those who fear its anti-Muslim repressions and those concerned about its role as the new “’Big Brother.’”

            What makes tracking the situation difficult, the Carnegie expert says, is that “in the countries of Central Asia, there are no quality analysts on China.” The strong schools of Uyghur studies that had existed in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan collapsed in the 1990s.  And as a result, the governments there do not have the expertise they need to navigate this situation.

            Umarov implies but doesn’t say that this lack of expertise could mean dramatic swings in policy toward China by Central Asian countries who may react less to the situation as a whole than either to their own economic advantage or to protests from populations concerned about repression.

Russian Attitudes toward Soviet Past Show Both Continuity and Change in Putin Era

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 24 – A Levada Center poll finding that 75 percent of Russians now have a positive view of the Soviet past has attracted enormous attention, but other results of this survey suggest there has been significant continuity under Putin in Russian attitudes about the Soviet past.

            For example, the current poll found that 65 percent regret the demise of the USSR but 75 percent did so in 2000. And the share who think that the demise of the Soviet Union could have been avoided is virtually the same now as then, 63 percent compared to 62 percent (https://www.levada.ru/2020/03/24/struktura-i-vosproizvodstvo-pamyati-o-sovetskom-soyuze/).

            And perhaps especially intriguingly, Russians said they reached their conclusions not on the basis of television (15 percent), Putin’s main delivery vehicle, or the Internet (11 percent), which often features alternative views, but on the basis of their personal experience (61 percent) or from relatives and friends who did (51 percent).

            But in presenting the findings of the latest poll, Karina Pipiya of the Levada Center says that they show that Russians do have a more positive attitude toward the USSR than they did earlier and that they name Stalin more often than other Soviet leaders and in a more positive way, both Putin themes.

            She says that as expected nostalgia for the past is greater among older people than younger ones but that many younger people have come to share the views of their elders, that this “nostalgia” reflects three things – the loss of superpower status, the destruction of a single economic system, and the loss of social cohesion.

            But Pipiya concludes that “the romanticization of the Soviet past among two-thirds of the population of the country is not leading to a desire to restore the Soviet system in present-day

Russia either among those who lived in Soviet times or the post-Soviet youth, among whom the Soviet path has given way to ‘a special Russian path’ and the European model of development.”