Mass Departure of Central Asians from Russia will Destabilize Their Homelands and Then Russia as Well, El Murid Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 24 – Any massive return of Central Asian migrant workers from Russia to their homelands will in the short term destabilize these authoritarian states and then in the longer term the instability they will create in that region will spread back into Russia itself, according to Anatoly Nesmiyan, who blogs under the screen name El Murid.

            The only way the authoritarian regimes in Central Asia have been able to maintain “relative stability”  is for them to have dispatched, mostly to Russia, the young men who helped power the Arab Spring in the Middle East, the blogger says (telegra.ph/Posledstviya-03-24-6 reposted at https://www.kasparov.ru/material.php?id=6601156C1AD42).

            But now there is a danger that many of the Central Asians, faced with a rising tide of xenophobia in Russia, will return home and produce exactly the same kind of instability there that such cohorts produced elsewhere. That won’t end the situation, however, El Murid continues.

            Instead, instability in Central Asia will lead to a flow back into Russia of this group of people; and inflamed both by war and their own experiences with xenophobia and repression, this second wave of Central Asians will destabilize Russia itself quite possibly under the banner of radical jihadist ideology.

            What that means, of course, is that those Russians who want Central Asians to go home are buying only a temporary respite from the threat to Russia and may in the process be unwittingly creating an even more dangerous enemy than the one that they now face, El Murid concludes.