Tackling regional divides
The IWPR has published an article entitled “New Social Policies Needed to Bridge Regional Conflicts” (Russian version here).
The report refers to information from the Foundation for Tolerance International’s Early Warning for Violence Prevention Programme. The most recent bulletin (Issue 71, May 10 -16) included information about clashes between groups of Kyrgyz youths from the Petropavlovka and Poltavka villages on May 9-10:
A conflict situation has arisen in the disco club in Poltavka village of Jayil rayon between the youth from Petropavlovka and Poltavka villages. At 24:00 a group of young men from Petropavlovka beat up two young men from Poltavka village. The two men who were assaulted proceeded to gather about 100 fellow residents, and at about 01:00 they went in the direction of Petropavlovka village to search for the offenders. Unable to locate the attackers, the Poltavka villagers broke windows of the Petropavlovka secondary school and House of Culture along Sovetskaya str. They whistled and shouted ‘Come out, Petropavlovka villagers!’ but nobody appeared, and the young men from Poltavka village eventually dispersed.
Meanwhile, a guard in the disco club in Poltavka village called the Jayil ROVD police after the fight. The police arrived at about 01:00 but did not find anybody. The police officers searched the village and finally left to ROVD without finding anybody.
May 10. The next day at 08:00 about 20 migrants from Osh and Jalalabat oblasts (see Weekly Bulletin Issue No. 70) addressed the Kyzyldyikan Ayil Okmotu in Petropavlovka village in connection with the previous day’s events. They demanded that the head of Ayil Okmotu undertake measures to establish order in the village, and confirmed that their houses were not damaged. The akim of Kyzyldyikan Ayil Okmotu, Talant Jibekeev, called a police officer on duty, questioned those gathered about the events, and ordered the police officer to investigate the fight and track down those who had broken the House of Culture and secondary school windows.
Tensions between migrants from rural areas to more urbanised areas have been growing since 2005, when land seizures by new arrivals around Bishkek began. As IWPR explains, the situation is particularly tense in the northern Chuy region:
The country’s largest industrial and processing enterprises are concentrated in the Chuy region, and it is also home to the capital Bishkek, which gets most of the country’s financial and investment inflows. Hence the region attracts most of the migrants who are seeking a better life than have in economically underdeveloped regions, in both the north and south.
Whilst all agree that measures need to be taken to tackle this form of intra-ethnic regional conflict, opinions differ about the causes.
IWPR News Briefing Central Asia observers argue that the escalation of regional conflicts is the result of north-south rivalry (long denied by politicians - CXW) coming out into the open as the Bakiev-Kulov tandem broke down.They go on to recommend that the government de-politicise the issue of regional differences and devise a programme to promote inter-regional tolerance.
Others, however, feel that the regional dynamic is being imposed from above:
Bazarbay Mambetov suggests the north-south confrontation has been artificially hyped up over the past few years. The increasing frequency of grassroots clashes within the same ethnic group – the Kyrgyz – is, in his view, a sign that the idea that regional groups are divided by irreconcilable differences is being implanted from above.
Certainly, the cut-and-dry nature of a soley regional explanation is very appealing - just as ethnicity has often been used as an explanation for conflicts without looking at the underlying dynamics. Regional or ethnic differences may well play a role in facilitating conflict, particularly once it has begun, but often the ground for conflict has been prepared by local socio-economic factors such as high levels of unemployment and poverty and a shortage of resources. In such conditions it is very easy for a particular group to become the target for frustrations.
Interestingly, the suggested courses of action all focus on ideological programmes or policy changes:
“The state does not have a coherent social policy at the moment, so serious research centres and sociologists should work on this,” said political scientist Toktogul Kakchekeev. “Conflicts of this kind could escalate unless the policy is corrected immediately to take account of the problem of regionalism.”
Namatbaev suggests that education on tolerance between and within ethnic groups should form part of the ideological foundations of a multinational state.
In the long term these steps are undoubtedly necessary and to be welcomed. However, education and ideology cannot take the place of tangible improvements in the living standards of the population. Making people feel they can live, rather than just survive, is likely to lead to a greater increase in real tolerance than any educational programme can ever achieve.
on May 19th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Great post. It’s a little unclear how the fight in those southern Kyrgyz villages relates to regionalism.
I’ve posted further on the same issue with some translated material from an informative interview with a French anthropologist on the North-South divide.
on May 19th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
I believe the point that the IWPR article is making is that internal migration is seen as having a regional dynamic insofar as the influx of migrants to the north from the “south” is aggravating the supposed north-south divide.
In my view the north-south divide has been hugely overplayed. It’s a convenient primordialist argument that allows people to shrug and say there’s little that can be done as it’s just who people are. If we called it a core-periphery issue, then maybe there’d be a little more focus on economic and infrastructure development issues.
Of course, there’d still be no quick fixes, but getting rid of entirely essentialist arguments might encourage some more practical approaches - even if, as you suggest in your post, for your average Kyrgyz, “The only immediate option visible to me is to vote for that deputy who’ll partially redistribute resources, while fighting for his share of limited resources/power in Parliament.”
Thanks for the comments and for your post.
on May 20th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
But, to an extent, the tension between the periphery and the center is not a new dynamic. Remember, it was that sense that all resources flowed from the periphery (be it eastern Europe or the Baltics or Central Asia) to Moscow that sped the collapse of the USSR (once Moscow was unable to return at least a functional level of resources to the periphery). I think that same resentment and suspicion still exists, whether justified or not, throughout Central Asia. The impression that Almaty and Bishkek suck up all the profits from multi-national activities and leave the periphery to wallow in the pollution and waste of those activities.
This dynamic, in my opinion, has escalated as Central Asia, like so many other developing regions, witnesses a mass migration from rural to urban areas. No work, no prospects, no service outside the large cities, and so the cities are inundated with poor people.
A recipe for civil unrest, it seems.
on May 20th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Hi Andrew,
I’m not arguing that there isn’t a regional divide, and you’re absolutely right that it’s nothing new - not in Kyrgyzstan, and not here in the UK, either. What I am against is this essentialist approach, i.e. “northerners and southerners just don’t get on”, rather than looking at the reasons for tensions and what might be done to address them in “real” terms. Throwing more ideology at people who’ve had a belly-full of ideas and promises is, as you conclude, likely to lead to more unrest, and will also help propagate essentialist reasoning and regional factionalism and government inaction - but then to be fair, unrest puts the brakes on governing anyway in favour of crisis management.
WRT core-periphery dynamics in the USSR, don’t forget that Central Asia was a net beneficiary - one of the reasons the “catapult to independence”, to use Brill Olcott’s phrase, resulted in such catastrophic economic decline.