By Alexander Maistrovoy ——Bio and Archives--June 17, 2012
World News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
… In the middle of the 80s Uzbekistan was the epitome of a “New Historical Community” – “Soviet People” (a type of “multiculturalism”) with a diversity of nationalities peacefully existing side by side with each other. However in the late 80s the firm grip of the regime has weakened and in May 1989 the dormant fervors sprang out. The first victims were Russians; the second were Meskhetian Turks that were transferred here from the Meskheti region of Georgia by Stalin in the 40s. This massacre entered history as "Pogrom in Fergana Valley". We still do not know how many Turks were slaughtered. Armed with crowbars, pitchforks and axes, the crowds burned alive, dismembered and raped people under the slogan "Uzbekistan for Uzbeks"; "Strangle the Turks, smother the Russians" and "Long live the Islamic flag". "Snapshots - (in Fergana) testimony of debauchery, of madness and sadism: burnt corpse; murdered man and a teenager (probably father and son) and a bludgeon – the murder weapon; mutilated corpse of a woman, thrown into a ditch; burned-out houses. …Approaching Kokand ...we saw pillars of black smoke and then bright torches of burning houses. We were able to distinguish angry faces, sticks in hands... They were thugs, 25-30 years of age. They threatened us with fists and bludgeons; others tossed stones at the helicopter with impotent rage. We saw how they dragged Turkish girls from the buses and raped them. We saw how they threw a Russian man from the roof of a house …and then, burnt him alive ... " (2) (Resembles Syrian "sketches", or doesn’t it?).The pogroms recurred in June 1990 in Osh (this time – the Kyrgyz were the victims), and again in 1991 - in Namangan. Mass atrocities ended only when Islam Karimov, the current Uzbekistan president, came to power and suppressed the mad crowds with an iron fist. From that time on Uzbekistan has been a stable country with many people coexisting peacefully. When the 1997 riots renewed in Namangan, Karimov rigorously suppressed them again. The West rushed to accuse him of violation of human rights without realizing that hadn’t he done it with maximum determination and force, there wouldn’t be any “human rights” or humans left in Namangan in particular, and in the country in general. In Kazakhstan, in 1986 the nationalists attempted to settle old scores with the Russians. By a pogrom in the center of Alma-Ata, a large crowd armed with sticks and stones demanded to elect a Kazakh native to be the First Secretary of the Communist Party. Many were killed and hundreds injured as a result of the pogrom. The period of turmoil ended when the current President Nursultan Nazarbayev came to power. Since then Kazakhstan has been a prosperous and rapidly developing country. Like Uzbekistan, it is not a liberal democracy, but people who live here have the basic rights - the rights to life and feeling of security. Events in Tajikistan evolved in a similar matter. In February, 1990 crowds of rioters, screaming “Death to Armenians”, destroyed homes of Armenians and other minorities. Arsons, mass murders, cruel rapes swept Dushanbe, life was paralyzed. Rioters burned people in their own homes, caught them, tortured to death, raped girls and women and to end with - murdered them. The country was blazing several years until Emomalii Rahmon took power into his hands in 1994. Since then, Tajikistan is rarely mentioned in the international news reports. Life went back to normal in this country. Pogroms of Armenians, provoked by the Karabakh conflict, swept Azerbaijan in 1989-90. At first, there was the Sumgait in February 1988. "Thugs broke into the previously marked apartments. Armenians were killed in their own homes, but sometimes they were pulled out to the streets or to the yards for public mockery. Only a few were “lucky” to die from an ax or a knife. Most died in a painful humiliation and suffering. Murderers pounded them, tormented, doused them with gasoline and burned them alive. Gang-rapes of women and girls occurred often in front of their relatives. Eventually, the torturers killed their victims. They didn’t have mercy for neither old men nor for children".(3) “I saw dismembered bodies with my own eyes; one body was chopped by an ax; legs, arms were chopped off from the body – almost nothing was left. They (murderers) collected leaves from the ground, tossed them over the corpses, then poured gasoline from cars and fired them up. These bodies looked horrible ", - wrote British journalist Thomas de Waal.(4) Pogroms resumed in Baku in 1990. According to de Waal, an area densely populated by Armenians turned into a scene of mass murder: people were thrown from the balconies of the upper floors, lynched, and burned alive. Rape was accompanied by sadism and barbarity. A period of instability ended when Heydar Aliyev, a tough and dodgy politician, came to power, and subsequently handed over the authority to his son - Ilham Aliyev. Now Azerbaijan, as other Central Asia republics, is the authoritarian regime with quasi-democratic institutions, but regardless is very popular among the people, because it provides the main thing that they need - security, stability and tranquility. The Middle East is not that different from Central Asia and the Caucasus: there are same unwritten laws and rules. An example of this was the massacre of Christians by Palestinian militants in Damour (Lebanon) and retaliation in the Sabra and Shatila by Christian Phalangists. Similar things are occurring in Libya today. We are yet to see a repetition of the atrocities in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere, where the regime is unable to restrain the instinctual brutality of the crowd. Alas, (as politically incorrect as it may sound) the Middle and the Central East (excluding the fiasco of the Ataturk experiment in Turkey) have always known only two forms of existence (I emphasize - not the reign, but the existence): the domination of crazed mobs or despotism (in the form autocracy, military junta or theocracy). There is no other choice, and there never will be. Without any doubt the second form of existence (with all its flaws) is preferred, because it sets rigorous game rules and allows the mass of ordinary people to survive. The Syrians are very well aware of this eternal order of things. I think they would prefer Hafez al-Assad’s tyranny to empty and meaningless declarations about "revolution," "democracy," "liberal values”and "human rights".
View Comments
Alexander Maistrovoy is a graduate of Moscow Univ. in Journalism, worked there in his field and made aliyah in 1988. He works at the Russian language newspaper Novosty Nedely, has had articles posted on many internet sites and authored “Ways of God” about different religious and ethnic groups in the Holy Land, and with Mark Kotliarsky the Russian book Jewish Atlántida.