Orwell’s War in Central Asia
Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia… Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. – 1984, G. Orwell
Ismoil Somoni, a 9th century Samanid amir, is a well-regarded figure in Tajik history, largely credited with strengthening and expanding the Samanid Empire. On August 10, 2015, however, his familiar statue, proudly cast in the center of the southwestern Tajik town of Nurak, was draped in an unfamiliar black linen resembling an ISIS flag. A few weeks later, the Tajikistan Ministry of Interior announced that it had arrested 10 men in connection with the incident and stamped the blame firmly on the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), Central Asia’s only recognized Islamist political party.
As the country’s second largest political party, the IRPT has maintained an active role in state politics ever since its creation in 1990, despite facing constant harassment and pressure from the government.
On August 28, the government officially banned the IRPT from operating and blacklisted the party as an extremist organization intent on spreading ISIS propaganda.
The fear of ISIS’s expansion into Central Asia is neither new nor limited to the region; in October, Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Russian Federal Security Service, announced that the increased presence of Afghan ISIS militants along the country’s northern border could lead to an invasion of Central Asia.
The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU),an ISIS-affiliated extremist group scattered across northern Afghanistan, has also seen its numbers grow. Director of the local Radio Marshaal, Amin Mudaqiq, reported that people were regularly coming from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to join the IMU.
However, numbers for Central Asian recruits largely differ depending on the source. The various ministries of defense across Central Asia all give significantly higher estimates than does the non-governmental International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, for example. This is hardly surprising; despite the fact that the majority of Central Asians widely identify as Muslim, much of the current political elite continues to maintain Soviet worldviews that harbor suspicions over pious Muslim activity of any kind.
For the governing elite, Islamic values are potential destabilizers that seek to undermine their power and their credentials to rule. The Human Rights Watch alleges that in Uzbekistan, thousands of prisoners are serving time for phony charges pertaining to unspecified religious activity, and the state “regularly uses the state-controlled media and the arts to promote its messages about the bogeyman of Islamic extremism.” The government’s incentive to promote the “ISIS threat” is thus not difficult to perceive: not only can it be used to direct attention away from real domestic issues, but it can also be used as leverage over foreign governments (i.e. Russia and the U.S.) to gain favorable concessions in the arena of international affairs.
The idea of heightened extremist presence in Central Asia is two-fold. On the one hand, if it is a real problem, it has more to do with the plights of migrant workers in Russia than it does with moderate Islam back at home. On the other hand, the alienation and repression of Muslims by local regimes is ironically fertilizing more extremist sentiments. Orwellian tactics of state-funded fear promulgation, used in order to avoid coming to terms with the contemporary social dynamics of the region, can only pave the way for even more instability.