Is Uzbekistan Heading For a Clan Revolution

As Central Asian leaders continue to observe the fallout from the sudden death of Islam Karimov. The premature demise of one of Central Asia’s long standing political players has created a significant power vacuum within the state.

The fallout from this vacuum has the potential to go three ways. Firstly, Uzbekistan could collapse into political turmoil as the three largest regional clans from Samarkand, Tashkent and Ferghana, compete to consolidate and expand their power structures. The resulting infighting will destabilise the Uzbek state and society leading to regional diasporas and potentially the rise of terrorism.

Another path open to Uzbekistan is that its new leader will walk the country out of its current stagnancy and seize the opportunity to economically and politically move beyond the hardships characterised by Karimov’s 25 year rule. However, given that civil strife is an anathema in most Central Asian nations it is likely that Uzbekistan will just get a new hand on the wheel and everything will continue as normal.

Clan Struggle

Nevertheless the power vacuum created by Karimov’s death will create significant ripples in Uzbekistan’s political landscape. Thanks to Islam Karimov’s iron grip on the Presidency, Uzbekistan’s regional clans have often been an obscured part of Uzbekistan’s political landscape. They are a real and imminent danger to the stability of this nation. Currently the country is divided among 7 clans. If you want to check out the geographical locations of the clans follow the link on  Stratfor.



While the seven clans are divide along provincial lines it is the larger three, Samarkand, Ferghana and Tashkent that are most likely to initiate clan conflict. The smaller regional clans of Jizzakh, Khorezm, Karakalpak and Kashkadarya are more subjugated to the larger clans and tend to keep their focus on their own regions. While these alliances are currently holding, it would take little for these pacts to become destabilised.

Islam Karimov, like the Soviets before him, kept the destabilising jostling of the clans at bay by rigidly sticking with a system of balancing the clans’ power throughout his rule. Aided by his own lack of clan, thanks to his orphancy, Karimov was considered an outsider and as such could sit above the disputes due to his lack of regional ties.

However, Karimov was not immune to the clans’ disfavour. In 1999, for example, several car bombs were set off in Tashkent after his removal of one of Taskent clan’s political elites from the Interior Ministry (MVD). Likewise in 2004, the Interior Ministry (MVD) and the National Security Council or SNB (formerly the KGB), which are linked respectively to the Samarkand and Tashkent clans, appeared to have a turf dispute with bombs exploding across Tashkent and Bukhara.

A Time for Stability or Subversion?

So far there has been little turmoil in Uzbekistan since Karimov death. The succession of Shavkat Miromonovich Mirziyoyev, the long-time Prime Minister, to the position of Interim President has experienced no issues.

This is despite the fact that legally the Interim President should have been the Senate Chairman Nigmatilla Yuldashev. Presumably this is because Mirziyoyev is a member of the Samarkand clan and is supported by Tashkent heavy weight, Rustum Inoyatov, the head of the SNB.

According to EurasiaNet.org, Uzbek Journalist Elparid Hadjayev admitted that this transition was not surprising.

“I think that Nigmatilla Yuldashev would have felt very uncomfortable in the position of interim president. He is not a popular figure [and] most people in the country don’t know him. Clearly that is why they picked a person that is in control of the situation in the country,” said Hadjayev.

Furthermore, Mirziyoyev is a logical choice because of his foreign affairs record as Prime Minister and his close ties to Russia.

International Pressure

The importance of international players in Uzbekistan’s presidential contest cannot be understated. Russia and China both see the value in promoting a friendly face into the contest. Russia, for example, has recently wished for more pro-Russian leadership in Tashkent. In the past five years Uzbekistan has been keeping Russia at arm’s length, by holding off from joining with Russia’s plans to establish a Eurasian Union and its 2012 rejection of the Russia led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO).

China is likewise concerned about the presidential transition but for differing reasons. A Karimov led Uzbekistan was a linchpin in China’s Silk Road Initiative and China has invested heavily in infrastructure in the country. Currently China uses Uzbekistan as a key gateway to the LNG suppliers in the west with three main China-Central Asia Natural Gas Pipelines traversing the entirety of Uzbekistan, and a fourth under construction. Furthermore, Uzbekistan supplies resource hungry China with gas, gold and uranium. So it is hardly surprising that Beijing has sought to upgrade its diplomatic ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership.

Cloudy with a Chance for Revolution
While the transition to an Interim President has been smooth and considerate of the country’s need for economic stability, the next few months have the potential to be very tumultuous.

In Uzbekistan the constitution decrees an election to elect a new president must be held 3 months from now. It is during this period that rivalries will explode as political elites and their clans jockey for the greatest piece of the political and economic pie. The current incarceration in a mental institution of President Karimov’s daughter Gulnara Karimova, the Harvard educated one time billionaire and groomed successor to his presidential throne, by Interim President Mirziyoyev is just the first shot of the Mirziyoyev campaign to secure power.

Then there is Mirziyoyev’s rivalry with Rustam Asimov, the deputy Prime Minister and former close confident of Islam Karimov. Previously a trusted advisor to President Karimov, Asimov has in the past few months been slowly removed from the inner circle of power by Mirziyoyev and SNB Head Inoyatov.

The direction this rivalry will take is not clear. Certainly if Mirziyoyev decides to hold onto power by any means possible the prospect of a colour revolution, like those of the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in the 2000’s is not out of the question.

Added into this volatile situation is the involvement of China and Russia who each have a different agenda in Uzbekistan. China, according to several analysts, are desperately unsure about Mirziyoyev and the security of their assets in Uzbekistan. If they refuse to do business with him and the Samarkand clan due to his volatile reputation there is a significant risk that separate clans could utilise this as a means to make their own grab for power.

Russia meanwhile is an old hand at playing one clan of against another to get what they want. During the days of the Soviet Union Russian authorities would regularly make power sharing arrangements with differing Uzbek clans, often supporting Samarkand over Tashkent or vice versa to manipulate their hold over the country. If Russia views China as interfering with its own economic and security plans for Uzbekistan, it will support another clan in their quest for political power.

A rivalry between Russia and China’s differing needs played out in the Uzbek theatre will increase clan rivalries as each group will view the economic and political advantages of garnering international support for their rise to power as paramount. If Mirziyoyev refuses to call the elections and the clans will turn violent, this will destabilise not just Uzbekistan but China and Central Asia politically and economically as well.

The Risk of Hacking Dissent in Kazakhstan

A recently released report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has illustrated the increasing ferocity of the Kazakh government’s cyber campaign against dissent in Kazakhstan. According to the report, the Kazakh government has continued its campaign of intimidation against journalists, opposition members and their families, associates, and lawyers of those who are involved in any litigation with the Kazakh government via malware, cyber-espionage and even kidnapping.

Termed Operation Manal by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Kazakh government hired two independent cyber security firms to supply monitoring malware to surveil and collect data on the Central Asian government’s most outspoken opponents.

Silencing Dissent

Unfortunately this is only the latest chapter in the Kazakh government’s war on dissenters. Since 2011, Kazakhstan has increasingly attempted to establish a Kazakh version of the Great Firewall of China.

Starting softly by forcing all news and forcing sites with .kz domain names to channel their traffic through local Kazakh servers, the Kazakh government effectively pushed multinational companies like Google and Russian blogger sites out of the Kazakh market and opened the way for domestic monitoring of the Internet. In 2012 the Kazakh government targeted news and media outlets that had been critical of the government’s reaction to the December 2011 Zhanaozen strikes, forcing four outlets offline.

Since 2012 the Kazakh government has utilised a variety of malware and targeted spearphishing operations run by hired overseas actors to forcibly crackdown on what it sees as the core instigators of Kazakh political dissent. Mukhtar Ablyazov, the founder of the opposition party, Democratic Choice for Kazakhstan, was one target of Operation Manul’s malware. According to the EFF report, malware was utilised to identify the location of his wife and six year old daughter in Italy. They were then seized by Italian authorities and taken as apparent political hostages by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2013.

Other main voices of public dissent including the newspaper (and now online journal), Respublika, and the blog, Kazaword, have been targeted by the government through both cyberattacks and through the U.S. court system. The Kazakh government’s representatives are currently attempting to use American law to threaten Respublika's web host and to extract information on the organization from Facebook's logs, all the while monitoring Respublika’s founder Irina Petrushova and her husband through its cyber intrusion programmes.

Recreating China’s Great Firewall

Since January 2016, the Kazakh government has extend its cyber surveillance to the whole of Kazakhstan and intercepted all of the country’s encrypted web and mobile phone traffic. Mandating that all Kazakh citizens install a new “national security certificate” on their computers and smartphones that intercepts requests to and from foreign websites, officials can now read mobile and web traffic between Kazakh users and foreign servers, breaking current privacy protections such as SSL.

Attempting to ease the privacy concerns surrounding the new initiative, Kazakhstan’s largest telecommunications company, Kazakhtelecom JSC released a press statement declaring that telecommunication operators were now “obliged” under law to intercept encrypted web and mobile connections flowing into its borders but that this was a measure to “secure protection of Kazakhstan users” who have access to encrypted content from “foreign Internet resources”.

The reality though, is it is little more than a cost effective version of China’s Great Fire Wall. While these measures will allow Kazakh officials to monitor and block large segments of Kazakhstan’s digital traffic for Internet and mobile users it will also cost Kazakhstan politically and economically.



Breaking Dissent or shrinking Economy?

In a recent article on China’s Internet censorship, Margaux Schreurs illustrated the adverse effect that China’s internet censorship is having on foreign investment. A number of issues were identified as being detrimental to businesses.

Issue	Side Effect
Unreliable or slow Internet Access	Communication Delays, loss of online traffic to websites and business
Difficulty of Maintaining Privacy	Lack of confidence and financial development
Inability for Telecommunication Devices and applications to work	Mobile internet devices are unable to function correctly without their inbuilt software
Security Risks, Data Risks	Data stored by the government becomes an attractive target for hackers who can then utilise the data for their own personal use.
Consumer Wariness due to Government Retention of Data	No trust in domestic IT firm products  as they are seen to be unsafe

Table 1: Primary Side Effects of Internet Censorship for Business

Be it unreliable internet access, the lack of privacy or the inability of devices like mobile phones and computers to function correctly, Internet censorship can hinder companies from doing business and lead to delays in communications and poor financial development. These issues make countries with Internet censorship less attractive for foreign investment, a situation that Kazakhstan cannot currently countenance given the significant economic pressure on the Kazakh economy.

Security Risk

The lack of cyber security is also a prominent concern throughout the Central Asian IT market. In Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, messenger services like Salem, Pager and Va4ach have struggled due to the perception that they are simply the government’s personal data collection agencies, who will steal their personal and business data.

The real concern for Kazakhs and for foreign companies involved in Kazakhstan, according to Steven M. Bellovin, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, was that Kazakhstan’s system would be a tempting target for hackers or foreign government’s cyber intrusion specialists. “Anyone who hacked these boxes would also be able to monitor traffic”.

This poses a significant risk not just to Kazak business but also to those foreign firms involved in the domestic market. As illustrated by the case of DigiNotar, a publically trusted Dutch certificate authority, who in 2011 were hacked thanks to Iran’s internet monitoring and issued a ream of fake certificates to access the accounts of 30,000 Iranian Gmail users. After the attack became public knowledge major technological companies like Google, Microsoft and Adobe blacklisted DigiNotar which went bankrupt several months later.

If this occurred in Kazakhstan and the Kazakh certificate authority is blacklisted then large sections of the internet will no longer be available to Kazakhs. A beneficial outcome if you are trying to control the net surfing population but of little value when trying attracting overseas investment.

Published First in Global Risk Insights

 

The Danger of NATO’s Power Play

The past two years has seen a significant rise in the tension between Russia and the West. Aggravated by Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, the tension surrounding Russia’s belligerent behaviour has caused an upsurge in sabre rattling from Central and Eastern Europe to the Nordic and Baltic Regions.

From predictions by former NATO deputy commander, British General Sir Alexander Richard Sherriff, that NATO will be at war with Russia by 2017, to the pronouncements by Swedish Armed Forces’ Maj. Gen. Anders Brännström that: “we could be at war within a few years”, security is paramount for the countries surrounding Russia.

To this end there has been a surge in defence spending throughout these regions. Lithuania, for example, has decided to increase defence spending by 32%. Sweden’s decision to also place an extra 1.2 billion dollars into the defence budget over the coming four years indicates that they are worried by the threat posed by Russia and determined to protect themselves.

NATO’s Power Play

Encouraging this spending is NATO, who is taking its role as European protector very seriously. Over the past year and a half NATO has been mobilising its members to engage with the Baltic and GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova) countries in an ongoing strategy of reassurance.

After the collapse of the Minsk Agreement and the continuation of the Crimean conflict, many in these regions now fear that they will be next on the Kremlin’s agenda. Capitalising on this fear, NATO has spent the first half of 2016 demonstrating that it will not stand for more of Putin’s revisionist foreign policies, by engaging countries throughout Russia’s borderlands in military exercises and by integrating military operations.

2016 NATO Northern and Eastern European Manoeuvers

Cold Response	Norway	17-28 March
Brilliant Jump Alert 16	Albania, Poland, Spain and United Kingdom	1-4 April
Steadfast Alliance Ballistic Missile	Multiple European Locations	18-29 April
Flaming Sword	Latvia, Lithuania	1-20 May
Brilliant Jump Deploy 16	Poland	17-26 May
Sabre Strike	Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania	2-14 June
Baltops	Baltic Sea	June 3-26
Dynamic Mongoose	North Sea	26 June-4 July

Two years ago this would have been seen as an imposition by NATO’s member states, who preferred to leave Russia a buffer of former soviet states rather than risk further destabilisation of the region. It was understood that Russia saw its former soviet territories as an extension of itself and that it was Russia’s desire to maintain peace and security within its former empire.

This past arrangement is now over and NATO, with its recent declaration of a Russia Policy at the NATO Ministerial Conference, has made a significant change in the NATO-Russia playbook. The specific mention of countries like Georgia and the decision to provide an increase in the ‘boots on the ground’ along Russia’s north eastern flank, indicates that NATO is worried about the new powerful Russia.

The Risk of Russia’s Response

NATO’s games do not come without some jeopardy. The biggest risk is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reaction to NATO’s aggressive policies. So far the response to NATO’s behaviour has been restrained. There has been a series of vague warnings to Sweden and Finland on the cusp of their meetings with NATO and two minor military incidents. The first  in the Baltic with the Russian flyover of an American aircraft carrier and the second in  Syria where Russian jets entered into territory overseen by America.  Overall, Russia has taken the proverbial high road with Russian Foreign Ministry’s Spokesperson Maria Zakharova declaring in May that 

Russia "has tried to be consistent [in its reaction to NATO's posture] and present facts when it comes to NATO's expansion and Russophobic remarks with regard to Russia's imaginary threat."  

Domestically though it is a different story. Putin has overseen the restoration of a fractured and weak state and throughout this time he has pursued an aggressive foreign policy where Russia’s interests are concerned. From Russia’s involvement in the conflicts in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Moldova to Putin’s recent foray into the Middle East, Russia is not afraid of conflict.

Fortress Russia

Over the past two years alone, Russia has increased and developed its defence capabilities. The Russian military has taken delivery of a swathe of new weapons which they have been field testing in the Syrian conflict.  They have also been restoring and developing the Barguzin (BZhRK) combat railway missile defence system, which is Russia’s answer to NATO’s ballistic missile shield. There is also the extension of the S-300 missile defence system to Iran and Kazakhstan. This expansion will provide protection to Russia’s oil and gas assets from missile attacks originating in the Persian Gulf.

The construction of Fortress Russia is hardly surprising. It is in line with Putin’s formal declaration that NATO is a security threat and his statement that “we are duty-bound to pay special attention to solving the task of strengthening the combat readiness of our country.” The real question now is will Russia respond to NATO’s brinksmanship?

Domestic Risks?

Domestically, Putin needs to be seen to respond. Despite his miraculous ability to remain in power, Putin has faced domestic backlashes. In 2011, when he was re-elected, his approval rating slumped to 69% and there were a number of protests against the state. However, after the annexation of the Crimea and a renewal of tension with the West, Putin’s approval rating has reached 83%, with Russians forgetting their economic troubles and unifying behind their President in a nationalistic pride.

To maintain this support Putin must develop a new hard-line foreign policy. Russia must meet NATO move for move in the European theatre. To this end the recent removal of 50 senior and mid-level commanders of the Baltic fleet after the failed to go toe to toe with NATO during its recent Baltic operations is surmised as one example of the application of this new tough foreign policy in the domestic Russian arena. The risk with this policy is that removing large portions of the military will create a backlash against Putin in upper echelons of the military and state

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The Risk of Choosing NATO

For the states that border Russia, NATO’s posturing may be leading them down a perilous path. Firstly, by choosing to side with the west they run the risk of Russia seeing them as a threat and taking steps to neutralise that threat. Secondly, they may suffer an economic backlash or other destabilising tactics used by Russia. These governments risk their stability by joining with NATO.

Nevertheless many of these countries see this as a risk worth taking and are seeking European partnerships and ties. Countries deep in Russia’s backyard, such as Moldova, have requested at the NATO Summit in Warsaw this week to remove the Russian peacekeepers in Transnistria because the presence of Russian forces exacerbates the military tension between the two nations.