| Public statements by Russian diplomats on the tragic events in Uzbekistan indicate a lack of understanding by our authorities not only of the situation in the post-Soviet space, but also of the very criteria for the stability of political regimes. The apotheosis of this, to put it mildly, misunderstanding was yesterday's statement by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who called the tragedy in Andijan a provocative action of criminal groups like the Taliban.
Considering that the Taliban criminal group managed to take power in impoverished Afghanistan and control this country until the invasion of American troops at the end of 2001, one must think about why such “provocations” become possible and even lead to success.
In reality, the main provocateur of such tragedies is the government itself and only it. Because stability based on the total suppression of the rights and freedoms of people in the midst of their total poverty is not stability at all, but a powder keg, ready to explode at any moment from any match thrown.
President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov burned out the entire secular opposition in the country with a hot iron, partly throwing it into prison, partly forcing it to leave the country. Having carried out a brutal purge of the entire information space (there is not a single TV channel or print publication in Uzbekistan that has not been subject to preliminary censorship by the authorities), plunging the already poor republic in Soviet times into monstrous, almost total poverty, official Tashkent has long and persistently interpreted any attempt at speech people against themselves - up to elementary food riots - as the machinations of Islamic extremists. The official authorities of Uzbekistan proclaim themselves the last and only defenders of a secular state, which is an absolute lie - Andijan is far from the most Islamized city in the country, and the overwhelming majority of the population of Uzbekistan have never been adherents of Islamic values, not to mention religious extremism.
In Andijan - to call a spade a spade - the authorities shot a crowd of civilians driven to despair by hopeless poverty and constant bullying by their superiors. And if the Russian authorities sincerely believe that by killing half a thousand tortured people, the Uzbek regime has proven its ability to maintain stability in the country, they are greatly mistaken.
All the sudden changes of power in the post-Soviet space, which cause genuine amazement among the Russian authorities and a stream of conspiracy theories about “color” revolutions paid for by Western non-governmental organizations, are caused precisely by attempts to replace the stable development of the country with the stabilization of the dominant position of the ruling clan. The only thing that unites the processes taking place in the post-Soviet space and causing such panic among the Russian authorities is the impossibility of the government, which flouts the law and does not provide people with normal conditions of existence, indefinitely maintain the status quo by force.
The Russian government, which may have chosen the Uzbek, forceful version of forced “stabilization” in recent years, must understand that democracy, the election of all government bodies, the rotation of the country’s leaders within the framework of the Constitution is not a whim of “extremists paid for by the West,” but a natural a condition for maintaining real stability in the country. Which - and this is one of the most important, if not the main criterion for a truly stable regime - in principle should not depend on the personality of the ruler.
Two constitutional presidential terms are enough time for people to understand whether they want to live under this government or not. The legal opportunity to change power peacefully is the main barrier to what the Russian Foreign Ministry, either through thoughtlessness or by order from above, calls criminal provocations of extremists. Even if you believe the version of official Tashkent and official Moscow about the provocation of the Islamists, one cannot help but understand that only the government itself provides objective reasons to succumb to such provocations. But holding on to bayonets for any government is disgusting, immoral and, in the end, still murderous. Semyon Novoprudsky
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