Value to Big Powers May Not Save Kyrgyzstan

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Roza Otunbayeva, the head of the provisional government in Kyrgyzstan, landing by helicopter in the southern city of Osh on Friday, after days of ethnic fighting there.

By ELLEN BARRY

MOSCOW — A year and a half ago, the world’s great powers were fighting like polecats over Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked stretch of mountains in the heart of Central Asia.

The United States was ferociously holding on to the Manas Air Base, a transit hub considered crucial to NATO efforts in Afghanistan. Russia was so jealous of its traditional dominance in the region that it promised the Kyrgyz president $2.15 billion in aid the day he announced he was closing Manas. With the bidding war that followed, Kyrgyzstan could be forgiven for seeing itself as a global player.

And yet for the past week, as spasms of violence threatened to break Kyrgyzstan apart, its citizens saw their hopes for an international intervention flicker and die. With each day it has become clearer that none of Kyrgyzstan’s powerful allies — most pointedly, its former overlords in Moscow — were prepared to get involved in a quagmire.

Russia did send in several hundred paratroopers, but only to defend its air base at Kant. For the most part, the powers have evacuated their citizens, apparently content to wait for the conflict to burn itself out.

The calculus was a pragmatic one, made “without the smallest thought to the moral side of the question,” said Aleksei V. Vlasov, an expert in the politics of post-Soviet countries at Moscow State University.

“We use the phrase ‘collective responsibility,’ but in fact this is a case of collective irresponsibility,” he added. “While they were fighting about whatever — about bases, about Afghanistan — they forgot that in the south of Kyrgyzstan there was extreme danger. The city was flammable. All they needed to do was throw a match on it.” He referred to the city of Osh, which suffered days of ethnic rioting.

Kyrgyzstan might have unraveled anyway, but competition between Moscow and Washington certainly sped the process.

To lock in its claim on the base after the threat of expulsion, the United States offered President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev $110 million to back out of his agreement with Russia, which had already paid him $450 million. Congratulating itself on its victory, Washington raised the stakes by announcing the construction of several military training facilities in Kyrgyzstan, including one in the south, which further irritated Moscow.

This spring, the Kremlin won back its lost ground, employing a range of soft-power tactics to undermine Mr. Bakiyev’s government. Mr. Bakiyev was ousted by a coalition of opposition leaders in April, and conditions in Kyrgyzstan’s south — still loyal to the old government — hurtled toward disaster.

“Let’s be honest, Kyrgyzstan is turning into a collapsing state, or at least part of it is, and what was partially responsible is this geopolitical tug of war we had,” said Alexander A. Cooley, who included Manas in a recent book about the politics of military bases. “In our attempts to secure these levers of influence and support the governing regime, we destabilized these state institutions. We are part of that dynamic.”

Last week, as pillars of smoke rose off Osh and Jalal-Abad, citizens begged for third-party peacekeepers to replace local forces they suspected of having taken part in the violence.

Roza Otunbayeva, the head of Kyrgyzstan’s interim government, asked Moscow for peacekeepers, and when that request was denied, for troops to protect strategic sites like power plants and reservoirs. She asked Washington to contribute armored vehicles from the base at Manas, which she said would be used to transport the dead and wounded, she told the Russian newspaper Kommersant.

So far, Moscow and Washington have responded mostly with humanitarian aid pledges — late on Friday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said that Ms. Otunbayeva’s request was still under consideration.

The United States, overextended in Afghanistan and Iraq, has neither the appetite nor the motivation for a new commitment. Russia, the more obvious player, sees the risks of a deployment outweighing the benefits. Russian troops would enter hostile territory in south Kyrgyzstan, where Mr. Bakiyev’s supporters blame Moscow for his overthrow, and Uzbekistan could also revolt against a Russian presence.

Mr. Vlasov, of Moscow State University, said: “Who are we separating? Uzbeks from Kyrgyz? Krygyz from Kyrgyz? Kyrgyz from some criminal element? There is no clearly defined cause of this conflict. It would be comparable to the decision the Soviet Politburo made to invade Afghanistan — badly thought through, not confirmed by the necessary analytical work.”

If the explosion of violence was a test case for the Collective Security Treaty Organization, an eight-year-old post-Soviet security group dominated by Russia, it seems to have failed, its leaders unwilling to intervene in a domestic standoff. In any case, neither the Russian public nor the county’s foreign policy establishment is pressing the Kremlin to risk sending peacekeepers.

“If you send them, you have to shoot sooner or later,” said Sergei A. Karaganov, a prominent political scientist in Moscow. “Then you are not a peacekeeper, but something else.”

Though it seems that the worst of the violence has passed, great challenges remain. Beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis is an unstable state at the heart of a dangerous region. The Ferghana Valley, bordering Afghanistan, is a minefield of religious fundamentalism, drug trafficking and ethnic hatreds.

If Kyrgyz-style violence should radiate across borders in Central Asia, the result could be a rise in Islamic militancy that would directly threaten Russia and the United States.

The failure of international institutions last week should alarm both capitals. President Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia began their relationship with the crisis over the Manas base, and as they grope toward tentative collaboration in the post-Soviet space, Kyrgyzstan has dominated their conversation.

Now, Kyrgyzstan needs help building a stable government that knits together the north and the south. Dmitri V. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, suggested that NATO should be working with the members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization to develop a mechanism for collective action. The next time a Central Asian country is wobbling at the edge of a precipice, he said, someone must be prepared to accept responsibility.

“You can abstain from a local conflict in Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Trenin said. “You can close your eyes to it — it’s bad for your conscience — but you can live with it. If something happens in Uzbekistan, you will not be able to just let it burn out.”

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U.S. concerned about new Japanese premier Hatoyama

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By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 29, 2009; A08

While most of the federal government was shut down by a snowstorm last week, there was one person in particular whom Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called in through the cold: Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki.

Once he arrived, Clinton told him in blunt, if diplomatic, terms that the United States remains adamant about moving a Marine base from one part of Okinawa to another. That she felt compelled to call the unusual meeting highlights what some U.S. and Asian officials say is an alarming turn in relations with Japan since Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama led an opposition party to victory in August elections, ending an almost uninterrupted five decades of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.

Since the election, a series of canceled dinners, diplomatic demarches, and publicly and privately broken promises from the new government has vexed senior White House officials, causing new concern about the U.S. friendship with its closest Asian ally. The worry extends beyond U.S. officials to other leaders in Southeast Asia, who are nervous about anything that lessens the U.S. security role in the region.

A pledge of assertiveness

At the center of concern are Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan. Hatoyama had campaigned on promises he would be more assertive than previous Japanese leaders in dealings with the United States. He and his coalition partners opposed parts of a $26 billion agreement between the two nations to move the Marine base to a less-populated part of Okinawa and to transfer 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam.

The United States has seen the moves as central to a new Asian security policy to assure Japan's defense and to counter the rise of China. But Hatoyama and his allies saw the agreement as the United States dictating terms, and wanted the base removed.

Increasingly, U.S. officials view Hatoyama as a mercurial leader. In interviews, the officials said he has twice urged President Obama to trust him on the base issue and promised to resolve it before year's end -- once during a meeting between the two in Tokyo last month and another in a letter he wrote Obama after the White House had privately expressed concerns about the Japanese leader's intentions.

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On Dec. 17, Hatoyama officially informed the Obama administration that he would not make a decision about the air base by the end of the year. He told Clinton the news in conversation at a dinner in Copenhagen at the conclusion of the United Nations climate-change summit.

After the dinner, Hatoyama told Japanese reporters that he had obtained Clinton's "full understanding" about Tokyo's need to delay. But that apparently was not the case. To make sure Japan understood that the U.S. position has not changed, Clinton called in the Japanese ambassador during last week's storm, apparently having some impact.

"This is a thing that rarely occurs, and I think we should take this [Clinton's action] into account," the ambassador told reporters as he left the State Department.

Hatoyama's moves have befuddled analysts in Washington. So far, most still think he and his party remain committed to the security relationship with the United States.

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They explain his behavior as that of a politician who is not accustomed to power, who needs to pay attention to his coalition partners -- one of which, the Social Democratic Party of Japan, is against any U.S. military presence in the country. They note that Hatoyama has put money aside for the base-relocation plan in Japan's budget and that other senior members of his party have told their U.S. counterparts they will honor the deal.

Shifting policy?

But some U.S. and Asian officials increasingly worry that Hatoyama and others in his party may be considering a significant policy shift -- away from the United States and toward a more independent foreign policy.

They point to recent events as a possible warnings: Hatoyama's call for an East Asian Community with China and South Korea, excluding the United States; the unusually warm welcome given to Xi Junping, China's vice president, on his trip to Japan this month, which included an audience with the emperor; and the friendly reception given to Saeed Jalili, the Iranian national security council secretary, during his visit to Japan last week.

Michael Green, senior director for Asia at the National Security Council during the Bush administration, said the concern is that senior officials in Hatoyama's party with great influence, such as Ichiro Ozawa, want to push Japan toward closer ties with China and less reliance on the United States. That would complicate the U.S. position not just in Japan but in South Korea and elsewhere.

"I think there are questions about what kind of role Ozawa is playing," Green said, adding that Ozawa has not been to the United States in a decade, has yet to meet the U.S. ambassador to Japan, John Roos, and only grudgingly met Clinton during an earlier trip to Japan.

"The prevailing view is that this is basically a populist, inexperienced government sorting out its foreign policy," he said, "but now there is a 10 to 20 percent chance that this is something more problematic."

U.S. allies in Singapore, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines -- and Vietnamese officials as well -- have all viewed the tussle between Washington and Tokyo with alarm, according to several senior Asian diplomats.

The reason, one diplomat said, is that the U.S.-Japan relationship is not simply an alliance that obligates the United States to defend Japan, but the foundation of a broader U.S. security commitment to all of Asia. As China rises, none of the countries in Asia wants the U.S. position weakened by problems with Japan.

Another senior Asian diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid, noted that recent public opinion polls show Hatoyama's approval rating slipping below 50 percent, while Obama remains popular.

"Let's hope Hatoyama gets the message that this is not the way to handle the United States," he said.

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U.S., Japan remain at odds over Marine air station on Okinawa - washingtonpost.com

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By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

TOKYO -- The wrestling match between the United States and Japan over the location of the U.S. Marine air station in Okinawa is far from over -- despite President Obama's chummy visit here with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

The two leaders now warmly address each other as Barack and Yukio. But they sharply disagree over the purpose of a "high-level working group" that they announced Friday to sort out an increasingly heated dispute over the future of the Marine air station, which has become a focus of anger on Okinawa.

That southern island accommodates most of the 36,000 U.S. military personnel based in Japan. Many Okinawans, after decades of living with noisy American aircraft and rambunctious American troops, have come to associate the U.S. military presence with noise, pollution and periodic crime.

Obama explained during his quick visit here that the working group, which includes U.S. Ambassador John V. Roos and the foreign and defense ministers of Japan, would focus only on implementing a 2006 agreement in which Tokyo agreed to allow the Futenma Marine Corps air station to be relocated on Okinawa.

White House officials later insisted this did not mean that the U.S. government would reopen or renegotiate the agreement, which is part of a $26 billion military deal that involves transferring 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam. The United States is treaty-bound to defend Japan in case of attack.

But Hatoyama does not agree with this narrow interpretation of the working group's authority.

On Monday, he said the formation of the working group does, indeed, mean that Japan will be able to move beyond the language of the 2006 agreement.

"If our review is merely aimed at making a decision confirming the agreement, it's meaningless," Hatoyama told reporters in Tokyo. "If we already have an answer, we don't need to hold talks."

Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan was elected in August with a promise that Japan would be less passive in its relationship with the United States, has said the air station should be moved off Okinawa or even outside Japan.

No deadline has been set for the working group's decision, but both Obama and Hatoyama said they want it made quickly.

Last month, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates warned that if Japan backs away from the 2006 agreement and decides not to allow the relocation of the air station on Okinawa, the United States would halt the transfer of 8,000 Marines to Guam and refrain from returning parcels of land to the Okinawan government.

The dispute over the air station has become the signature issue in Japan's recent efforts to assert its will in negotiations with its most important ally, as well as a symbol of Hatoyama's leadership ability. It is also the most serious sticking point in U.S.-Japanese relations in many years.

Russia to Build Military Base in Breakaway Georgian Region of Abkhazia of Georgia

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 13, 2009

MOSCOW, Aug. 12 -- Prime Minister Vladimir Putin traveled to the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia on Wednesday and pledged to strengthen Russia's military presence there, defying U.S. and European objections amid simmering tensions in the region.

Speaking on the anniversary of his nation's victory over Georgia in a five-day war last year, Putin said the Kremlin planned to spend nearly $500 million to build a base in the separatist enclave and reinforce its de facto border with Georgia.

"It won't be a Maginot line," Putin said, referring to the fortifications France built against Germany before World War II.

His remarks and appearance in Abkhazia underscored Russia's growing foothold in what once was Georgian territory and highlighted the sharp differences that remain between Moscow and Washington despite the Obama administration's efforts to "reset" bilateral relations.

U.S. and European officials have called on Russia to comply with the cease-fire agreement that ended the war and withdraw its troops to prewar positions and levels. But Russia says it is no longer bound by those promises because it recognized Abkhazia and another breakaway region, South Ossetia, as independent states after the war.

It is unclear how many Russian soldiers remain in the disputed territories, where Moscow has stationed troops since the post-Soviet conflicts of the 1990s. But the military said in June that plans to double its prewar presence to nearly 7,500 troops had been scaled back. Instead, officials said more Russian border guards would be deployed.

Russian forces are stationed at two bases, one in the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali and the other in Gudauta, a town on the Black Sea coast in western Abkhazia. The Gudauta base was built during the Soviet era and is considered a strategic asset because it boasts one of the largest military airfields in the Caucasus.

Russia and Abkhazia have been haggling over Gudauta for months, with the Abkhaz seeking to get more from Russia in return for use of the base. It was not clear whether Putin had succeeded in breaking a deadlock in talks over a formal treaty on the subject.

Some Abkhaz are said to be wary of growing too dependent on Russia, but the authorities greeted Putin warmly as he arrived by helicopter in the local capital of Sukhumi. The visit came a month after U.S. and European officials criticized Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for making a similar appearance in South Ossetia.

The Georgian Foreign Ministry issued a statement denouncing Putin's visit, calling it "yet another provocation carried out quite in the tradition of Soviet special services."

In an interview with Abkhaz reporters broadcast in Russia, Putin chastised the West for condemning the Russian invasion of Georgia, which he has long argued was required to protect South Ossetia from a Georgian attack.

"That's not even double standards, not even triple standards. It's a complete lack of any standards," he said, accusing the United States of pressuring countries to continue supporting Georgia's claim to the territories.

Asked about the possibility of another war, Putin replied: "Given the Georgian leadership today, nothing can be ruled out, but it will be much harder for them to do it."

The Obama administration has repeatedly endorsed Georgia's territorial integrity, and only Nicaragua has joined Russia in recognizing the sovereignty of the separatist regions.

Special correspondent Sarah Marcus in Tbilisi, Georgia, contributed to this report.

Kuwait Arrests 6 in Plot to Hit a U.S. Base

By ROBERT F. WORTH

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Kuwaiti authorities said Tuesday that they had arrested six jihadists who were planning to attack the main United States military base in the country and other sites.

The six men, all Kuwaitis, gave “full confessions” about their plans to attack Camp Arifjan, a sprawling American logistics and supply base in the desert south of Kuwait City, along with Kuwaiti security agencies and other targets, according to a statement released by Kuwait’s Interior Ministry. The men were a “terrorist network” under the influence of Al Qaeda, the statement said.

The ministry did not provide further details. But the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Rai, citing a “security source,” said the men had confessed to buying a truck and filling it with chemicals and gas cylinders, with the intention of ramming it into Camp Arifjan.

The Kuwaiti authorities had been tracking the men for some time, the newspaper said. One of the six was believed to have been involved in a 2002 attack in which Kuwaiti extremists opened fire on Marines training on Failaka Island, off the Kuwaiti coast, killing one and wounding another, the newspaper reported.

Kuwait, a small, oil-rich country with a relatively vibrant elected Parliament, has been a staunch American ally ever since United States troops led the effort to liberate it from Iraq in 1991. It served as a crucial staging area for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A small number of militants who oppose the country’s relationship with the United States have periodically attacked American troops and civilians working with them.

Increased U.S. Military Presence in Colombia Could Pose Problems With Neighbors

By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — A plan to increase the American military presence on at least three military bases in Colombia, Washington’s top ally in Latin America, is accentuating Colombia’s already tense relations with some of its neighbors.

Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which are members of a leftist political alliance that is led by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and backed by his nation’s oil revenues, have all criticized the plan, saying it would broaden the military reach of the United States in the Andes and the Caribbean at a time when they are still wary of American influence in the region.

Despite a slight improvement in Venezuela’s relations with the United States in recent months, Mr. Chávez has been especially vocal in lashing out at the plan. Speaking on state television here on Monday night, he put Venezuela’s diplomatic ties with Colombia under review, calling the plan a platform for “new aggression against us.”

Colombia’s foreign minister, Jaime Bermúdez, on Tuesday defended the negotiations, which are expected to produce an agreement in August, asking neighboring countries not to interfere in Colombia’s affairs. “We never expressed our opinion in what our neighbors do,” he said, pointing to Mr. Chávez’s attempts to strengthen ties with non-Western nations. “Not even when the Russian presence became known in Venezuelan waters, or with relations with China,” he added.

The United States has been negotiating the increase of military operations in Colombia in recent weeks, faced with Ecuador’s decision to end a decade-long agreement allowing E-3 AWACs and P-3 Orion surveillance planes to operate from the Manta Air Base on Ecuador’s Pacific Coast.

While American antidrug surveillance flights would sharply increase in Colombia, the world’s top producer of cocaine, the agreement would not allow American personnel to take part in combat operations in the country, which is mired in a four-decade war against guerrillas. A limit of 800 American military personnel and 600 American military contractors would also remain in place, officials involved in the talks said.

Still, depending on how the accord is put in place, American troop levels in Colombia could climb sharply. The United States currently has about 250 military personnel in the country, deployed largely in an advisory capacity to Colombia’s armed forces, William Brownfield, the United States ambassador to Colombia, said last week.

Colombia, which has already received more than $5 billion in military and antidrug aid from the United States this decade, has found itself isolated diplomatically as Mr. Chávez presses ahead with his efforts to expand Venezuela’s oil diplomacy while eroding American influence in the hemisphere.

Other countries chafe at Colombia for different reasons. Colombia’s diplomatic relations with Ecuador have soured since Colombian forces carried out a raid on a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebel camp on Ecuadoran territory last year. A festering boundary dispute with Nicaragua has also made for tensions between Colombia and Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, an ally of Mr. Chávez.

But with Venezuela itself, Colombia remains locked in a complex game of interdependence.

Its sales of manufactured and agricultural goods to Venezuela remain resilient despite Mr. Chávez’s occasional outbursts directed at his ideological opposite, Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe. And faced with disarray in its oil industry, Venezuela relies on imports of Colombian natural gas, narrowing the possibility of a severe deterioration in ties between the two countries despite their sharply different views of cooperation with the United States.