BISHKEK (TCA) — The President of Kyrgyzstan is gaining strength, and although he will hardly abandon the political and economic course of his predecessor, tensions are possible within the country’s ruling elite. We are republishing this article on the issue by Nurjamal Djanibekova, originally published by Eurasianet:

The defection of a high-ranking figure from within Kyrgyzstan’s presidential administration has ignited talk of tensions within the ruling elite.

After days of uncertainty, President Sooronbai Jeenbekov on March 7 accepted the resignation of his chief of staff, Farid Niyazov, a prominent figure on the national political scene. Niyazov is widely known as a loyal confidante of Jeenbekov’s predecessor, Almazbek Atambayev.

Speaking to reporters this week, Jeenbekov denied that there was any tussle going on behind the scenes, but there are few analysts in Bishkek taking him at his word.

Whatever jostling is underway is presumed to be occurring between the Jeenbekov and Atambayev camps. Because of changes made to the constitution following the 2010 revolution, Atambayev was required to step down at the end of his six-year term. Jeenbekov, an influential but markedly dour politician from the rural south, was in effect a successor hand-picked by Atambayev. His assigned role was to continue Atambayev’s legacy, which is centered around incremental economic development, loyalty to Russia and ensuring stability at all costs, usually by jailing opposition politicians and persecuting independent journalists.

Jeenbekov duly won the October presidential elections with 54 percent of the votes cast in a contest many have said was marred by irregularities.

No sooner had Jeenbekov taken office, political commentators began to speculate about his designs on building his own independent power base. Political analyst Mars Sariyev told Eurasianet that the moment seems to have come for the president to come out from under Atambayev’s shadow.

“Jeenbekov will start positioning his own people. He has found room for movement, he will begin to operate more freely. He had the shortcoming of being fully controlled by Atambayev, but now people won’t say this anymore,” Sariyev said.

Edil Baisalov, a leading functionary in a prior presidential administration and an outspoken commentator on the political scene, echoed this point.

“[Jeenbekov] will pursue his political course, confidence in his own mandate will increase with every passing day, and he will gain strength. This is a natural process, but we can already say with certainty that he is not a puppet of Almazbek Atambayev, as the latter may have assumed [would be the case],” Baisalov said.

Niyazov’s role now, said Baisalov, will be to engineer a parallel center of authority in the Atambayev-founded Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan, or SDPK, which occupies a dominant role in parliament.

Political analyst Denis Berdakov said he believes Niyazov’s resignation is connected to a planned SDPK congress, but he downplayed talks of tensions.

“We are expecting the party congress at the end of this month and the start of the next. This is quite an important congress — the SDPK is entering a period of qualitative change, and that is why Niyazov is leaving. There is no conflict between him and Jeenbekov as such,” he said.

The SDPK had planned to hold its congress immediately after the October elections, but the party has failed to agree on a date since that time.

Igor Shestakov, an analyst who spent much of the Atambayev presidency adopting fiercely pro-government positions, speculated that early parliamentary elections could be in the offing.

“On one hand, the SPDK has influence, because its representatives occupy positions in the presidency and the prime minister’s office. But Atambayev’s departure from the presidency requires an internal reordering of the party,” he said.

Several top positions in government are still held by Atambayev loyalists. There is Prime Minister Sapar Isakov, whom Atambayev considered his right-hand man, General Prosecutor Indira Djoldubayeva and the head of the State Committee for National Security, Adil Segizbayev.

Kyrgyzstan’s most recent parliamentary elections, in 2015, produced a fragmented, multi-party legislature that accurately reflected the erratic political scene.

The SDPK won the largest bloc of seats in the 120-seat Jogorku Kenesh but fell more than 20 deputies short of securing an outright majority, forcing it into a coalition deal. This is nothing unusual for Kyrgyzstan. With the exception of the authoritarian phase ushered in by now-deposed President Kurmanbek Bakiyev between 2005 and 2010, the Jogorku Kenesh has historically served as an anarchic forum for horse-trading and grandstanding — a refreshing contrast with the seat-warming that mainly occurs in other Central Asian parliaments.

All such considerations are largely moot though, since real power lies in the president’s hands, despite constitutional tinkering ostensibly aimed at balancing authority among the branches of government. Any attempt by the SDPK to reassert its heft and to present a counterweight to Jeenbekov in the process would present an intriguing scenario.

Atambayev hinted back in November that he might go down this path, contradicting earlier pledges to quietly slip away from the political scene and devote more time to his creative streak — he is a keen singer-songwriter. In a cryptic statement in the days before leaving office, Atambayev vaguely dangled the prospect that he could run for parliament as the list-topping candidate for the SDPK.

“I don’t plan to become chairman of parliament or the government, or even a member of parliament, but I will be number one,” Atambayev said.

After spending the latter phase of his time in office crushing his opponents by various means, Atambayev may find himself in the improbable position of crafting an opposition force of sorts.

TASHKENT (TCA) — Global and regional powers and Afghanistan’s neighbors will attend the International Conference “Peace Process, Security Cooperation and Regional Connectivity” that will take place on March 26 and 27 in Uzbekistan’s capital Tashkent, the Jahon information agency reported.

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TASHKENT (TCA) — The route Tashkent-Andijan-Osh-Irkeshtam-Kashgar is the shortest motor transport corridor from Uzbekistan via Kyrgyzstan to China. The road runs through Sary-Tash and Irkeshtam pass in Kyrgyzstan at an altitude of more than 3,500 meters above sea level, the Jahon information agency reports.

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ASHGABAT (TCA) — Citizens of Turkmenistan staying abroad have failed to obtain cash, pay for purchases or transfer funds from their bank cards, the independent foreign-based news website Chronicles of Turkmenistan reported on March 7.

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KABUL (TCA) — Iranian embassy officials in Kabul say that the development of a railway system in Afghanistan will help boost the country’s trade with Iran and other Central Asian countries, and that in order to boost trade through its Chabahar port, Iran is working to connect Chabahar’s railway line to the railway network in Afghanistan, TOLOnews reports.

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DUSHANBE (TCA) — As Tajikistan is facing the threat of growing Islamist extremism, the government needs to understand that poverty, unemployment, and religious illiteracy are among the main causes of this phenomenon, and to develop a strategy to counter the threat. We are republishing this article on the issue by Paul Goble, originally published by The Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor:

Despite popular misperceptions of religiosity in general and Islam in particular flourishing most strongly in poor rural areas, the Islamist revival of the last 30 years has been primarily an urban phenomenon. This has been the result of the loss of familial ties by those who moved from villages into the rapidly growing cities as well as the communication revolution, which has allowed Islamist activists to reach the new urbanites. That is what happened in Iran and in the countries affected by the Arab Spring. And it is now occurring in Central Asia—and nowhere more than in Tajikistan, the most Islamic, and one can also say Islamist, country in that region (see EDM, February 6).

The rise of Salafists and Wahhabists in major Tajikistani cities and among Tajik diasporas in Russian cities like Moscow have long been a concern for officials in Dushanbe, who fear that these movements could link up with other forces, domestic and foreign, to produce an Islamist revolution. The authorities have, thus, tried to prevent these trends from overwhelming traditional Tajik Islam. Most of their methods have proved counterproductive—be they closing down rural mosques or calling home some 6,000 Tajikistanis studying in madrassahs abroad but not providing them with jobs on their return (News.tj, November 3, 2017; see EDM, February 6, 2018). As a result, the situation has reached critical mass, and an Islamist explosion in Tajikistan’s cities is increasingly likely.

Two Tajikistani experts, Khokim Mukhabbatov and Mavdzhigul Ibadullayeva of the Muslims Against Narcotics, Extremism, Force and Terrorism, describe in some detail how that precarious situation came about (Islamio.ru, February 23). They note that Salafism or Wahhabism, as this trend is usually referred to in Tajikistan, arrived there already in the 1980s, as a result of the Iranian revolution and the war in Afghanistan. From the beginning, most of the Salafists and Wahhabists there were young men between the ages of 18 and 30 who had left their villages for the cities or for work in the Russian Federation. Lacking the stability their families and the local rural mullahs provided, they were prime candidates for recruitment by Salafists from abroad. That is still the case today. And the size of this cohort has increased as the cities have swelled in size and the number of Tajiks who have worked in Russian cities has risen over the last 15 years.

These young people, the two experts say, have had their religious worldview formed not by imams and mullahs in their villages but by Internet sites that appealed to them as Muslims rather than as villagers or Tajiks. It was only a short step from there for them to become recruits for the Caliphate (Islamic State) and to take up jihad against other Muslims—including Shiias and the Ismailis, both of whom have strong communities in Tajikistan, and Sunnis, who the web preachers said had sold out their faith.

A decade ago, Mukhabbatov and Ibadullayeva say, Tajikistani Senator Oli Turadzhonzoda already warned that “the Salafists have the upper hand in several major cities. In the kishlaks [rural settlements], districts and rural areas, there are almost none of them.” That pattern continues to this day, the two experts contend.

Dushanbe has vacillated between incentives and suppression to deal with the domestic growth of Islamism. On the one hand, the government has tried to make concessions such as amnesties and reaching out to Salafist backers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, the authorities have cracked down hard on Salafists and Wahhabists inside the country—especially upon their return from studying abroad or working in the Russian Federation—by adopting new laws that impose draconian sentences of many years in prison for such activities. Neither approach has worked, the two experts say. The first has been taken by the Salafists as an indication of their own strength and the weakness of the Tajikistani government. And the second has created an ever larger group of people either in prison or listed as extremists who have no reason to support the government and every reason to join with others in opposing it or even seeking its overthrow.

The Salafists and Wahhabists have a real advantage compared to Tajikistan’s government: they understand and can use modern technologies to reach and organize their followers, something Dushanbe lags in, Mukhabbatov and Ibadullayeva argue. But that is not their only advantage. The Salafis reject most of modern science even as they use its fruits, the two continue. But they are particularly sensitive to traditional ways. Unlike the government, they use local dialects in reaching out even to their urban followers “in order to more quickly find a common language” and “strengthen their influence” in the country as a whole via their urban constituency. In addition, they reject any attention to the pre-Islamic history of the country, oppose the use of Russian in Tajikistan, and reject all efforts to improve ties with Moscow.

Recognition is growing in Dushanbe, the experts note, that the Salafists are gaining too many advantages and that Tajikistan’s authorities need to adopt a more effective strategy to counter them. But as of now, they suggest, few in the government have any good ideas as to what such a strategy should look like.