From Overseas Press

Militant gains unlikely in Kyrgyz unrest

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-06-17 10:59

Provided Kyrgyzstan does not descend into total chaos, its ethnic violence is unlikely to hand gains to militant Islamists whose creeping influence in central Asia is testing nerves from Moscow to Beijing.

Radical groups sympathetic to the Taliban or al Qaeda have had nothing to do with the unrest that has cost at least 176 lives since June 10 in the country's worst clashes for 20 years.

But analysts say any radical Islamist attempt to use the strife to impose Islamic rule would likely fail since the authorities are on alert for such an effort. Any fears that an Islamist failed state was in the making were misplaced.

"The Afghan/Somali scenario is not very likely," said Anna Zelkina, at the Centre of Contemporary Central Asia and the Caucasus at London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

"I am sure there will be religious overtones but to my mind they are likely to be on the fringe."

Islamic militancy has deep roots in the poor region, and Islamist groups have social support, if not political power.

Moscow fears the worsening violence could produce a lawless area in Kyrgyzstan's south that might one day provide safe haven to transnational Islamic militants and organised crime gangs.

But independent regional specialist Christopher Langton described as unlikely a "worst case scenario" in which militants in parts of southern Kyrgyzstan and neighbouring Uzbekistan successfully exploited the instability to recruit and organise.

Even if the authorities' grip on their security forces had been shown to be tenuous in the latest unrest, "the Kyrgyz have quite a good hand on these (Islamist) groups. I don't see it going the way of Afghanistan at the moment," he said.

Instability in the region also concerns other powers, a point noted in a commentary on the ethnic killings by Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group outlawed in Kyrgyzstan.

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It said the country's killings could not be seen in isolation from geopolitical rivalry between Russia and the United States. Only Islamic rule could bring independence from the "hegemony of the regional and global powers", it said.

"As the two old rivals play their new 'Great Game', Muslim bodies remain mere pawns to be sacrificed," the transnational group said on the website of its British branch.

Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, argues it uses only peaceful methods to achieve its goal of establishing a worldwide caliphate -- a theocratic Muslim state.

But regional governments accuse groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir of stoking unrest and seek to crack down on their operations.