Behind the riots in Uzbekistan, this area is known as the "back of the moon on earth" | Kyo Brewery
author：The Beijing News commented
Behind the riots in Uzbekistan, this area is known as the "back of the moon on earth" | Kyo Brewery
What kind of place is the Republic of Karakalpak, where the riots took place in Uzbekistan?
Behind the riots in Uzbekistan, this area is known as the "back of the moon on earth" | Kyo Brewery
President of Uzbekistan Mirziyoyev. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
Text | Pottery short room
On July 4, local time, the Legislative Committee of the Lower House of Parliament of Uzbekistan announced that it would delete all the draft constitutional amendments aimed at changing the status of Karakalpak in its territory on the proposal of President Mirziyoyev, with the aim of rehabilitating the Karakalpak riots that just occurred three days ago.
What caused the riots?
In May 2022, Uzbekistan President Mirziyoyev unveiled his blueprint for the construction of a "new Uzbekistan" and said that it would be achieved by amending the constitution; On June 25, Uzbekistan officially announced nearly 180 constitutional amendments related to the "New Uzbekistan Blueprint."
But it contains a seemingly unremarkable amendment to the "unity of Uzbekistan and the unshakable territorial integrity", while the Karakalpak Republic is an autonomous region that clearly stipulates in the current constitution "sovereignty" and "independence through a referendum". Thus, the unrest that broke out in the long-neglected Karakalpak Republic caught Mirziyoyev off guard.
According to Chapter 17, paragraph 74, of the Constitution of Uzbekistan, Karakalpak "has the right to withdraw from the independence of the Republic of Uzbekistan on the basis of the results of the referendum of the Republic". Not only that, but the original Constitution also clearly stipulated that Karakarpak could make local laws and regulations that were different from Uzbekistan's, but the Parliament of Uzbekistan had the right to veto local karakalpak regulations that it considered "inappropriate" – and correspondingly, the Parliament of the Republic of Karakalpak had the right to prevent the entry into force of national legislation of Uzbekistan that it considered "inappropriate".
However, more than one of the nearly 180 newly promulgated amendments directly or indirectly jeopardizes the aforementioned privileges expressly granted to Karakarpak in these original Constitutions.
The move ignited the anger of the locals almost immediately, and various demonstrations, protests and riots continued over the past few days. At about 15:00 on July 1, the unrest escalated into large-scale street violence and police-civilian clashes in the capital of Nukus. According to Uzbek officials, the riots resulted in 10 deaths, 243 injuries and 516 arrests.
On 2 July, Mirziyoyev, who had hurried to Nukus, declared a one-month state of emergency in Karakalpak, with a curfew from 21:00 to 7:00 the following day from 3 July to 2 August, while restricting the passage of vehicles across the province and stipulating that the police had the right to check pedestrian documents at any time.
On July 4, uzbekistan's House of Representatives passed Mirziyoyev's proposal that "all existing rules governing the autonomous status of Karakalpak remain unchanged" and decided to extend the final statute of limitations for "public discussion" of the "package" amendments from July 5 to July 15.
Karakalpak has a long history of resentment
Karakalpak, which means "land of black cloaks" in Turkic, is known as the "Republic of Karakalpakstan" and is located in the southeast and southwest of the Aral Sea, the fourth largest saltwater lake in the world.
Behind the riots in Uzbekistan, this area is known as the "back of the moon on earth" | Kyo Brewery
Infographic: The capital of Uzbekistan, "Tashkent City". Photo: Official website of the Embassy of Uzbekistan in China
Historically, the main ethnic group of Karakalpak is the Karakalpak people, which are considered to be descendants of the Western Turks and have their own language, writing, customs and habits closer to the Kazakhs. In 1936, the main ethnic group in the autonomous region was the Karakalpak, followed by the Kazakhs, and the Uzbek population was less than 20%. Because of this, when the United Communist Party (Brazzaville) announced the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, the locals generally wanted to become a separate republic, or part of the Kazakh republic.
At that time, the Central Committee of the United Communist Party (Brazzaville) "broke up and reorganized" the concentrations of various ethnic groups in Central Asia for the sake of "divide and rule", and the Karakalpak Autonomous Region was classified as a Uzbek republic of "different languages and different species". With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the declaration of independence of Uzbekistan, Karakarpak sought to establish a separate state or incorporate into Kazakhstan.
However, the then President of Uzbekistan, Karimov, fearing the loss of this area, which occupies 40% of the country's territory, did not hesitate to allow it to form a separate republic, and gave a series of privileges in the constitution, including "sovereignty" and "referendum independence", leaving the Karakalpak Republic within the territory of Uzbekistan.
Until the outbreak of the Nukus incident, security in the area had been stable, but this did not mean that the locals were not resentful.
Initially, this resentment was directed at Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. In particular, in the 1950s, Soviet leader Khrushchev forcibly built a large number of unprotected canals to develop cotton cultivation in disregard of local conditions and actual conditions, resulting in serious economic and social development imbalances in the river region and Karakarpak, which were also the "land of fish and rice in Central Asia" in history: Karakarpak, located in the lower reaches of the two rivers and around the Aral Sea, became the hardest hit area of this "biggest ecological disaster of the 20th century", and the famous rice-growing areas in Central Asia were reduced to a barren land that relied on dry land and fished for a bare livelihood.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Karimov gave a sharp critique of the previous Soviet policies and gave Karakalpak a high degree of autonomy, which once gave hope to the locals.
But then during his 25 years in power, he still resigned himself to the "Khrushchev Aqueduct" that led to the ecological disaster in Karakalpak, and even continued to promote cotton cultivation in order to earn foreign exchange, eventually leading to the almost complete drying up of the South Aral Sea and the complete desertification of Karakarpak: Uzbekistan is the most densely populated country in Central Asia, with as many as 35.3 million people, while Karakalpak, which covers an area of 2/5 of Uzbekistan, has a population of less than 2 million.
As a result of the complete collapse of the economy, it has become one of the world's few highest incidences of tuberculosis, cancers, liver and kidney diseases, and various birth and genetic diseases. In 2020, the local infant mortality rate will be as high as 75 per 1000, equivalent to the level of many sub-Saharan African countries that are considered the worst in this data, and more than 10 times that of the United States.
Such a tragic situation makes Karakarpak little known, and some call it "the back of the moon on Earth" and think that "people outside Uzbekistan know even less about it than about the moon".
After Karimov's death in 2016, his successor Mirziyoyev had loosened his grip on Karakalpak, and natural gas was found on the Aral Sea lake bed, and locals began to hope that "tomorrow will slowly get better". But it was at this time that the "New Uzbekistan" package of amendments changed the situation.
Where is the hope for tomorrow
This time, despite the resistance, Mirziyoyev decisively abandoned all attempts to change the autonomy of Karakalpak: the main direction of the "new Uzbekistan" plan was not this "moon back", and it was not too much to lose for it.
Since independence, Uzbekistan has been very wary of interference from outside the country and has been more wary of a new territory that did not belong to it historically. After the riots, Mirziyoyev suppressed it with an iron fist for the first time, and on the other hand, he did not hesitate to withdraw his life to appease, and his mentality of not wanting "outsiders" to intervene was quite obvious.
Since the historical and practical contradictions between the Karakalpaks and the Uzbeks, who account for only 32% of the local population, are not fierce, as long as the capital does not make too low-level mistakes, it is believed that the apparent riots and turmoil will soon subside.
However, as mentioned earlier, the root cause of the contradiction is the anthropogenic destruction of the Aral Sea ecological chain, and the consequent total collapse of local society, which is probably insoluble at least in the short term, and even if the contradiction is temporarily resolved, how Karakalpak will develop in the future still needs a package.
