By Guilherme Wilbert (the Saker Blog)
Uzbekistan, a relatively small country wedged between landlocked Turkmenistan to the south and Kazakhstan to the north, is undergoing state reshaping and suffering from protests that some analysts are calling “foreign interference” in what is known as Karakalpakstan.
Karakalpakstan is a relatively sovereign region within Uzbekistan. Relatively because it shares veto power over its “state” decisions (the territory is not a de facto country) with Uzbekistan. According to Karakalpakstan’s own constitution, relations with the Uzbeks are regulated by treaties and agreements, and disputes in theory are resolved through “conciliation.” It turns out that the region’s right of secession is limited by the veto power of the Uzbek laws. More specifically in article 74, chapter XVII of the Uzbek Constitution it is stated, “The Republic of Karakalpakstan shall have the right to secede from the Republic of Uzbekistan on the basis of a national referendum held by the people of the region.”
The region needed to be autonomous with an attempt by Uzbekistan to try to emulate the Russian federation model, which also has republics endowed with certain autonomies, but because they are ethnically different from Russians in general. In the case of Karakalpakstan, it works almost the same way since out of almost 2 million people in the region today, it was estimated in 2007 that at least four hundred thousand were part of the Karakalpak ethnic group and Uzbeks numbered 400,000 along with Kazakhs, who make a number of just over 300,000 in the region.
So realize the cultural imbroglio within the region…. Which makes them perfect victims of possible color revolutions.
Recently, earlier this month, large protests broke out in the territory that is trying to secede from Uzbekistan as there is an Uzbek constitutional proposal on the region’s autonomy to withdraw autonomous status.
The press secretary of the country’s president, Sherzod Asadov, said in his telegram that this past Saturday a State of Emergency in the autonomous region needed to be implemented until August 2 as an attempt to contain the spirits of the region’s population.
The country’s president arrived in the region last Saturday for a visit and promised that he would uphold the constitutional amendments that authorize the region to have autonomous status.
But not all protests are always legitimate and supported by the regional population.
I must remind you that Kazakhstan, in January of this year, part of Russia’s eastern front, also underwent an attempted colored revolution which required calling in peacekeepers from the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization), a military alliance also known as the Tashkent Treaty between Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus. This saved the continuation of Kazakh President Tokayev’s term in office.
And it was proven in these protests that there were several foreign interferences to the point that the president of the country needed to call in friendly armies to maintain social order in the country. This could result in a pro-Western color revolution in a country historically allied to Russia.
The Westerners’ tactic of divide and conquer is well known, which they have tried in several parts of the world, be it in Sudan, which also became South Sudan after several inter-religious and ethnic conflicts in the region fomented with the blindness of the international community, be it in the former Yugoslavia that was dissolved into the small states we know until today after a NATO intervention. Examples are not lacking.
The question remains whether what is happening now in Uzbekistan is something that has to do with popular power, which could indeed be seen with good eyes, or whether it has to do with foreign powers and interference to make Uzbekistan an even smaller country, assuming that in a possible independence of Karakalpakstan, the government would almost 100% certainly be pro-Western, making it evident that what could be about self-determination of peoples and all the discussion about it today, in fact was a territorial dissolution of an already small country sponsored by the usual agents.
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