Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (18 page)

“Definitely,” the journalist concurs. “People are radicalizing because they are angry at the system. A polarization is taking place in this country.”

Laruelle agrees. “Democracy and human rights groups are discredited,” she says, “because they are connected in people’s minds with the economic shock therapy after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and Western economists brandishing the triumphalist free-market ideology of the Reagan-Thatcher era, new countries emerging from the Soviet rubble in
the 1990s abruptly canceled price supports and subsidies and auctioned off state-owned enterprises at fire-sale prices. The result, for most, was a dizzying plunge into economic misery, while others made off with the spoils.

Now “people are looking for social justice, not abstract concepts of democracy or human rights,” says Laruelle.

The place where Uzbeks discuss such concrete issues that preoccupy them, she maintains, is in their prayer circles. “The only people who talk politics and social justice these days are the Islamists. They have legitimacy because of their works of charity. The argument they are making is that the regime is corrupt and unjust
because
it’s secular. Such reasoning did not have much resonance in the past. Now it does.”

Hizb-u Tahrir, for example, the Islamist group with which Karimov conflated the Andijan businessmen after the 2005 massacre, lashed out in a Web posting at a highly publicized visit by Gulnora to Kokand, an ancient Silk Road city on the road from Tashkent to the Ferghana Valley, in mid-2013.

G. Karimova is at a loss after her thoughtlessness, her self-interested and greedy initiatives, and her dark deeds have become public knowledge, and led to a search of her house in France and an investigation of her subordinates in Switzerland. . . . For decades, her father along with his subordinates has . . . shamelessly drunk the blood of ordinary people [and] plundered the country’s wealth. . . . Such savage and selfish humans must never be allowed to govern, otherwise the lives of the Muslims of this land will be intolerable.
³³

Michigan State University visiting professor Martha Brill Olcott—who has spent much of the past thirty years in the region—says the sentiment she derives from discussions with religious leaders is that “it’s not possible to get at the problem of economic corruption except through spiritual purity.”

Here again, corruption—an ambiguous word in every language, implying moral as well as material depravity—seems to nourish a turn toward religion, seen as the most powerful means to combat it.

I
N THE FERTILE
, conservative Ferghana Valley, drivers line up for hours to buy natural gas to fuel their cars, and women who weave silk do without heat in the winter because of chronic shortages—in this gas-producing country. Nevertheless, peace reigns. People prefer to gather for prayers, not in mosques, but behind the closed doors of their homes, to avoid attracting attention. Restaurants are required by law to serve alcohol, and some have received government subsidies to convert their family-style dining rooms into vaulted clubs with music that pulses deep into the night. The aim, according to residents, is to lure the youth away from religion. The Karimov regime is quick to label devout Muslims, or people who refer to religious principles to guide their conduct—like the Akromiyya businessmen—as radicals.

It’s a characterization that may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if used as a foil to shift attention toward cultural issues and avoid addressing underlying grievances.

Such radicalization may in fact be the objective. It would represent yet a further example of symbiosis between authoritarian regimes and religious extremism, as was visible in Russia during its 1990s conflict with separatist Chechens, in Algeria, or most recently, in post–Muslim Brotherhood Egypt. Entrenched kleptocracies may find it simpler to face off against violent extremists, who terrify their populations and the international community alike, and who can be killed as enemies, than to confront political or economic movements calling for deep-seated government reform.

As for frustrated Uzbeks, a virulent, exiled, jihadi group, more radical even than Hizb-u Tahrir, does exist. It is called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and is active in Afghanistan and Pakistan and other parts of the region. U.S. intelligence sources say that evidence recovered from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan records a spate of Uzbek recruits and contributions to the IMU and Hizb-u Tahrir, in the wake of the Andijan massacre.

*
“Alina” is a fictitious name. Her research was cut short when information she was unearthing about the Karimov family’s corrupt activities led to her arrest. She cannot pursue or openly discuss her work, even from abroad. When she was released from prison and allowed to flee Uzbekistan, she was warned that if she were ever to publicize her findings, her family would pay the price. Such warnings are not empty. Dissident Uzbek religious leader Obid Kori Nazarav was shot in the head February 2012, in the small Swedish town of Strömsund, where he lived in exile. In the summer of 2013, the seventy-one-year old father of Bahodir Choriev, a dissident who writes extensively on economic issues, was arrested and charged with rape.

†
Of the other independent states that emerged from the Soviet Union and its dependencies, Azerbaijan probably resembles Uzbekistan most closely. Ukraine under Yanukovych, as well as Romania, present similar characteristics, though both display a somewhat more equal competition between competing kleptocratic networks than Uzbekistan. None of these, however, has a resource flow that resembles Uzbekistan’s cotton monoculture. See pages 113–15 of this book.

‡
“Rustam” is also a fictitious name.

§
For a diagram of the Uzbek kleptocracy, please see
Appendix
.

CHAPTER TEN

Variation 4: The Resource Kleptocracy

Nigeria, ca. 2014

I
n Africa’s populous giant, Nigeria, conservative Muslims are found not in the lush southern valleys but in the dry and gradually desertifying north. Among the oldest cities in West Africa is Kano, on the fringes of this zone. Its dense, vibrant core once cinched together trade routes crossing the habitable lands on the southern edge of the Sahara with those leading north to the centers of thought and industry on the Mediterranean. Today, in that compact old-city hub, stalls at ground level and suspended overhead on a kind of open-air scaffolding overflow with bright-hued bolts of the region’s famous fabrics. Men wear straight-sided caps and flowing robes of lightweight cotton, whose designs seem embossed on the glossy surface.

A remarkable religious diversity flourishes in this historic town. Christians and some animists make up a sizable minority of its population. As the night shift started in a small plastics factory on its outskirts, I sit with the owner, Ali Harisu Kadiri an-Nasiri, who is also the leader of one of the area’s Sufi orders, as he describes his group’s ritual veneration at the graves of holy men. We crane together over his cell phone to watch a video of members twirling in a characteristic Sufi dance.

Kano residents can distinguish among different Sufi orders by the configuration of their prayer beads; the practice of different groups emphasizes different sacred numbers. Most Kano Muslims are more conventional. According to an-Nasiri, it is only since about 2007 that
fundamentalist Salafis have been a presence around town, taking over mosques and founding schools. After class, flocks of schoolgirls flutter home through the streets in their plumage of long uniform veils. Residents say parents patronize religious schools less out of ideological affinity than because they are cheaper and more professionally run than public schools.

Still, Kano residents, along with their neighbors in states across the Nigerian north, applauded the adoption of Islamic law, or shari’a, in 2000 for criminal as well as civil cases.

A dozen years later, on January 21, 2012, explosions tore through police stations, the state security service headquarters, and a few other administrative offices across the city. More than 150 people died. The group that claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks is known as Boko Haram—roughly translated as “Western education is forbidden.” Ritually forbidden, that is. Unclean.

This moniker categorizes Boko Haram in many Westerners’ minds. Such violent Islamist extremists, many believe, are unlettered, backward, viscerally opposed to the intellectual achievements or cultural openness of Western society. About a year after the Kano attack, Boko Haram and a splinter faction known as Ansaru were designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. Department of State.
¹
In 2014, the group horrified the world by sweeping down on a rural school, kidnapping nearly 300 girls, and melting away with them into the forest.

Boko Haram burst onto the international stage in the summer of 2009. Traveling to a funeral by motorcycle, the story goes, like a mechanized herd jostling down a dust-powdered road some three hundred miles east of Kano, members of a reclusive, puritanical community that openly admired the Afghan Taliban ran afoul of the state police. That was the day the police had chosen to enforce a law requiring motorcycle helmets. An altercation ensued. Shots were exchanged. And then came the carnage: more than a month of pitched battles across four Nigerian states, makeshift bombs, mass arrests, and summary executions. The deaths on both sides, and among passersby, numbered into the thousands.
²

The CLEEN Foundation, which advocates for justice sector reform in Nigeria, has been researching the reasons for radicalization, especially among the youth, in the northeastern states. Its findings on the
origins of Boko Haram suggest uncanny echoes of Uzbekistan. Boko Haram members, who followed the teachings of a charismatic preacher, taxed themselves, says CLEEN’s Valkamiya Mary Ahmadu, much as the Akromiyya did in Andijan. But instead of using the money for social welfare purposes, “members could access the fund to found small businesses.”

A common entry-level business endeavor in Nigeria is to set up as an
okada
, or motorcycle taxi. Buses that ply highways between cities leave riders off on the verge, where secondary roads join. A flock of motorcycles awaits to whisk passengers to their homes in nearby villages for a few cents a ride. Numerous members of the militant group took up this occupation. By forcing
okada
s to buy helmets for themselves and their passengers (or pay a bribe not to), the police were attacking the community’s economic viability, CLEEN’s research suggests.

Other experts say the group had been stockpiling arms for months, and the clash with the police was part of a deliberate move by local government to rein it in.

Still, even in a country whose very name has become synonymous at home and abroad with fraud and corruption, the Nigerian police are infamous for their excess. “They’re worse here than in any other country I’ve worked in,” says an experienced international rule of law practitioner.

“The police are like flies that settle on your arm,” a civil servant in the Kano State government puts it. “You can’t even see how many there are buzzing around, in the air, coming and going.”

In a report entitled
“Everyone’s in on the Game”: Corruption and Human Rights Abuses by the Nigeria Police Force
, Human Rights Watch details the exactions. Ordinary Nigerians are “routinely subjected to police extortion,” it concludes, as “an inevitable fact of everyday life.” One trader is quoted as saying:

When we put our goods on the ground to sell, the police say it’s not allowed, that we have to pay them money to sell there. Other times they take our goods and ask us to pay to bail them out. This happens every day. . . . The police will chase you away until you pay them something. The police are not protecting us; they are fetching money for their own pockets.
³

According to Kano residents, the police preside over the illicit trade in the town’s bustling main market, extracting their cut from the sale of counterfeit medicine and other dangerous goods. They “frequently impound cars and motorcycles.” They make victims of crimes pay for the write-up. “And even the pen,” snorts Yunusa Zakari Ya’u, executive director of the Centre for Information Technology and Development. (
Neither work nor pen nor the various inks come without price.)

“They arrest people, and don’t take them to court. And they begin negotiating their release. Or there’s a second way: the court orders your release, but the police bring you back to detention, and start negotiating.” Or with a stubborn bargainer, they turn to torture to extract the money they’re after.
⁴
They routinely board vehicles at improvised checkpoints on highways and city streets, to shake passengers down.
⁵

In the eleventh-century Persian mirror
The Sea of Precious Virtues
, the tenth rule of kingship is to “restrain the hands of . . . mercenaries.” The king must “protect the caravans on the highways,” for “taking illegal imposts is just like brigandage and theft.”
⁶

Deputy Commissioner Muhammad Guri runs a specialized police bomb squad in Kano. It had not deployed in two years, he tells me, though the most recent suicide blast in the city dated back only three months. To reach his cramped office—where a young aide in civilian clothes reclined in an armchair, feet up on his boss’s desk, shouting into a cell phone for some time before sauntering out—I had to get past a desk downstairs. The initial reaction of the two officers behind it, the ingrained reflex, was to delay. It reinforced their power, placed me in a position of need.

Guri helped lead a multiyear U.K.-financed community policing initiative, which included meetings with initially reluctant neighborhood leaders and a hotline for complaints. What was hardest, Guri acknowledges, was “to change the mentality of our men. They joined the police to make money.” After a high point in 2007, the program flagged around 2009, he says, when the foreign funding ended. The Nigerian government never mainstreamed the training and procedures the program piloted.