foir_3880

FOI-R--3880--SE
For example, in April 2013, President Nazarbayev underlined the threat of
religious extremism as a regional problem, and highlighted Afghanistan is the
‘source and exporter of terrorism and extremism’ (Nazarbayev, 2013).
Kyrgyzstan’s Concept of National Security from 2012 examines the ‘expansion
of international terrorism and religious extremism’ solely as an external threat
that has both violence and ideological dimensions. The document links the threat
directly to the military and political situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where
the ‘basic ideological and military forces of terrorism, religious extremism, and
special training camps for militants [...], which are operating in Central Asia, are
concentrated’. Internal factors such as ‘the impoverishment of a certain part of
the population, a significant social differentiation and the weakness of the state
ideology against the degradation of the educational and intellectual capacity of
the people’ are treated merely as a condition enabling the ‘activation of terrorist
and extremist manifestations’ (Kyrgyzstan, 2012).
Tajikistan’s Military Doctrine of 2005 sees a ‘preservation and growth ... [of]
religious contradictions, destabilizing both within the state and in the Central
Asian region’ as one of the main sources of a latent military threat (Tajikistan,
2005). In accordance with the Law ‘On Security’, ‘political extremism in any
form, including incitement [...] [of] religious enmity or discord’ is considered a
threat to the security of the Republic of Tajikistan. Calls for ‘the use of existing
denominational differences and different religious beliefs for political purposes’
are seen as disruptive (Tajikistan, 2011). The document’s approach, seeing
Islamism as a military and an ideological issue as well as a problem for both
Tajikistan internally and the wider region, puts Tajikistan at the axes’
intersection.
According to Turkmenistan’s Military Doctrine from 2009, ‘international
terrorism, separatism and religious extremism’ are linked to external threats that
have a violent more than an ideological character. Threats such as ‘plan of action
aimed at changing the constitutional order’ and ‘the activities of extremist and
separatist parties, aimed at destabilising the political situation in Turkmenistan’,
are ascribed to the internal type of threat, but the external aspect is assessed here
to be the dominant one (Turkmenistan, 2009).
Unlike the other Central Asian countries, Uzbekistan sees the threat of Islamism
as mainly internal, as outlined by President Islam Karimov as early as in 1997
(Karimov, 1998). Furthermore, Uzbekistan’s National Security Concept (1997)
links ‘religious extremism and other manifestations of religious intolerance’ to
internal political threats. When assessing the violence in May 2005 in Andijan,
Karimov did not exclude external intervention, but also noted that such
intervention is effective only when enough protest potential has been
accumulated in a country and when state power is weak (Karimov, 2005: 20–23).
With the above understanding of the Islamist challenge in mind, events in
Afghanistan are seen in Uzbekistan as a challenge to its security, although
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