Ferghana Valley The Heart Of Central Asia – S Frederick Starr

Concurrently, the new Congress named Nabiev acting president of Tajikistan and declared a state of emergency. Confrontations broke out at once between supporters of the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies. Leninabadskaia pravda darkly warned that the situation threatened not only the Leninabad political elites, but the Ferghana region as a whole. A Leninabad deputy wrote that “[oppositionists] are running the show in Dushan- be.” Indeed, he had been told that the crowds there were calling for all politicians from Leninabad to leave the capital.30 On November 24, 1991 Nabiev emerged as the winner of the presidential elections.

On December 8 the heads of now-sovereign Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met at Belovezhsk in Belarus and effectively dis- solved the USSR, forming instead the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 21, eleven of the former Soviet republics supported these decisions, and four days later Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. Nabiev then came out in support of the Belovezhsk agreement. This should have launched a phase of state-building, but in Tajikistan it was cut short by a civil war in which some 50,000 people perished and twice that number were left homeless or refugees.

Only after the signing of an inter-Tajik treaty in 1997 did an independent Tajikistan begin to form. Causes and Consequences of Ethnic Conflicts in the Ferghana Valley: Uzbek Perspectives on the “Ferghana Events” The Soviet government’s longstanding policy of deporting ethnic groups it con- sidered undesirable had increased the number of ethnic groups in Uzbekistan. Archival records indicate that by 1950 some 184,122 people had been deported to the Uzbek republic, not counting the Crimean Tatars, Turks, Koreans and Greeks deported there during World War II.

These included 5,860 “kulaks,” 842 Vlasovites, 126,114 Crimean Tatars, 41,885 Georgians, 7,788 Germans, 884 people from the North Caucasus, 746 Kalmyks, and 3 Moldovans.31 During the war, 110,000 Turks had been forcefully deported from their homeland of Meskhetia in the southwest of Georgia,32 as were 183,155 Tatars from their homeland in the Crimea.33 These peoples were resettled mainly in the Ferghana cities of Kokand, Kuvasai, Margilan, as well as other areas of the valley, with a few also in the Tashkent area. Because Uzbeks and Meskhetian Turks shared similar languages, cultures and religion (both were Sunni Muslims), they related well to each other and even inter- married.

Good relations reigned for more than half a century. Even at the height of the confrontation, large numbers of Uzbeks sheltered Meskhetian families in their homes. But when Gorbachev’s program of perestroika started instituting sweep- ing reforms, everyone in the multi-national country began looking to the interests of his own group or nation.

Those peoples who had been involuntarily deported began preparing to return to their native lands and restore their national cultures.

The Heart of Central Asia With some twelve million inhabitants, the Ferghana Valley is one of the most densely populated places in the world. It is also the most volatile region of Central Asia. Not only is the area ethnically and linguistically diverse, it is politically divided, with parts ruled by three different states—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic—whose distant capital cities all relegate Ferghana to their respective peripheries.

These complexities make a comprehensive, multidimensional understanding of the Ferghana region all the more elusive. In order to construct such an analysis, the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute assembled an international, interdisciplinary team of thirty scholars with the requisite expertise. Their carefully planned, collaboratively authored chapters cover the historical and topical terrain with unmatched depth and breadth and balance. Studies of Central Asia and the Caucasus Books in this series are published in association with the Central Asia– Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center at the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H.

Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, and the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm, under the editorship of Svante Cornell. Ferghana Valley The Heart of Central Asia Edited by S. Frederick Starr with Baktybek Beshimov, Inomjon I. Bobokulov, and Pulat Shozimov M.E.Sharpe Armonk, New York London, England Copyright © 2011 by the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504. The EuroSlavic and Transroman fonts used to create this work are © 1986–2011 Payne Loving Trust. EuroSlavic and Transroman are available from Linguist’s Software, Inc., www.linguistsoftware. com, P.O. Box 580, Edmonds, WA 98020-0580 USA, tel (425) 775-1130. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Starr, S. Frederick. Ferghana Valley : the heart of Central Asia / edited by S. Frederick Starr with Baktybek Beshimov, Inomjon I.

Bobokulov, and Pulat Shozimov. p. cm. — (Studies of Central Asia and the Caucasus) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7656-2998-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Fergana Valley—History. 2. Fergana Valley—Geography. 3. Fergana Valley—Social ­conditions. I. Beshimov, Baktybek. II. Bobokulov, Inomjon I. III. Shozimov, P.D. IV. Title. DK919.F47S73 2011 958—dc22 2010044468 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1984.

~ EB (c) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 v Contents Acknowledgments vii Introducing the Ferghana Valley S. Frederick Starr ix 1. The Ferghana Valley: The Pre-Colonial Legacy Abdukakhor Saidov (Tajikistan), with Abdulkhamid Anarbaev (Uzbekistan) and Valentina Goriyacheva (Kyrgyz Republic) 3 2. The Rise and Fall of the Kokand Khanate Victor Dubovitskii (Tajikistan), with Khaydarbek Bababekov (Uzbekistan) 29 3.

Colonial Rule and Indigenous Responses, 1860–1917 Ravshan Abdullaev (Uzbekistan), with Namoz Khotamov (Tajikistan) and Tashmanbet Kenensariev (Kyrgyz Republic) 69 4.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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