Islamic Movement of Kyrgyzstan: Terror Group or Straw Man?

Hundreds of young Uzbeks from Kyrgyzstan are getting into the terrorism business, says Keneshbek Dushebayev, the head of Kyrgyzstan's National Security Service (GKNB). Moreover, they have created yet another new extremist organization, the Islamic Movement of Kyrgyzstan (IMK), he said without providing evidence on April 29. 

That the 400 or so would-be terrorists training in camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan are mainly ethnic Uzbeks is a charged assertion in the current climate of rising Kyrgyz nationalism. 

Dushebayev says the IMK is a newly set-up group, and there is no evidence of it having appeared in news reports until now. With no real details, the likelihood is that the IMK will simply be added to the alphabet soup of acronyms designating alleged terrorist groups in all their guises, alongside the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Islamic Movement of Turkmenistan (IMT) and the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU).

Dushebayev has been making ominous warnings about the threat of terrorist violence since last summer’s ethnic bloodletting in southern Kyrgyzstan. At the start of the year, he announced that a group of detained militants had been planning five attacks in the country and predicted that the number of terrorist plots discovered could increase as the investigation proceeded.

For the sake of balance, the militants rounded up at the start of the year belonging to another theretofore unheard of group, the Jamaat Jaysh al-Mahdi in Kyrgyzstan, were all ethnic Kyrgyz, Dushebayev said at the time. 

Dushebayev's factual reliability has long been under question. He was, for example, one of the main proponents of the theory about foreign snipers and fighters being actively involved in the ethnic violence. That account seems to have died a quiet death, although it could always be revived at some propitious future juncture.

The size and scope of terrorist movements in Kyrgyzstan is clearly understood by very few. This is part due to the overwhelming feeling that Kyrgyzstan's security services are trotting out one terrorist threat after another, providing the absolute flimsiest of evidence, with the specific aim of inculcating a calculated sense of dread -- or panhandling for foreign assistance. 

Fear mongering is rarely good for the kind of democratic values that President Roza Otunbayeva insists she favors. If Dushebayev wants to engender deeper trust in the intentions of his organization (then again, who says that he does?), maybe he should exercise greater transparency and consistency in his endless warnings of impending terrorist catastrophe.

Anyway, is it really possible to take him seriously when he cautions about the IMK's plans to "undermine social, political, and economic stability" in Kyrgyzstan? That seems like a job already being carried out by the political parties in parliament.