A citizen of Karakalpakstan, in 2014 (Dominic Derati/Getty)
Demonstrations continued, for the second day in a row, in the city of Nukus, the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan, and a number of other cities in the republic, to protest once morest constitutional amendments proposed by Uzbek President Shavkat Mirzayev, including the deletion of the word “sovereignty” in the description of the republic. Karakalpakstan, and a paragraph referring to its right to secede from Uzbekistan following organizing a popular referendum in this regard.
Parliament and the Ministry of Home Affairs in Karakalpakstan accused a number of protesters of trying to take over government bodies. The Ministry of Interior confirmed in a statement today that a group of “riots” organizers were arrested, whom the statement accused of “hiding behind populist slogans” and “manipulating the awareness and confidence of citizens.”
The authorities reported that “the instigators, relying on the assembled citizens, tried to seize state institutions, thereby dividing society, and destabilizing the social and political situation in Uzbekistan.”
Karakalpakstan Parliament and the Ministry of Home Affairs have accused a number of protesters of trying to take over government bodies
Karakalpakstan’s parliament stressed that the authorities “have the necessary capabilities to prevent further fragmentation of the situation.” In an attempt to blame external parties, the parliament statement said: “We are concerned regarding attempts by some unhealthy external forces from abroad to influence the development of the situation in Karakalpakstan, including through targeted information releases to distort current events.”
The Kazakh authorities had announced the closure of the border crossings between the territory of Karakalpakstan andKazakhstan Neighboring, and stopped the movement of trains between the two parties at the request of the Uzbek authorities.
Kazakhstan also arrested a number of Karakalpaki nationalist factory workers near the border with Uzbekistan, who had published a video in which they declared their solidarity with the demands of the protesters in Nukus.
The demonstrations began at noon on Friday in Nukus, and spread to the cities of Chimbay and Moynak, and the calls for demonstrations began immediately following the publication of the version of the new constitution in Uzbekistan for public debate on June 26, with discussions continuing for ten days.
With the spread of calls to demonstrate, the authorities restricted access to social networking sites and reduced the speed of the Internet on mobile phones, but this did not prevent hundreds from gathering in Nukus, according to videos published by the Norda media site on its channel on Telegram, in which at least hundreds of people appeared. Carrying flags of the Republic of Karakalpakstan in the streets of Nukus. The demonstrations continued at night, according to videos posted by the same channel.
The demonstrators demanded the release of the journalist, local activist Dolatmurat Tagimuratov, who urged citizens to participate in rallies once morest the draft constitutional amendments.
While describing the demonstrations as “illegal”, the Uzbek Interior Ministry attributed what happened to a “misinterpretation of constitutional reforms.” “The President of the Republic addressed the demonstrators. People began to disperse,” the ministry statement said.
A ticking time bomb from the soviet era
The Republic of Karakalpakstan is a new example of the Soviet leaders’ “time bombs” to prevent their empire from collapsing easily. In the last three decades, the republics of Nagorno-Karabakh (between Armenia and Azerbaijan), South Ossetia (in Georgia), Abkhazia (also in Georgia), and Pridnestrovia appeared in the last three decades. (Transnistria in Moldova), Ukraine’s Crimea (which Russia annexed by force in 2014) as well as the Chechen Republic, which is part of the Russian Federation, and it is not excluded that other conflicts will arise.
The Republic of Karakalpakstan is part of the well-known historical region of Khiva, which is currently distributed between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, with an area of 166,590 thousand square kilometers, or 35 percent of the area of Uzbekistan, and inhabited by nearly two million people, according to the latest statistics (the population of Uzbekistan is 35 million), and it has two official languages. : Uzbek and Karakalpaki.
And in the early Soviet era (1917 – 1991), Karakalpakstan was annexed as an autonomous region in the Kazakh Socialist Republic, and later in Kyrgyzstan.
In 1932 it became part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic under the name “Karakalpakia Autonomous Socialist Republic”. At the end of 1936, it was annexed to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.
The problem arose following the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose borders were just an administrative border for a state that the communists did not expect to collapse. In 1990, the Supreme Council of the Karakalpakaya Republic adopted the declaration of state sovereignty as an independent state.
In 1993, the republic signed an agreement to enter Uzbekistan for a period of twenty years. The agreement provided for the right to withdraw from Uzbekistan by holding a referendum. Article 74 of the Uzbek Constitution stipulates that the Republic of Karakalpakstan is “a parliamentary republic, with its own state flag, emblem, constitution and national anthem”.
According to the signed agreement, the legal status of the Republic has been decided since 2013 by virtue of a referendum determining its survival in Uzbekistan or its secession, but opponents of staying within Uzbekistan accuse Tashkent of systematic attempts to integrate Karakalpakstan with other Uzbek regions, and to restrict the Karkalpik language that depends on the Cyrillic characters (Russian), noting that Uzbekistan decided years ago to adopt the Latin alphabet in its language.
Karakalpakstan has been chaired since October 2020 by Murad Kalibekovich Kamalov. According to the Russian “News 1Ru” website, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirzayev nominated him as the only candidate for approval by the “Jokarji Kenes” Council of Elders in the Republic of Karakalpakstan.
The legal status of the republic since 2013 was to be decided by a referendum determining whether it should remain in Uzbekistan or its secession.
The website indicated that the two presidents have good relations, especially that Kamalov graduated from the KGB Higher School of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, and worked between 2018 and 2020 as head of the KGB.State Security in Karakalpakstan.
The republic was an important agricultural region and produced large quantities of cotton, wheat and vegetables, but the bad exploitation of the rivers in the Soviet era led to an environmental disaster in the region, most of which became a barren desert following the drying up of the Ural Sea.
According to official data, there are a lot of minerals in the desert areas, and there are huge deposits of gold, iron, phosphorite, bentonite, kaolin clay and salts, in addition to granite and marble.
The opposition believes that the recent discovery of oil and gas and mineral wealth in the republic was the main reason for Tashkent’s attempts to speed up the process of its integration with the rest of the regions, not taking into account their privacy, and later reaching a new legal status that ends a rare situation in the world, which is an independent republic within another independent republic.