Reform Crisis in Uzbekistan and the Karakalpak Protests

President Shavkat Mirziyoev initiated several constitutional amendments in Uzbekistan at the end of June which have reminded the world about the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, bordering the dying Aral Sea. Efforts to diminish the Republic’s autonomy resulted in mass protests that unfortunately turned deadly. Join us to explore the reasons that prompted Mirziyoev’s constitutional amendments, Tashkent’s difficulties in encouraging further reforms, and the future of Karakalpak people’s autonomy.

Speakers

Navbahor Imamova, Anchor, Editor and Producer, Uzbek Service, South and Central Asia Division, Voice of America, President, VOA Women’s Caucus;

Temur Umarov is a Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the OSCE Academy (Bishkek);

Dr. Akram Umarov is Director of the Afghanistan Research Group and Associate Professor at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy;

Yuriy Sarukhanian, International Relations specialist. Author of analytical Telegram channel Seriya Penalti;

Moderator: Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Director of the Central Asia Program; Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program; Co-Director of PONARS Eurasia; and Research Professor of International Affairs at The George Washington University.

Transcript

Marlene Laruelle :

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, good afternoon. Welcome to this online seminar of the Central Asia Program. My name is Marlene Laurelle. I’m the director of the Central Asia Program. It’s my great pleasure to be with you today to discuss the situation in Uzbekistan. And so we will be discussing here both the constitutional reform, the tensions they have been created, the situation in Uzbekistan. And with us, we have three great experts joining us and I’m really grateful they could find time for this seminar in the middle of the summer.

Marlene Laruelle :

We have with us Navbahor Imamova who is the editor and producer of Uzbek series at Voice of America. Timur Marov, fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the USC Academy in Bishkek and Akram Umarov, director of the Afghanistan research group and associate professor at the University of Foreign Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent. We should have had with us Yuri Sarukhanian, International Relations specialist and the author of analytical Telegram channel Seriya Penalti. So I would like to give the floor to Navbahor to give us your first assessment. Thank you.

Navbahor:

Well, thank you so much. Hello everyone. It’s great to be part of this important discussion Marlene so thank you for organizing this, for having me here with these brilliant folks, Akram and Timur. I have enormous respect for their work as a reporter and of your work as well. And it’s an honor and pleasure to share my views and insights as a journalist, as an observer. And I’m a proud VOA journalist, but I will not be speaking on behalf of my organization here. I am really speaking as someone who’s been covering these issues. And I would just start off by saying that Karakalpakstan case is the story of today’s Uzbekistan, stand through and through. And I know many in Tashkent won’t like the description of this, but what happened in Nukus early July, put this part of the world on the map and it increased the attention to what’s happening inside Uzbekistan, where reforms were announced in 2017 and how and to what extent those reforms then have been changing the country. It’s a story of economic and social injustice.

It’s a story of the distrust between the state slash regime and the people. It’s a story of poverty and corruption. It’s a story of political confusions and contradictions. And we’ve heard from many Karakalpaks, that they’re actually more angry at their local leaders than those in Tashkent. So that is itself, a bigger story here that we also need to focus. The Karakalpak part of the Uzbek constitution is not changing, we know that much. But the arguments about it, the disagreement on the status of Karakalpakstan, the constitutional guarantee to the Karakalpak people will continue to be debated inside and outside the country, and the government will have to address these issues. So just by canceling the changes to the constitution, I will argue, will not be enough at all. Is Karakalpakstan really an autonomy? Can you have a sovereign state within a sovereign state? Can actually Karakalpaks have the kind of a referendum that the Uzbek constitution guarantees them in reality? Uzbekistan is a highly centralized unitary government where you cannot hold regional referendums, it’s legally impossible if you look at the rest of the Uzbek constitution.

So how can you have a dialogue now that discusses those issues? These are very internal issues and we realize that the Uzbek government doesn’t want to discuss all these issues on international arenas perhaps, but I would argue that you have to still address them, you cannot ignore these realities. And then you have this group called Karakalpak activists. Tashkent can call them separatists or all they want, but they exist and they have a louder voice now, there is more interest in their plight now. They’ll continue to fight what they believe in and this is something that the Uzbek government cannot ignore. And because these calls are about Uzbekistan territorial integrity, it’s about its sovereignty and stability, one of the biggest challenges I see for the government in the near future is to come up with a strategy that addresses these issues and that also addresses and deals with this critical Karakalpak public now, inside and outside Uzbekistan.

So what does the Mirziyoyev administration think about the 1990 declaration on the sovereignty of Karakalpakstan? How about the 1993 agreement that was made with the Karakalpak people that was supposed to be reviewed in 20 years that the system forgot? Tashkent needs to explain its position. So far, what I have heard from some lawmakers and policymakers as well as lawyers from Tashkent is that, the Uzbek constitution is the best answer. That is Tashkents position. Whatever the Uzbek constitution, the main law of the country says, that’s the answer. But I think you need to go deeper, you need to elaborate, you need to start that conversation. Because Karakalpaks have questions, they have demands. And Tashkent may call them destructive forces in general, and so far, that’s what we have heard from the government. They can sideline them, but will that then ensure Uzbekistan’s stability? What happens to the critical voices when you don’t engage them? Or will Karakalpak activists become what we see the so-called Uzbek opposition? Tashkent calls them irrelevant.

Navbahor:

Do you want to have irrelevant group of people who have a huge impact on the minds of their fellow Karakalpaks back at home if they’re calling, let’s say these, foreign based Karakalpaks destructive forces? So again, the government needs to really think there. Cutting people off from the world by cutting them off the internet. Is that something that was Uzbekistan wants to be doing? What does that say about your reforms? What does that say about your promotion of new Uzbekistan? How are you going to convince the world that you’re open for business when you can really completely shut a huge part of the country from online communication? Everyone I talk to in the Mirziyoyev administration now tells me that president Mirziyoyev has strictly instructed everybody to respect human rights and to do everything that they can so that Uzbekistan meets its international obligations. That means that the Nukus investigation has to be as credible, as independent, as impartial as possible. So now we have this commission investigating what happened to Nukus right there in Karakalpakstan, this point, and the commission is led by the Uzbek ombudsman, Feruza Eshmatova.

Navbahor:

It is a parliamentary probe, let’s just call it that. It is a parliamentary probe, it will report to the parliament, it’s being done by the Uzbek people for the Uzbek people and I hear Uzbek lawmakers who argue that it’s okay that it doesn’t include any foreign experts. It doesn’t have to, it’s our investigation. Fine, but what that commission then delivers may not be enough for the international community. It may not be enough at all to meet Uzbekistan’s international obligations. So then the next question, will Uzbekistan open for foreign experts? Will they be engaging international groups? And then my question to these international human rights organizations who’ve been calling on social media so far, for deeper and more independent investigation, are you ready to carry that out yourselves? It’s one thing to call for such things online and through social media, or maybe in your conversations with Uzbek officials, but in reality, it’s not easy to carry out such investigations, such probes. So is there enough unity and solidarity within the human rights community to do something like that?

Navbahor:

And also many Uzbek thinkers have been telling us that Uzbekistan now needs to focus on national identity promotion, national integration, which is also, I think is very crucial. Uzbekistan needs to start that very uncomfortable conversation about diversity and minority rights and interethnic dynamics, something that we don’t have such a dialogue in the country now. Uzbek state media, which is really still dominant, for example, don’t carry such content. Forget about news and analytical coverage, the most watched, the most popular Uzbek TV shows are in broken Tashkent dialect. They’re not relevant to the rest of the country at all, but people still watch them. That is the projection of diversity in Uzbekistan right now. And so will that change? Also, a very important part of the conversation should also be Karakalpak intellectuals, professionals, artists, talents, who have been mainly silenced throughout this process. I’ve been talking to some of them. They’re very afraid to talk. And ironically, some of them are very active promoters of the new Uzbekistan.

Navbahor:

They’ve been doing the state propaganda, but now they cannot express their own views, they cannot share their own analysis about the motherland. Will that change in the coming days? And it should, you should bring them into that conversation. And finally, I think it’s crystal clear by now that this was a major historic miscalculation by the leadership. The promotion of constitutional reforms pushed personally by president Mirziyoyev, and there was nothing wrong with it when he proposed to do this after his reelection in November 2021. Well, he got reelected in October, but in his speech I mean, in November. Those reforms have been coined as the will of the Uzbek people and that backfired in Karakalpakstan. That was another really, I would argue, major failure. You should have called them what they are. President Mirziyoyev is proposing these constitutional reforms, do we want them?

Navbahor:

Instead it was promoted as the will of the Uzbek people. And it backfired in Karakalpakstan, let’s say, in the most poorest, remote and least probably known part of Uzbekistan. There is this internal political turmoil here, which I believe president Mirziyoyev is dealing with. I hear that he’s cleaning house, that they will be more changes in the administration. Let’s see. This is a major test. Will these constitutional reforms continue as if everything is okay or will there be rethinking, re-strategizing? Will there be deeper analysis? Thousands of people came out, protesting in a country where a lot of us have argued all along that something like this would never happen. And Tashkent should not be surprised. They should know what was happening in Karakalpakstan. And if this is not a clear indication that the current strategy needs to be reviewed, I would argue, what else? What else do you need for Uzbekistan to happen for you to review this current, let’s say push, for constitutional reforms. I’ll end here and look forward to hearing from my co-panelists. Thank you.

Marlene Laruelle :

Thank you so much Navbahor for launching the discussion like that on so many critical issues. I saw that we are lucky Yuri could join us. So let me introduce him. Yuri Sarukhanian, who is an international relations specialist, but also the author of the analytical telegram channel Syria Penalty. Yuri, thank you so much for joining us in difficult condition for you today. I wanted to give you the floor immediately, in case you wouldn’t be able to stay with us for the whole duration of the event and then we will go back to Timur and Akram. Yuri.

Yuri:

Good evening. No, I will be able to stay with you the whole event so we can stick with the agenda.

Marlene Laruelle :

Okay, very good. So then maybe Timur, would you like to go second?

Timur:

Thank you very much for having me. It’s a huge honor to be here alongside with Navbahor, Yuri, Akram and you Marlene. Yes. First of all, I want to also add to what Navbahor has already said as someone who is considered to be national ethnic minority in Uzbekistan. I’m from Samarkand, ethnically Tajik. I also feel what is it like to be someone who’s language is not official language, as someone who’s watching TV and cannot watch TV in Tajik, as someone who walks on the streets and cannot see signs in Tajik and thinks that Tajik is only the language that you can speak at home. This feels strange. And I think in this regard, there should be done some changes in the policies of Uzbekistan. But I wanted to scale out a little bit and to look at why this miscalculation has been made by the political regime.

Timur:

And in my view, I think the number one and maybe most important problem that we see here is that the political leadership underestimated the results of the reform it started itself, when Shavkat Mirziyoyev came to power. Because if we compare how society lives during the last years of Islam Karimov and how society lives today, we will see that these are two almost different societies. The middle age in Uzbekistan is 29 years old. So we can say that the biggest chunk of the population of Uzbekistan does not really remember of the times that were before the last six, five years. For them, their most active part of their lives are happening in this very dynamic Uzbekistan, that is very open to the world and claims to be really democratic as never before. And they live in completely different country. They use internet daily, there are more than 18 million internet users in Uzbekistan. If they don’t like something, they go to protests. If we look at the Oxus Society database, we’ll see that from 2018 to 2021, there were more than 200 protests across Uzbekistan.

Timur:

If they don’t like something they go to Facebook and write directly to the government agencies and tag everyone that can be tagged, go to media and talk about their problems. They know different Uzbekistan. And what I think is that the leadership doesn’t understand that while you live in this situation with this society, you cannot act like classic authoritarian country during Islam Karimov. And what the constitutional reforms and the changes in the constitution are all about is, it’s all done with the old instruments. The government wants people to believe that it is them who wants the constitutional reforms, it is them who wants to give the president more power according to the project of the constitution that has been published before the Karakalpak events. And this is completely wrong because it feels like the government lives in illusion and doesn’t really understand its own society, doesn’t really understand what are the problems that people on the ground face. And because of that, decisions that are made in Tashkent are sometimes really wrong.

Timur:

And what is more important is that I do believe that Uzbekistan saw what was happening all across Eurasia, all across post-Soviet space. We saw what was happening, for example, in January 2022 in Kazakhstan and that at that moment, shocked everyone and especially shocked everyone in Uzbekistan. We remember how president Mirziyoyev even stopped his January vacation for that and there were measures taken in Uzbekistan for coping with some potential protest crossing the border of Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan. But what strikes me the most is that the leaderships looks so closely for the events outside of the country but does not really investigates and analyzes what’s going on inside. I don’t believe that there is some secret agency in inside Uzbek government that knows what’s going on everywhere in Uzbekistan. And since I don’t see any public discussions about the political developments, about the problems on the ground, I do believe that there is no real good analysis that is out there inside Uzbekistan that can be used in the decision making process. And the problem where we don’t have it is that the government does not allow it to happen.

Timur:

When, for example, my friend Yuri who’s also here, published great analytical piece on Karakalpak events. We saw that this article was deleted for a couple of hours. These instruments does not work in modern Uzbekistan. And at this moment, it’s already too late to go back to say that, oh my God, we are too far with these reforms, we have to go back to those calm years where we could do whatever we want with the society and the society will take it. Now it’s different. And now if the government wants to continue to be stable, I think there should be done more work on developing the politology, developing the expert community, giving more money to universities and trying to understand your own society, your own problems, and to focus on that much more than it is happening right now. I’ll stop here and will be happy to answer any questions we have.

Marlene Laruelle :

Thank you so much Timur, for your remarks. I now would like to give the floor to Akram to continue our discussion.

Akram:

Yeah. Thank you very much for the invitation and I’m very happy to be part of this excellent panel of speakers. I think while analyzing this situation in Karakalpakstan, we should focus on several issues, I think. First of all, the roots of this crisis. Obviously they didn’t appear suddenly, there were deep causes of the problem and they gradually formed constructed for decades. I don’t think that this is something which happened in couple of weeks or even couple of months or years. I think the situation in Karakalpakstan, as many people know, the social economic situation is not the best one, even in comparatively to other regions of Uzbekistan. Because of this RLC crisis and the following social economic degradation, people were suffering for many years because of the social economic problems, and actually many people left the country.

Akram:

Yeah, they left either to other province of Uzbekistan or left the country as a migrant to other parts of the world. And also, because of this ecological crisis and lack of resources, also people had much worse living conditions comparative to other parts of Uzbekistan. I think when there was a change of leadership in 2016, there was understanding how situation is bad in Karakalpakstan. I think that’s why the first visit after this first election of Mirziyoyev, that he did his first internal visit to Karakalpakstan, and he barely declared about the strategy to invest in Karakalpakstan and to try to modernize it. And then there was some attempts to modernize. There were capital investments, I think in five years, 2016, 2021. There were investments equal to one billion US dollars, so capital investments in the infrastructure of Karakalpakstan, in creating new factories and et cetera.

Akram:

So the big town, which was quite populated during the Soviet time, but then due to the RLCA issue, many people left this town. It didn’t have a proper water supply. There was no proper water supply and the water supply was provided just in end of 2017, I think. And recently, they built in a small airport in this town. I think there is an understanding about the problems of Karakalpakstan. And there was an attempt to improve the situation. There is a very traditional stuff in Uzbekistan. The president gathered all Hokims and made them responsible for… The lawyers of province of Uzbekistan, they were responsible for each district of Karakalpakstan. So to help these districts to improve their infrastructure and make some renovation and also establish region to region context.

Akram:

But the problem with this, I’m going to my second point. Yes, there were attempts to improve this situation and to respond to the increasing challenges and in this direction, but the problem with all these things, with all this investment, there is no proper monitoring and evaluation. There is no proper assessment to what extent this investments were efficient and what kind of other steps we could do in this situation. And I fully agree with Timur about lack of independent expertise and analysis. I think this was the biggest challenge for all this reforms and not just Karakalpakstan, but of all other areas as well. Why there were no prediction about social moods of people, there were no sociological service. There were no analysis of internal politics. Yeah. There are some small branches and public think tanks who deal with internal politics, but the current situation, again, demonstrate that either they do not have necessary capacity or I don’t know, what are the reasons why they couldn’t predict.

Akram:

Because obviously after the announcement of this changes, Karakalpak social media were burning. So many people expressed that they do not support this changes and they would like to keep the current version and this didn’t find a proper response from, from central government. I think there was an obvious, a lack of communication. And this leads to the issue of, again, the capacity political institutions. When I wrote a small piece about Kazakhstan in January, I said this was the biggest challenge to the Central Asian region in its 30 years history. But now we can see there is this internal unrest is happening that happened in Kazakhstan and in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In general, of course, there are different reasons and different roots of this problems, but in general it showed that we are still in the process of building our political institutions. We still need to do more on providing more transparency, more accountability and again, also to have this independent expertise and analysis.

Akram:

And all these things could be easily prevented if there were proper understanding of the problem and also analyzing internal politics. There were also issue of appointing proper merit based people in Karakalpak government, in other structures which deal with this part of the country. And the next point is, the main thing which I think we should try to do in the current situation, to move this problem to the interethnic problem, the Uzbek Karakalpak issues. On a bottom level, on the people to people level, I don’t see any problems on relation with Karakalpak. I have many colleagues in my university, I have many friends in Tashkent. And as a province of Uzbekistan who are ethnically Karakalpak, we are friends, we have no problems on this level. I think that the main thing now, I could see in many social media the attempts to push this problem to the point of having a interethnic… To give it interethnic damage.

Akram:

I think this is very, very big threat for our security. And actually, this is not true. And again, the problem is this proper assessment. And finally about international reaction, I think we could see that this regional corporation is developing because on these days, you could see that there were back to back phone calls with all regional of Mr. Mirziyoyev with all the regional leaders. And they had discovered the issue and they all expressed support to Uzbekistan. Also other countries, even the statements which had criticism of Uzbekistan from the statements of state department and EU, they were quite moderate. I think no one is actually interested now in any kind of destabilization, especially Uzbekistan when it’s at least, as Timur also mentioned, it’s showing some kind of intention to modernize itself. And of course, there are still many, many problems on this task.

Akram:

But still at the same time, there is this attempt, there is a wheel to modernize, to change the system, to build something more efficient and effective. I think in this situation, the easiest way to respond to the crisis would be to emphasize national security, region security and to repeat the same mistakes which Uzbekistan made during its previous challenges towards security. But saying Uzbekistan is more now conscious about its reputation, is more conscious about establishing some communication with people and that’s why we could see some attempts to respond to all this criticism and to establish this commission. Maybe it’s not ideal, but still we have this commission with several independent members and I think we should wait a little bit for the initial assessment of this commission before making any kind of conclusions. Thank you.

Marlene Laruelle:

Thank you so much Akram, for your really important remarks. I will give the floor now to Yuri. Yuri, the floor is yours.

Yuri:

Good evening colleagues. Thank you very much for the invitation and for the chance to participate in this discussion. Talking about Karakalpak crisis, I think that we should, first of all, shift from the discussion of separatism and territorial integrity issues. Second is that we should abandon interethnic tensions and we should try to stop both activists, bloggers, et cetera, from both sides. Both from Uzbek locally, who tried to demonstrate Karakalpaks as separatist with a long term ambitions to leave Uzbekistan. And both in Karakalpakstan, the activists who try to demonstrate Uzbeks and Uzbek population as the one who is oppressive and who organizes genocide, et cetera. For me, Karakalpak crisis is an absolute case of just poor decision-making process that Uzbekistan suffers for many years already, first of all. And second is the poor communications practices of the government.

Yuri:

That is also an issue for many years. Why the first one? So decision-making process in Uzbekistan, if we talk even about Karakalpak crisis, nobody explained to us what was the reason of such amendments to the constitution. So if they tried to do this, they should be justified, but we don’t have this justification. We can just think… We understand that we are living in a post-Soviet country and the legitimacy of post-Soviet states is now questioned by Kremlin regime. And Kremlin regime uses such territories, such cases as Karakalpakstan, to south Assyria, to push the states. So that might be a logical the government to prevent someone from interfering to this. But again, we never heard from them what was the main idea. So if for 30 years, Karakalpakstan never suffered any separatist intentions if there were no tensions and ambitions to leave with Uzbekistan.

Yuri:

And now after these amendments were announced, Karakalpak agenda shifted towards, we want to quit. So the decision making process was poorly implemented. And the second one is communications. The communications with the society about the decisions made. Here in Uzbekistan, the government made a huge progress in information policy in informing the people about their action, like the done actions, and in promoting them. But the government is never really engaged in communicating. Because when you are communicating your decision, it means that you are trying to sell to the society your agenda, to demonstrate both positive aspects, negative aspects of the decision and just to try to persuade people that the decision is right. But what we have seen with Karakalpak amendments, they were never explained. They were never truly communicated to Karakalpak society because you never announced such amendments to an ethnic territory in your country, that you just abolish some status without preliminary discussions with these people, without attracting opinion leaders.

Yuri:

And the next. So I would like to specify that we had already such mini crisis caused by this poor decision making process. It’s not of course, comparable to Karakalpak one, but I remember a few years ago, I don’t know if it was 2017 or 2018, when Samarkand hosted a media event. There was a task to put an order to the streets and to deal with stray animals. And they just were killed, both stray animals and domestic animals. Then we had a program on renovation of infrastructure in the cities. And so people were just forced to leave their apartments, to leave their houses without compensation, et cetera. Again, it was poorly implemented, it was poorly communicated. Karakalpaks crisis is the most, let’s say, tragic and the most attractive to the media just because we have an ethnic minority there. And it’s the same logic of making mistakes in the decision making process. Because when the amendments were announced, Karakalpak society was not really eager to launch this ambitions to quit. There was a misunderstanding. They just didn’t get what is it about. And the government was silent.

Yuri:

They thought, I think, that if they stay silent, it will just be dealt itself. But the more they were silent, the more tensions grew and it resulted with the events of the first July. And as you can see, the second July president came to Nukus to abolish this amendment. So if the government did the same thing on Monday, not on Saturday, we could never have this tragic event. So again, poor implementation of their decisions and poor communication of their decisions. And the last but not least what I would like to mention is that the government should shift from one sided communications with the society to two sided communications. So the government should be more attentive to the feedbacks it has on different ambitions that it declares and try to understand what people want. But in a post-Soviet area, sometimes when the government go to compromise, try to fight a solution with the society, it is perceived as the weakness. Because we live in the post area, the inheritance of Soviet area where you have a hard power at the main indicator of force, the soft power is not appreciated.

Yuri:

And here the same thing. The government should quit this logic. If it tries to understand people and receive the feedback and improve their different program initiatives, et cetera, upon the feedbacks, it’s not the weakness. On the contrary, it means that the government tries to build this lines with the people and to build the network that can function and that can always indicate that something is going wrong. Because we don’t know how the decision was made but we definitely know that when the decision on the amendments concerning Karakalpakstan was made, nobody in the government told guys, it will not end well, we should not do this. Or they told it but they were not really influential to influence this decision. And in this case, you need the society. You need always this top down and bottom up communications in order to improve the program, in order not to make silly mistakes that cause then some really tragic events. I will stop here and I think we can move to the Q and A.

Marlene Laruelle :

Thank you so much Yuri, for your question. Listening to you all and looking at the discussion in the chat, I was thinking about the events we had in January about the Kazakh event. And I can feel the same kind of, of course, gap between what is the analytical perspective and the fact that many people in the chat are already focusing on what is happening on the ground in term of police violence, detention, the way it will be investigated and so on. And I think that’s just totally typical for any authoritarian regime repressing a population. So it just make me putting Kazakhstan in parallel. But I also see in the four of your presentation is, so several small points before taking some question, that we see a wake up from a lot of societies in the post-Soviet region, right? We had Kazakhstan, we had Belarus, right? I even don’t speak up about Ukraine and Russia, right? And I think it’s Timur who was saying that it’s a new generation, right?

Marlene Laruelle :

It’s new people who have been used to living relatively compared to some Soviet period, more free in society and who are waiting from the regimes to deliver more. And I think that is that also. So there is a general context. Then you have systemic political issue that all of you were mentioning, right? The point is not only a Karakalpakstan, the point is just how the Uzbek regime is treating its own Uzbek cities than as a whole. And here also, as you were saying, we have a lot of issues about reversing the top down mechanism and finding way to engage with society and to be more on a listening mood than on a ordering mood. Then we have systemic social economic issues. And I think it’s really important for us to remember, what is Karakalpakstan, right? In term of social economic dynamic. It just one of the worst region of the country. And it has been like that since always, right? So it’s really a region in suffering social economically. And then only then arrive, I think, the ethnic cultural aspect that make things worse, of course, received by that minority.

Marlene Laruelle :

Thank you so much. That’s a great way to conclude. I think our discussion. I wanted to thank all of you for your great insight and thanks our participants who were some very lively and just to remind that it’s always better in an academic context to be collegiate in cordial in the chat discussion and to avoid other accusations because they are not helping the cause. So, as I said, thank you once again for your great insight. Indeed, it’s a very sensitive topic and we all understand how the situation is stands on the ground for all the citizens of Uzbekistan and especially the Karakalpaks right now. And we hope to reconvene sometime in August for the only Karakalpak centered discussion and try to give the floor to people from the region about what is going on, but also more broadly about the situation culturally and social economically of the Karakalpak region. Thank you so much once again and hope to see you very soon in one of our other events. Thank you all.