Barbara: Welcome everyone, my name is Barbara Janice [IB], I’m a scholar, research scholar at the [Woodrow], [IB] centre for scholars, I recently received my PHD in political science from Indiana University and I’m working on post Soviet opposition movements, and actually all the post soviet [IB] now and it’s my great pleasure to be here. And I thank the Rumiforum for inviting me. So I’ll serve as the moderator, and I’d like to introduce Dr. Kevin Jones who is an assistant professor at Georgetown University. Dr. Jones has a lot of experience not only in Kyrgyzstan but also in many of the post soviet countries and he currently is working at a research centre at Georgetown University and his expertise ranges from studying conflict in Africa, to Mexico to the former soviet space and he’s even done some work in United States. Dr. Jones is an expert in Kyrgyzstan, not only is he a scholar of central Asian politics and of conflict in central Asia, but he also is a practitioner, he worked for the United States agency for international development and as a volunteer in the peace corp. for five years. And Dr. Jones has an extensive array of publications and the ones that I thought were very interesting were, his publications, he include a manual, a teaching guide manual, entitled conflict management and peace keeping. He has also published, will have an upcoming publication on the drug killings of US consulate employees in Mexico, he also has worked on projects and has a publication forthcoming on violence during Kenya’s 2007 election and he has done an excellent assessment of the international response to the [Andy John] events in 2005 with Fiona Hill. I think Dr. Jones work has really contributed great deal to our collective understanding and ways that we can prevent and effectively respond to violent conflict, and so without further ado, I’ll give the floor Dr. Jones.
Kevin DeWitt: Thank you Barbara, thank you very much. We were talking earlier and discussed that, first of all for sure I’ve met her husband and probably met you at some point in central Asia, so it’s a small world of those that focus on central Asia and we often cross paths many times. And actually reminds me of…we are here at the Rumiforum, reminds me of one of my favourite [Sufi] wise people which is [nazrudin] you can decide which country he’s actually from and we can leave that for another debate, but a wise [Sufi] fool as they described him, and he has a great story, where he’s sitting at a cross roads, and he’s sitting at this cross roads where absolutely nothing is happening, it’s an empty road, but there was a very large rock there, so he sits down on top of the large rock, and he’s just sitting there quite calmly and his followers come up to him and go “ oh great master, teacher, why are you sitting at this cross roads, there’s absolutely nothing happening here, why are you here”?
So he sits back in his very wise foolish way, he responds “well, there’s nothing here but something might here, and when it does happen here I will have the absolute best seat in the entire house.” Now I feel a little bit like that watching central Asia since I went there in 1997, and have had the pleasure of actually watching the region from one of the best seats in the house having lived there for quite some time and going back there regularly. And now unfortunately the things that are happening there are not the things that you would want to be observing, but I feel a little bit like the wise fool sitting there and saying eventually it will come and everyone will look at this tiny little spot on the map.
So I’ll start with a little bit and then I’m only going to try and… I have my clock here actually to keep myself on time and Barbara will throw something at me, I’m sure if I go too long. I’m going to try in about 20 minutes so we can have plenty of time for questions and discussions, I’m going to try and give a bit of a background on the region, I know many of you know the region, but want to give a little bit of the background on some of the history and conflict and kind of what bring us up to the current present situation, talk a little bit about specifically what happened in 2005, because that’s a very important stage setter for what happened in 2010, go into a little bit more detail of what happened in April with the presidential protest that occurred in April 2010, and then bring us up to the current what happened in June 2010, and really bring us up as much as I can to what’s happening right now. And much on the same way with quantum physics, the closer you get the more confusing it gets, the more we get closer to the present day of what’s happening there the more confusing it is. And quite simple, I talk to friends on the ground, I read reports, but what’s happening right now is quite simply difficult to ascertain exactly.