So where I’ll try and go now is to try and go forward in the sense what do we do now? What’s the situation on the ground and what has been the regional response? And where do we go in a sense from US and international policy response? I think first of all from a local response the, unfortunately the local government or the national government has very, very little authority very little legitimacy. And has very little practical… levers of power that they actually have control over. So for them to either actually do something is very, very difficult. And since you either need to have legitimacy or you need to have power. Ideally you have both and since they have neither and so anything they’re able to do is going to be extremely constrained. The problem one of the biggest problems right now and I just spoke to someone in the region in [IB] just a few days ago. Still one of the biggest issues is the lack of trust in the police services in the local and the police [IB]. Is that they are seen as how much of this is completely true we are going to have to wait to find out. What we are seeing as a major part in the ethnic violence and we are seeing this going into villages and actually killing people burning homes and are not seen as protectors. And so the police have lost any amount of legitimacy as a protector from one group to another. And that’s a very key point. The end of the day while it is a national police service in that sense it’s not a national police service in the sense of the control. It’s very localized in it’s control I saw this in 2005 I have seen it throughout the region. Is that the local leaders really control the regional police services.
And so the idea of a unified national control is really not what’s occurring. And so that’s I would argue the most important issue right now is the lack of control of the police services in the south. And so general citizens don’t feel safe they don’t feel safe opening their businesses they don’t feel safe travelling. They don’t feel safe if they are stopped in the street if you’re an ethnic Uzbek and you’re stopped by ethnic Kazakh militia you are going to have a fair shake you don’t know what’s going to happen to you. And that’s a fundamental problem that has to be solved before you can have any degree of stability in the region. The government right now unfortunately is, they are purely in a reactive state. Regionally what has happened Uzbekistan opened the border I believe it was June 12th and 13th I think close it again June 14th and 15th. I’ve heard some discussion that Uzbekistan’s done a great job of stepping forward and helping. I beg to differ a little bit. I think the key part is they opened the border very briefly but then they shut it down. It’s their reaction has historically and primarily been we don’t want the instability we don’t want the refugees. We don’t want the people coming into the region and creating more problems.
So Uzbekistan has done some humanitarian aid and is assisting with some of the refugees on their side of the border but it’s extremely minimal. Kazakhstan closed their border for a period of time it’s now reopened. I’ve heard it’s completely reopened for most traffic I don’t know all the border crossings but I believe it is. They have been providing some humanitarian aid. Kazakhstan of course is the chair of the [OSCE] and has tried to use that role to make international appeal to be… But to be quite honest it’s had very little effect in terms of any type of [OSCE] action in the region. You would think this is almost the ideal situation Kazakh the neighbor to the north is the chair of the [OSCE] if anyone can provide the pressure. But unfortunately that really hasn’t been the case and I’ll come back to the [OSCE] in a minute. China there’s been no major… they briefly closed the borders but for China it’s primarily a trade route. Border very briefly closed in June mid June once things [quieted] down after tow or three days border’s back open and trucks as far as I am able to hear are more or less continuing across the border provided a small amount of humanitarian aid at this point. But I don’t expect China to make a major shift. Or they’ll just the borders will continue to be open and they’ll just monitor the situation. They are not; I don’t expect them to do very much. And Russia’s response was also this really isn’t our problem quite simply in the phone call to [IB] that was publicized [IB] basically sorry you’re on your own we’ll send some humanitarian aid. They do send in troops the troops to the [cont] air base to protect their air base and not to do anything else.
So I mean I think it’s there’s a, in a sense nothing has happened in the international community for Kazakhstan to put it quite blankly. There has been some international humanitarian assistance which is important. But from a security stand point which you remember is what we’ve been talking about for Central Asia for the last 20 years is that this is an important security nexus. This is important because of Afghanistan it’s important because of Pakistan. It’s important because of Islamic terrorist groups it’s important because of drugs. And if we ever have an explosion in [Fergana] valley it would be horrible well it happened. And generally the international response has been a shrug quite simply. And you can argue whether that’s good or bad. You can argue that it’s a good thing that it didn’t turn into a widespread violence and spread across the borders and we are not seeing violence in Uzbekistan that’s a very good thing. But it’s also on the other side we really haven’t… all these organizations just briefly to touch on them very briefly. The [CSTO] which is the security organization group that’s part of the former Soviet Union states many of them are members of which has an agreement that if one member similar to a NATO if one member is attacked the other members will respond has decided to do nothing. And the response again from Russia was the CSTO would only come into effect if there were armed incursion from another country internal violence we won’t respond to.