A Kyrgyz Revolution... if we can keep it

I haven't been blogging on the Kyrgyz developments for what I view as understandable time-consumption reasons, but the main thing I would watch for now that Akayev appears to be out of the way is what Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) and the remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan/Islamic Movement of Turkestan (IMU/IMT) do now that he is gone. The IMU/IMT is an al-Qaeda affiliate group, but they don't have anywhere near the infrastructure or clout that Hezbollah does in Lebanon.

Of these two groups, HuT is the better organized and the one most likely to attempt to seize advantage of the chaos.

There is a lot that is unknown about HuT, but (and Nathan may quibble with me on this one) whenever I see the group's name pop up I always think back to this comment from the wiretaps taken by the Milan prosecutor's office that were printed up in Il Nuovo:

On 16 of last month there was a confidential meeting with the shaykhs in Poland; the final decision was to completely change the Hizb al-Tahrir front and to build a new organization that concerns
itself with the national territory and with the international territory but we need highly trained people at every level.

The speaker is an unknown German Arab al-Qaeda member, possibly Abderrazak al-Mahjoub, and he is addressing Nasr Usama Mustafa (Abu Umar), the Egyptian imam of Milan's infamous Via Quaranta mosque. If the latter name sounds familiar to you, it may be because it appears quite likely that he was abducted by the CIA and sent back to his native country, where he may have been subject to torture at the hands of the Egyptian authorities. In any case, Abu Umar was unquestionably an al-Qaeda member and the fact that his unknown superior refers to Hizb-ut-Tahrir as a "front" certainly places anything they try in Kyrgyzstan in a far different perspective than simply being a large group of Islamist fundamentalists. I should also probably add the standard caveat that even if they are an al-Qaeda front I still don't support the policies of despots like Karimov with respect to their mass detention and torture of suspected HuT members.

All the same, I think that the comments of Abu Umar's unidentified visitor need to be seen within the context of the following excerpts from the Heritage Foundation report:

In documents drafted before 9/11, Hizb leaders accused the United States of imposing hegemony on the world. After 9/11, Hizb claimed that the U.S. had declared war against the global Muslim community (Umma), had established an international alliance under the "pretext" of fighting terrorism, and was reinforcing its grip on the countries of Central Asia. Hizb further claimed that the U.S. accused Osama bin Laden of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks "without any evidence or proof."

The current leader of Hizb is also unknown, as are where he resides and the identity of the senior officers of Hizb ... While anecdotal reports place the organization's headquarters in London and indicate that many European converts to Islam are staffing mid- and senior levels of the organization, very little evidence confirms this.

You put all of this together and I think that a very worrying picture starts to form. We have just had what I think that we can all agree is a positive development in Central Asia, but now, as in Lebanon, the issue is whether or not we (or rather, the Kyrgyz) can keep it that way.

UPDATE: Arthur Chrenkoff has some thoughts.