From the issue dated April 23, 2004
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In Central Asia, an American Professor Finds Hostility Spiked With Cynicism
It was the first day of the new academic year, and I was already stumped. A new Fulbright professor of journalism, I had arrived in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, just a week earlier, and had managed to figure out what to teach in the absence of a university catalog and to craft a syllabus for my course without an academic calendar. But with my first class due to begin in 10 minutes, I still couldn't devise a way to get into my classroom here in this former Soviet republic. "Klyuch?" I repeatedly asked the key lady, one of five guards perched officiously behind a desk just inside the entrance to the main building of the Kyrgyz-Russian-Slavonic University. (My Russian was abysmal, but I suspected that the language barrier was the least of my problems.) "She's a foreign professor visiting this year," a kind student offered, intervening on my behalf. The key lady glowered: "Under whose authority?" "The rector," answered my young savior, invoking the name of the highest authority she could imagine. At the mere mention of the mighty one -- rectors at Central Asian universities are academic ayatollahs -- the key lady sat up straighter. But she still didn't turn over the key. "Americanski?" she snapped after a careful examination of my clothes. "Da," I said, introducing myself. The ice did not melt, but once I signaled my willingness to sign her log, she grudgingly entrusted me with the means to enter my classroom. My first class was a disaster. Ten minutes into an exegesis on course requirements and the impropriety of turning assignments in late, a dour woman in a white coat barged in. Without so much as a glance in my direction, she commanded my students to follow her out the door, leaving me standing alone, mid-sentence, at the blackboard. Only later did I discover that she'd led them away for their annual vaccinations. My second class got off to a similarly awkward start when the director of the American Center, a suite of rooms outfitted by the U.S. Embassy with books, computers, and furniture, snarled at me for leaning against a desk that my taxes had helped to pay for. Still, flushed with excitement at the prospect of training young people who would forge a new journalism after decades of Pravda and other state-controlled rags, I refused to give in to despair. Week after week I chatted up students clustered around the tea table and introduced myself to passing faculty members. But my enthusiasm was rarely reciprocated. A few professors deigned to nod in my direction when we crossed paths, but most simply refused to talk to me. "She doesn't belong here," one philosopher opined (at least that's how my students characterized her statement). Other faculty members, I was told, warned students to beware of "the American": "She must be an agent," they cautioned. "CIA or FBI." Nike maintained no sweatshop anywhere in the country. U.S. troops had never despoiled Central Asian soil. Few Kyrgyz had ever seen an American. Still, the wariness was palpable. Over the past three years, I have often wondered how I would have explained such suspicion if I had arrived in Kyrgyzstan after September 11, 2001. Would I have simply assumed that the hostility was a result of the United States' bombing of Afghanistan or its invasion of Iraq? But I landed in Central Asia in August 2001. And as I taught journalism in Bishkek, lectured in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, reported from Afghanistan and Iran, and traveled across Iraq, Russia, China, and Indochina over the course of the following year, I was forced to confront a more confounding tangle. I caught my first glimpse into that miasma of misinformation, envy, and anxiety on the morning of September 12, 2001, when I staggered into class only to face my students' announcement that a world war between Christians and Muslims was imminent. I had been up all night surfing through 63 television channels that did not include CNN, so I wasn't exactly in the mood to teach. But the professorial gene kicked in as soon as I settled behind my desk. "Which Christians and which Muslims?" I asked the class. Half of the students in the room called themselves Muslimsalthough after eight decades of Soviet hegemony, few knew what Islam required. "Are you talking about yourselves?" "Not really. Muslims here aren't really Muslims like in Afghanistan." The quietest girl in the class shyly suggested, "But Muslims have to defend other Muslims against attack" I stopped her mid-sentence. "What if the Muslims are in the wrong? And what happens when Muslims attack other Muslims?" "Muslims don't attack other Muslims," she insisted. "Iran and Iraq? The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait? Should I go on?" A boy in the back raised his hand. "But Muslims have no choice but to hate the United States and declare a jihad, since the United States is always attacking Muslims," he said. "Is that true?" I pressed. "Where have we attacked Muslims?" "I don't know. That's what people say." "In Bosnia and Somalia, we were supporting Muslims," I said. "And in the war against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, we were supporting Muslims who were attacked by other Muslims." A stony silence, more of bewilderment than hostility, enveloped the room, as if I'd just announced to a group of American students that the earth wasn't round, or that Utah was just a cartographer's fantasy. It was the first of many retreats in the face of an unaccustomed challenge to official truths. Tired and cranky, I filled the void by turning a table: "Can you explain to me why there's never been a call for a jihad against Russia?" The room tensed. "Why should Muslims be angry at the Russians? The Russians are our brothers." "But your 'brothers' have been attacking Islam for decades," I countered, ticking off the list: the suppression of Islam in Central Asia, the invasion of Afghanistan, the war in Chechnya. "But the Russians are poor," they responded. My second lesson in Anti-Americanism 101 followed swiftly in my afternoon class. "America got what it deserved because it always meddles in everyone else's business," exclaimed a senior named Rada, just moments after her classmates offered me their formal sympathies for the attacks on New York and Washington. "What 'meddling' are you talking about?" I asked. They all shouted at once: Vietnam, Bosnia, Serbia, Haiti, Somalia, Iraq. Their knowledge of history, well beyond what American teenagers could have mustered, was cold comfort. Could they really see no difference between Vietnam, which I thought of as old-style American imperialism, and Bosnia or Haiti, President Clinton's postmodern brand? I interrupted the litany: "If Uzbekistan invaded Kyrgyzstan to annex the Kyrgyz part of the Fergana Valley, what would you want the United States to do?" The lush valley had been split between the Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tajik Soviet Socialist Republics by Stalin, no slouch in the "divide and conquer" department. But in the post-Soviet era, many Uzbeks lusted after the entire basin. "You must defend us," they said. "But we can't," I responded. "That would be meddling." "Oh, no, it would be different if the Uzbeks invaded. You wouldn't be meddling. You would be defending us." I knew that back home Americans were searching desperately for understanding, for someone to punish, or for new policies and programs that might win hearts and minds. But nothing I heard or saw on my travels offered a single, practical clue about how to turn back the global tsunami of anti-Americanism. In fact, in Iran, where I spent my winter break reporting and vacationing, I couldn't detect so much as a glimpse of it. No matter where I wandered there -- from Qom, home of the revolution that toppled the shah, to old Bam and Tehran, passers-by stopped to chat or invite me to tea, their warmth to an old enemy perhaps the clearest reflection of their animosity toward their own government. "Why don't more Americans come to Iran?" they asked. "We love Americans." In Afghanistan, where I sneaked in to do some reporting just as the Taliban were sneaking out, women peeked out of their doorways, kissed my hands, and murmured, "Thank you." The following summer, in Myanmar, strangers approached me and whispered, "Why won't the United States do for us what you did for Afghanistan?" Even the verbal abuse heaped on me during class by students, and the daily glares from the key lady, felt too empty and passionless to be very revelatory. The students weren't militant about their anti-Americanism, or about much of anything. History had rendered them too cynical for any level of fervor. Their antagonism felt vestigial, the persistently acrid smell of the cold war tinged with envy and the bitter odor of half-truth doled out by a sleazy press. Only once during my yearlong sojourn did I witness anti-Americanism flare into the chilling belligerence seemingly endemic in Western Europe -- into screaming matches with young people and menacing tirades on television and in the press. But it had nothing to do with the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, globalization, or any other excess -- imagined or real -- of American adventurism. It was the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City, that turned the Central Asian streets mean. In Bishkek, once-friendly taxi drivers assailed me because George W. Bush had bribed judges to deprive Olga Koroleva of the gold medal in women's aerial freestyle skiing. My students railed that the judges had been corrupted by pity for America -- the only possible explanation for Sarah Hughes's triumph over Irina Slutskaya in the figure-skating competition. And in Turkmenistan, strangers in the market ranted at me about the injustice of Larissa Lazutina's disqualification from the games by Americans so threatened by her cross-country-skiing prowess that they'd trumped up a charge of drug use. Just before the closing ceremonies, I flew to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to lecture at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy, the Harvard University of Central Asia. After months of grappling with anti-Americanism that seemed a riot of contradiction and urban mythology, I thought I would finally have a chance to parse the issues with the brightest of students, to plumb the depths of world opinion with the region's most educated scholars. I had boned up on oil-pipeline plans that, rumor had it, were America's true agenda in Afghanistan, and on the fine points of the Caspian Sea negotiations. When I finished my lecture on the American news media and opened the floor to questions, I was convinced that I was ready for anything. A young faculty member rose to the microphone. The room fell still, 300 people bracing for the explosion. "Why did the United States cheat during the Winter Olympics?" he asked, a clear "gotcha" in his voice. Cheers erupted from the crowd, filling the lecture hall. "How do you know that the Americans cheated?" I asked with as much defiance as I could muster, although I was feeling more defeated than defiant. "It's been in all the Russian newspapers," he declared triumphantly. An old hand in the third world, I'm not easily thrown by such blatant anti-Americanism. But when I left the university that afternoon, I realized that I was weary. I'd moved to Central Asia to train journalists, not to strike a blow for Uncle Sam. Yet every word I uttered -- about critical thinking or the news media's responsibility to promote information above opinion -- was drowned out by the steady din of political fables and tabloidesque truths unalloyed with skepticism, nuance, or even fact. As I made my way back to the hotel, I was struck by the odd parallel between that conundrum and my nation's: Even if the United States became everyone's paragon of virtue -- a twisted tango, given the vagueness and endless mutations of virtue's definition -- how much really would change? Would the Russian press or Iranian television share that good news with people who have no means to change the channel? Elinor Burkett is chairwoman of the department of journalism at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and author of So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places (HarperCollins, 2004). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 33, Page B12 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education