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Chapter 3 Femicide as Terrorism: The Case of Uzbekistan’s Unveiling Murders Marianne Kamp Although a “conflict zone” may be a war zone, many conflict zones consist of situations where the state lacks a monopoly on violence and where, in that absence, various groups try to assert their own dominance through force against agents of the state. Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet government and Communist Party struggled against multiple opponents to establish control over most of the territories of the former Russian Empire. The first few years of this struggle, 1918 to 1923, involved open warfare between competing military forces. The civil war’s end, when the Red Army defeated the Whites, did not halt conflict in all of the Soviet territories . In Central Asia, armed rebel groups known as basmachi (attackers/ bandits), fought against Soviet rule, attacking rural communities to supply themselves and to gain cooperation from villagers. The Soviet state, unable to assert dominance over rural districts, sought loyalty from the Central Asian rural poor by offering benefits, while using violence to arrest the supporters of the basmachi, the wealthy, and village leaders. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, basmachi attacks continued, but rural Central Asia also experienced Soviet state power, as authorities established village councils, initiated land reform, and threatened traditional elites. Those elites tried to mobilize their own resources to maintain their positions. In this context, one of the Communist Party’s initiatives for rapid cultural change opened a new, gendered zone of conflict. From 1927 to 1930, Uzbek men attacked and murdered Uzbek women who had unveiled. The murders were a violent social response to the Hujum (attack), a Communist Party campaign to change Muslim women’s lives in Central Asia by enforcing legal equality, opening schools and jobs for them, and encouraging them to join the Communist Party. In Uzbekistan, mass unveiling ceremonies Femicide as Terrorism: The Case of Uzbekistan’s Unveiling Murders 57 became the Hujum’s most potent symbol. It is estimated that 2,500 women were murdered in connection with unveiling between 1927 and 1930—during the Hujum. The officially atheist Communist Party pushed for a radical social change, one that intervened in Uzbek family and community life. Many Muslim clergy denounced these efforts and called upon fellow Uzbeks to attack and kill unveiled women. Many murderers were from the victim’s family; others were neighbors or community members. For several years the Communist Party regarded the unveiling murders as “crimes of everyday life,” a category that included polygyny and minor marriage, and thus as evidence of Uzbek society’s need for the party’s intervention in family life. Crimes of everyday life violated the Soviet Constitution ’s guarantees of rights, but unlike other crimes, their motivation was attributed to custom, which both marked their perpetrators as backward and mitigated the consequences of their actions. Some historians have argued that the party prematurely or wrongly initiated the Hujum, thus stimulating a wave of violence against unprotected women.1 Both the party’s regard of murders as “crimes of everyday life,” and scholarship that sees the party as provoking the murder wave, assume that in Central Asian society, violence against women, including murder, was natural. Neither party nor scholars question why men would respond to state offenses, or to women’s unveiling, by harming women. Anthropologist Shirin Akiner writes: “For Central Asians, [the Hujum] was a defeat and a brutal rape; the honor and dignity of the community was suddenly and monstrously violated.”2 The Soviet state launched radical changes, but to focus on the state’s role as provocateur is nonetheless very one-sided. The state did not murder or rape women; Uzbek men did. Rhetorical flourishes aside, coerced unveiling cannot be made the equivalent of rape or murder. The temporal and cultural contexts for these murders help explain them, but even more important are questions about the purposes of the murderers. In trying to deal with the murder wave, one of the state’s strategies was to re-evaluate the seriousness of the murders, changing their legal category from “crimes of everyday life,” to “terrorism” and “counter-revolution.” The murder wave in Uzbekistan took place in the context of a struggle for control of society between groups whose religious ideas shaped their politics , and a government that forcefully opposed religion. The Communist Party regarded enforcing women’s equality as important to transforming the economy, politics, and culture, for the goal of “building socialism.” Clergy who spoke in...

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