[Dixielandjazz] S. Frederick Starr--complex person

Wed May 24 18:08:13 PDT 2006

To:  DJML Listmates

This article from Harpers.org relating to S. Frederick Starr, founder of the
Louisiana Repertory Ensemble.  It's more about his current political
activities as an advocate for Uzbekistan.  OK to skip it  if it is outside
your interest range.  However, many on this list either know Fred Starr  or
are aware of his jazz related activity.  I hope that you will, as I did,
find of significant interest.

Fred Starr-is a former professor, college president, jazz scholar, historian
and now political advisor and political advocate.

He's formerly served on the Tulane faculty.  During that period he formed
the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble.  Sometimes still plays with that
group, time available.

Subsequently he became president of Oberlin College.

Author:  as mentioned in the article, he wrote the definitive book on Jazz
in Russia.  Also, not mentioned in the article, he wrote the definitive
biography of America's first piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Oxford
U. Press, 1995.

I had occasion to speak with him a couple of times about jazz related
matters and heard him as featured speaker at the Louis Armstrong, Satchmo
Summerfest, in New Orleans.

Last time we spoke on the phone several years ago, I inquired about his
activities and he said he was working in the DC area trying to promote
international trade.

In reading this article, I hadn't realized that he'd been an advisor to
presidents and had no idea about his advocacy of Uzbekistan.

For information and possible comment.

_________________________________________

The Professor of Repression

S. Frederick Starr, Uzbekistan's friend in Washington

Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006. By Ken Silverstein
<http://harpers.org/KenSilverstein.html#sb-professor-repression-3284828> . 

Sources <http://harpers.org/sb-professor-repression-3284828.html##> 

A year ago this month, security forces in Uzbekistan killed hundreds of
protesters in the town of Andijan. Human rights groups and journalists
reported that the crowd was overwhelmingly unarmed and had come out to
protest corruption and poor economic conditions. "The scale of this killing
was so extensive, and its nature was so indiscriminate and disproportionate,
that it can best be described as a massacre," Human Rights Watch said in a
study of the events at Andijan. 

The regime of Islam Karimov sought to justify the carnage by saying that the
demonstration was organized by Islamic militants seeking to overthrow the
government (an argument the Uzbek government knows is music to the ears of
the Bush Administration). Last week the Karimov regime sought to prove its
case by staging the U.S. debut of a short video on the Andijan crackdown.
The event was sponsored by the Hudson Institute and the Central Asia
Caucasus Institute (CACI) at Johns Hopkins University, and co-hosted by CACI
director Professor S. Frederick Starr. An account at EurasiaNet.org said
that Starr "sought to undermine the credibility of several independent news
accounts . . . alleging journalists deliberately falsified their stories. 'I
think they were lying . . . of course they had an anti-government agenda,'"
he said. 

It was all in a day's work for Starr, who is perhaps the Karimov regime's
most outspoken advocate in Washington-a regime that once tortured a
political prisoner to death with methods that included the use of boiling
water and then arrested his elderly mother when she complained. He also
speaks fondly of several other despotic governments in central Asia, a
region he views almost exclusively through theprism of American geopolitical
interests and with little interest in issues like human rights and
corruption. 

Starr, an advisor on Soviet Affairs to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush, is described by those who know him as charming, erudite, and
brilliant. His 1983 book, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union,
is widely considered to be one of the most intellectually scintillating
feats of Cold War scholarship. Starr is a past director of Sidanko, a
Russian energy corporation, and Rector Pro Tem at the University of Central
Asia. 

Starr has led CACI since it was founded in 1996, and he has actively sought
friendly relationships with Central Asian governments and leaders. He even
wrote the preface to the 1998 English-language version of Karimov's
page-turner, Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century. Starr
wrote that Uzbekistan had "made impressive strides" since gaining
independence in 1991, including putting "in place the main elements of a
more consultative and responsive government," and went on to approvingly
cite Karimov's assertion that "social harmony and stability are the
essential conditions for reform and not merely its consequences."
Translation: "Until the population stops complaining about my leadership,
reform is impossible and political repression required." 

CACI has also worked closely with the Bush administration. Starr is
especially tight with vice president Dick Cheney's office and is friendly
with ex-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, now head of the World Bank;
Wolfowitz is also the former dean of John Hopkins's School of Advanced
International Studies, where CACI is housed. The Pentagon has long sought to
justify its ties to Central Asian regimes and Starr has been happy to
deliver the requisite intellectual underpinnings. At the request of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff he helped author a 2001 study, Strategic Assessment of
Central Asia, which was produced by CACI and the Atlantic Council. "The U.S.
government uses his institute as a bridge to deepening relationships with
governments in the region," said a person familiar with CACI and who asked
to speak off the record. 

CACI works closely with the local Uzbek embassy and Starr sometimes appears
on Capital Hill, where he offers testimony that invariably supports the
regime. At one congressional hearing in 2004 he said that Uzbekistan was
making important strides on democracy and attacked human rights groups,
suggesting that they were exaggerating problems under Karimov. 

Starr also is frequently cited in the press, where his close ties to the
government go unnoted and he is identified merely as an independent academic
expert. In a 2004 story in the Washington Times, he decried Congress's
refusal to certify that Uzbekistan was making progress on human rights,
which had led to a partial aid cutoff. "This is a shortsighted, poorly
informed and self-defeating decision that contradicts the view of some of
the best experts in the State Department itself and of independent experts
as well," he told the newspaper. "The decertification is a body blow to many
known reformers in the Uzbek government." 

On May 16, 2005, just days after the Andijan massacre, Starr was already
peddling the Karimov regime's line in an interview on NPR. He generally
blamed problems in the country on Islamic militants, described the country
as a "linchpin of the region," and said a revolution there "could be a
disaster." The United States, said Starr, has "a very serious interest
there, not jut a security one but a large regional one because it borders
all the countries in the region." 

Starr doesn't just do Uzbekistan. He served as an election observer to
Kazakhstan's 2004 parliamentary vote, a trip sponsored by a group called the
International Tax and Investment Center (ITIC). Starr and an "independent"
observer team that included ITIC's president, Daniel Witt, said that while
much of the Western media "judged the election a failure," it had concluded
that the balloting marked "a real and even notable step forward." 

Starr and Witt were back to "monitor" the following year's presidential vote
in Kazakhstan and they again disagreed with the majority of observers who
denounced the election as badly flawed. "While there were shortcomings
compared to international standards, it was a genuine competition and
represented an important step forward, not only for Kazakhstan but the
entire region," they wrote. As with the 2004 ITIC report, the Kazakh embassy
in Washington posted the assessment on its web site. 

So what exactly is the ITIC? According to the group's web site, it is a
non-profit organization "that is helping to lower barriers to tax, trade and
investment in transition economies by facilitating the exchange of
information and know-how between Western executives and government officials
in these countries." Witt emphasized in an email to me that ITIC receives no
funding from the Kazakh government. That's correct-but he does get cash from
a host of companies and organizations with interests in Kazakhstan,
including the American Chamber of Commerce in Kazakhstan, ChevronTexaco,
China National Petroleum Corporation, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, the
Kazakhstan Petroleum Association, Marathon Oil Corporation, and Occidental
Petroleum. 

I emailed back to ask Witt if such funding undermined ITIC's claim of
independence. "ITIC does NOT do election related work," he replied. "These
two election related missions were more my personal desire to further
promote economic reforms and show the positive correlation with political
reforms. Thus, there was NO influence on the above mission reports and
related op-ed/articles from any of our sponsors or board members." 

Right. I'm sure Witt would deem as impartial an election observer team sent
to Cuba by a group that was funded by companies with billions invested on
the island. His assertion that ITIC does no election work seems equally
bizarre, especially as a statement by his team of observers was put out on
ITIC letterhead and both reports are on the group's web site. 

Starr has also lent a helping hand to the regime in Azerbaijan. In October
of 2002, Ilham Aliyev - who has since succeeded his father as president but
was then First Vice-President of the state oil company, a member of
parliament, Vice-Chairman of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, and head of
the national Olympic Committee-visited Washington for meetings with Bush
administration officials and with "prominent policy thinkers," according to
a statement from the Azeri government, which listed Starr in the latter
category. 

During that visit, Aliyev also spoke at Johns Hopkins, an event sponsored by
Starr's CACI and Harvard University's Caspian Studies Program, the latter
which has converted itself into the Azeri government's unofficial press
agency. The Caspian Studies Program was launched in 1999 with a $1 million
grant from the United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce-whose past and
present advisors and directors include Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, James
Baker III, and Brent Scowcroft-and a consortium of companies led by
ExxonMobil and Chevron. Its inaugural program was a panel discussion
featuring Ilham Aliyev. 

Unlike Harvard, Starr apparently doesn't charge for his services. He told me
that CACI receives no funding from Central Asian governments or oil
companies other than $25,000 annually from Chevron during the Institute's
first few years of existence, which Starr said was cut off because the
company disagreed with certain positions taken by CACI. Given Starr's
record, that's true ingratitude. 

* * *

This is The Professor of Repression by Ken Silverstein
<http://harpers.org/KenSilverstein.html#sb-professor-repression-3284828> ,
published Wednesday, May 24, 2006. It is part of Washington Babylon
<http://harpers.org/WashingtonEditor.html> , which is part of Harpers.org
<http://harpers.org/index.html> . 