Mick Hartley

Under the heading “A Powder Keg That Is About To Explode”, Giles Whitten in the Times looks at Uzbekistan:

To Rumsfeld, Uzbekistan is the country on Afghanistan’s northern border that helpfully leased a major military base to US forces for its conquest of the Taleban. To discerning travellers for the past six centuries it has been the land of Tamerlane; of silk and saffron and the finest oases between the Pamirs and the Caspian. It is also, in 2004, an astonishing preglasnost relic where democracy, free markets and religious tolerance are if anything more remote than in 1991, the year in which Islam Karimov, deftly but unopposed, promoted himself from General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Uzbek SSR to President of his own new, independent republic.

Karimov has an intense dislike of being judged by the criteria of the international human rights agenda. He would prefer to be left to enjoy a place at the top table of world leaders, to which he has been welcomed because of Uzbekistan’s strategic position at the heart of Central Asia. Since 9/11, with some equivocations, the US has obliged. For opening the Khanabad base to American forces in September 2001 Karimov was rewarded with a full-dress White House reception and US aid worth more than $200 million a year. Renewal of a significant chunk of that aid depends on a decision by the US Secretary of State on whether to certify that Uzbekistan is moving in the right direction on human rights. Colin Powell’s decision, due last month, has been postponed.

A failure to re-certify Uzbekistan would risk unravelling America’s entire Central Asian strategy, yet the alternative would trigger widespread derision. As Craig Murray, Britain’s Ambassador in Tashkent, told The Times last week: “No reasonable person could argue in good faith that there is any sign of improvement in the human rights situation. It’s still appalling.” […]

President Karimov’s morbid fear of religious fundamentalism is fashionable in the age of al-Qaeda but also deeply Soviet, and Sovietism preserved in aspic is Uzbekistan’s real problem. The country has not survived the past 12 years completely unchanged — Tashkent has its Sheraton; cell phone signals are impressive — but opposition parties are banned, all media is censored and Karimov’s delusions are beginning to rival those of his neighbour, President Saparmurat “Turkmenbashi” Niyazov of Turkmenistan. (In September Karimov’s historical and political writings will reportedly become the core of the Uzbek national curriculum.)

As for the economy, it makes Stalin’s five-year plans look nuanced and enlightened. Over the past two years Karimov has sealed his borders, slapped a 70 per cent tariff on all imports and shut down the bazaars. Soviet-era collective farms are unreformed and pay their workers the equivalent of $2 a month. Technically, private farming is allowed, but those who try it are told what to grow, whom to sell it to and at what price. Last month a Western researcher visited a “private” farm southwest of Tashkent whose “owner” had dared to sell his apples on the open market. He received a ten-year prison sentence while his neighbours were ordered to cut down his apple trees, and did so.

“Miserable poverty combined with a total lack of solidarity is producing a social vacuum,” this researcher said. “And it’s precisely this vacuum that militant Islam is filling.”