Mick Hartley

Jeremy Page in the Times provides an update on the situation in Uzbekistan, two months after government troops fired on unarmed protesters in Andijan, killing hundreds:

In the chaos that followed, [Kabuljon] Parpiyev disappeared. Islam Karimov, the President of Uzbekistan, blamed the violence on local and foreign Islamic extremists, including the Taleban, and named Mr Parpiyev as the organiser.

Now Mr Parpiyev has briefly emerged from hiding in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan to reject Mr Karimov’s charges and to threaten further unrest. “Yes, we are all religious, but not extremists or radical Islamists or anything similar,” he told The Times through an intermediary in his first newspaper interview since the massacre.

“This is Karimov’s invention, to distract the world community’s attention from the Andijan events, to hide the roots.”

He also said that he was prepared to take up arms and stir further civil strife among Uzbekistan’s 26 million people. “They cannot be patient any more,” he said. “If they can get a small push, if they are supported, they will all stand up to fight the regime.”

I’m currently reading “Chasing the Sea” by Tom Bissell, an account of a journey through Uzbekistan undertaken in 2001. After the capital Tashkent, he visits the old Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, the Ferghana valley in the east of the country where the borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan interweave – deliberately, thanks to Stalin – in a nightmare of complexity, and finally the west and the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea. It’s a good read, and a useful way to soak up some understanding of the country. It’s clear, for instance, that Karimov’s fear of Islamic extremists is far from imaginary. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and despite the fact that Uzbeks and Tajiks and Kyrgyz belong to Hanafi Islam, one of the most tolerant and flexible of the Sunni subdivisions, Saudi-funded Wahhabis were encouraging young men in the Ferghana Valley to militarise and throw off secularism. Signs began to appear on mosques saying things like “Long Live the Islamic State”. Eventually their leader Tohirjon Yuldashev announced that the city of Namangan was under Islamic law and urged jihad against Karimov. By the late nineties Yuldashev, driven out of Uzbekistan, with his followers (and others) subject to imprisonment and torture by Karimov’s thugs, was resident in Taliban-controlled Kabul, and together with Juma Namangani announced the creation of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).

In 1999 IMU operatives detonated six car bombs in Tashkent in a failed effort to assassinate Karimov. The explosions killed 13 and wounded 128 people. The following year, IMU guerrillas based in neighbouring countries invaded southern Uzbekistan and penetrated as close as 60 miles to Tashkent before they were driven back.

So…on the one hand Karimov, a brutal hangover from Soviet Communism, on the other, the fundamentalists of the IMU….and in the middle, the Uzbek people.

Is Kabuljon Parpiyev, as Karimov claims, an extremist? He says not – but can any protest against Karimov avoid being co-opted by the fundamentalists, whether the IMU or our old friend Hizb-ut-Tahrir (“today the Guardian, tomorrow the world”) who have been implicated by Uzbek authorities? And for how long will the US continue to view Karimov as one of our bastards?