The Washington Post
July 1
Tashkent taxi driver sticks a plump thumb in the air and barks: "America, okay!" An authoritarian president speaks proudly of his "strategic relationship" with the Bush administration. Half a dozen dissidents argue that Washington can help democratize their still-feudal society.
All over Uzbekistan this summer, people are intrigued and enthused about their country's new alliance with the United States. The keenness grows from events that constitute high drama and historical transformation for a country that remains uncertain about its nationhood in the 12th year of independence.
President Islam Karimov was received warmly at the White House in March. About 1,000 U.S. troops are stationed here at an air base supporting the nearby war in Afghanistan. U.S. aid will nearly triple this year, and Karimov's government seems to be responding, if tentatively, to foreign pressure on human rights issues.
One of the dissidents to benefit from the new climate is Mikhail Ardzinov, 65 and white-haired, who was beaten bloody by the political police just three years ago. On the eve of Karimov's departure for Washington, Ardzinov exploited U.S. pressure to make his Independent Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan the first such group to be registered by the government.
Pressure from foreigners, especially Americans, is "very effective," Ardzinov said in his small apartment in a suburban high-rise. Garrulous and good natured, Ardzinov has preserved a small hole in the living room ceiling that once housed a KGB microphone.
He said the number of political and religious arrests has fallen sharply this year -- 60 since January, compared with 3,500 in 1999, the year Tashkent, Uzbekistan's capital, was hit by six mysterious car bombs in a single day. Without producing any evidence, the government blamed Muslim radicals and rounded up thousands of suspects, sending most of them to jail.
Of course, the families of those arrested don't see an improved situation. According to Matilda Bogner, Tashkent representative of Human Rights Watch, the wives of those arrestees, including several she visited recently, do not share the general enthusiasm for the United States. And in the countryside, many Uzbek Muslims are thought to sympathize with the Taliban more than with the West -- but silently.
It is just a few miles from Ardzinov's scruffy apartment building to the splendid new White Palace, as the official presidential office and residence is known. Making the trip takes a visitor from a poor and humble residence to an extravagant monument to political power, where Karimov, the last communist leader of Uzbekistan and now the father of this new country, is surrounded by an army of attentive guards and aides.
In an interview in a brightly lit reception room, Karimov leaned forward from a white sofa to emphasize the importance of the relationship with the United States from his perspective. The Russians don't like it, he said, not hiding his satisfaction, but the United States and Uzbekistan now have a genuine strategic relationship. "There was no way they could imagine it!" he said of the Russians.
He recounted with a satisfied grin how officials at the State Department were surprised when the Uzbeks proposed a formal statement on the new Uzbek-American alliance that included strong language on the need for Uzbekistan to democratize and move to a free-market economy -- "obligations we have taken for ourselves that the State Department didn't even imagine."
In the words of a senior Western diplomat here, Uzbekistan is an "opaque place." Everyone believes politics are dominated by mysterious and corrupt clans and alliances, the diplomat said, but no one can, or will, explain them to a visitor.
Karimov's clan is from Samarkand, the ancient city on the old Silk Road where the president grew up. But it also includes some business leaders in Tashkent. Or so it is widely believed.
In the words of this year's State Department report on human rights in Uzbekistan, elections held here since independence in 1991 have been "neither free nor fair." Karimov has banned his opponents from running and controlled the news media. Karimov's photograph appears in every official office in the country, and in conversation, his ministers always find a way to praise him personally.
Economic conditions are bad. In the crowded Fergana Valley, once the politically dominant region of the country but now marginalized by a government more favorably disposed to Tashkent and other areas, the unemployment rate may be more than 40 percent, according to a World Bank estimate. Soviet-era factories closed in droves, but relatively few new enterprises have opened.
Half of the 25 million people in Uzbekistan, by far the most populated country in Central Asia, are under the age of 19. Millions of jobs will have to be created, and quickly, to avoid an economic crisis.
For now, the country is surviving on trade. All kinds of people can be found in Uzbekistan's colorful bazaars, selling something to make a little money. Ismail Otabayev, an artist in the Fergana Valley town of Namangan, supports himself on a few dollars a week by selling fruits and berries from a private family plot in the town's bazaar.
Foreign investment is low, not least because the som, Uzbekistan's currency, is not freely convertible to hard currencies. The government manipulates the currency, selling it at a variety of exchange rates, a formula that seems to ensure corruption and confusion.
A delegation from the International Monetary Fund is currently in Tashkent evaluating how well the government is fulfilling promises to move toward real convertibility at stable exchange rates. The IMF withdrew from the country this year when the government flouted IMF guidelines.
Despite such bad news, senior officials sought in a round of interviews to leave the impression that everything was coming up roses.
The security situation has improved markedly because the United States and its allies all but destroyed the government's nemesis, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, in attacks in Afghanistan, where the group had taken refuge, according to Defense Minister Kodir Gulamov. The group's charismatic military leader, Juma Namangani, was reportedly killed by allied bombing. As a result, Gulamov said his ministry is about to announce a significant reduction in the size of the 70,000-member army.
Gulamov, a thoughtful nuclear scientist who speaks excellent English, said Uzbekistan is now free to "wrestle with our economic problems, which are the most important," and "build a civil society" of meaningful institutions outside government.
Now that the United States has provided long-term stability, promised Elyor Ganiyev, 41, the minister of foreign economic relations, all measures needed to fully liberalize the over-regulated, corrupt and still heavily managed Uzbek economy "will now be quickly taken." The president has ordered that this be done, he added by way of reassurance. The whole system of economic regulation will be overhauled within two years, he said.
"We understand very well that our political system needs improving," said Abdulaziz Kamilov, Uzbekistan's foreign minister. "Naturally, we are going to build a democratic, civil, open society." It won't look like a Western model, he acknowledged, particularly because "the relationships to power" will remain more traditional.
Tradition in this part of the world has often meant that people should show total respect to the local khan or emir, who doesn't share power or limit it by law.
But Uzbeks can have fairness, and "a law-abiding government," Kamilov said.
Karimov, the president, was also emphatic: Uzbekistan will build a modern, democratic nation.
He said he has great hopes for the thousands of Uzbek students he has sent abroad to study in the last dozen years, most of whom have returned home and started careers in business and government.
Karimov has spent more and put more emphasis on education than any other Central Asian leader.
The problem for a curious outsider, as a representative of one international organization here put it, is that Uzbeks, especially officials, have mastered the talent of saying what foreigners want to hear. "I've heard so many nice words, so many nice promises," said this official, requesting anonymity. But the promises don't get fulfilled, he added.
This is the experience of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which negotiated an agreement with the government in January 2001 to inspect Uzbek prisons and detention centers, and conduct private, confidential interviews with inmates.
This April the Red Cross took the unusual step of announcing it was suspending its program here, saying local officials would not live up to the conditions of the agreement. The State Department and many other monitoring organizations say torture of prisoners is a major problem.
A senior U.S. official here said recently that relations with the Red Cross seemed to be improving, noting that the ICRC was recently given access to former members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan who were turned over to Uzbek authorities by the new Afghan government.
But in an interview here, Jerome Fontana of the ICRC said that meeting did not satisfy all the conditions the Uzbek government agreed to last year. He added that nothing has changed since April, and that the ICRC visits to prisons would not resume until the Uzbeks assured full compliance.
Another item on the U.S. officials' list of positive developments was the official end of censorship this spring. Although Uzbekistan's constitution banned censorship, it was practiced by the same bureaucracy that censored local publications in Soviet times.
At a press conference held last month in Tashkent by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, the editor of the local newspaper Vremya I My said she had been ordered not to take the formal end of censorship as permission to publish the work of independent journalists.
Also opaque is the status of Islam in this overwhelmingly Muslim but also strongly secular society. A visit to the grand mufti of Tashkent, Abdurashid Bakhramov, suggests that the recognized religious leader is a close ally of the state. President Karimov's portrait was the largest decorative item in his office. He had only praise for official policy, and sharply disputed the idea that a government crackdown on practicing Muslims, documented as harsh by numerous foreign governments and organizations, had gone beyond appropriate prosecution of radicals bent on violence.
The government has closed hundreds of mosques and imprisoned thousands of Muslims, many simply for being religious, their families say. According to Bogner of Human Rights Watch, people are arrested just for praying five times a day. There are about 7,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbek jails, most of whom were imprisoned for their religious beliefs.
Karimov flatly rejected the idea that a harsh policy on Islam would produce a backlash and prove counterproductive. Since Sept. 11, he said, there has been no basis for questioning his government's unforgiving policy on Islamic fundamentalism. It was obviously correct to treat dangerous people sternly, he said.