The revolutions that have rocked the Middle East have been avidly followed by people in Uzbekistan who could not help but note the parallels between Egypt or Tunisia and their own situation. Like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, 80, who has been in power for 30 years, presiding over a ruthless regime where political prisoners are tortured and civil society suppressed in the name of resistance to extreme Islam, so President Islam Karimov, 72, has been in power for 22 years with exactly the same kind of brutal methods invoking exactly the same kind of justifications.
Of course there are major differences. For one, Uzbekistan and Central Asia in general do not have anything like Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-funded television company that has revolutionized civic life in the Middle East with its hard-hitting coverage of oppressive governments and its featuring of dissident intellectuals and bloggers. Russian TV, while marginally more free than domestic Uzbek broadcasting, surely doesn't fulfill that role. Uzbekistan hasn't carried any news on state TV about the unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere, yet people are gleaning news from Radio Ozodlik, the Uzbek service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the BBC Uzbek Service. While Uzbeks have access to Facebook, which has been an important (though possibly overstated) factor in rallying Tunisian and Egyptian democrats, the government blocks all opposition sites.
On a January 28 program on Radio Ozodlik, Shamsiddin Atamatov, leader of a group called Andijan Justice and Development, who has been forced into exile, saw a direct correlation between the events now on Tahrir Square in Cairo and on Babur Square on May 13, 2005 in Andijan in the Ferghana Valley, but perceives Karimov as more brutal than Mubarak; Karimov ordered troops to fire on unarmed demonstrators including men, women, older people, and children, and Mubarak has apparently limited troops mainly to use tear gas. Tashpulat Yuldashev, a former diplomat, said he believed that while the governments used similar oppressive tactics, Egypt had a higher standard of living. In fact, Uzbekistan is just one below the rung of Egypt on the United Nation's Human Development Index, at the position of 102nd place out of 169 countries.
Like Mubarak, Karimov has spun a convincing tale for Westerners concerned about Islamic fundamentalism and the spread of the Taliban from Afghanistan that only his brutal but secular rule can prevent extremism. His invocation of terrorist attacks in his own country has been a persuasive tactic in regaining support from the U.S. and European Union after ties were broken over Andijan. For their part, Western leaders find that they can enlist a rather reluctant Tashkent into helping supply NATO's war in Afghanistan by referring back to its own concern about terrorism. Meanwhile, as more and more people see their relatives jailed and tortured for religious devotion or human rights activity, they grow angry and in some cases radicalized, inevitably serving as a self-fulfilling proposition for the regime.
In January, the BBC conducted a survey of most-trafficked Uzbek-language sites and most-discussed topics and found that religious sites and Islam were the most popular. On Internet forums, sometimes the discussion can be extreme -- listeners might become incensed, for example, at learning of the plan of the American pastor Terry Jones to burn the Koran. Religious leaders and political commentators interviewed by the BBC have found that such extreme reaction is typical when people are first accessing new information; people are very hungry for news suppressed by official media.
Meanwhile, the Uzbek regime has only tightened the screws harder at home, with more and more individual trials of human rights activists or journalists, and mass trials behind closed doors of religious believers, many of them tortured under interrogation, for belonging to groups outside of state control. Rashid Bekjan, a member of the opposition Erk Party and brother of its leader Muhammad Salih, was placed in solitary confinement in Navoi Prison for 20 days last month, just when he was scheduled for release February 18 after serving a 12-year-sentence.
An Uzbek policeman who defected to Norway has brought a dossier of documents allegedly showing Interior Ministry orders to follow dissidents abroad. While the story could not be confirmed, it was consistent with what Uzbek authorities already do in intimidating anyone with relatives abroad, constantly hauling them in for questioning.
A recent panel discussion at the Open Society Institute publicly opened the conversation on the ongoing problem of forced child labor in Uzbekistan with a UNICEF official, Dr. Susan Bissell, Chief of Child Protection. Following criticism from NGOs, she acknowledged that her agency had used an outdated survey that had not sufficiently addressed the problem of forced child labor. She described the complexities of the issue of tracking the practice, noting that UNICEF is not a monitoring organization and that the International Labor Organization is better suited to perform the kind of inspection missions needed.
The problem is that the ILO is still denied entry to Uzbekistan, although in his meeting January 24 with Karimov, European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso raised the issue of the ILO visit -- without any commitment in response. UNICEF acknowledges observing the use of child labor, but has chosen to tackle the problem through collaboration rather than condemnation. Dr. Bissel noted that there was some "limited success" in this approach in the last harvest: in those regions where UNICEF worked with local government, the age of the children recruited was at least 14, and the periods of work were shorter. This was little comfort for activists like Umida Niyazova of the Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights, who countered that in other regions, children as young as 10 were forced to work, and farmers continued to struggle in a system with quotas and fixed prices.
An incident at the UN Committee on NGOs indicated the persistence of Gulnara Karimova, President Karimov's daughter, in attempting to gain international respectability. Her organization, the Social Initiatives Support Fund (SISF), a government organized and funded agency, applied for consultative status as a non-governmental organization. A Kyrgyz diplomat who is a member of the 19-country body asked how SISF collaborates with the government -- thereby stalling approval until the next session.
Karimova's "civic" activities are part of a quest to rehabilitate her controversial image in the wake of the demise of Zeromax, a conglomerate of companies with interests in industries from oil to sports to precious metals which was seized and put into bankruptcy last spring. Miradil Djalalov, the chief executive, was detained for a time and then released, and his whereabouts are not known now as the company is being chopped up and sold, in some cases by one state entity to another. Interestingly, Oxus Gold PLC, which had a wholly-owned subsidiary, Oxus Resources Corporation, in a joint venture with the Uzbek company Amantaytau Goldfields, has agreed to sell its entire 50 percent stake and is exiting from Uzbekistan. Djalalov, a director of Oxus, will step down, according to a report from proactiveinvestors.co.uk.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick compiles the Uzbekistan weekly roundup for EurasiaNet. She is also editor of EurasiaNet's Choihona blog. To subscribe to Uzbekistan News Briefs, a weekly digest of international and regional press, write [email protected]
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