As part of his trip to Uzbekistan in February to meet with President Islam Karimov and other top officials, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake, Jr. spoke at an Uzbek-American business forum in Tashkent. He told members of the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce that NATO’s Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is part of an overall stability plan for the region. "The Obama Administration places a high priority on building economic partnerships in Uzbekistan and throughout Central Asia so this region once again can be a crossroads for trade and ideas," Blake said in a speech published on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent. This new Silk Road doctrine involves cooperating with Central Asian governments to find investment opportunities for U.S. companies, which will prove an economic boon Uzbekistan and its neighbors. The problem is that, in Uzbekistan, the companies are all run by the state or are close to state officials, so it really involves supporting the authoritarian state in another manifestation.
Blake said the U.S. spent $23 million in Uzbekistan in 2010 on supplies for troops, and an additional $5 million in October-November 2010; in construction materials alone, the U.S. has already purchased almost as much in the first two months of 2011 as in the previous year. In the past, the U.S. purchased produce in the United Arab Emirates to deliver to Afghanistan. Last August, Donald Nicholson, president of the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce, told business people visiting Uzbekistan that the U.S. planned to buy more fruits and vegetables from Uzbek farmers now and sort and pack them for shipment to Afghanistan, the Russian news service regnum.ru reported February 20. He said American forces required more than 40 tons of fresh vegetables and fruits a day.
A dozen U.S. business executives travelled to Tashkent as part of the official U.S. delegation, and met with Uzbek Vice Premier Elyor Ganniev to discuss trade and investment. Among the companies represented were Boeing, Case New Holland, ExxonMobil, FMN Logistics, General Electric, Honeywell, Nukem, Sikorsky, White & Case, Zeppelin, General Motors, Microsoft, and Nobel.
The U.S. has also decided to weigh in on the water wars of Central Asia, likely because they are a potential conflict generator. The Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate produced a report on the issues, "Avoiding Water Wars: Water Scarcity and Central Asia's Growing Importance for Stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan," which does not explicitly address the conflict between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan over the dam construction, but does quote former CENTCOM commander Anthony Zinni: "‘‘[w]e have seen fuel wars; we’re about to see water wars," The Bug Pit reported. The U.S. has provided approximately $46.8 million in assistance for water-related activities to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009, but only $3.7 million shared among all five Central Asian states. The report calls for drawing more attention and resources to the issues with technical projects, such as helping to measure water flow and volume to produce some solid data, which has been absent and a source of rising recriminations.
With the uprisings in the Middle East, attention has focused on Uzbekistan and other Central Asian nations, and analysts have asked whether revolutions of this type could happen in this region. Russell Zanca, an anthropologist at Northeastern Illinois University, made a presentation February 28 at Columbia University 's Harriman Institute in New York, titled "Where’s the Uzbek Revolt? Twenty Years of Dictatorship and Counting." Zanca commented that labor migration has emerged as a safety valve for Uzbekistan's discontented population, and was pessimistic about any near-term prospect for democratization in Uzbekistan. Change will not likely come soon given Karimov's record for crushing political and religious dissent and his grip on power, said Zanca. At least 10 percent of the working-age population, or about 3.5 million people, are believed to work outside of Uzbekistan.
Because the neighboring countries where they work have slightly better conditions for free media and expression, the labor migrants may constitute a catalyst for change someday, says Zanca. Mobile phones and the Internet may be more accessible -- but still expensive for most people. There is a tiny but growing contingent of Uzbeks both inside and outside of Uzbekistan use Twitter. Last August, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Uzbek Service, Radio Ozodlik, reported a story from the business site UzDaily.com about Twitter usage in Uzbekistan. Dom Sagolla, one of the creators of the micro-blogging platform, gave a presentation at the World Congress on Information Technologies. Combing through figures from various countries, he observed a surge in activity on Twitter from Uzbekistan, although the number of users remained among the lowest. Sagolla found that from comparisons of the date May 16, 2009 with May 16, 2010, Uzbekistan apparently led the world in growth rates on Twitter, followed by Indonesia and Venezuela. He thought this might hold some significance for tracking future technological or cultural developments.
But it turned out that he had just happened to hit on a day when one of the top stories of the year -- the seizure of Zeromax -- was published by international and regional news outlets, causing a burst of activity. While the use of social media remains limited and the government restricts some sites, it is nevertheless an important amplification factor for the independent media; ferghananews.com, for example, tells readers to look for their Facebook page for news if they can't reach the web site. The government maintains very strict control over the Internet and the import of literature -- in fact in justifying the ban on import of Bibles, authorities recently told the Uzbek Bible Society that the electronic version of the web should be sufficient.
Uzbekistan continues to keep the border with Kyrgyzstan closed since violent unrest last year in which 400 people were killed, mainly ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. This has had a catastrophic effect on informal cross-border commerce, leading to a 75 percent drop in trade at southern Kyrgyzstan's largest market. The closure has pushed up food prices in Kyrgyzstan and has only incited more smuggling along the 1,100-kilometer border. Traders bring cheap Chinese consumer goods from Kyrgyzstan into Uzbekistan, and cheaper fruits and vegetables from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, paying bribes to border guards along the way.
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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