Uzbekistan Weekly Roundup

As the route from Pakistan to Afghanistan grows increasingly insecure and relations between the US and Pakistani government deteriorate, the role of Uzbekistan has become more and more important to Washington to sustain the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), the supply route to NATO troops fighting in Afghanistan. As the US sought to increase cooperation with Uzbekistan, the pressure was on from both the Pentagon and Tashkent to end the American ban on military assistance which has been in place for 7 years since 2004, over concerns about Uzbekistan’s severe human rights problems. The restrictions remained in place after the US condemned the massacre by Uzbek government troops of protestors in 2005 and was evicted from the Uzbek air bases it had used to reach Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama has been asking Congress to grant a waiver to restrictions on military assistance in order to accommodate Tashkent. The White House made the case that Foreign Military Financing (FMF) was required to secure the vital route to Afghanistan, The Bug Pit reported. Since 2002, FMF money for Uzbekistan has been contingent on the US secretary of state certifying that Uzbekistan is making human rights progress; since 2004, no secretary of state has made the certification. Even so, the Obama Administration pushed for renewed military cooperation because of frayed relations with Pakistan after the assassination of Osama bin Ladn.

Human rights groups objected strenuously to the move, saying that no progress in human rights has been made at all, and that aid should not go to military and law-enforcement that has been implicated in massive human rights abuse.

On September 17, the US Senate Appropriations Committee approved language in the foreign operations bill which grants the waiver to Uzbekistan, with a stipulation of a periodic six-month review. The approval was essentially a victory for those wishing to restore military aid to Uzbekistan, as it is highly unlikely that any senator will hold up the entire foreign operations legislation coming to a vote later this year over Uzbekistan.

In a press conference after a meeting with Uzbek Foreign Minister Elyor Ganiev in Washington to seal the renewed relationship, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to characterize the human rights situation in Uzbekistan as improved, although she did not give examples. Likely she had in mind a few largely abstract improvements to law mentioned in the last State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, including the introduction of habeas corpus and greater access to attorneys. Yet whenever pious Muslims are tried, either lawyers are missing or they quietly report that their clients have been tortured, and fear for their own jobs.

The actual aid going to Uzbekistan now will be largely symbolic – only $100,000, and only equipment like bullet-proof jackets. Why does it mean so much to Tashkent? The Bug Pit theorizes that the US aid, even if symbolic, is about building a hedge against Russia. As it approached the 20th anniversary of independence, Tashkent became more vigorous in removing signs of Russian dominance, whether in the form of old Soviet war statues, or whether through boycotting the military exercises of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), of which Uzbekistan is only a nominal member. The rivalry with the Kremlin goes way back to the Soviet era, when Tashkent styled itself as the regional hegemon in Central Asia – a role that Moscow sometimes seems to want for itself. Uzmetronom.com, a website that frequently publishes leaks from the Uzbek government, says that Tashkent is increasingly looking to NATO for its security as it eyes the planned departure of US troops from neighboring Afghanistan in 2014.

The greater cooperation with the US and NATO isn’t just about keeping Russia off balance, but a pragmatic assessment that the CSTO will not provide sufficient security – it was unable to act when more than 400 ethnic Uzbeks were killed in pogroms in neighboring Kyrgyzstan in June 2010, despite a request from Bishkek to intervene. Even so, Tashkent is likely to maintain its historical ties with Moscow, aligning with Russia in multilateral institutions and keeping trade open – Russia buys most of Uzbekistan’s cotton and other products such as motor vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of Uzbek labor migrants working in Russia send home a significant remittance contribution to the economy.

Revelations from the activist organization WikiLeaks, which recently released thousands of cables alleged to be US dispatches from capitals around the world, outline the balancing act that the US attempts in trying to increase military cooperation even as it raises sensitive human rights concerns. Yet the US seems to accept ephemeral signals from the Uzbek regime as proof of “improvement” for its engagement. For example, in January 2010, the US Embassy in Tashkent held a reception to mark Martin Luther King, Jr Day, inviting a number of leading critics of the regime. When an official was willing to be introduced to independent photographer Umida Akhmedova, a cable writer took this as a thaw. But the next month, Akhmedova was arrested and charged with “slander” of the Uzbek people for her frank documentary film and photographs of rural poverty. The US spent much of 2010 and 2011 going to bat for intellectuals related to its programs who were arrested by the regime – Voice of America reporter Abdumalik Boboyev and an HIV/AIDS campaigner Maxim Popov. Perhaps because of threats to end the NDN cooperation made personally by President Islam Karimov (also divulged via WikiLeaks), US officials stopped meeting with dissidents.

The moral of this story isn’t that the US shouldn’t meet with activists because they are “the kiss of death” – the Uzbek regime is the original “kiss of death” suppressing civil society. Rather, as Human Rights Watch and other advocates have pointed out, the US should be consistent despite the regime’s bullying, because Tashkent needs the validation provided by rapprochement with Washington for its own political exigencies vis-à-vis Russia and for the NDN’s economic boon.

Some 60 human rights and trade union activists picketed the US-Uzbek Business Forum in Washington, protesting the use of forced child labor in the cotton industry and other human rights ills. The forum this year was expanded evidently after the legislative victory, and Uzbek Foreign Minister Ganiev attended along with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Susan Elliott and executives from the companies doing business in Uzbekistan – NUKEM, General Motors, General Electric, Honeywell, and others. The State Department has rolled out its “Silk Road Initiative” in recent years as a vision of transition from war-fighting to security provision for trade and development in Central Eurasia.

Yet with suppression of both mainstream and social media, ongoing imprisonment of activists and state control over agriculture and exploitation of students throughout Central Asia, stability is likely to remain elusive in this region for some time to come and the “Arab Spring” will continue to serve as an inspiration.

By contrast with the US, the European Union has been inching backwards from cooperation with Tashkent, unimpressed with lack of human rights progress and stung by harassment and even hostile takeovers of European businesses. Members of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee rejected a trade deal this week that would have eased Uzbekistan's export of textiles to Europe, citing the use of forced child labor in Uzbekistan's cotton industry, Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe reported.