The failed August 1991 putsch against former Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev marked the coup de grace for the Soviet Union. After the collapse, an atmosphere of naìve hope and inflated expectations prevailed in both the East and the West. In the former Soviet Union, people believed that prosperity and freedom could be quickly achieved following the removal of the Communist system.
Despite their state-building efforts, the states of Central Asia have not completely shed their Soviet identity. One of the starkest reminders of the Soviet legacy is the many statues of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin that still stand in the region.
Though geographically distant from Central Asia, Israel is playing an increasingly significant economic role in the region. In early July, Israel's Minister of Infrastructure Avigdor Lieberman led a delegation of business leaders on a seven-day visit to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
5 U.S. FOREIGN POLICY INTERESTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN CENTRAL ASIA
Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., Research Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Shelby and Kathryn Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Tolib Yakubov, the head of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, says that protests like the one staged in Tashkent have become an increasingly common occurrence in Uzbekistan, where hundreds, if not thousands of believers have been arrested in a government effort to counter the security threat posed by radical movements, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Hizb-ut-Tahr
