Behind the Silk Curtain

Briggs, Joe Bob
1 July 2004
The National Interest
page129
ISSN: 08849382

ISLAM KARIMOV was such a happy and contented Communist Party leader that, when his domain inconveniently became the independent republic of Uzbekistan in 1991, he simply took all the trappings of Soviet Communism-one-party rule, state control of the press, secret surveillance of the populace, five-year plans, government monopolization of the means of production-and converted them, lock, stock and political prison, into a well-oiled banana republic-or, to speak more properly, a cotton republic, since Uzbekistan was completely denuded and environmentally destroyed during its decades as the designated cotton supplier to the rest of the USSR.

Of course, there were little niggling problems for Karimov. He had to get a new flag. He had to invent a new name for the KGB. (He settled on National Security Service.) He had to learn Uzbek, since that's what some of the natives actually speak. He had to take the oath of office with one hand on the Quran and one hand on the new democratic constitution, which must have thoroughly revolted him since, in the intervening 13 years, he's never actually paid attention to either one.

You would think at some point he would have changed his first name, since he believes that most Islamists are threats to civilization and, more to the point, to his own life. But since the country is 86 percent Muslim, he's got that General Custer feeling in the pit of his stomach all the time. he deals with it by forcing all mosques to be approved by the state. Anyone caught worshipping at home (the official charge is being "too pious"), or praying in public (he forbids the mosques to broadcast the call to prayer), or wearing a beard (the symbol of what he inevitably calls "Wahhabism"), is subject to summary arrest and interrogation.
Karimov's most telling act of political symbolism was to take down all the statues of Marx and Lenin (and let's not forget Stalin, who had an especially strong statuary presence in Uzbekistan) and replace them with Tamerlane the conqueror.

Tamerlane had a way of uniting warring Central Asian tribes-with the sword-and Karimov feels a philosophical, if not spiritual, kinship. In one of Karimov's typically endless speeches to his parliament (the kind that are reported Pravda-style with notations of "unanimous ovation"), he said of the outlawed Muslim organizations: "Such people must be shot in the head. If necessary, I'll shoot them myself, if you lack the resolve." This is the kind of public strongman chutzpah we haven't been able to enjoy since the days of Nikita Khrushchev.
Islam Karimov's biography reads like a Monty Python skit about a humorless Bolshevik climber. Raised in a Tashkent orphanage (thereby realizing the early Soviet ideal of being educated entirely by the state), he was trained as an engineer (the prototypical job of the aspiring party member) and took his first job as assistant foreman at the Tashkent Farm Machinery Plant. (Say "Tashkent Farm Machinery Plant" with a John Cleese accent. Right, then. See what I mean?) he was quickly promoted to design engineer at the Chkalov Tashkent Aviation Production Complex, which supplied most of the cargo planes to the Soviet Union, and in 1966 started his party career as First Secretary of the Kashkadaria Regional Committee, which qualified him for a job at the State Planning Office.

That would be the same planning office that consistently met its cotton quotas on five-year plans-until satellite photos in the 1980s revealed that most of the cotton had never been planted, much less harvested. The cotton that did exist had been sold on the black market. By that time, Karimov was head of the State Planning Committee, so he bravely took to the offensive and, according to his official website, "resolutely defended his nation, rejected all criminal myths and defamations from outside by those who, for the sake of their career aspirations, tried to set up interrogation rooms in the ancient land of the Uzbeks." More than 50,000 bureaucrats were fired, but Karimov, at the top of the pyramid, survived and thrived, becoming Uzbek First Secretary in 1989.

Of course, that devotion to the "ancient land of the Uzbeks" is entirely a post-1991 phenomenon, occasioned by the failure of his Geezer Bolshevik pals to carry out their coup. Before independence, Karimov was part of the hardcore wing of the party, so much so that terms such as glasnost and perestroika were never used in Uzbekistan. "If we remain part of the Soviet Union", said Karimov as the tanks rolled through Moscow, "our rivers will flow with milk. If we don't, our rivers will flow with the blood of our people." As soon as the coup was suppressed, though, Karimov became a diehard nationalistand started filling Uzbek rivers with the blood of his people.
For much of the rest of the 1990s he amused himself by hounding the political opposition into prison or exile, and inventing new ways to deal with this pesky constitution thing.
For his first election in 1991, he banned the Unity Party (founded by Tashkent intellectuals in 1989 and claiming a membership of 1.5 million) and the Islamic Renaissance Party on the grounds that they might put forward actual candidates who could receive actual votes. But to keep some semblance of democracy he found an opponent: a poet named Mohammed Solih, representing the Erk Party (I'm telling you, it's a whole Python episode).

The result was Karimov receiving 86 percent of the vote. Two points about this: 1) The fact that 12 percent voted for the Erk poet is pretty amazing in a country that has no idea what democracy is. 2) Karimov was so scared by that 12 percent that he drove the poet into exile, banned the Erk newspaper, drove Erk supporters out of legislatures, and made sure anyone else associated with Erk would be fired from his job, detained or interrogated. (Presumably he also banned the complete poetical works of Mohammed Solih, although there's no evidence that the public was clamoring for his stanzas.) Karimov's one concession: he allowed the party to continue to exist. No doubt they gather on Wednesdays to read Kahlil Gibran under the watchful eye of a government agent.

For the 1995 election Karimov decided that, rather than being irked by Erk again, he would set up his own opposition party-the National Progress Party-but then apparently thought even that was too dangerous to public order. So the National Progress Party magnanimously decided not to run a candidate at all, and the voting was characterized as a "referendum" as opposed to an election, because Karimov had discovered, to his horror, that the constitution only allowed him to serve two terms.
Karimov maintained that the word "referendum" meant that his first term had merely been extended five years, so that he could run again in 2000. He did, of course, but he'd taken so much international heat for his "referendum" that he promised the next trip to the polls would be "an election with choices." That choice came in the form of a wimpy guy named Abdulhasiz Dzhalalov, who was so naive that he told reporters he was only in the race to make it appear democratic, and then proudly announced that he cast his own vote for Karimov. With such fierce opposition, Karimov was only able to garner 91.9 percent of the vote.

The Good Ol' Soviet Model
AS DICTATORS go, Karimov follows the Soviet model of persecution in that any international outcry can be characterized as meddling in the nation's internal affairs. He's old-fashioned about interrogation, favoring electric shock, rubber truncheons, rape of family members of those who won't reveal where the fugitive is, asphyxiation, suspension from wrists or ankles, needles under the fingernails and toenails, and that old favorite of the Hollywood thriller, burning with cigarettes. His sole innovation in this respect seems to be the recent boiling alive of two troublesome Muslims. Unfortunately the mother of one of the dead men, shopkeeper Fatima Mukhadirova, persuaded the British embassy to investigate her son's death, and the University of Glasgow conducted an autopsy on the body concluding that, yes, the man had been boiled (probably in water), but only after his head and neck had been severely beaten and all of his fingernails ripped off. For her pains, Fatima Mukhadirova was sentenced to six years hard labor-and was only released after an international outcry preceding Donald Rumsfeld's visit to Tashkent.
Which brings us to the point. Perhaps no world leader has benefitted more from 9/11 than Islam Karimov. Since most of his waking hours are spent figuring out how to eliminate Islam from his part of the planet, the U.S. declaration of war on the Taliban must have seemed like a gift from God (if not from Allah). Turkmenistan has a dictator even more iron-fisted that Karimov. Tajikistan is still bursting into periodic tribal warfare. Uzbekistan, on the other hand, has a capital city with a Le Meridien and an Intercontinental-in other words, just Western enough in a region that makes it its policy to hate the West.

So when Karimov granted the U.S. permission to use the Khanbad military base, he suddenly became America's best friend. (If you have any doubts, check the Uzbekistan website, which has ridiculously gleaming smiles on the faces of President Bush, Donald Ruinsfeld, Colin Powell and Paul O'Neill as they gladhand the dictator.) In fact, making a pact with Karimov did accomplish three things for America: It provided the U.S. with a base for pursuing the Taliban, made inroads into the Kazakh and Turkmen oil and gas market (Caspian Sea pipeline politics), and gave America major influence in the most populous, settled and central of all the Central Asian republics. That's got to tick off Russia and China big-time.
For Karimov, the deal was just an open checkbook. When he met with Bush at the White House in March 2002, he went away with $500 million in aid and credit (more than 15 times what he would get in the normal course of things), $25 million in military assistance, $18 million for "border security", and $1 million for police. Bush called him one of America's "foremost partners in the fight against terrorism"-a sentiment that's been repeated by a parade of dignitaries that have made the trek to Tashkent, including Generals Tommy Franks, Richard Myers and Anthony Zinni, and Senators McCain, Lieberman and Daschle. Of course, while all this was going on, there were between 7,000 and 10,000 prisoners being held on religious and political charges in Uzbekistan.

The political charges Karimov didn't have to worry about. "Member of an Islamic terrorist organization", was pretty much all the explanation he had to give, although under Uzbek law they might have been imprisoned for such crimes as "encroachment on the constitutional order", "anti-state activities", "subversion" or "infringement upon the honor and dignity of the president"-an umbrella of terms that pretty much allows him to shackle up anyone-nutjob Islamist, simple believer or pro-Western secularist-who looks at him the wrong way.
The prisoners held on religious charges were a little bit more embarrassing for the United States, especially since one of America's stated goals in fighting the Taliban was to establish freedom of religion. To give you some idea of the schizophrenia of Karimov, he first established a human rights organization, then abducted the founder of it from a conference in Bishkek, and then charged him with sedition. No doubt the man had acted beyond his charter, like the Erk Party.
In other words, the War on Terror for Karimov is a bureaucratic convenience. Since his nation is full of outlawed parties run by Muslims, any one of them can be characterized as terrorist simply by its existence. To be fair, there are some scary Islamic parties in Uzbekistan, the kind that want to establish sharia and bring back the caliphate, but the majority of the underground movements just want simple democracy, which would result, of course, in an Islamic government of some kind, but not a theocracy, and certainly not the retro-Soviet model that Karimov upholds by sheer force of will. There are even parties that call for a secular government on the Turkish model, but those are lumped in with the others because Turkey, for Karimov, is just entirely too anarchic.

KARIMOV has quite a few things going for him as he exerts minority rule. For one thing, Uzbekistan is the most settled and populous of all Central Asian countries, with most of the people concentrated in Tashkent and the Fergana Valley, where the aforementioned cotton fiasco took place and where the ethnic broth has caused centuries of bloody strife. (The other two-thirds of the country is wasteland, including the Aral Sea, which was once the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world. Since 1961, it has lost more than 60 percent of its water as its feeder streams were used for cotton irrigation. It became so polluted with insecticides and fertilizers that it salinized, killing all the fish, grounding ships, poisoning the drinking water and the vegetables, and leaving a salty lethal dust throughout a moonscape of dead ponds and sandbars.) The people in the eastern third live in towns and villages that have changed little for two centuries, making surveillance easy. For example, each neighborhood still has its elder, called a "white beard", who gets his authority from the community, but his wages from the government. Since no one in the neighborhood can do anything without the white beard's permission, these figureheads are used by Karimov as enforcers and informants. There's no intelligentsia to speak of; it was originally wiped out by Stalin, then periodically purged by subsequent Soviet leaders. The purge of the Unity Party was the latest successful effort to drive the liberal democrats into exile. The mean monthly income is $50-high by Central Asian standards, but not high enough to create a dangerous middle class. The "sum", as the currency is called, is not convertible, so there's virtually no foreign investment and, by necessity, a barter economy. (The sum is devaluing at the rate of 30 percent per year.) The country's biggest highway runs from Tashkent to Termiz on the Afghan border-literally a dead end in terms of trade. Just as the Iron Curtain protected the Bolsheviks for seven decades, Uzbekistan's isolation (the Silk Curtain?) protects Karimov.

And so Karimov is able to rule a nation of 24 million with relative ease because it's full of extremely large families (more women with ten or more children under the age of twenty than any other former Soviet republic; half the population under age 15 have no upward mobility nor means of migration (although 60,000 do manage to leave the country each year). In some respects the population lives as it did 15 centuries ago. (Silkworms, for example, are raised in homes, a literal cottage industry.) Although the population is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, there is one extremely important Shi'i shrine in Shakhimardan-the resting place of Ali, son-in-law of Mohammed and fourth caliph, whom all Shi'a consider second only to Muhammad himself in holiness. The mosque and tomb there were torched in the early 1920s, probably by Bolsheviks, and during the Soviet era it was renamed in honor of a secular Communist poet (I'm not making this up), but the desecration of the site rankles the Shi'a and makes for some strange alliances with their nominal Sunni rivals.
In other words, there's just enough radical Muslim unrest for Karimov to justify any level of suppression to his War on Terror friends in the West. His number one enemy is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a largely secret organization that wants to establish a theocracy. Two IMU rebels have been sentenced to death in absentia, and many other members are languishing in prison. These are real terrorists, suspected in six bomb attacks in Tashkent in 1999 that killed 16 people, and they have also been known to trade Western hostages for money.
Karimov uses these bad guys to extend his xenophobia to other groups, including people who aren't Muslim at all. Jews, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Greeks, Meskhetian Turks and Slavs have all been leaving the country rather than expose their bosses to the embarrassing chore of firing them. Censorship was officially abolished in 2002, but press restrictions still forbid mentioning corruption, drug trafficking, Islam or anything resembling criticism of Karimov. Five journalists are currently in prison, including the freedom-of-the-press activist Ruslan Sharipov, serving four years.

Getting Away with It
FOR THE most part, Karimov has been allowed to get away with it. Even when he has appeared at Western press conferences, usually alongside U.S. leaders, he's gotten softball questions. The sole exception I know of was Andrea Koppel of CNN, who used Colin PowelPs visit to Tashkent to ask Karimov, "What do you say to your critics who say that you are nothing more than a brutal, repressive, authoritarian dictator?"
Karimov's reply could best be described as indignant confusion. "I am very surprised to hear the question you posed", said the man who longs for the simplicity of communist times.
And I believe that these questions that are asked are due to be asked and probably we cannot circumvent these questions. We have to answer them. What can I answer? My answer is that one is to see things rather than hear them one hundred times. I would like to invite you for communication with me on a more permanent basis and believe that I will not disappoint you.
For some reason I find this answer, in all its opaque evasion, strangely unsettling. It's the answer of a man who's not used to being asked questions at all, much less questions that suggest his performance is subject to review. It's almost delusional in its raving complexity, the reaction of a man in the first moment after he's been shot.
Of course, we should have expected that. Karimov is one of those old-school Tyrants of the Book who, like Lenin and Stalin, has his every utterance recorded as holy writ. We don't have space here to list all eleven of the books he's published since 1996, but suffice it to say, they begin with the page-turner Uzbekistan: National Independence, Political Ideology. After that, they get progressively longer and denser, reaching a kind of apex of prolixity with his 2000 masterwork, Our High Goal Is the Independence and Prosperity of Our Motherland, Freedom and Welfare of Our People (I checked Barnes & Noble, but they're all sold out.)

The only other person who speaks publicly in Tashkent about the freedom and welfare of the Uzbeks is this fellow Craig Murray, the British ambassador, who had the bad manners to say in an October 2002 Tashkent speech that Uzbekistan is not a democracy, that it's not becoming a democracy, and that Karimov's war against terrorism is simply an excuse for persecution.
The American embassy, which had gone to great pains to portray Uzbekistan as an "emerging" democracy, was extremely upset. Uzbek leaders demanded an apology. Ambassador Murray refused to stand down, continuing to rail against the government as late as August 2003, speaking about repression of political activity, lack of free speech, the inequality of wealth, the absence of reform, and, by the way, the systematic use of torture. Eventually he caused so much alarm in London that he was investigated by the Foreign Office for misconduct. In October 2003 he returned to London for "medical reasons", but he's continued to make speeches about Karimov's government, and the U.S. embassy in Tashkent has made no secret of loathing him.
Of course, Murray is not saying anything that hasn't been said already by various international aid agencies. The Amnesty International report from 2000 recounts the torture of five members of the Party of Liberation (a banned Islamic group that professes to be non-violent) through such means as suffocation with a plastic bag, hanging upside down, needles under the nails, burning of the hands and feet, and electric shocks administered via devices fitted to their heads. The top United Nations official on torture, Theo van Boven, said in December 2002 that such treatment-in order to force confessions-is "not just incidental but has a nature of being systemic in this country."
Everything started to get messy around 1999, after a failed attempt on Karimov's life (always a wakeup call for a dictator), resulting in more roundups, summary trials, detentions-and an emboldened resistance. A few months back, 43 people were killed in Tashkent and Bukhara over three days, when the nation's first suicide bombings took place. And there are indications that the Islamic militants are mobilizing for more. But the dissidents may have overplayed their hand. President Bush, no doubt at Karimov's urging, issued a statement, saying,
These attacks only strengthen our resolve to defeat terrorists wherever they hide and strike, working in close cooperation with Uzbekistan and our other partners in the Global War on Terror.

In other words: the West doesn't regard these as liberation movements.
But had Karimov pulled a bait-andswitch? The official Uzbek press blamed the bombings on the Party of Liberation, which had hitherto been non-violent and issued a denial of involvement from its London office. The much more likely assassins would have been the IMU, which is pretty well tied to terrorism throughout the region but is less of a long-term threat to Karimov. (The IMU is mostly made up of impoverished farmers, whereas the Party of Liberation is made up of college-educated urbanites.) Karimov used the attacks to link the Party of Liberation to "international terror", whereas Human Rights Watch and other groups said it was simply a homegrown insurgency in response to secret police practices such as parading prisoners before their neighbors and forcing them to publicly confess themselves as traitors and enemies of the state, or arresting entire families in order to gain the surrender of a relative. The truth in Central Asia is always hard to sort out, but Karimov made clear where he stands:
I'm prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic. . . . If my child chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head.
The week before he said that, Karimov and his ministers had formally declared 2004 "The Year of Kindness and Mercy" in Uzbekistan. Presumably this means they had dismantled one of their flesh-boiling cauldrons as a prelude to reform.

Islam's Despotism by the Numbers
Overall megalomania rating: 94
Sexual proclivities: Lifelong marriage, 2 daughters
Meetings with Jimmy Carter: 0 (but after 9/11, he did meet with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy's former National Security Adviser)
Death index: 24 (prefers dungeons and frowns on starvation)
Destruction index: 82 (supervised the Planning Office when the Aral Sea was destroyed, and millions of acres became unusable tor generations)
Depletion of natural resources index: 100 (see above)
Preferred form, of elections: One candidate "with choices"
Parliamentary facade index: 97
Toys: The kind of baronial mansion favored by the commisars of old
Preferred weapons: Electrical devices, truncheons, cigarettes
Preferred structure of goon squads: Faceless secret policemen
Theory of government: I am the people
Sartorial preference: English-cut suits, circa 1985
Preferred housing: See Toys, above
Nepotism index: 48. A low figure due primarily to his lack of extensive familial relations. Most of his appointments would be more accurately described as cronyism.
Islam Karimov's biography reads like a Monty Python skit about a humorless Bolshevik climber.
Briggs discusses Communist Party leader Islam Karimov's act of political symbolism. Karimov's most telling act of political symbolism was to take down all statues of Marx and Lenin and replace them with Tamerlane the conqueror.
Joe Bob Briggs is a Texas satirist whose latest book is Profoundly Disturbing; Shocking Movies That Changed History (Rizzoli, 2003).

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