In Uzbekistan, if you look a little Muslim, you better watch your back. The
Uzbek government is waging a Pyrrhic war against its own people and its
neighbors in hopes of resisting the influx of radical Islamic fundamentalism.
by Ted Rall
Sept. 16, 2000
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan --Mikhail (not his real name) was dropping off a passenger
from his deathtrap Lada taxi when the first bomb went off.
"I thought my life was ended," Mikhail remembered. "Two buildings disintegrated
a few hundred meters ahead of me. Things -- pieces of the buildings, pieces of
cars -- were falling around me for at least a minute. Everything was on fire."
Then the second bomb -- actually a set of bombs -- exploded in rapid-fire
sequence. "One of the ministries fell into the street. I saw the militsia [the
Uzbek military police] coming. I had a beard; not a long beard but still a
beard, so I ran away."
Mikhail wasn't the only Uzbek who narrowly escaped the February 1999 bombing:
so did President Islam Karimov, the hard-line, pro-Western, anti-fundamentalist
leader of this former Soviet republic, who was a mere 200 meters away from the
blast center when the government offices were destroyed. Those bombings in this
capital city, largely considered to have been an attempt on Karimov's life,
were the start of the country's counter-jihad that has cost hundreds of lives
and led to countless border wars, and that threatens to topple a laughably
fragile balance of power in this, perhaps the world's most volatile region.
Uzbeks share a Central Asian brand of manifest destiny, believing that their
country alone is equipped psychologically and militarily to act as Central
Asia's policemen. "Why do you want to go to Turkmenistan?" the Uzbek consul to
New York asked me when I applied for my first visas to visit Central Asia, in
1997. "It's nothing but desert. Kyrgyzstan is nice with the mountains, sure,
but you see the mountains and then what? Kazakhstan is nothing more than an old
nuclear-testing ground. Now Uzbekistan, we have 2,500 years of history, all the
best cities, the best food. You should really just visit Uzbekistan."
At first glance, Uzbekistan does have the most to offer the few Western
tourists who make it past its arcane visa application forms, corrupt policemen
and customs officials, and ocean of chickenshit bureaucracy (in town for more
than a few hours? Don't forget to register with OVIR -- it used to be called
the KGB.) The stunning Silk Road cities of Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand offer
13th century architecture to rival anything in Europe.
Tashkent, a bleak Soviet sprawl (everything and everyone was destroyed in a
massive 1966 earthquake) that's home to more than two million souls, is the
primary transportation link to the outside world -- the local cybercafé doesn't
actually have a computer, but you can get there by the world's most
architecturally majestic subway system. The land of 12-cent Cokes and 18-cent
beers can be pretty pleasant, once you figure out the bizarro currency: The
black market exchange rate between the US dollar and the Uzbek sum is three
times higher than the official rate posted at banks, but banks actually
exchange at the black market rate, which is perfectly legal but only
temporarily.
As for the food, suffice it to say that a starving wild dog issued a yelp
before racing away after I threw it my leftover shashlyk (mutton kabob).
But on this, my third trip to this gerrymandered-by-Stalin conglomeration of
Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, and Kazakhs straddling the vast wastes of the Kyzylkym
Desert to the west and the great Asian steppe to the east, it's become
painfully clear that Uzbek microimperialism has had dire consequences -- mainly
for the Uzbeks.
A year and a half after a still-anonymous would-be assassin attempted to kill
Karimov, fighting raged 30 kilometers east of Tashkent between government
troops and, well, nobody's sure whom. The Termiz border crossing to Taliban-
held sectors of Afghanistan has been shut since 1998 because local militants
have taken to sniping at Uzbek troop transports.
The Uzbek-Tajik border, as my 23 fellow travelers and I were to discover a week
later, was the scene of ferocious high-altitude fighting between the Kyrgyz
Army and -- well, nobody really knows whom for certain, but Karimov blames an
outfit called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which may or may not be
the same group of guerillas numbering anywhere from 300 to 1,200 (nobody knows
for sure) that held four Japanese oil company geologists and four mountain
villages hostage for months late last year.
To add to the magnificent lack of reliable information, the IMU is said to
comprise Tajik-based Uzbek Islamic fanatics, Taliban-trained Tajiks, or a
secular coalition of Taliban, Tajiks, and Uzbeks. Their goal is to overthrow
Karimov and establish Taliban-style rule in Uzbekistan and then in the other
Stans, or to keep heroin supply lines open between Afghanistan and Turkey, or
neither -- again, depending on who's doing the reporting.
Karimov clamped down on the Uzbek media, turning local newspapers into
hilariously inane party organs ("Karimov announces all things better," one
daily blared upon my arrival at the brand-new Sheraton Tashkent.) More
disturbingly, Karimov is so pissed off at nearly having been killed in the
February 1999 bombings that he's not letting his own lack of information stand
in the way of state-ordered repression, especially targeting men who are or
appear to be Muslim in order to stamp out what he suspects is radical Islamic
violence.
As 1999 wore on, scores of suspects were rounded up and hung, some of them
charged with no more than membership in militant Islamic organizations or
mosques -- often on evidence no more compelling than a long beard. Male
residents of Tashkent have recently turned to a crisp, clean-cut look as a
result. The executed have included men with disparate, and according to
international observers, occasionally nonexistent ties to the Chechen
resistance, Iranian-backed Hezbollah, and Central Asia's favorite bogeymen, the
Taliban.
During last year's Kyrgyz hostage crisis, Karimov decided to take unilateral
action against the Uzbek militants holed up along the A372 highway from Sary
Tash to Dushanbe by asking the Kyrgyz to bomb the IMU-held villages. The
Japanese government threatened to pull its fiscal aid if its four geologists
stationed there were further endangered by bombing, so the Kyrgyz decided to
try to starve the hostage-takers out. Ultimately, Karimov took bold and
decisive action and called out an Uzbek air strike anyway against his
neighbor's territory.
Unfortunately, the Uzbek air force bombed the wrong villages, killing anywhere
from a few dozen to hundreds of people -- not even the Kyrgyz know for sure
because the region is so remote, even by local standards. The Kyrgyz reacted by
closing the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border and severing diplomatic ties. On their second
sortie, the intrepid Uzbek pilots bombed the wrong towns again -- this time on
the Tajik side of the border. Fortunately for the Uzbeks, Tajikistan doesn't
have enough of an actual government to have a Tashkent embassy to close in the
first place. In the end, the IMU fighters left of their own accord after the
Kyrgyz promised them safe passage back to their bases in anarchic Tajikistan.
As might be expected from a man facing three simultaneous invasions by
surrealistically anonymous ground forces, countless alleged assassination plots
and his own narrow escape from Central Asia's answer to the Oklahoma City
bombing, Karimov sees himself as a man both personally and politically under
siege. The Uzbek government sees an Afghanistan to the south full of training
camps for young jihad fanatics who want to spread the Taliban's brand of purist
Islam (no music, no movies, no chicks). Tajikistan has no government worth
mentioning, and its border with Uzbekistan is a constant battleground.
Uzbekistan considers its other neighbors weak (Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Kazakhstan) or untrustworthy (Russia).
Needless to say (but let's anyway), everyone else finds the Uzbeks presumptuous
and annoying.
When there's an unpleasant job to do, you'd best do it yourself, so Karimov
says Uzbekistan will chase down and "crush and kill" radical Muslims wherever
they go -- without worrying about minor details like borders. In June, Russia's
Vladimir Putin accused Afghanistan of training and supplying the Chechen
resistance; Uzbekistan not only offered safe passage to Russian bombers but
asked for permission to send in its own ground troops. (The saber-rattling
ended without comment in late July.)
It's an old historical lesson, but the oppression of fringe movements often
radicalizes people who would otherwise consider themselves moderate. A bus ride
from Bukhara to Tashkent -- normally a two-day ordeal of dusty, cramped seats,
blaring Thai kickboxing movie soundtracks, and caged birds at the doors of
death -- can take four or five days thanks to an endless series of police
checkpoints. AK47-toting kids in berets toss bags, demand bribes, and arrest
anyone who kinda sorta looks Muslim -- which is roughly a third of the
populace.
Ugly allegations have surfaced about the fates of the arrested, thousands of
whom have disappeared without a trace.
"Someday they'll find the bodies," an elderly woman moneychanger whispered to
me in Samarkand's bazaar at the foot of the majestic Registan mosque as a $50
bill bought sheaves of notes thicker than the Manhattan phone directories,
white and yellow combined. "Everyone knows they kill them out in the desert."
Checkpoints take anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours to clear, and they
occur roughly every 30 miles. At first, my fellow travelers dealt with each new
checkpoint with customary American good cheer, shouting out "Checkpoint!" to
get everyone to sit down and assume the traditional Central Asian posture of
glum fear the police expect from their subjects while they're gleefully shaking
them down. But suffering through that ritual dozens of times eventually made
the glumness real. Uzbekistan has become a huge pain in the ass, even for the
militantly anti-Muslim.
The vast majority of Uzbekistan's Muslims want what people in Central Asia have
always wanted: to be left the hell alone, to work and pray as they see fit. But
faith has been politically polarized, and you're either on one team or the
other -- and both sides have very, very big guns
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