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Uzbekistan courts the great powers
By Dr Michael A Weinstein
The "heart" of Central Asia - as its
president, Islam Karimov, calls it - Uzbekistan
has become an object of interest and contention
for world and regional power centers due to its
geostrategic significance. The major players are
the United States, Russia and China, all of which
covet access to its abundant energy and mineral
resources, and view it as an essential element in
their designs for dominant influence in the
region.
Bordering Kazakhstan on the
north and west, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan on
the south, and Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan on the
east, Uzbekistan is a post-Soviet state that has
been ruled by Karimov since 1990, shortly before
it declared independence in 1991 when the Soviet
Union broke apart. Since then, Karimov has used
the country's strategic importance to establish a
dictatorship and to resist successfully domestic
and foreign pressures for democratic and market
reforms. Uzbekistan has been and continues to be
perceived as too great a prize for interested
powers to risk destabilizing Karimov's regime,
which, through its 
repressive practices, has
awakened widespread public discontent and armed
opposition, some of which subscribes to Islamic
revolution.
Aware of the Karimov regime's
instability, interested powers have not seen any
better alternative to it. The domestic democratic
and secular opposition, which is banned from
participating in elections and state institutions,
is divided and fractious; Muslims are unacceptable
to the interested powers; and Karimov has been
willing to work with all sides, favoring one or
the other according to his calculations of which
tilt will best secure his continued rule for the
moment.
With 26.5 million people,
Uzbekistan has the largest population among
Central Asian states and the strongest military.
The country is the second largest cotton exporter
in the world and is also a major exporter of gold
and oil. Its largest export partners are Russia
and China, and its largest import partners are
Russia and the US. The country's economy remains
dominated by state controls, which has caused
foreign investment to lag, and by the crony
capitalism that has become familiar in the
successor states of the Soviet Union.
The
relative stagnation of Uzbekistan's economy has
led to high rates of unemployment, particularly
among youth, creating the conditions for armed
opposition. Karimov's policy of import
substitution and currency controls has awakened
dissent among the trading class. As a result of
cronyism, the gap between the wealthy and
privileged few, and the majority of poor (60% of
the population lives on less than a dollar a day)
has widened since independence.
Unlike his
counterpart in Turkmenistan, President Saparmurat
Niyazov - another dictator from the Soviet era -
Karimov has not been able to alleviate misery by
providing free energy and subsidized travel to the
population. He holds his power uneasily and has
responded to threats to it by tightening
repression rather than by attempting to compromise
with disaffected groups or to execute reforms.
Karimov's often repeated maxim for Uzbekistan's
development is "Never destroy the old house unless
you build a new one". In practice, that has meant
keeping the old Soviet structure and trying to
patch it up as it falls apart, with the addition
of a few new outbuildings.
Karimov
regime's inherent instability
Governing a
country with several regional centers, Karimov
gains his support from an alliance of dispersed
political elites that profit from the state and
crony economy, and are jealous of their spheres of
influence. Called "clans" in local parlance, those
elites are united only in their respective self
interest and have no unified policy. They have
found it expedient to back Karimov and he has used
their coalition of convenience to perform the role
of arbiter and to centralize his power. Yet the
clans do not always agree and do not have great
personal loyalty to Karimov, who performs a
balancing act to keep the political system
coordinated.
In contrast to Niyazov, who
managed Turkmenistan's transition from communist
ideology by formulating an ultra-nationalist
ideology and engendering a cult of personality,
Karimov functions in an ideological void.
Perceiving the greatest threat to his power coming
from Islam, he has attempted to exert control over
religion by permitting only state-licensed Muslim
clerics, who preach moderate and regime-friendly
Islam, to practice, and repressing those who do
not. Analysts agree that Karimov's policies have
aroused support for radical Islam among
Uzbekistan's 70% Sunni Muslim ethnic Uzbek
population. Karimov has not made fine distinctions
among religious tendencies, suppressing even
peaceful forms of Islam that do not accord with
state criteria, which has increased disaffection
with his regime.
Armed opposition to
Karimov's regime began in earnest in late March
and early April, 2004, when a series of bombs went
off in Uzbekistan's capital Tashkent and the city
of Bokhara, killing 47 people. Over five days of
unrest, as security forces strove to repress the
violence, the perpetrators' identity remained a
mystery.
Karimov blamed Islamic
revolutionaries, specifically Hizbi Tahrir - a
transnational group originating in Jordan that
envisions a caliphate spanning Central Asia.
Before September 11, 2001, Uzbekistan had
experienced an Islamic insurgency in the form of
the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an
al-Qaeda-linked group. During the US-led war
against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the IMU
joined their allies and most of their fighters
were thought to have been killed or captured.
Karimov was reluctant to attribute responsibility
for the 2004 attacks to the IMU, because he had
stated that they had been eliminated as a threat.
Western analysts and the excluded
opposition parties did not accept Karimov's line,
arguing that whether or not the perpetrators had
links to Islam, Uzbekistan's economic conditions
and the repressive tactics of the Karimov regime
had awakened resentment far beyond the sector of
the country's population sympathetic to Islamic
revolution. They believed that the scope and
coordination of the operations were beyond Hizbi
Tahrir's capabilities and could only have been
undertaken with domestic support and
participation.
In the wake of the
bombings, Karimov's security forces imposed a
crackdown, rounding up and arresting suspects, and
eventually putting 15 of them on trial on July 28,
2004. On July 30, suicide bombers struck the US
and Israeli embassies, and the prosecutor
general's office in Tashkent, killing themselves
and two other people. The IMU claimed
responsibility.
After the US-led war in
Afghanistan, Karimov became one of the strongest
and most vocal supporters of Washington's "war on
terrorism". He has let the US establish its
largest military base in Central Asia, housing
1,000 troops, and has cooperated with the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) stabilization
force in Afghanistan. At the same time, he has
used the "war on terrorism" as a cover for his
repression of all opposition, spreading the
definition of "terror" so broadly that it includes
all forms of non-official Islam, arousing the very
resentment that leads to increased support of the
revolutionaries. With the 2004 bombings, Karimov
now faces a genuine problem of armed opposition,
an increasingly disaffected population, and a
temptation to intensify repression.
Karimov's tactics of maintaining his rule
and the dominance of the state-related "clan"
networks has included rigid press controls, prison
killings and torture, a captive judiciary, police
intimidation, travel restrictions, import
controls, suppression of non-governmental
organizations and the exclusion of all peaceful
opposition parties from the ballot.
As
Karimov has tightened repression, domestic
opposition unrelated to Islam has surfaced.
Through the autumn of 2004, civil unrest bubbled
up in Uzbekistan's bazaars when traders resisted
efforts by the police to enforce restrictions on
imports. Traders fought police and in one incident
on November 1, in the Silk Road city Kokand, two
police cars were torched. There have also been
demonstrations against social conditions,
including one on December 23 when a group of
sight-impaired women protested the conditions of
the hostel in which they live, which has no water
and central heating. In a December 25
demonstration, teachers protested the arrest of
their school director on charges of abuse of
power; they claimed that the director was arrested
because he had refused to send his students to
work on cotton plantations as "voluntary" unpaid
laborers.
Despite his repressive tactics,
or perhaps because of them, Karimov seems to be
unable to cap dissent and disorder. According to
analyst David Lewis of the International Crisis
Group, "The government's still in control -
there's just the sense that they're not sure how
to react, the sense of political instability has
risen."
Great power
competition
As the Karimov regime faces
growing civil unrest and loss of authority, and
seeks to right itself, interested powers continue
to jockey for influence over it. The US, Russia
and China, as military and economic powers, have
strategic and economic interests in Uzbekistan,
and Japan has economic interests there. During
2004, the balance of power tilted against the US,
as Karimov cultivated stronger ties with the other
players, partly due to Washington's cancellation
of foreign aid to Tashkent on the basis of
human-rights violations and, more fundamentally,
because US investment had not come up to
expectations.
After Tashkent's embrace of
the "war on terrorism" in 2001, it appeared that
Washington would become the strongest outside
influence in Central Asia. Since then, Moscow has
striven to regain its foothold in the region, and
Beijing and Tokyo have moved to establish
footholds there too. Washington and Moscow have
divided interests in Uzbekistan, which bring them
into collaboration and conflict, whereas Japan and
China have coherent and mutually conflicting
interests.
On July 1, 2004, US deputy
assistant Secretary of State for European and
Eurasian affairs B Lynn Pascoe told Congress that
"it is necessary to further boost and strengthen
US-Uzbek bilateral relations" because of
Uzbekistan's strategic importance in maintaining
regional security. Nonetheless, on July 14,
Washington canceled US$18 million in non-military
aid to Tashkent because Secretary of State Colin
Powell refused to approve the Karimov regime's
human-rights record.
The aid freeze was a
signal to Tashkent of Washington's displeasure at
the failure of Karimov to achieve stability
through its repressive tactics. It did not affect
military cooperation and, on October 20, NATO
secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer announced
that Tashkent's human-rights violations would not
impede its relations with the organization, and
that he expected NATO to sign a cooperation
agreement with Tashkent in the near future.
Washington's primary security interests in
Uzbekistan, which concern the stabilization of
Afghanistan, are not likely to be affected by any
adverse response of Karimov to the aid freeze. The
US will keep its base and Karimov will be eager to
accept Washington's help in beefing up his armed
forces. However, Washington's overall power is
likely to be diminished, especially in the
geoeconomic sphere.
The "great game" in
Uzbekistan concerns the eventual destination of
the country's energy reserves. Washington wants
Uzbekistan's oil and gas to flow to Japan rather
than to China, and has reportedly worked behind
the scenes in Moscow to block a gas pipeline to
China and to push for infrastructure in Russia. A
Russo-American accord on the energy issue is
checked by Moscow's strategic interest in
restoring influence in Uzbekistan at the expense
of Washington, which has moved Moscow closer to
Beijing.
At the June 30 summit of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in
Tashkent, Moscow firmed up a strategic partnership
agreement with the Karimov regime that includes
joint military exercises, and Beijing granted
Tashkent a $1.5 billion aid package - the largest
that it has ever disbursed to a country. The SCO,
which also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan, is an effort by Moscow and Beijing to
counter Washington's influence in Central Asia,
and to build an alliance that creates a
"transcontinental bridge" between the European
Union and Southeast Asia, excluding US influence.
At the same time that Moscow and Beijing
have attempted to draw Tashkent more firmly into
the SCO orbit, Tokyo has continued to court the
Karimov regime, unconcerned with its human-rights
violations, obstacles to economic reform and
suppression of domestic opposition. On August 21,
Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi visited
Tashkent with a preferential credit of $150
million, adding to the $1.8 billion of aid and
investment that Tokyo has given Uzbekistan over
the past several years. In a press conference on
August 26, Karimov singled out Japan as a "fair
country" that deserves a seat on the UN Security
Council more than France does.
The
increased activity of Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo in
Uzbekistan signals a turn toward more immediate
regional power centers by Tashkent and away from
Washington and the EU. In the months before the US
aid freeze, the European Bank for Reconstruction
and Development had suspended loans for most of
its projects in Uzbekistan, due to the absence of
economic reform and democratization. It appears
that the Euro-American alliance considers Karimov
to be a bad investment and is willing to concede
influence over his regime as long as its security
interests are met regarding Afghanistan.
How the issue of energy distribution will
be resolved remains to be seen. Washington will
continue to appeal to Moscow's economic interests
in order to try to block energy exports to China;
Beijing will continue to woo Tashkent with aid and
investment, and seek ultimately to bring Russia
into its sphere of economic influence; and Tokyo
will pursue its efforts to compete with Beijing on
Uzbekistan's economic front.
Under more
favorable domestic political conditions, Karimov's
position would be strengthened by the courtship of
emerging regional power centers. As it stands, the
Euro-American alliance seems to be betting that
eventually its inherent instability will bring
Tashkent's crony and statist regime down, offering
the opportunity for a reassertion of Western
influence. China, Russia and Japan are placing
their wagers on the Tashkent regime, hoping to
draw Uzbekistan into their orbits firmly enough to
secure their interests even with a successor
regime.
Western analysts and Uzbekistan's
democratic opposition speculate that Karimov fears
a Georgian-style Rose Revolution or a
Ukrainian-style Orange Revolution more than it
does Islamic revolutionaries. At present, domestic
dissent has not reached a level at which mass
direct action against the regime seems likely, but
dissent is building and the Islamists have
reactivated their armed struggle.
From a
geostrategic perspective, Uzbekistan is one of the
most unpredictable and problematic areas of great
power conflict in the world; it bears close
watching by those concerned with the future
configuration of world politics. Recent
developments point to a confirmation of the drift
toward multipolarity, but that could change if the
current regime in Tashkent loses its hold on
power.
Conclusion: Parliamentary
elections
Faithful to his strategy of
"reforming" Uzbekistan's political system through
"evolution" rather than "revolution", Karimov
engineered elections on December 26, 2004 for a
new bicameral parliament that he billed as a move
to decentralize and institutionalize state power.
The previous parliament had a single
chamber that was elected by local bodies; the new
one has a directly elected lower house that is
charged with legislation and an indirectly elected
and partially appointed upper house that can block
the projects of the lower house, but cannot
initiate legislation itself. According to Karimov,
the new parliament marks a "devolution of power";
he will give up his post as chairman of the
cabinet of ministers while retaining the
presidency, and will no longer have the right to
sign cabinet resolutions, although he will still
issue decrees.
The election demonstrated
Karimov's gradualism; although the new parliament
refurbishes the "old house" of communism, it
leaves the latter standing. The five parties
participating in the election all pledged their
loyalty to Karimov and, according to the Russian
newspaper Kommersant, campaigned on their support
for him. In contrast, the four parties opposed to
Karimov, which had filed for places on the ballot,
were banned from participation on the basis of
"technical violations".
The Central
Election Commission claimed that 85% of eligible
voters participated in the elections; the
international press reported a light turnout,
along with instances of "proxy voting", in which
family members came to the polls and cast ballots
for their kin.
As would be expected, the
democratic opposition criticized the elections as
illegitimate. Otanazar Oripov, leader of the Erk
Democratic Party, summed up the opposition's
stance: "The event called 'elections' were not
elections: there was no choice, no competition and
no opposition." Abdurahim Polat, head of the
Birlik Party, was blunter, calling the elections
"clowning and buffoonery".
The
Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE), which sent a nominal team of 21
election monitors, echoed the opposition in more
diplomatic language. Lubomir Kopaj, who headed the
"observation mission", concluded: "Regrettably,
the implementation of the election legislation by
the authorities failed to ensure a pluralistic,
competitive and transparent election." Focusing on
the electoral process itself, rather than the
prior exclusion of the opposition, the
Commonwealth of Independent States, which had sent
a full team of monitors, deemed the elections to
be "legitimate, free and transparent".
In
a street interview with journalists after he had
voted, Karimov responded to criticism of the
elections by accusing the OSCE of cultural
imperialism: "I accept with understanding
constructive criticism from the OSCE and observers
currently monitoring the elections. But do you not
agree with me in saying that a body attempting to
artificially create an opposition similar to
itself in Uzbekistan is no democracy either?"
Karimov then moved on to discredit the opposition,
remarking that the Birlik Party "has no practical
backing" in the country and that members of the
Erk Party had supported the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan and had "fought against Uzbekistan".
Reaffirming his gradualist approach,
Karimov told his critics that they should "look
for opposition from among young people" and even
"create this opposition" from "young people who
have studied in America and Europe"; but that they
should not "create opposition from those who are
rejected". Reform will come, according to Karimov,
through generational change; for the present,
Uzbekistan will have to make do with the "old
house".
As the parliamentary elections
played out, Russian President Vladimir Putin
ratified the Moscow-Tashkent strategic partnership
agreement, and Uzbekistan's Foreign Minister Sadyk
Safayev pledged that Tashkent will continue to
cooperate with Washington in the "war on
terrorism". On December 28, newspapers and news
services around the world reported that Uzbekistan
was one of the recipients of suspected terrorists
from the custody of US security agencies - a
process of "rendition" of detainees to cooperating
countries that apply torture.
Published
with permission of the Power and Interest News
Report, an analysis-based
publication that seeks to provide insight into
various conflicts, regions and points of interest
around the globe. All comments should be directed
to content@pinr.com |
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