A bridge too far in Central
Asia? By Nicholas
Schmidle
KARASUU, Kyrgyzstan - The
first part of the 15-mile road from Osh to Karasuu
looks like any other place in Osh. A single line
of trees, painted white halfway up the trunk, runs
along either side of the road and a factory that
once made iron parts stands gutted and empty.
Like the two abandoned plants on the other
side of the city, one that once made silk products
and another that, I was told, built water pumps,
heating pumps and "any other kind of pumps you
would want", this iron factory employed thousands
of people during Soviet times. But now, with local
unemployment at about
70%, many people spend
their days at the bazaar in Karasuu. If they are
lucky, a truckload of recently arrived goods from
China will need unpacking. If there aren't, they
wait near stalls until petty tasks crop up.
But some are making out. As I neared
Karasuu in a taxi, I saw dozens of new homes being
built at the edges of cotton and cornfields. While
the economy is hurting in Osh, Kyrgyzstan's
second-largest city, some people are getting rich
in Karasuu, which is in the Osh region of southern
Kyrgyzstan.
The main reason is the Karasuu
bazaar. It is believed by many to be the largest
in Central Asia. Millions of people living in
southern Kyrgyzstan and eastern Uzbekistan depend
on the Karasuu bazaar, in some way or another, for
their livelihoods.
Chinese umbrellas as
well as DVD players and towels sit in boxes
stacked on top of one another in giant shipping
crates that are backed up to sellers' stalls.
"Twenty years ago you wouldn't have been able to
find a Chinese product in this market," one seller
said. "Only Soviet and local stuff was sold."
Now, with China's economy roaring ahead,
low-quality electronics and textiles, many of them
missing the "QC" (Quality Control) sticker that
consumers in the West peel off without thinking,
are shipped to Central Asia - and usually,
directly to Karasuu bazaar. The people making
money are those who can afford to buy their own
crates, pick up goods themselves in China and then
sell them in Karasuu. These are the people who are
building new homes on the road into the town.
My taxi pulled through a clump of cars and
cows in front of the bazaar. Dust kicked up
everywhere. Summer in the Ferghana Valley is dry,
and children are constantly splashing buckets of
water on the sidewalk to limit the dust. The
driver crept along in the traffic another few
minutes. Then the crowds and the dust thinned out,
and we sped toward the nearby border with
Uzbekistan.
A few hundred feet from the
border crossing, people crowded again. On wooden
strollers fitted with four tires fit for a compact
sedan, men roped down television boxes - the size
of small refrigerators - as many as four tall,
four wide and four deep. Women, bowing with each
step, walked unsteadily with several rolls of
carpet balanced on the their backs. One man
wearing an oversized T-shirt took long strides and
waved a pistol as he shouted orders to some
children loading a stroller. I got out of the car
(no motor vehicles are allowed to cross) and
walked toward the crossing.
Close to the
line separating Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and the
bridge spanning the Shakhrikhansay River, Kyrgyz
border guards mingled in the thick concentration
of people. While I didn't see any passports or
documents being flashed, I saw plenty of prolonged
and padded handshakes. Across the bridge, the
Uzbek flag fluttered a bit. I had no sooner
squared the flag in the frame of my camera when
someone shoved me and ripped the camera out of my
hand. Welcome to Karasuu.
Four months ago,
the bridge between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan was
only a tongue of concrete sticking out a few feet
from the Uzbek side over the river. In spring
2002, Uzbek authorities tore the bridge apart. It
stayed that way for more than three years, and all
border traffic was rerouted to an official
crossing a few hundred meters up the road.
Officially, the government of Uzbekistan was
levying a 90% tax on imported goods, and who knows
what unofficial rate they were demanding.
But people evaded the transit tax and
continued to cross at the old spot using the
cables and wires rigged across the fast-flowing
Shakhrikhansay River. Smugglers balanced TV sets
on their backs and treaded carefully along a taut
cable to the other side. At least 97 people died
trying to cross.
So when demonstrations
and violence in Andijan, Uzbekistan, plunged the
Ferghana Valley into disorder for a few days in
the middle of May, residents on the Uzbek side
glimpsed an opportunity to fix the bridge.
On May 12 and 13, Uzbek authorities
machine-gunned hundreds of demonstrators during
street protests against the trial of 23 local
businessmen in Andijan accused of "Islamic
extremism" and membership in the allegedly
extremist group "Akramia". On the night of May 12,
armed men led a prison break that freed the 23
(and dozens of others) and soon thereafter, a
crowd gathered in Babur Square to demand a meeting
with President Islam Karimov. Karimov sent his
military instead. Armored personnel carriers
(APCs) and tanks closed in on Babur Square on
March 13 and began indiscriminately firing on the
crowd. The Uzbek government puts the death toll at
187; independent estimates range as high as 1,000.
After the massacre at Andijan, Uzbekistan
recalibrated its foreign policy. Uzbek-US
relations quickly soured. Washington pushed for an
international investigation into the events, and
Tashkent responded by launching a virulent
anti-American campaign in the Uzbek media, and
evicting the Pentagon from an airbase it has been
using in southern Uzbekistan to support Operation
Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan since autumn 2001.
Then, while fending off attacks from the
Americans and Europeans, Karimov flew to Beijing,
where Communist Party authorities heaped praise on
him for his strong stance against Islamic
extremism. Karimov has also recently improved
relations with Moscow. (The original call to
withdraw American forces from Central Asia came in
a statement issued by the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) in June. The SCO consists of
China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
and Tajikistan, and is seen by many as a rival to
US interests in the region.)
But in the
days after Andijan, another miniature rebellion
was taking place in the Uzbek town across the
border from Karasuu. Baktiar Rahimov rode a horse
through the village, rousing citizens to unite
under the order of Bayaman Erkinbaev, a notorious
deputy in Kyrgyzstan's parliament and boss of the
Karasuu bazaar, to rebuild the bridge. "We have
400 gunmen!" Rahimov yelled out on the night of
May 14.
How many gunmen Rahimov truly had
remains uncertain, but the people in the village,
emboldened by the uprising in Andijan, seized the
chance to restore the economic lifeline between
Uzbekistan and neighboring Karasuu bazaar,
Kyrgyzstan and China.
Local citizens
fetched welding guns and scraps of the old bridge
they had kept stashed in their homes since the
bridge was knocked down in 2002. In a few hours,
the bridge was passable. In a few days, with
authorities from either side looking on, it was
like new. So why, after all their aggression days
before in Andijan, didn't the Uzbek military do
anything to prevent the rapid reconstruction?
Alisher Saipov, a local journalist in Osh, told me
that, "If the borders were not opened at this
crossing at this time, there would have been mass
bloodshed. And if the [Uzbek] government tries to
close the bridge again, they will have an even
bigger conflict [than Andijan]."
For now,
the people hanging around the border seem pleased
by how things have turned out. One Uzbek woman,
Alima, leaned against a wooden fence and watched
people load carts and hustle them toward the
bridge. She bit on her nails and looked away while
we spoke. Alima explained that she has been
selling children's clothes in Karasuu bazaar for
six years, but business was never so good.
"Karasuu is very barakali," she said with a
sly smile. In Uzbek, barakali has several
meanings and suggests a range of things, including
profitable and endless. A pot of tea that pours
cup after cup is barakali. A business that
generates profits day in and day out is
barakali. Karasuu is barakali.
Once a month, Alima loads an empty crate
onto the back of a truck and drives to Urumchi,
China. In Urumchi, she swaps for a full crate and
returns to Karasuu. The whole trip takes only a
few days, but Alima estimated that each crate
earns her more than US$50,000. She hasn't crossed
the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border in years, nor does she
have any inclination to do so. Traders come to her
stall in the bazaar, purchase a few hundred
dollars worth of goods, and then take them over
the border themselves. Alima just comes to the
crossing occasionally to watch.
Later that
day, I met a guy named Akimjon sitting on an empty
stroller. He wore a handkerchief around his neck
and was covered in dust. Everything in Karasuu was
covered in dust. Since it reopened, he crosses the
border between 10 to 15 times per day. If someone
wants to get a stack of light bulbs across the
border, they will give Akimjon the equivalent of
$3 for each run; one dollar goes to the Kyrgyz
guards, one dollar goes to the Uzbek guards, and
he keeps a dollar for himself. "If you want, I can
get you across this evening," Akimjon said to me.
"Come back at dark."
How this border
crossing could be pasted together with a few
pieces of scrap metal and turned into one of the
main channels of Chinese goods to Central Asia is
impressive when you stand there observing the
bedlam and the corruption and the awkwardly packed
strollers loaded with televisions. To understand
the dynamics of Central Asia and, more
specifically, the Ferghana Valley, you must begin
here. Standing on the side of the road, I watched
countless numbers of traders and hustlers and
others wearing hard scowls and bandages on their
faces roam the streets looking to make a few som
(Kyrgyzstan's currency).
But I also
watched with alarm at how easily people moved
across international borders. One Friday
afternoon, I saw thousands of men from Uzbekistan
cross into Kyrgyzstan to attend services at the
mosque where a radical imam delivers his weekly
sermon. At about 1 pm, they began coming over the
bridge and into the two-story mosque. Afterward,
they poured into the streets and returned home -
some to Karasuu, some to Osh, some to Uzbekistan.
Again, no one showed a passport. For locals, a few
dollars goes much further than a passport.
And while the steady flow of goods is
keeping most locals pleased, the ease with which
arms or terrorists could pass through the border
post at Karasuu poses serious concerns for the
Uzbek government - and the fresh-legged Kyrgyz
one. If this economic activity stops, the
miniature rebellion in May that fueled the
rebuilding of the bridge will become much more
intense, and much more bloody.
Potential
problems also surround tensions between border
guards on either side. Uzbekistan has alleged that
the "terrorists" who triggered the events in
Andijan were organized and based in camps in
Kyrgyzstan. (On September 15, the Office of the
Prosecutor-General in Tashkent claimed that groups
of armed demonstrators rallied in Osh's central
football stadium and in a local school before
marching from Kyrgyzstan into Andijan.)
Uzbekistan also recently announced a
decision to turn off supplies of natural gas, the
main source of electricity and heat, to Kyrgyzstan
this winter, citing late payments from Bishkek. A
more likely reason, however, is that Uzbekistan
responded angrily to the Kyrgyz government's
evacuation of 439 Uzbek refugees (who had fled to
Kyrgyzstan after Andijan) to Romania in late July.
And two weeks ago, a fistfight broke out between
Kyrgyz and Uzbek border guards at a crossing north
of Karasuu.
In light of these episodes,
the border guards on either side are supposed to
be on high alert. I figured they had enough to
worry about with the strollers lined up and the
people walking freely between the two countries to
target me. So as I stood off to the side of the
walkway crammed with people leading across the
border into Uzbekistan, I was startled when
someone knocked me off balance and jerked my
camera out of my hand.
One Kyrgyz officer
handed it to another, who handed it to another,
and I tried to follow the camera before it
disappeared somewhere amongst the dozen soldiers
who manned the post. Eventually my friend and I
grabbed the attention of one officer. I apologized
and explained how I could easily erase the photo
from the camera. For 30 minutes, we discussed
international regulations that prohibit
photographing borders.
Finally, the guard
whistled to another over a crowd of people and we
entered a shed with four other officers. The
camera dangled from one of their wrists. "Erase
the picture," he ordered. I held up the display
screen and proceeded to scan through a few rolls
worth of shots. The guards seemed to enjoy the
slideshow, including the pictures of my apartment
in Washington and my dad riding his new mountain
bike. But, alas, there was no picture of the Uzbek
flag fluttering in the breeze. The Kyrgyz Border
Service was just too quick and too sharp to let
that happen.
Nicholas Schmidle
is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. He
is reporting from Central Asia this fall.
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