Washington Post - 10.01.2001

 

Washington Post

New Allies Seek Payback

Central Asians Expect U.S. to Ignore Abuses In Return for Help in Anti-Terror Campaign

By Susan B. Glasser

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, Sept. 30 -- In President Islam Karimov's Uzbekistan, more than 7,000 political prisoners are in jail, many of them religious Muslims accused of no more than sporting a beard or circulating religious leaflets. The political opposition has been thoroughly crushed. There is no independent mass media. And the few who do speak out are routinely beaten, harassed, arrested or driven into exile.

Economic conditions are just as bad. The average wage is officially $20 a month, and unofficially much lower than that. Most of the few Western businesses that operated here have left. Even the International Monetary Fund pulled out a few months ago, expressing dismay over reforms that never happened.

But instead of criticizing Karimov's record, the United States is courting Uzbekistan's president, along with other authoritarian leaders throughout the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. As they sign up for America's coalition to fight terrorists based in neighboring Afghanistan, they are banking on less scrutiny of their abuses at home and more concrete aid from a distant superpower that never needed their help before.

Many critics at home and abroad fear that, in the search for new allies, the United States will abandon its former concerns, changing its stance on everything from Russia's brutal war against Islamic rebels in Chechnya to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. And nowhere could such flip-flops be more significant than in newly relevant Central Asia, where all five former Soviet republics are economically struggling and politically repressive, governed by Communist Party bosses renamed presidents.

"They have promised us that America will not sell out human rights to get Karimov's friendship," said Mikhail Ardzinov, who runs one of Uzbekistan's few independent human rights groups. "But we know that the tone will change now."

Sitting in the apartment where he was beaten by Uzbek police two years ago, Ardzinov interrupted an interview to retrieve the blood-stained shirt he was wearing that day. He showed photographs of the wounds on his face. He said his phone is bugged and that he is followed by the secret service the Uzbeks still call the KGB.

But, he said today, not at all bitterly, "Terrorism is now the greater evil."

And in that fight, Uzbekistan is offering the United States an unprecedented military foothold on former Soviet territory: use of several strategically important air bases without which strikes over the border into Afghanistan would be much harder to launch. Karimov talked by telephone last week with President Bush and publicly spoke of his readiness to allow his airspace "to be used in the fight against terrorism for humanitarian and security aims."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met his counterpart from Kazakhstan on Saturday, and said the State Department was in touch with all the Central Asian countries. "We've been very pleased with how forthcoming they have been, with respect to condemning the acts of the 11th of September, of offering support in various kinds of ways," he told reporters.

Uzbek officials and independent analysts said much broader cooperation has been agreed on. Several U.S. transport planes have reportedly landed at military facilities here, including one today just outside Tashkent, and several sources said the Uzbek military has received orders to prepare their bases to receive U.S. warplanes.

In exchange, Uzbek leaders have begun to speak of the new attitude they want from the United States, "guarantees" of a different, less critical relationship with their strategically located country of 25 million people.

"We want to show in reality, not just words, our readiness to cooperate in a real way with the Americans. Maybe after that, in America there will be more appreciation of our problems," said a top-ranking Uzbek official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We don't want America to limit itself to criticism, but to help constructively."

They also want promises that the United States will not unleash a war on Uzbekistan's borders that could destabilize its government. Karimov's government fears both a flood of refugees from Afghanistan and renewed incursions by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an extremist group that aims to overthrow Karimov and install an Islamic fundamentalist government. Karimov blames the movement for explosions in Tashkent that killed 16 people two years ago; the group came over the border from Afghanistan in 1999 and 2000 to stage armed confrontations in Uzbekistan and neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

"We should receive a guarantee of security for our territory and our borders," Karimov said last week. A senior Uzbek official was even blunter. "We want a guarantee that America will not begin a conflict and then just leave us to deal with the consequences," he said.

Reflecting the new pragmatism he said he hopes the United States will embrace, this official said Uzbekistan would be able to allow democratic reforms only after the threat of Islamic terrorism from Afghanistan has been eliminated. "It is in our interests to help deal with this problem. Then we can spend money that we would have spent on defense on reforms," he said.

The United States has already muted its criticism in recent years. Despite campaigning by human rights groups, Uzbekistan was not on the State Department's 2000 watch list of countries where religious freedom is not respected; a government commission recently produced its list for 2001 and Uzbekistan was not on it.

"Obviously, there are geopolitical concerns of the U.S. at play in this decision," said human rights activist Ardzinov. "We believe Uzbekistan is an authoritarian regime under the personal power of the president, and it should be on the list of those countries where the worst repressions of human rights occur. This regime must be on this blacklist."

Instead, Bush made a huge bow to Karimov's government by mentioning in his speech to Congress last month the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan as a terrorist threat. He argued that the rebels being fought by Karimov's government are tied to Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States.

"This was a major victory for Karimov," said Anvar Nazirov, a researcher at the French Institute for the Study of Central Asia here. "Bush's speech made a great impression on Uzbekistan."

Nazirov and even some human rights activists argued, however, that there may be a positive side to unprecedented cooperation with the United States by a country still struggling to deal with the legacy of Soviet totalitarianism.

"There is a hope that rapprochement between Uzbekistan and the United States will push Uzbekistan to serious economic reforms and that through economic reforms we may eventually come to democracy," he said.

But Nazirov said it is not hope but fear that has caused Uzbekistan to ally itself with a former Cold War foe. "Fear unites the entire Uzbek society," he said, "fear of terrorism and fear that we could become like Afghanistan," devastated by war, run by religious extremists and cut off from the rest of the world.

Such fears are easily encountered at the bus station in Tashkent's old city on a sultry Sunday. Teacher Gulchekhra Mirsadikova ticked off a list of the wars that have plagued the former Soviet republics in the last decade: Armenia versus Azerbaijan, civil wars in Georgia and Tajikistan, not one but two Chechen wars inside Russia. "God willing," she said, "we don't want it here."

Sitting on a nearby bench, Tijabayev Abdumova was more focused on the retaliation that Uzbekistan's new partnership with the United States might provoke from Afghanistan's Taliban regime. "We don't need a war," said Abdumova, a trader at the market. "Things are hard enough here."