Lenin justified ruthlessness by quoting a Russian folk saying—"When you live with wolves you must learn to howl like a wolf." Last month, Islam Karimov, the ageing Uzbek president, did what his Soviet apparatchik training told him to and howled "shoot." When the shooting stopped, hundreds of people lay dead in the streets of Andijan, a city in the fertile, ethnically complex Ferghana valley, east of the capital Tashkent.
A regime which competes in nastiness with Turkmenistan for the mantle of worst in central Asia blamed "Islamic extremists" linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir for provoking the trouble. Hizb, which is banned, is a declaredly non-violent movement which aims to set up an Islamic caliphate across the former Soviet republics of central Asia. Much of its support comes from the heavily populated Ferghana valley.
But in Andijan, as in nearby Korasuv and most other Uzbek towns and villages, the under-25s make up more than 60 per cent of the population—and most of them are unemployed. Economic frustration, coupled with political repression and widespread corruption, is at least as responsible as religious exaltation for the tensions. For millions of young Uzbeks, the only escape from poverty is to seek work on the building sites or farms of Russia or neighbouring Kazakhstan. Their meagre remittances keep many a family from starvation—and underpin the faltering domestic economy.
The latest protests were sparked off by the trial of a group of local businessmen running an economic self-help movement designed to circumvent the restrictions of an economy without working banks and dominated by corrupt cliques linked to the government.
Economic misery has been a potent factor behind other recent revolts in former Soviet lands. But there is a big difference. In Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan the Soviet-trained apparatchiks, when pushed, followed the precedent set, to his honour, by Mikhail Gorbachev. They did not shoot. They resigned and paved the way for new leaders and new policies.
But Karimov is the Nicolae Ceausescu of central Asia, and could well end up sharing a similar fate. It might have turned out differently had the 67-year-old Karimov, who has been president since the Soviet collapse in 1991, allowed this resource-rich country to follow the reform path followed elsewhere in the post-communist world. Instead, he opted to continue the Soviet system of state control, channelling hard currency into subsidies to loss-making enterprises, such as the car assembly joint venture with Daewoo in the Ferghana valley that operates at below half capacity and loses an estimated $5,000 on every car exported, mainly to Russia, where it sells on its low price.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Uzbekistan—with its 26m population, fertile land and hard currency earnings from gold, cotton, gas and other minerals—was seen as the rising star in central Asia. It was to Tashkent that international companies flocked to register their presence in the region.
Over the last decade they have de-camped. Mostly they moved to Almaty in neighbouring Kazakhstan, whose president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has attracted billions of dollars of foreign investment into both oil and non-oil developments by combining economic liberalism with tight, but not obtuse, political control.
The Kazakhs have managed both to prevent rapidly increasing oil revenues from spilling out into an uncontrollable inflationary surge and to maintain some limits on corruption. As a result, Kazakhstan has become a regional powerhouse while the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) groups Uzbekistan alongside Turkmenistan and Belarus in what it calls "the slow-reforming economies." All three "suffer from pervasive government intervention."
And it is that combination of pervasive intervention, together with political repression, economic incompetence and widespread corruption, which underlies not just the recent outburst of popular fury in Andijan, but a series of similar protests across Uzbekistan over the last few years.
The regime has been impervious to repeated urgings by the EBRD, World Bank, IMF and western governments to undertake the kind of reforms that have worked elsewhere and would provide an escape valve for energy, ambitions and frustrations. Two years ago, it was offered a golden chance to convert to a more productive economic policy when the EBRD held its annual conference in Tashkent. The conference, with its influx of potential investors, was preceded by an IMF mission with a plea for the dismantling of a complex dual exchange rate system—a system which led to huge distortions while ensuring big profits for the small elite that controls the hard currency income from cotton, gold and other natural resources.
A senior executive from one of the handful of big western companies grimly sticking it out in Uzbekistan—including Newmont mining corporation, Nestlé and British American Tobacco—told me: "This country is run for the benefit of about seven people and their associated clans."
One might ask whether Uzbekistan would have developed differently had the US not suffered its post-9/11 trauma. In central Asia, as in the middle east, this has translated into a noticeable reduction in the state department's attention to human rights issues and a much higher profile for Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon.
Few were quicker to notice the new wind blowing from Washington than Karimov, who was the local Communist party boss in the days when Uzbekistan provided many of the soldiers and the main logistical support for Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Now Karimov offered Washington the use of former Soviet bases along its southern border with Afghanistan. What he got in return was a less strident approach to civil rights questions, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in base rental payments, aid—and a big boost for local contractors rebuilding the Karshi-Khanabad base.
The Pentagon originally thought of Khanabad as a temporary facility from which to launch military and humanitarian missions on targets in Afghanistan. This is no longer the case. Just before the EBRD conference in 2003, a senior US army procurement officer told a packed meeting of the US-Uzbek chamber of commerce that the Pentagon was now placing contracts for permanent buildings with a 25-year life. The aim was to turn Khanabad into both a secure operational base and a rest and recreation facility for US forces in the region.
The cynical Pentagon view of Karimov as a safe pair of hands in a turbulent region has been shot to pieces on the streets of Andijan, as has Karimov's belief that Washington will automatically protect him. It was not to Washington or Moscow that Karimov looked to for support after Andijan. Instead he flew to a red carpet welcome in Beijing.
Uzbekistan's fate now hinges partly on the outcome of a classic great power tussle between China, Russia and America for influence in this strategically sensitive country, whose people are sick of being humiliated and impoverished. Some have been pushed towards militant Islam in much the same way as Poles rallied around the Catholic church as the champion of pre-communist values and traditions. But the young Uzbeks I met in two recent visits to the country, while full of contempt for Karimov and his clique, and anger at western support for the regime, had no desire to return to another obscurantist form of government. What they wanted was a chance to live their own lives and prosper in their own country. And some told me they were prepared to fight for it.
