Table of Contents

CONFLICT PROFILE: UZBEKISTAN
By Jim Lobe

COZYING UP TO KARIMOV
By Robert M. Cutler

INDIA: CRACKDOWN ON ISLAMIC GROUPS
By Abid Aslam, FPIF Contributing Editor

CONFLICT PROFILE: UZBEKISTAN
By Jim Lobe

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF Conflict Profile that is posted in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/selfdetermination/conflicts/uzbek.html.)

History

Fought over by neighboring empires eager to gain control of the fabled Great Silk Road between China, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean for centuries, present-day Uzbekistan consisted of three independent emirates and khanates (Bukhara, Kokand, and Khiva) when Imperial Russia took control of the territory. In April 1921, Tashkent became capital of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Local Bolshevik authorities implemented a repressive secularization campaign. The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) was created in December 1924.

During Soviet rule, Uzbekistan became a major cotton producer, made possible by massive irrigation projects that eventually contributed to the drying up of the Aral Sea and the disappearance of most of the country's fertile land.

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's "glasnost" policies relaxed curbs on religious practice and led to increased interest in and practice of Islam and a resurgence of ethnic pride and history. In 1989, ethnic Uzbeks attacked Meskhetian Turks (deported by Stalin to Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia in 1944) and other minorities living in the poor, densely populated Ferghana Valley, which lies in the far eastern part of the country.

Independence came in 1991. The Soviet Union's collapse changed little in the short term as the then-first secretary of the Communist Party, Islam Karimov, was elected president. Most opposition groups were not permitted to field candidates.

Karimov's first term was characterized by harassment and repression of independent political parties and independent nongovernmental organizations, including human rights groups. In 1995, Karimov cracked down hard on the outlawed opposition party, Erk, after charging its leaders with conspiring to overthrow the government. In the same year, his People's Democratic Party (PDP) swept the general election, and a referendum granting him a new five-year term was approved by 99.6% of the electorate, according to the official count. Opposition parties also were effectively barred from 1999 legislative elections. Karimov won yet another five-year term with 91.9% of the vote in 2000 presidential elections denounced as unfair and not free by western observers.

Since 1993, much of Karimov's domestic efforts have been directed toward repressing independent expressions of Islam. This campaign intensified in 1997 after the killing of two policemen in the Ferghana Valley, which prompted Karimov to frame his anti-Muslim efforts as part of the fight against terrorism. International human rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International, have become increasingly outspoken in assailing summary executions and disappearances, "routine" use of torture, arbitrary arrests and prosecutions, and public "hate rallies" against family members of detainees. In a memorandum submitted to the Bush administration last month, HRW cited estimates that 7,000 pious Muslims are currently serving lengthy sentences in prison for such offenses as "anti-state activity" or "attempted subversion of the constitutional order."

The campaign against independent Muslims intensified yet again after February 1999, when a series of bombs exploded near government buildings in Tashkent, killing 16 people. The government blamed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU also was accused of kidnappings and armed incursions that took place in August 1999 along Uzbekistan's and Kyrgyzstan's common border and again in August 2000 along the country's border with Tajikistan. The government committed substantial military resources, including bombing raids, against suspected IMU hideouts in Kyrgyzstan (killing a number of Kyrgyz civilians) in 1999. U.S. officials believe there may be nearly a dozen armed Islamist groups besides the IMU, and that they are attracting growing support.

Ethnic Profile

(total population of about 25 million people)
Uzbeks: 71%
Russians: 8%
Tajiks: 5%
Kazakhs: 4%
Tatars: 3%
Karakalpaks: 2%

External Relations

Uzbekistan has tried both to assert political and strategic leadership over the other former Soviet states in the region--an effort that has earned it considerable resentment and hostility from its neighbors--and to maintain independence from Moscow. Karimov refused to join a customs union formed by Russia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan in 1996 and even pulled out of the 1992 Commonwealth of Independent States' collective security treaty in 1999. Uzbekistan subsequently joined a security group consisting of Georgia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. Throughout the 1990s, it sought closer military ties with NATO, particularly the United States, Germany, and China in order to keep its dependence on Moscow to a minimum.

In June 2001, however, it became a member--along with Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan--of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an accord to cooperate in the fight against religious and ethnic militancy in the region while promoting closer economic ties.

Karimov has resisted economic reforms urged by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In frustration, the IMF withdrew its resident representative from Tashkent in April 2001. Rural poverty has grown steadily over the past decade.

U.S. Policy

Despite criticism of Karimov's authoritarian rule and human rights record, the United States has maintained generally good relations with Uzbekistan over the past decade, providing it with some $263 million in economic and military aid between 1992 and 2001. Washington has appeared to be chiefly interested in Uzbekistan's cotton, mineral, and gas resources, as a key target for expanding U.S. influence in Central Asia, and as a bulwark against drugs and radical Islamism. In 1998, according to the former head of U.S. Central Command, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, Karimov offered to host U.S. troops, with whom Uzbeki forces conducted joint exercises. The U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division deployed more than 1,000 soldiers to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on October 2, 2001.

Washington, which put the IMU on its terrorism list in September 2000 and has charged it with drug smuggling, has also provided antiterrorism and border assistance despite, as one senior U.S. official said recently, its understanding that Karimov's repression constitutes "the underlying cause for the extremism."

Despite the intensifying repression against Muslim believers, the quasi-governmental U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom failed to name Uzbekistan as a country "of particular" concern last year under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, which gives the president the power to impose a variety of sanctions, and it again avoided naming the country in its August 2001 recommendations. During the past year, on the other hand, Washington persuaded Tashkent to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its prisons and to release a prominent human rights activist.

(Jim Lobe <jlobe@starpower.net> is a contributing editor with Foreign Policy In Focus, online at www.fpif.org, and an editor with Inter Press Service in Washington, DC.)

COZYING UP TO KARIMOV
By Robert M. Cutler

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF Global Affairs Commentary, posted in its entirety at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0110kari.html.)

Uzbekistan has sought a special relationship with the U.S. since the early 1990s. The country received designation as an American "strategic partner" in 1995 in a bilateral communique. This "strategic partner" relationship has, until recently, been largely a rhetorical designation.

In its new war on terrorism, however, Washington is quickly moving to put this strategic partnership to work. It has already turned to Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov, who has spent the past decade cracking down so hard in his own country that he has driven the possibility of loyal Islamic dissent out of the political arena, and is now targeted by the Taliban-backed Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), with which there have been military clashes over the past two years.

Although Uzbekistan may provide a useful launching pad for a U.S. armed intervention in Afghanistan, with which it shares a small border, as well as surveillance capabilities, the danger exists that too blunt an American approach would negatively affect U.S. interests and the future of politics in the region. To avoid counterproductive effects requires sensitivity to local nuances. It would be a mistake, for example, for Washington to lump together all Islamic political movements. In Central Asia in particular, the indigenous development of Islamic social and political thought historically differs from that in other parts of the world, including Afghanistan. Islamic trends in Uzbekistan are especially distinctive.

In the early 1990s, Karimov denounced "Islamic fundamentalism." In the early post-Soviet tumult--before Western observers realized what was happening--he stamped out all forms of political opposition. In this way he brought the country's nascent multiparty system to an unhappy end, treating as outlaws even those who might have become a "loyal opposition" that supported the regime and its institutions. The result was a radicalization of many of the groups that survived.

For example, the liberal tradition within the historical Jadid ("Renewal") movement seems to have been lost. This reformist Islamic movement, native to Central Asia, took shape in the early twentieth century, before the Bolshevik revolution, in order to resist Russian cultural and political dominance. It operated through clandestine religious celebration and education, including the establishment of printing houses. The Jadid movement had an underground revival in the decades after the Second World War. However, given the overarching forms of control that the Soviet-Russian regime attempted to install, as contrasted with the more limited control that typified that Tsarist-Russian presence, late Soviet Jadidism tended to be less collaborative and more confrontational vis-à-vis Moscow. Under Gorbachev's glasnost, it burst onto the scene publicly.

Jadid's conservative wing influenced the formation of the contemporary Hizb-e-Tahrir group, which agrees with IMU on the overthrow of all secular states in the region, and on the eventual goal of a transnational Islamic Caliphate. But Hizb-e-Tahrir concentrates at present on the dissemination of religious education and propaganda, whereas the IMU focuses on the armed struggle. This is the spectrum of political Islam under Karimov's authoritarianism: the distinctive and progressive modernism of the liberal Jadidists has disappeared within the country.

For the U.S. to be visibly identified with the Karimov regime, in the eyes of those social strata where these are not already linked together in a demonizing mythology, is a danger both to U.S. interests in the region and to the progressive evolution of society and politics in Uzbekistan.

(Robert M. Cutler <rmc@alum.mit.edu> <http://www.robertcutler.org/> is Research Fellow, Institute of European and Russian Studies, Carleton University, Canada.)

INDIA: CRACKDOWN ON ISLAMIC GROUPS
By Abid Aslam, FPIF Contributing Editor

Opposition parties have rallied against an Indian government decision to ban the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), saying the move is discriminatory. The government says SIMI has ties to suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

The ban has sparked unrest in many parts of the country. Police reportedly killed four protesters over the weekend in Lucknow, capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, a region of extreme economic and social disparity that is the cultural seat of Urdu--the official language of neighboring rival Pakistan.

The crackdown against Muslim organizations in India comes as international groups ranging from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to the International Crisis Group warn of an upsurge in political repression, specifically targeted against religious groups deemed a political threat to ruling elites, in Central and South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

The government banned SIMI on September 27 and arrested SIMI President Shahid Badr on charges of causing communal disaffection, Inter Press Service reports. Critics charged the government with political opportunism in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, which Bin Laden is suspected of masterminding.

SIMI leaders in at least three other states--Madhya Pradesh, Maharasthra, and Kerala--also have been taken into custody, adds Inter Press.

Officials in Madhya Pradesh arrested two people on suspicion of working for Pakistan's secret service. The arrests followed the seizure of more than 100 illegal U.S., Czech, and South African guns, reports Reuters.

Most--but not all--Indian states are enforcing the ban, Inter Press notes, yet even here opposition groups have demanded that extremist Hindu organizations also be banned--in particular, the Bajrang Dal, a Hindu group with ties to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The main opposition Congress party has enforced the ban in states where it governs, but has assailed it as designed to fan communal flames in the run up to provincial elections scheduled for early next year in Uttar Pradesh. The Communist Party of India also assailed the ban as sectarian.

Party spokesperson Jaipal Reddy said the Bajrang Dal were prime suspects in the 1999 murders of Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons but was shielded from prosecution.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, leader of the regional Samajwadi Party, which is leading the polls in Uttar Pradesh, said the ban smacks of opportunism, coming as it does when international attention is focused on Al Qaeda.

Home Minister Lal Krishan Advani, however, said the government had signaled a possible ban well before September 11.

The home ministry now plans to crack down on madrassah, or Islamic schools, arguing that these are a breeding ground for "jihadis," or proponents of holy war, and that they serve as shelters and weapons caches for Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency.

India is home to more Muslims than the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The neighbors and nemeses often trade accusations that the other's secret service is stirring up communal disturbances in its territory.

Local media and Inter Press note, however, that the BJP government has made a virtue of polarizing Hindu and Muslim voters and seems to be using the tactic to advance its chances in the upcoming vote in Uttar Pradesh, a key state because of its large population and proximity to the capital, New Delhi.

The BJP came to power, albeit at the head of a coalition, partly on the strength of communal violence that spread nationwide from the Uttar Pradesh town of Ayodhya, where, in 1992, Hindu groups demolished the Babri Mosque, saying it stood on the site of a temple signifying the birth of Lord Rama.

(Abid Aslam <aaslam@igc.org> is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy In Focus and the North America and Caribbean editor of Inter Press Service, an international news agency.)

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