Time Bomb
A crisis in faraway Uzbekistan reverberates around the world. Could it spark a renewed
cold war?
Bryon MacWilliams and Michael Meyer
May 30 issue - Uzbekistan is quiet, for now. But the violence that shook the eastern town
of Andijan is reverberating elsewhere. In the capital of Tashkent, Uzbekistan's autocratic
president, Islam Karimov, clearly hopes his strong-arm tactics will maintain his hold on
power. Moscow (not to mention leaders in places like Belarus) worries about another
post-Soviet revolution, following on the heels of Georgia and Ukraine. Western leaders are
torn. They have no choice but to condemn a dictator's repression. Yet they fear what might
replace him.
More than a week has passed since the bloody morning of Friday, May 13, and it's still
unclear what exactly happened. The previous night, says a Radio Liberty reporter on the
scene, Andrei Babitsky, about 70 to 100 hard-core protesters had stormed the local jail
and released 23 political prisoners. By early morning, the citizens of Andijan had turned
out en masse—as many as 10,000, according to various reports. But when crowds occupied
official buildings, government security forces fired upon them with heavy machine guns
mounted on armored personnel carriers. Snipers shot from rooftops as a helicopter circled
overhead. Karimov angrily denied that he ordered a massacre, claiming that only 169 people
died in the incident, including 32 special police. But international human-rights groups
cited anywhere from 400 to 750 deaths, including many women and children. Eyewitnesses
told observers for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a London-based
international media-development NGO, how soldiers went from body to body in the town's
main square, executing the wounded. Even many hours later, visitors to the scene described
a grisly tableau of blood and body parts scattered across the square and surrounding
streets. According to IWPR, a city pathologist counted 500 bodies at School Number 15 in
the old town, guarded by armed soldiers.
Whatever turns out to be true, the shots fired in
Andijan are echoing throughout Central Asia and beyond. From Washington, to Brussels, to
Moscow—not to mention neighboring Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan—governments
are watching to see whether the unrest will spread. "If this is what we think it is,
that a massacre took place, then it's the beginning of the end" for Karimov, says
Zeyno Baran, director of security programs at the Nixon Center in Washington. He expects
the violence to escalate in the coming weeks. So does Leonid Ivashov, a retired Russian
general and vice president of the Russian Academy for Geopolitical Problems in Moscow.
"This was a true armed rebellion," he says. Those who planned it were counting
on an iron-fisted response from the government, he adds, suggesting that the president's
widespread unpopularity, especially among young people, will make it difficult for him to
retrench like the Chinese government did after Tiananmen Square in 1989. "Karimov now
has no choice but to try to right social wrongs," says Ivashov. "It's impossible
to correct the situation through the use of soldiers and police."
Will the president see things that way? More likely,
experts say, he will opt for brutality. The Uzbek strongman sits atop one of the most
efficiently repressive state-security machines in the region. Unlike Georgia, Ukraine or
Kyrgyzstan, there is no organized opposition in Uzbekistan. Elections are rigged, and
there is no free press. Foreign radio is jammed, phones are regularly tapped, dissidents
are followed and all the old KGB dirty tricks of political persuasion, kangaroo courts and
torture are regularly brought into play, according to Craig Murray, a former British
ambassador to Tashkent who claims there are 10,000 political and religious prisoners in
Uzbekistan. He himself was relieved of his duties by his bosses in London late last year
after publicly complaining that two such prisoners had been boiled to death by Uzbek
police in October 2002.
Clearly, Uzbekistan is an awkward ally—yet it counts
among its friends both the United States and Russia. State Department spokesman Richard
Boucher said Washington was "deeply concerned of reports of indiscriminate
firing" on the demonstrators. Yet Washington pointedly did not take sides. After
9/11, the Bush administration established a strategic partnership with Karimov, plunking
down $500 million for a military base in southern Uzbekistan in preparation for operations
in Afghanistan and paying $60 million or more a year in military aid and training.
Above all, Washington worries about who might replace Karimov. The nightmare scenario:
overthrow by aggressively anti-American Islamic militants, many of whom are active in the
famously lawless Fergana Valley. There was little evidence to support the Karimov regime's
claims that the rebellion in Andijan was the work of Muslim extremists; if anything,
witnesses report that the protests represented a broad swath of mainstream citizenry. Yet
that did not diminish fears of an Islamic-style revolution, either in Tashkent or foreign
capitals. "These demonstrations are not what we saw in Georgia or Lebanon. These were
armed people taking over prisons. We recognize the need for Uzbekistan to deal with its
terrorism problem," says a senior U.S. State Department spokesman, adding: "You
don't want to walk away and let Uzbekistan become another Afghanistan."
That's Moscow's worry as well. Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov declared last week that Muslim radicals linked to the "Taliban" were
behind the Andijan uprising, and made clear that Russia supported the use of force by
Uzbek authorities. Other Russian leaders went further, suggesting that events in Andijan
were backed not only by international terror networks but also by the United States, bent
on destabilizing Russia and limiting its influence in the region. Late last week the head
of Russia's Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev, declared war on foreign
"spies" operating under the cover of Western NGOs. The upheaval in Andijan was
only the latest in a string of efforts to undermine Russia and its allies, Patrushev said.
They must be stopped—"in the interests of state security."
A new cold war? Not yet, but it could come to feel that way, especially if the region's
other authoritarian leaders take a leaf from Andijan in dealing with their own opposition.
With Eve Conant in Washington, Nadya Titova in Moscow and Owen Matthews in Istanbul
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
Newsweek International, May 30, 2005
http://msnbc.msn.com
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