National Post (National Edition)
UZBEKS LOOK TO FUTURE AFTER DESPOT
Uzbekistan’s only ruler dies at 78
MOSCOW • The death of Islam Karimov, the only president independent Uzbekistan has ever known, is pushing Central Asia into uncharted territory.
Karimov, a ruthless autocrat who ruled Uzbekistan for almost three decades, died Friday in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. He was 78.
A joint statement by the Cabinet of Ministers and the Parliament announced the death, saying he had a stroke that led to multiple organ failure.
The most important country in the region — as measured by population and geography — Uzbekistan under Karimov became the archetypal post-Soviet police state: corrupt, brutal, and defiantly inward-looking. With Karimov’s death or incapacitation, Uzbekistan is transitioning to new leadership at a time of extreme economic distress and geopolitical uncertainty in Central Asia.
Even in a region defined by dictatorship, Karimov was known as a tyrant with an explosive temper and a penchant for cruelty. His troops machine-gunned hundreds of unarmed demonstrators to death during a 2005 uprising, he jailed thousands of political opponents, and his henchmen reportedly boiled some dissidents to death.
Under Soviet rule, Karimov had been the first secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party, and his suppression of the earliest opposition political parties started with independence. Two early opposition groupings had their public assemblies banned and their leaders driven into exile in the early 1990s. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other political exiles from these and other movements left as well, clustering in Turkey, Europe, and the U.S.
He came under widespread international criticism from human rights groups, but because of Uzbekistan’s strategic location as a vital supply route for the war in neighbouring Afghanistan, the West turned a blind eye to Karimov’s worst abuses.
In 2005, after people massed in the main square of the Fergana Valley city of Andijan following a prison break, Karimov’s security forces massacred hundreds of civilians and shuttered the offices of international civil society organizations. A new wave of repression was directed against the few local human rights groups and political dissidents who held on. The U.S. was expelled from its Karshi-Khanabad military base, known as K2, after it criticized the massacre, but by 2009 relations had warmed again amid America’s crisis with Pakistan that threatened supply lines to coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Central Asia was an important thread in the alternative to the Pakistani route and Uzbekistan held the most important crossing into Afghanistan for goods destined for U.S. troops. And so Washington slunk back, without the Karimov regime ever acknowledging its crimes in Andijan. Human rights groups never got back into the country and journalists and civil society activists are still denied entry more often than not.
Much attention is now given to how authoritarian governments learn from each other and share techniques, with a disproportionate focus on Russia as the innovator, spreading ideas like labelling nongovernmental organizations “foreign agents.” But Uzbekistan was the region’s original pioneer: banning all unregistered religious activity in 1998; expelling nearly all foreign NGOs in 2005-2006; blocking access to social media platforms; kidnapping dissidents and secretly delivering them to prisons; and assassinating exiles in countries as diverse as Sweden and Turkey.
This brutal history is why few observers of Central Asia hold much hope for an “Uzbek spring” in the wake of Karimov’s death. The political opposition exists only in exile and largely online. There is no independent civil society — no NGOs, no independent bar associations, unions, mosques, or even soccer leagues.
Karimov’s death comes at an extremely precarious time for Uzbekistan and Central Asia as a whole. The collapse in oil prices and Western sanctions that thrust Russia into recession in 2014 also sent Central Asian economies dependent either on Russia or on oil into a tailspin.
A new leader will probably need to bring in some sources of new financing to prove his capability and to make payments to keep the security services in line. Allowing Uzbeks to travel and trade more freely within the region would be a popular move and one that could boost the economy.
There is never a good time for a leadership transition in a centralized system like Uzbekistan’s and Karimov leaves no clear successor behind. Like all dictatorships, Karimov’s rule was about reducing the choice to one of stability or chaos. Now we have to see what the chaos brings.