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• Requiem for a Dual Hegemony

After Andijan

A testimonial by Jamshid Mukhtarov

Compiled by Alex Stonehill

Uzbekistan has been a troubled country since its independence from The Soviet Union in 1991.  Like many other Central Asian countries in the region, its political leadership, headed by President Islom Karimov, is largely made up of the same politicians from Soviet times.  Corruption and authoritarianism still rule the day.  But where other countries, such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, have taken steps towards democracy and development, Uzbekistan has become increasingly isolated and repressive.  In 2005 Uzbekistan was included in Freedom House’s “The Worst of the Worst:  The World’s Most Repressive Societies,” and human rights groups around the world have reported wide-scale violations of virtually all basic human rights, from torture and arbitrary arrest of those seen as opposing the government, to restrictions against freedom of religion, speech, the press, association and assembly.  President Karimov’s term continues to be extended through national referendums (in 1995 and 2002), but most international observers refuse to recognize the results.

On May 13, 2005, mass protests were held in the southern city of Andijan challenging the abuses of Karimov’s government, including the imprisonment of 23 Muslims accused of extremism. The events of that day have come to be known as The Andijan Massacre; protestors claim that Uzbek troops fired without warning on peaceful demonstrators.  While no one can confirm numbers, estimates of the dead typically range from 400-1,000 people.  The government blamed armed Islamic extremists for provoking the violence and claim that troops were simply protecting Uzbekistan from terrorists. While a recent video released by the Uzbek government confirms that armed Uzbeks were in the crowd, human rights groups maintain that the majority of protestors were peaceful citizens.

Due to the repressive and dangerous situation in Uzbekistan, CLP journalists realized they would be unable to successfully report from within the country.  However, we did have the opportunity to interview one of the few political refugees from Uzbekistan that have escaped to southern Kyrgyzstan since the massacre.  Here, in his own words devoted human rights activist Jamshid Mukhtarov, Director of the Ezgulik Human Rights Society in the southern Uzbek city of Djizzak, discusses his decision to flee his country, his evolution as an activist and the horrors of life under one of the most repressive regimes in the world.

*                             *                                *

I was not always an activist.  First I was a businessman wholesaling beverages, but I immediately collided with corruption and it was hard for me to make a living.  By 2003 I began to sense that the people of Uzbekistan were being treated very badly and knew I needed to find a way to help.

We founded the Ezgulik Human Rights Society and began working closely with Human Rights Watch.  A lot of what we did was trying to get information out to people about what is going on, I spent a lot of time circulating pamphlets and booklets on human rights to citizens.

Almost immediately a campaign of pressure against human rights workers began.  Members of our organization were regularly beaten by army and police.  When I complained about these abuses to authorities, through letters and telegrams to government officials and politicians, it was as though I’d done nothing.  They responded with silence.

In May of 2005, Uzbek citizens in Andijan came out and protested despite their fears.  They were simply urging the government to make a better situation for the people of the country.  They wanted an end to poverty and a better government.  When troops fired on them on May 13th at least 1,000 people died.  Sometimes I wonder if the government didn’t orchestrate the entire thing just to terrify the people and ensure that no one would try again for a revolution like in Kyrgyzstan or Ukraine.

After the Andijan Massacre, Human Rights Watch released a magazine condemning the government’s actions.  I copied this magazine and circulated it as widely as I could.  It seems that law enforcement agencies and authorities also received the magazine.  After this pressure against human rights workers increased, I was put on house arrest along with all of my colleagues.  Authorities even organized a pro-government rally in Djizzak and many human rights workers were tortured by participants.

In January of 2006 I was arrested on rape charges and beaten by the arresting officers who made it clear that my beating was a result of my activism.  Both my brother and sister were also arrested on false charges.  My sister, who is 20, was accused of murdering a taxi driver over a fare.

One morning, soon after that, I was sitting having my breakfast when someone knocked on my door and warned me that the Minister of International Affairs had ordered that I be taken under arrest.  At first I thought this was just another form of intimidation, but when I asked a close friend who also worked on human rights, she said that the government was coming for all of us and that we had to flee the country.

I was smuggled over the border into Kyrgyzstan wearing women’s clothes that night.  My wife and two small children joined me five days later.  We have no official status as political refugees.  I can’t work here because we have no papers; we are receiving a little money to live off of from different organizations.

I know that we can’t go home until President Karimov is ousted.  I’m sure that if I were to return now I would be killed.  It is hard maintain hope that things will change and we will be able to return home - everyone is so afraid after what happened in Andijan.  But there is an election in 2007 and I know that the people despise Islom Karimov.  They know that he is only a puppet master that speaks good and popular words that mean nothing to us.

Requiem for a Dual Hegemony

Editorial by Alex StonehillJuly 5, 2006

The collapse of the Soviet Union is my earliest memory of politics.  The sense of relief and of victory that I felt around me was overwhelming, and I became fascinated with the idea that events on the other side of the world could mean so much in my own home.  Televised images of East Germans taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall or Boris Yeltsin speaking from atop a tank in Red Square became the very definition of freedom in my ten year old mind, and even as I grew older and learned of the theories behind communism and the Cold War missteps of the CIA, this picture of humanity breaking free of oppression by sheer will stuck with me.

My educators in public schools in Seattle and Liberal Arts colleges in New York were careful to ensure that I understood the experiences and psychology of Holocaust survivors, followers of different world religions, victims of the atomic attacks in WWII and even the fundamentalist Muslims who have taken over the role of Communists as the ideological enemies of our time.  But nobody ever tried to demystify or even explain to me the basic realities of Soviet life.

A visit to the post-Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan over the last month was the first time I ever had the chance to explore these realities first hand.  I was completely baffled upon speaking to scores of citizens who had lived during the communist era that – even in Kazakhstan, a place used as a nuclear garbage pit by the Soviet Union that is now rolling in the profits of newly exploited oil wealth – almost no one told me they thought things were better now than under Soviet rule.

Of course past times always look rosier, especially in the eyes of older people struggling to adjust to a new system, but I have to admit that I witnessed many indicators of the positive legacy left by communism.  Kyrgyzstan, a country with one of the lowest average incomes in the world, nonetheless rates extremely highly with regard to literacy and gender equality and has an impressive infrastructure of roads, buildings and public utilities in comparison to much wealthier, non-Soviet countries.  Squatters on the outskirts of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, complained that they had been forced to move there from rural villages because the Soviet era railways, roads and power lines that had connected their homes to the rest of the country had fallen into disrepair and dysfunction since independence.

The flip side of the pro-Soviet sentiments of Central Asians who have lived under both systems is what capitalism has failed to deliver in their countries since independence.  In the American mentality, free markets, private property and democracy all go together, but in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan, or Russia for that matter, they are very much separate concepts.  Local populations have different connotations attached to these terms, partly due to the actions of local politicians and businessmen, as well as Westerners, who introduced this rhetoric after independence.

There’s no doubt that Soviet style political repression and denial of private property rights would be a nightmare for most Americans, especially of upper and middle classes.  But populations in post-Soviet countries watched the (albeit meager) economic guarantees communism provided disappear with independence, while the same repressive communist leaders made a graceful transition to capitalism, amassing property and embracing a hyper-consumerist lifestyle, while maintaining most of the same corrupt and repressive tactics that kept them in power in the Soviet era.

No wonder citizens of these republics are still skeptical of the new system and confused by the rhetoric of freedom, democracy and capitalism that accompany it: in most of the post-Soviet world the West has been happy to watch capitalism take root and left concerns about democracy as an afterthought.

What is more surprising though is how unsure Americans still seem to be about what we mean by these terms, and how unwilling we’ve been after the fact to explore the alternative interpretation that communism provided.  The Cold War, for its countless casualties and ridiculous propaganda, also forced a heated debate between economic and political systems.

But since America declared victory in that debate fifteen years ago, we’ve become lazy about articulating the answers to questions about what it is we value about democracy, why we think it goes together so well with capitalism, or whether we think freedoms to things like uncensored speech or private wealth are still more important than freedoms from things like poverty and unemployment.  Ongoing critical consideration of these questions is especially important now that we are engaged in a violent effort to spread our values abroad in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

After talking to so many people in Central Asia who were disappointed with what American hegemony had brought them, I was embarrassed to think of how many healthy political discussions I’d been involved in back in the U.S. that someone had abruptly ended with the statement “…but Communism failed.”

  It did fail, and for a lot of good reasons from corruption to political repression to over-centralized administration of local affairs, but that can’t mean that the conversation about what is the best way to run our world is over.  Former Soviet citizens like the ones I met in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan still have something to teach us about the meaning of democracy, freedom and human rights and how we can best uphold these values.   If we continue pretending that their voices are simply a fading echo of the past, then our own system is sure to fail as well. 

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© 2007 The Common Language Project