Uzbekistan struggles with post-communist future

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan — While the United States was distracted with Afghanistan in 2002 and by Iraq this year, it has a keen interest in the political fate of a new strategic partner in Muslim Central Asia, the republic of Uzbekistan.

A large former Soviet air base there became a staging area for the U.S. attack on the Taliban regime early in 2002, and U.S. troops remain stationed there as others scour the mountains of eastern Afghanistan for a spider hole containing Osama bin Laden.

President Islam Karimov was Uzbekistan’s Communist Party boss during the Soviet period, and he has had his hands full for the past 12 years steering his country toward a market-based economy and a democratic republic, and at the same time fighting a small group of armed rebels closely allied to bin Laden’s al Qaeda.

After car bombings killed 14 persons in the capital, Tashkent, in 1999, the government stepped up its crackdown on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which operated at that time freely in Afghanistan with the protection and support of the Taliban.

Uzbek security forces also arrested and jailed more than 4,000 people — watchdog groups say 7,000 — chiefly young men belonging to Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) and other underground Islamic groups that until now have avoided violence, but which, in the government’s view, want to set up a Taliban-like regime in Tashkent.

But Mr. Karimov’s critics in the Western press, the U.S. State Department and human-rights groups are legion.

“The government is the terrorist,” Margarita Assenova, a human-rights activist with Washington-based Freedom House, told Insight magazine. Mrs. Assenova, who spent several months in Tashkent showing people how to make official complaints about human-rights abuses, said the government uses “the terrorist threat” as an excuse to suppress any opposition group.

As the International Crisis Group, a multinational conflict-resolution group based in Brussels, reported in July: “In Uzbekistan, mass arrests of Muslims, many but not all members of radical political groups, have led to serious mistrust between authorities and the population and radicalization of those who have suffered from a brutal police force.”

Such criticism is exaggerated and naive, according to Stephen Schwartz, author of “The Two Faces of Islam” and a recognized specialist on Islamic extremism. “It is hard to understand how people who are working underground to overthrow the elected government and re-establish the Islamic caliphate can be any further radicalized,” he told Insight.

“The whole weight of the ICG report is to downplay the threat of Wahhabism, the threat of radicals as represented by Hizb ut-Tahrir,” Mr. Schwartz said. He has argued that — in a post-September 11 world — the doctrine of pre-emption trumps the presumption of innocence until proven guilty of terrorism.

As Mr. Schwartz wrote in an essay for the Weekly Standard, “groups like HT that do not yet carry out acts of violence nonetheless prepare an environment conducive to violence.”

“Identifying the advocates of extreme ideology with the practitioners of terror does not undermine the campaign against terrorism. The campaign against terrorism is undermined by weakness, irresolution and apologetics, not by identifying the enemy.”

At present, Hizb ut-Tahrir (pronounced “his-boot tuck-reer”) al Islami, (the Islamic Liberation Party), operates freely out of its London headquarters, but is legally banned in all Central Asian nations and virtually all countries in the Middle East. Its ideology envisions a strict Islamic state and the re-establishment of the medieval Arab caliphate.

The movement, which began in Jerusalem in 1953, sent preachers and missionaries in droves to Uzbekistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Because it operates clandestinely, its membership is unknown, but it claims to have thousands of adherents in Uzbekistan, and, according to the ICG report, HT has become the most prominent challenge to the government’s secular leadership.

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