Uzbek unrest threatens Russia

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MOSCOW -- "Uzbekistan is to Russia what Mexico is to the United States," Elizaveta Isaev, professor of Russian politics, said to me as we walked along Old Arbot Street.

"Just as the United States cannot control its southern border with Mexico, so a radical Islamic victory in Uzbekistan, coupled with our Chechnya problem, would create a perhaps uncontrollable Islamic threat to Russia," she continued. "How would Americans feel if Che Guevara were reincarnated on the U.S.-Mexican border?"

On May 13, the government of Uzbek President Islam Karimov repulsed an attempted revolt in the northern city of Andijan. Human rights groups claimed that about 1,000 people were killed by Uzbek security police -- they called it "a massacre" -- but the government in Tashkent rejects these figures.

Prodded by human rights groups, NATO, the European Union, the United Nations and initially the United States called for an independent international probe into the Andijan events. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov opposed such an investigation, and subsequently a U.S.-Russian agreement blocked any call for a human rights inquiry. Absorbed by events in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration is seeking to avoid overreach in Uzbekistan.

But the explosiveness of the situation in Uzbekistan was underscored by the fact that on June 3, amid intelligence reports of an imminent assault on the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Tashkent, both evacuated nearly all their staff.

Angered by the possibility of any U.S. involvement in its internal affairs, the Karimov government retaliated by curtailing American use of Uzbekistan's air base at Karshi-Khanabad, a logistics hub used to funnel supplies for military operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Rather than risk a deepening of great power disputes over Uzbekistan, the United States shifted its flight patterns from Karshi-Khanabad to airports in neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

Muslims comprise 88 percent of Uzbekistan's population of 26 million, and the country is considered a breeding ground for radical Islamic terrorist groups. The United States has identified four insurgent groups operating in Uzbekistan: al Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Islamic Jihad, and the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement. A fifth must be added to these, and this group is Hizb-Ut-Tahrir -- the Party of Liberation, which seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate in Tashkent.

"America is separated from the Muslim world by oceans, but Russia sits on top of a volcano," Mrs. Asaev observed. "Because Russia lies north of the majority of the Islamic world, we have 300 million Muslims on our southern flank."

Four major players are competing against each other in Central Asia: The United States, Uzbekistan, Russia and China. Central Asia is now a battlefield of great power diplomacy, and has re-entered the spotlight of history. It is a regional replay of the Cold War.