Uzbekistan: Dancing as the people die

The New Statesman
May 23 2005

BY JULIAN HOLLOWAY

I once danced with President Karimov’s daughter Lola
at her nightclub, the Katakomba. After a few seconds
her bodyguard cut in, and off she went past
Uzbekistan’s elite, her head set like a princess’s
under the flashing lights.
Since then things have changed in Tashkent. Local news
reports are heavily censored, but friends in the city
tell me people on the buses and metros are talking
openly about the massacre of hundreds of Uzbek
citizens in the east of the country by security forces
loyal to Lola’s father.
I have been to Andijan three times in the past few
years, researching a book on Babur, the first Mughal
emperor of India.
The Ferghana Valley was his first kingdom, and as
Babur’s story attests, what happens there can have
far-reaching consequences.
In his day, Andijan was famous for its music. It was
also prosperous from the soil and from trade. But
Karimov has maintained the Soviet policy of turning
the valley over to cotton, and has stifled the
cross-border trade in the interests of `security’. I
have seen people there living under plastic sheeting
in the fields. Despite the poverty, Andijan still
loves its music, and in the tea houses and pavement
cafés, as in Lola’s nightclub, the music is always
played too loudly.
Since last summer, the people of the town have been
deeply uncomfortable about the arrest and trial of 23
local businessmen: one owns a furniture factory,
another a private medical centre. The men are
followers of Akram Yuldashev, a local maths teacher
who wrote a book, The Path to Faith, about how to live
a good Muslim life. They are popular because of
their contributions to a fund distributing significant
sums of their money to causes such as an orphanage.
Religiously motivated actions of any kind are very
dangerous in Uzbekistan. Many more of Yuldashev’s
followers, or `Akramiya’, as the
government has branded them, have been arrested in
Tashkent. Men from the SNB, the Uzbek version of the
old KGB, are said to have taken their cars and
computers. Andijan has long been a town of fear, with
its prison sitting like a monument to
state terror between the town centre and the municipal
gardens on the outskirts. I remember asking a man in a
conspicuously empty museum in a fine, 19thcentury
religious building what it had been. He replied that
it had been a madrasa – `before the Wahhabis
disappeared’.
`Wahhabi’ was the earliest of a series of labels
designed to confuse pious Uzbek Muslims with armed
militants. After the `Wahhabis’ came `Hizb ut-Tahrir’,
and then `the Akramiya’. I wonder whether Yuldashev,
who is in prison in Tashkent, will be seen again.
Andijan is also pious and independent. Tension has
been growing in the town since the start of the trial
of the 23, fuelled by their hunger strike. On the
night of 12 May, a group of townspeople stormed the
jail and supporters of the 23 crowded into Babur
Square, a great crossroads divided with lawns between
whitewashed stones. When, two days later, I saw a
photograph of bodies swathed in white sheets, I
recognised the building as the unspeakable old hotel
in which I once stayed. All around Babur Square,
hiding behind the façade of Soviet town planning, is
an old town of courtyard houses where pomegranate and
apricot trees grow. The security forces have been
breaking down doors in the city, looking for the
ringleaders.
Who is really to blame for this atrocity? As always in
central Asia, that depends on whom you ask. The people
of Andijan say they were protesting against poverty
and injustice. After his return from `taking personal
control of the situation’, Karimov declared: `Members
of the Akramiya, which is a new sect of the Hizb
ut-Tahrir, have organised this disorder.’ There
certainly are Uzbek militants, but the Akramiya are
not these.
The next time Lola Karimova goes dancing, perhaps it
will be in Moscow, in exile. But how many will have
died before then?

Email: hollowayjcr@hotmail.com

PHOTO CAPTION: A bloody response: supporters of the teacher Akram Yuld