A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  ‘The base gave us some equity’ says Colonel Jon Chicky ‘There was a belief at least from the military perspective, that the base gave us an opening for the diplomatic side to do things with the Government.’

  The State Department was equally enthusiastic: with a little encouragement, Karimov might be guided in the right direction, and the apparent contradiction between strategic interests (access to K2) and democratic interests (human rights) could be resolved. The carrot was money; the stick, the threat of its withdrawal. If the policy worked, the United States-Uzbekistan deal might even pave the way for further relations around the world, and become a template for handling difficult Third World dictators in the future.

  Already, however, there were signs that things were going awry. On 27 January 2002, while his negotiators were assuring US delegates they wanted positive reform, Karimov extended the presidential terms of office, allowing himself to remain in power – potentially until the end of his life. Apparently, 9/11 had changed everything.

  ‘At a certain stage of historic change, you need a strong will and a certain figure,’ he said, ‘and you have to use some authoritarian methods at times.’

  US officials, unconvinced by his reasoning, comforted themselves that change was coming; maybe not fast, but the country was at last headed in the right direction. Two days later, Elizabeth Jones, US Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian and European Affairs, appeared on Uzbek television wishing the President a happy birthday and inviting him to the White House to meet George W Bush.

  Human rights monitors were less credulous. No matter what the United States offered Uzbekistan, they felt, Karimov was unlikely to change his spots. This was, after all, the man who had told the Uzbek parliament that Islamic extremists needed ‘to be shot in the forehead’, then offered to do it himself.

  ‘I’m prepared,’ he announced a year later, ‘to rip off the heads of two hundred people in order to save the Republic’

  Arrests of political dissidents continued unabated; prison conditions were still brutal; torture was still endemic; the Press still censored. The difference was that, after signing a deal with the United States, Uzbekistan now had a powerful argument with which to justify its repression.

  ‘9/11 changed the picture,’ explains Alison Gill, Human Rights Watch’s Tashkent officer. ‘The Uzbeks were delighted to continue their clamping down on people and cloak it in the language of the global War on Terror . . . It was a field day for them.’

  It wasn’t only the Uzbeks. All around the world countries involved in counter-insurgency operations, civil wars or repression of their own populations leapt on the War-on-Terror bandwagon. Dissidents, insurgent groups, religious groups, asylum seekers, activists – all kinds of awkward types were labelled ‘terrorists’ and targeted pre-emptively. Russian atrocities in Chechnya, Chinese persecution in Tibet and torture throughout the Middle East now became legitimate parts of the War on Terror.

  In December 2001, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak cited US policies as proving ‘that we were right from the beginning in using all means [to combat terrorism]’.

  Even Robert Mugabe had a go. ‘We agree with President Bush that anyone who in any way finances, harbours or defends terrorists is himself a terrorist,’ Zimbabwe’s Information Minister Jonathan Moyo told the Press in late 2001. ‘We, too, will not make any difference between terrorists and their friends and supporters.’

  In the face of this widespread opportunism, Uzbekistan became a poster case for the US administration.

  ‘How do you balance the immediate operational security imperative of waging war against al-Qaeda against the longer-term interest in protecting human rights?’ asks Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch’s leading Washington DC advocate. ‘We identified Uzbekistan as the test case.’

  Most human rights advocates understood that the United States was going to cut deals with unsavoury regimes in the post-9/11 environment. They also understood that leverage gained by co-operation rather than criticism might turn out be a force for good. They just considered it unlikely. ‘I thought it was going to be very, very difficult, but that it was worth trying,’ comments Malinowski. ‘And we also had to work with what we had.’

  To the astonishment of the staff of Human Rights Watch, ‘working with what we had’ in Uzbekistan paid dividends almost immediately. Karimov readmitted the Red Cross, relaxed some of the laws regarding opposition parties, dropped government censorship and, most surprisingly, in June 2002, publicly invited the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, Theo van Boven, to assess the state of the criminal justice system. There was a ray of hope.

  Uzbekistan milked van Boven’s visit for all it was worth, both prior to and during the trip in November and December 2002. When the report was released two months later, however, the President was appalled. The Special Rapporteur noted ‘copious’ reports of beatings, suffocation with plastic bags and gas masks, deliberate infection of inmates with contagious diseases, the insertion of needles under fingernails, rape, electric shock, false self-incriminatory confessions, the planting of evidence, arbitrary detention, withholding of the right to legal counsel, lack of respect for the presumption of innocence, rampant corruption in the judiciary and the absence of habeas corpus. Torture, he noted, was systematic (‘habitual, widespread and deliberate’), indiscriminate, pervasive and persistent. He also implied that it was sanctioned at the highest levels.

  The Uzbeks were horrified: to their minds, they were democratizing rather well. Inviting the Special Rapporteur was unprecedented in Central Asia. Now they were being publicly vilified. The Framework Agreement with the United States had contained all sorts of flowery language about human rights. No one expected to do it all at once.

  ‘A lot of the stuff in there [Karimov] didn’t expect to be held to,’ says a very senior State Department officer stationed in Tashkent. ‘Implicit in the K2 agreement was that the US would sort of give them a bye on human rights.’

  The US would. But only to an extent.

  After picketing the Andijan courthouse for the best part of four months, friends and colleagues of the twenty-three businessmen showed up on the day of the verdict expecting the worst. Nodir Mahmudov was summoned by the SNB and warned that there was to be no trouble. To placate him, officials suggested there was a real chance that some of the charges levelled against the businessmen were to be dropped and that the prosecutor was not going to ask for the maximum sentences. A couple of defendants might even be freed. But this was dependent on the trial ending peacefully.

  ‘Just stay quiet,’ the SNB men told him. ‘Don’t try anything.’

  When it was announced that the verdict would be delayed by a day, the crowd outside the courthouse became restless. SNB officers arrested a handful of protestors and carted them away, further inflaming the situation. The next day, 12 May, saw the verdict delayed again, this time indefinitely. There were rumours of further arrests. Mahmudov decided that enough was enough; after a brief conference with the relatives of the twenty-three and other union leaders, a rally was planned for the following day, 13 May.

  It was too little, too late. That night, at around 11.35 p.m., a group of the union’s associates launched attacks on police stations, military barracks and government buildings around the city. Weapons, ammunition and hand grenades were seized, along with a number of hostages and a truck: a heavy, Russian-made ZIL-131. An hour after the initial assault, the weapons, the ammunition – and the truck – were used to attack the jail. The goal was the liberation of the twenty-three businessmen, but, in the process of locating them, more than 500 criminals were released. Some of them were handed guns.

  Outside Andijan Prison, leaders of the jailbreak spread the word among the newly released prisoners that they were about to march to the city centre, where there would be a demonstration. The plan was to gather in front of the regional administrative building, the Hokimiyat in Babur Square, demand their rights and an opportunity to air their grievances with President Karimov.
Those who wanted to come along were more than welcome; others could simply go home.

  ‘There were loads of people in the street,’ recalls Sardor Azimov. ‘Some went in different directions, but I joined up with the majority and we all headed off to the Hokimiyat.’

  As they walked, escapees were lent mobile phones on which to call relatives and friends, partly to let them know what had happened, but mainly to tell them to come to Babur Square immediately to join the demonstration.

  As dawn broke on 13 May, Andijanis woke to the news that something momentous was going on in Babur Square. Children skived off school, adults ducked work; everyone went to take a look. By 7 a.m., hundreds of the city’s inhabitants were arriving. Protest leaders rigged up a PA system next to the Babur monument so that their demands could be heard. Drinks vendors and other street traders showed up. But they weren’t the only ones interested in the proceedings.

  President Karimov was woken at 1.45 a.m. with different news: Andijan was under attack. He and his interior minister Zokir Almatov immediately ordered troops on to the streets. Karimov then flew to Andijan where, from 7.30 onwards, he managed the crisis. As troops from the Interior Ministry flooded the area, the two groups, protestors and the Government, came to blows.

  According to witnesses, at around 8 a.m., a military vehicle approached Babur Square, stopped near the Hokimiyat, and two uniformed men climbed out. They raised their rifles and fired directly into the crowd, killing a young boy. Enraged, the protestors rushed the car, seized the men, beat them, then took them into the Hokimiyat as hostages. Other officials around the square received the same treatment.

  This cycle, a military drive-past, a shooting and retaliation by the crowd, became common throughout the day. Inside the Hokimiyat, hostage numbers rose; outside the number of casualties and protestors went up, too. Streets around the city square were blocked to impede the passage of military vehicles.

  Intermittently, the Government attempted to negotiate with the protestors by mobile phone. Interior Minister Almatov, who handled the talks, asked what the group wanted and was told that the release of political detainees, including Akram Yuldashev, was imperative. After conferring with the President, Almatov announced that this was impossible. The best he could offer was safe passage for the protestors across the border into neighbouring Kyrgyzstan. He wanted his hostages back. He wanted the protestors out of the country. That was the bottom line.

  Meanwhile, in the square, angry Andijanis queued to use the microphone to address the swelling crowds.

  ‘People started joining us, and started talking about their problems,’ recalls Nodir Mahmudov, one of the first to address the rally. ‘Pensioners came and said, “I don’t get my pension on time”; others started telling about their jobs and their financial problems.’

  Two hostages – the state prosecutor and the chief of the tax inspection authority – were thrust in front of the microphone to explain, presumably under duress, that they knew the twenty-three businessmen were innocent all along, but they had been pressured to convict them. The crowd threw stones.

  The protest in Babur Square, originally planned to air views about the twenty-three businessmen, was becoming something rather bigger.

  Among the crowd, it was rumoured the President was coming to hear Andijanis’ concerns, that Karimov would make things right. Every now and again a helicopter would circle overhead, reigniting the rumours: the President was on his way! As the excitement mounted, few protestors realized that government troops were sealing off streets around the square. A handful who attempted to leave were turned back by Armoured Personnel Carriers, and word spread slowly that the crowd might be trapped. By 4 p.m., all access to Babur Square was effectively shut off. Speakers at the microphone warned protestors not to panic, and to refrain from anything that might provoke a government show of force.

  ‘Do not spill any blood! These soldiers are your brothers!’ one warned. ‘They will not shoot.’

  The confidence that nothing bad would happen was echoed by a document written by one of the twenty-three businessmen and circulated through the crowd.

  ‘Dear Andijanis!’ it said. ‘If we stick together, they will not do anything bad to us.’

  But they would.

  The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture’s report was not the first inkling the Uzbek president had that his relationship with the United States was on the slide. As early as March 2002, the US State Department’s Office of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL), had warned that Uzbekistan was exploiting its role in the War on Terror to justify internal repression. Voices were raised in Congress as politicians began asking why, exactly, the United States was bankrolling a dictatorship that arrested, tortured, incarcerated and boiled alive its citizens.

  Although Karimov visited the United States in March that year and received assurances from President Bush that ‘we are not going to teach you’ about democratization, in reality things were turning out differently.

  Much of the pressure coming to bear on the Uzbek administration was the result of adroit lobbying by Human Rights Watch. The way the organization saw it, buddying up with dictators in Central Asia was not a productive way to wage the War on Terror. Ignoring human rights abuses for the sake of political expediency was a mistake the United States had been making in the Middle East for decades. It had led to the rise of al-Qaeda in the first place.

  Potentially, the situation was even worse in Uzbekistan. Whatever foreign NGOs might have thought about Karimov’s repressive techniques, the republic was facing a very real threat from extremist terrorist organizations, at the head of which were the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and al-Qaeda itself.

  These threats were not imagined. The goal of the organizations was to bring down the Government and establish an Islamic caliphate. Multiple bombings in Tashkent in 1999 had proved that the IMU could hit hard, accurately and with lethal force.

  ‘They did a pretty good job, they were pretty professional about it,’ recalls a senior State Department official stationed in the capital at the time. ‘It’s not easy to blow up five or six bombs within five minutes of each other in separate parts of town. That was serious.’

  In their more melodramatic moments, British and American politicians liked to characterize the al-Qaeda threat as ‘existential’, but the existence of America or Britain was never really threatened in the way Uzbekistan’s was.

  ‘It was an existential threat to the Uzbekistan that we knew about,’ says the official. ‘It sure as hell was an existential threat to Mr Karimov!’

  To US administrators there was a greater danger. If the IMU or al-Qaeda succeeded in attacking Uzbekistan with sufficient force, it might spark a civil uprising that could topple the Government. Once that happened, the country was likely to explode into violence. Another failed state in Central Asia had the potential to be catastrophic: now Russia had been elbowed out of the way in Uzbekistan, the United States might be expected to step in to maintain security – but the US military was already busy in Afghanistan, and was gearing up for Iraq. Worse, a major collapse of state power in Central Asia had the potential to spread across borders. If Uzbekistan went, it might take its neighbours with it. An epidemic of failed states in Central Asia had the potential to create havoc. That was how wars started.

  For all these reasons, it was crucial that Islam Karimov kept a lid on Islamist extremism in his country. The problem was, the way he was going about it – arresting, torturing and incarcerating innocent Muslims – was likely to achieve the exact opposite. Repressing legitimate forms of political dissent paved the way for extremist organizations such as the IMU and al-Qaeda to fill the void.

  ‘Very few cases that I monitored closely showed any real signs of actually being serious extremists,’ recalls Alison Gill. ‘There are extremists in Uzbekistan, make no mistake, but mostly the people I saw being accused actually had very little connection.’

  A case in point was the treatment being meted out to the twenty-thr
ee Andijan businessmen – all supposedly members of the phantom extremist group Akramiya (an organization so mysterious that no one, including the businessmen themselves, had ever heard of it).14 Human rights monitors worried that by arresting and torturing innocent Muslims Karimov was creating the very conditions he was attempting to avoid. US Senate advisers agreed. According to one, the situation in Uzbekistan, and especially Andijan, provided ‘textbook conditions for the growth of radical Islam’.

  The Uzbek administration didn’t see it that way. Karimov and his ministers were appalled that the United States, with whom they had just signed a special treaty and to whom they had leased, at some political cost, an airbase, was now dumping all over them. This was not at all what they had had in mind when they had signed up to the global War on Terror.

  By mid-2003, the Red Cross had pulled out of the country and the World Bank was warning that Uzbekistan needed to change its ways if it wanted more loans. News of prisoner abuses was all over the international press and the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture was making President Karimov look like a crook. Even the State Department, with whom Uzbekistan had negotiated the basing agreement, seemed hellbent on kicking the country from pillar to post.

  As if the United States had any right to lecture Karimov about human rights! Since 9/11, Karimov had allowed his country to become a hub for CIA rendition operations – apparently so that the United States could do the very same things he was currently being castigated for. To the Uzbek president, the scale of the hypocrisy was staggering. Money was coming in, sure, but not much, and probably not enough to justify prolonging the deal much longer. The relationship was beginning to fray.

  Officials involved in the US–Uzbek relationship place much of the blame for what happened next at the feet of an old foe: Russia. Deeply suspicious of US motives, the Kremlin had no intention of allowing its arch enemy – or her oil-hungry friends – to remain in the region for long. The only reason Vladimir Putin had permitted the Americans into Central Asia in the first place was that he had been powerless to stop them. He wanted US troops gone.