Uzbekistan Stays Tough

Inevitably a person's first impression these days upon arriving in Uzbekistan from Russia is one of abundance, prosperity and quiet. Tashkent, the capital and the largest city in Central Asia, is clean, orderly and, in comparison with Russia at least, stable and very wealthy. The city is overflowing with food - piles of melons line the city blocks, bread is sold on every corner, and shortages of necessities like milk and meat are almost unheard of.


In the wake of its first independence day celebration, Uzbekistan seems on the surface to be enjoying happy days - prices are low, and war and economic collapse, for the time being, are things most Uzbeks don't expect to see, except in television coverage of their neighbors.


There are several reasons for Uzbekistan's comparative stability, but the most obvious one is that the Uzbek government, headed by the former Uzbek Communist chief Islam Karimov, has very skillfully avoided a Tadjikistan-like power struggle. It


has achieved this mostly by retaining, even following the collapse of Communism, an authoritarian form of government. The KGB may be dead in Russia, but in Uzbekistan, the police and intelligence apparatus remain a force in the daily lives of many people.


I myself was affected by it. Two weeks ago I was visited in my apartment by three officers of the "SNB", which is the KGB's new name in Uzbekistan, and asked to leave the country. The whole thing was eerily faithful to my conception of a KGB operation - the knock on the door when you least expect it, the onslaught of prying questions about friends and acquaintances, the ransacking of the apartment, and finally the trip to a remote police station for further questioning in a room with no windows and one hanging lightbulb. Had it all not been a little scary, it would have been funny.


The officers were not Uzbeks, but ethnic Russians, and I got the feeling that they missed the old days, when the KGB had people more important than part-time journalists to worry about.


The ostensible reason for my deportation was a visa problem, but the real reason was almost definitely my status as a journalist. The Uzbek government has been openly hostile to journalists in its first year of independence. In June, Uzbek SNB agents travelled all the way to Moscow to interrogate members of a humanitarian aid group connected with the newspaper "Independent Weekly", which had been critical of the Karimov regime. In July, the opposition party newspaper "ERK" was effectively shut down by the government after it was, in the words of ERK party secretary Akhmad Ajan, "censored into nonexistence".


The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda has not appeared in Uzbekistan since the beginning of August, when distribution to the country was mysteriously halted following the paper's publication of a series of critical articles. Subscriptions to the Moscow News and Moskovskaya Pravda are expected to stop being delivered to Uzbekistan in the winter. Says Svatoslav Fennutin, a Tass correspondent working out of Tashkent, "The idea that there is freedom of the press in Uzbekistan is a myth".


Living in Uzbekistan, I felt like I had walked through a time warp. Life there is like a watered-down version of the way history books describe life in the former Soviet Union. Ordinary people are afraid of wiretaps. My own friends spoke in whispers whenever they said anything marginally critical of the government.


A lot of it might be paranoia, but on the whole the police are enough of a part of everyday life in Uzbekistan to justify the population's general fear of them.


I saw with my own eyes several examples of crude police tactics in Tashkent - most notably the rounding up of young women on Karl Marx street late at night for mass testing for the AIDS virus. This is a common practice in the city, and in most cases the women are offered only two ways out of sitting through the 36-hour testing process -bribes and sex.


In Tashkent a few weeks ago a party of about 20 students and film enthusiasts was interrupted suddenly by unexpected visitors - the Tashkent militia. Under the guise of a prostitution raid, the police seized most of the women at the party and took them away for questioning. The matter was eventually cleared up, and the women were released before morning, but the incident was enough to leave many of the guests scratching their heads. "It seems crazy", said one of the students at the party. "They hold an international film festival, invite people from all over the world to come to it, and then they do this. It doesnt make sense".


The experience of most of the other former Soviet republics in the last year has been so difficult that it is hard to find fault with Uzbekistan for keeping itself together by force. Most Uzbeks will agree. "We have no reason to complain", says Askar Islamov, an Uzbek businessman. "It's not Tadjikistan, and we're not going to die of hunger. That's the important thing".


As for myself, no harm came of my clash with the local police, and my only regret is that I had to leave a country where I was enjoying myself. But it's probably worth the West's while to know that the police state never left that part of Central Asia.


For now, the population is looking over the border at Tadjikistan and counting its blessings. But if the dust ever settles around the rest of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the tactics that are keeping peace in Uzbekistan now might someday arouse real anger in the population.


Matt Taibbi is a freelance reporter now living in St. Petersburg.