Terrifying ally against terror

President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan is a refreshingly old-fashioned despot. He favors one-party rule, a police state based on fear, secret surveillance, summary arrest and interrogation of anyone too religious, rubber truncheons, electroshock treatment, needles under the fingernails, and, at least once, the boiling alive of a recalcitrant witness. Meanwhile, he makes long speeches to his parliament about how all opposition is treason and his enemies must be dismembered: "I'm prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic; if my child chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head." His megalomania is worthy of Tamerlane, the 14th-century Central Asian conqueror, statues of whom he has erected across Uzbekistan. Since 2002, Mr. Karimov has been an ally of the US in the "war on terror." His website shows him in the company of George W. Bush and leading members of the Bush administration. Ever since he gave the US control of his Khanbad military base in March, 2002, money, generals and congressmen have all poured in. Earlier this year, Mr. Karimov promised to promote universal press freedom, in order to get European Union sanctions lifted. On June 2, he welcomed Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher, ostensibly to talk about increased aid and human rights, an area in which Mr. Boucher announced that Uzbekistan was showing progress. A week later, seven journalists were targeted as enemies of the state, on a 60-minute prime-time television broadcast. Their home addresses were publicized, along with their passport information, their workplaces, schools they have attended, occupations of their family members and information on the children of one reporter. All seven work in some capacity for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which paradoxically is funded by the US Congress. Only one, a freelancer, is now living in Uzbekistan. In 2005, RFE/RL's Uzbek affiliate Radio Ozodlik (Uzbek for "liberty") had to close its bureau in the capital city of Tashkent, after Mr. Karimov became enraged by its coverage of the Andijan massacre, when government security forces opened fire on hundreds of unarmed protesters. On the same day the hour-long prime-time propaganda was broadcast, a much ballyhooed Media Freedom Conference was staged in Tashkent. The government had agreed to hold the conference as a condition for the lifting of the EU sanctions. But all of the EU's suggestions for speakers were ignored. The invited guests were all favorable to the Karimov government, except for Miklos Haraszti, representative on media freedom for the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe, who somehow slipped through the cracks. He managed to get in a speech against the Uzbek penal code, among other things. Mr. Karimov seems to have promised the conference not only because of the EU sanctions, but also to satisfy some back-channel requests from the US State Department to clean up his image, ahead of Mr. Boucher's visit. Some countries like to fire a 21-gun salute when a representative of the West shows up. Mr. Karimov likes to free a couple of political prisoners. In this case the first get-out-of-jail-free card went to Mutabar Tojiboeva, a feisty woman from the Ferghana valley, who had spent 31/2 years in prison, part of it in a psychiatric ward, for talking too loudly about the massacre at Andijan. To her own surprise, she was paroled on June 2, the day Mr. Boucher arrived. Two days later, Mr. Karimov released a well-known political prisoner. Ahmadjon Odilov, imprisoned almost constantly since 1983, though briefly freed in 1991, when he set up a political party. Mr. Karimov doesn't tolerate independent parties. Once he refused to certify even a party he had created himself to run puppet candidates. According to Soviet and then later Uzbek propaganda, Mr. Odilov was a "butcher" who ran private prisons and secreted gold bars under tomato bushes, running the collective farms and industrial complexes of his region as a brutal fiefdom. More likely, he was the scapegoat for one of the most notorious scandals in Soviet history. Until the 1980s, the State Planning Office of Uzbekistan was one of the few Soviet agencies that always met the quotas for its five-year agricultural plan, ostensibly supplying most of the USSR's cotton. Then some satellite photos revealed that hardly any of this cotton had ever been planted, much less harvested. Paper had been shuffled, bribes had been paid. The small amount of real cotton had been sold on the black market. Islam Karimov was the head of the State Planning Committee at the time. He went on the offensive and, according to his website, "resolutely defended his nation, rejected all criminal myths and defamations from outside by those who for the sake of their career aspirations tried to set up interrogation rooms in the ancient land of the Uzbeks." More than 50,000 officials were fired, but Mr. Karimov survived and thrived, becoming first secretary of the Communist Party in Uzbekistan in 1989. Mr. Odilov went down as the perpetrator of the hoax. Some believe that the reason he was imprisoned for 15 years on various trumped-up charges–such as having drugs in his cell or violating prison rules–was that he knew Mr. Karimov's secrets. When released at last for Mr. Boucher's visit, he was 83, partly blind and in failing health. But that same week, the human-rights activist Solijon Abdurahmanov was arrested for "anti-government activity," drug possession and possession of "anti-state materials." The broadcast about the seven "traitors" soon followed. "We've only heard bits and pieces of it," said Sojida Djakhfarova, the director of Radio Ozodlik, now living in Prague. "Apparently it was set up as man-in-the-street interviews, the opinions of ordinary people who supposedly had information that we were plotting against the state. One of the people interviewed is our former bureau chief, who tried to sue over his compensation when the bureau was closed in December 2005. We recognized his voice over the phone. We recognized our own voices, for that matter. They had spent about six months piecing together various pieces of our broadcasts to make us look like criminals." Since the United States made its pact with Uzbekistan in 2002, there are estimated to have been more than 10,000 political prisoners held there on charges such as "encroachment on the constitutional order," "anti-state activities," "subversion," "infringement on the honour and dignity of the president," and "membership in an Islamic terrorist organization"–to Mr. Karimov, that means almost any religious organization with a Muslim majority, in a country that is 86 per cent Muslim. He tends to identify any new organization as a target in the war on terror, though most of them are simply seeking democratic reform, religious freedom or the release of political prisoners. Once, he established his own human rights organization, but when its president went for a conference to Bishkek, the capital of neighboring Kyrgyzstan, Mr. Karimov had him abducted and charged with sedition. To be fair, there is some radical Muslim unrest in Uzbekistan, but probably not at the level of Mr. Karimov's claims. His number one enemy is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a largely secret organization that wants to establish a theocracy. Two IMU rebels have been sentenced to death in absentia, and many other members are languishing in prison. These are real terrorists, blamed for six bomb attacks in Tashkent in 1999 that killed 16 people, who have also been known to trade Western hostages for money. But Mr. Karimov makes the IMU an excuse to persecute other groups, including non-Muslims. Jews, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Greeks, Meskhetian Turks and Slavs have all been leaving the country. Censorship was officially abolished in 2002, but press restrictions still forbid mentioning corruption, drug trafficking, Islam, or criticism of Mr. Karimov. Five journalists are currently in prison, including a freedom-of-the-press activist, Ruslan Sharipov, serving four years. Mostly, Mr. Karimov has been allowed to get away with it. Even when he appears at Western press conferences, usually side by side with US leaders, he receives easy questions. The sole exception I know of happened when, on the occasion of Colin Powell's visit to Tashkent in 2001, then-CNN correspondent Andrea Koppel asked Mr. Karimov, "What do you say to your critics who say that you are nothing more than a brutal, repressive, authoritarian dictator?" He replied, "I am very surprised to hear the question you posed. And I believe that these questions that are asked are due to be asked, and probably we cannot circumvent these questions. We have to answer them. What can I answer? My answer is that one is to see things rather than hear them one hundred times. I would like to invite you for communication with me on a more permanent basis and believe that I will not disappoint you." This is the answer of a man who is not used to being asked questions at all, much less critical ones. Such obliviousness to the freedom that the Western world hopes to advance should remind us that the West must not accept just anyone as an ally.