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8. Uzbekistan
- University of Notre Dame Press
- Chapter
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8 Uzbekistan Exploiting Justice Today, Facing Justice Tomorrow? Whereas new elites took power in Poland, Serbia, and Croatia, they were incarcerated, exiled, or murdered in Uzbekistan. This was not, however, a foregone conclusion early in the process of transformation. As a Soviet republic , Uzbekistan’s communist leadership faced a Moscow-directed process of political liberalization during the glasnost period in the second half of the 1980s. By late 1991, when Uzbekistan became independent, the country had a handful of political movements and parties poised to challenge the communists’ political hegemony. Among these were Birlik, an intellectualled movement formed in 1989; Erk, a political party offspring of Birlik, founded in 1990; the Islamic Renaissance Party, a social organization promoting the role of religion in the public sphere; and Adolat, its 1991 political party split-off.1 As this narrow picture of late Soviet-era politics suggests, Uzbekistan was fertile ground for multiparty democracy. The most powerful of these groups was probably Birlik, a large social movement numbering perhaps as many as 300,000 that called for a nationalist awakening of Uzbeks.2 Birlik leaders demanded that the Uzbek language be given official status, that Uzbek soldiers serve Soviet military duty within Uzbekistan, and that the environmentally costly focus on cotton production be ended.3 Just a year 171 after Birlik held its 1989 founding conference, personality conflicts and strategic disagreements over how to deal best with the ruling communist authorities prompted a group of activists led by Muhammad Salih to create the rival Erk Democratic Party, registered in September 1991.4 Birlik, registered as a party two months later,5 and Erk had similar platforms: demanding private land ownership and quick, “shock therapy” market liberalization . They were also both seen as highly nationalistic by the country’s large minority of non-Uzbeks. Uzbekistan’s last Communist Party first secretary, and then first elected president, Islam Karimov, abruptly ended this brief flirtation with democracy in late 1991 when, after being accused of rigging the December presidential elections (in which Salih won more than 12 percent of the vote), he began to actively persecute members of the opposition. Within months of Uzbekistan’s independence, each of the above organizations and parties had been outlawed, and many of their members were relegated to jail cells or lives in exile. Religious organizations were most aggressively targeted and were nearly obliterated from the political scene.6 The leaders of Birlik (Abdurahim Pulatov) and Erk (Muhammad Salih) fled the country in January 1992.7 By 1993 both Birlik and Erk had been formally banned, and political development in Uzbekistan since then has involved the introduction of new government-controlled parties, with vague and practically identical programs.8 Since that time, Birlik and Erk have been ruled in-country by senior-level party officials, though infighting, combined with government repression, has left Erk split into three wings and has greatly weakened Birlik . Still, those organizations, and two subsequent opposition parties (the Free Peasants Party and the Agrarian Party), found a niche in the repressive political sphere by establishing or closely cooperating with human rights organizations, through which they received foreign support and continued their political activities.9 Transitional justice in Uzbekistan has thus been left to the same highly repressive leadership that ruled during the communist period. While relative power arguments do not address transitional justice in cases of failed transition, such as Uzbekistan, I extend the argument logically and assume that, given the persistence of the old regime and the exclusion of those new elites who appeared as challengers only briefly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we should expect to see virtually no transitional justice in Uzbeki172 | THE COSTS OF JUSTICE [3.149.214.32] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:24 GMT) stan. This assumption is so commonsensical that the original purpose of this chapter was to evaluate opposition elite attitudes toward justice in the event that they should one day take power, and to focus more in depth on type 1 of the transitional justice spectrum. Yet President Karimov has taken steps to deal with past rights violations, even as he apparently authorizes present abuses. Strategic considerations are critical to understanding the path of transitional justice in Uzbekistan. As in Serbia and Croatia, foreign demands for particularly costly types of justice have prompted Uzbekistan’s political elites to pursue less costly, alternate justice measures. In particular, pressures for the cessation of rights violations carried out by the current regime have...