April 5, 2004
NEW YORK - After a wave of bombings and attacks across Uzbekistan left 40 dead last week, the Bush Administration quickly offered the strategic Central Asian state help in `fighting Islamic terrorism.'
Uzbekistan plays a key role in White House plans to dominate key Central Asian oil producing states — the region I call `Petrolistan.'.
The new US air base in Uzbekistan at Khanabad is the lynchpin of a network of American bases in neighboring Tajikistan, Kyrgystan. Afghanistan and Pakistan guarding the planned pipelines exporting oil from great Caspian Oil Basin.
Khanabad is a vital stepping stone in this new strategic `imperial lifeline' beginning at bases in Germany, Bulgaria and Romania, heading eastward to bases in Iraq and Qatar, then to South and Central Asia. The air bridge is designed to speed highly mobile US forces to trouble spots across the Muslim World, serving the same military function as did roads to Rome's legions and Suez to the British Empire's maritime power.
Uzbekistan, hailed by the White House as `our partner in the global war against terrorism,' is a favored US ally and aid recipient. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says relations between the US and Uzbekistan are `growing stronger every month.'
Russians, however, have long called the communist despots who rule Soviet Central Asia `Red Mafia' and `Red Sultans.' Aptly, because these regimes combine Stalinism's extreme brutality with the Mafia's criminality, clannishness and rapacity.
The Bush Administration's shameful tryst with Uzbekistan shows how the fake `war on terrorism' has allowed some US allies and vassals to massively abuse human rights under the banner of fighting terrorism.
Numerous rights groups — most lately Human Rights Watch — accuse the brutal totalitarian regime of Uzbekistan's President for Life Islam Karimov of being one of the world's worst abusers of human rights. All political opposition parties have been outlawed as `Islamic terrorists.' Free speech banned, newspapers censored, mosques and religious institutions put under secret police control. My extensive travels across Uzbekistan, which took me from the grave of the conqueror Tamerlane(Timur) in Samarkand to the fabled desert oasis of Khiva, revealed one of the most repressive police states I had seen.
Uzbekistan holds over 7,000 political prisoners in under unspeakable conditions — more political prisoners than held in the Soviet gulag during the 1980's. Human rights groups report that Prisoners are subjected to electric torture, burning with blowtorches, boiling alive, gang rapes, acid baths, and other atrocities.
Ironically, President Bush keeps trying to justify invading Iraq by citing Saddam's `torture chambers and rape rooms' while ignoring the horrors in Uzbekistan.
The Bush Administration rejects normal relations with communist Cuba because of its sorry human rights record and political prisoners. Cuba holds about 350 political prisoners. The US's new best friend, communist Uzbekistan, an infinitely more brutal, despotic tyranny than Cuba, holds over 7,000 prisoners.
America's other allies and satraps across the Muslim World also tolerate no real opposition; anyone stepping out of line is immediately jailed. Patrick Seale, one of the finest journalists covering the Mideast, recently observed this has created a dangerous political void — and terrorism. Al-Qaida, Hizbullah, Hamas…`have stepped into the vacuum created by the failure of Arab governments to stand up to Israel and protect their countries from Western pressure.' In other words, privatization of failed state policy.
An inevitable reaction to Karimov's despotic regime has been growing armed resistance by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). After 9/11, the US wrongly declared the IMU a terrorist organization, attacked its Afghan bases, and reportedly killed its deputy leader, Juma Namangani, and threw scores of IMU fighters into the Guantanamo gulag. The IMU, and other local militants, all branded `terrorist groups,' seek to overthrow Central Asia's communist regimes, or liberate Sinkiang from repressive Chinese rule.
Washington has been blasting Pakistan over its black market dealings in nuclear components. President George Bush urgently needs senior al-Qaida leaders captured or killed before November elections. So a deal was struck: Islamabad agreed to attack supposed concentration of IMU and al-Qaida militants in South Waziristan.
After a lot of wild claims about killing or wounding Al-Qaida leader Ayam al-Zawahiri and IMU chief Tahir Yuldash, Musharraf's copycat war on terrorism resulted in the deaths of about 100 local Pashtun tribesmen, and dangerous unrest in the traditionally autonomous tribal belt. Pakistan's army was seen imitating the Israeli Army in the West Bank and Gaza by bulldozing homes of suspects.
Small wonder so many Pakistanis were deeply upset by the Waziristan raids, coming as the did after the abandonment of the Kashmir liberation struggle and backstabbing old allies, like Taliban and IMU, to placate Washington.
The US seems to have learned nothing from the Cold War, when all sorts of dictatorial regimes and massive human rights violations were condoned under the banner of fighting communism. In fact, the Bush Administration is showing the same kind of knee-jerk reaction to the accusation `terrorist' that US governments did in the 50's and 60's to accusations of communism.
Today, any group forced to take up arms against intolerable injustice is automatically branded by Washington, guardian of the status quo, `terrorists.' The IMU, Chechen independence fighters, Nepalese Maoists, Hizbullah, Hamas, Kashmiri independence fighters, and Filipino separatists are recent additions. Talk about picking fights where no important US interests are involved.
Fighting Uzbekistan's Stalinist regime is not terrorism, it is liberation of an oppressed people. By supporting despotism for the sake of oil and anti-Islamic crusader ideology, the US is putting itself on the wrong side of justice and history.
Follow-up: Re Capt. James Yee, the persecuted Muslim chaplain this column called the `American Capt Dreyfus,' accused of treason and spying. The US Army has dropped all charges against Yee.
Foreign Correspondent
