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Uzbekistan

Country in central Asia, bounded north by Kazakhstan and the Aral Sea, east by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, south by Afghanistan, and west by Turkmenistan.

Government

Uzbekistan has a authoritarian political system based around a presidential executive. The 1992 constitution, as amended in 2002, provides for a directly elected president and a two-chamber legislature. The constitution placed a limit on a president serving no more than two consecutive five-year terms, but this was later extended to seven years and the two-term limit was disregarded in 2007. The president selects and replaces provincial governors, the prime minister, and deputy ministers. The two-chamber legislature, known as the supreme assembly, or national assembly (Oli Majlis), comprises a lower house, the legislative chamber, with 120 members elected for five-year terms, and an upper house, the senate, comprising 100 members: 84 elected by local assemblies and 16 appointed by the president. Deputies are elected to the lower house by a majority system, with a second ballot ‘run-off’ race in contests with no clear first-round majority. Elections are dominated by candidates supportive of the president as opposition parties find it difficult to register. For administrative purposes, the country is divided into 12 regions.

History

The Turkmen are Turkic-speaking descendants of the Mongol invaders who swept across Asia from the 13th century. Part of Turkestan, Turkmenistan was conquered by Tsarist Russia 1865–76, with the emir of Bukhara becoming a vassal. The Tashkent soviet gradually extended its power 1917–24, with the emir of Bukhara deposed in 1920. Uzbekistan became part of the Turkestan Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921 and a

constituent republic of the USSR in 1925, although guerrilla resistance continued for a number of years.

Some 160,000 Meskhetian Turks were forcibly transported from their native Georgia to Uzbekistan by Stalin in 1944. After World War II Uzbekistan became a major cotton-growing region, producing two-thirds of Soviet output. The Uzbek Communist Party (UCP) leadership, who controlled the republic like a feudal fief, were both notorious for the extent of their corruption and for their obedience to Moscow. In return, Uzbekistan received large subsidies.

Growth of nationalism

From the late 1980s there was an upsurge in Islamic consciousness provoking violent clashes with Meskhetian, Armenian, and Kyrgyz minority communities, particularly in the Fergana Valley, which had become a hotbed for Wahabi Islamic militancy. In September 1989 an Uzbek nationalist organization, the Birlik (‘Unity’ People's Movement), was formed. The UCP, under the leadership of Islam Karimov, responded by declaring the republic's ‘sovereignty’ in June 1990 and replacing Russian administrators with Uzbeks.

Independence recognized

President Karimov did not immediately condemn the August 1991 attempted coup in Moscow by conservative communists against the USSR's reform-communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev. However, once the coup was defeated, the UCP broke its links with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and on 31 August 1991 the republic declared its independence. Uzbekistan joined the new Commonwealth of Independent States in December 1991; Karimov was directly elected president, capturing 86% of the vote, although international observers viewed the elections as not free or fair. In February 1992 the republic joined the Economic Cooperation Organization, founded in 1975 by Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey, and admission to the United Nations was granted in March; US diplomatic recognition was also achieved at this point.

Authoritarian secular rule

President Karimov embarked on a strategy of gradualist market-centred economic reform, although foreign investment was also encouraged. He adopted an authoritarian, secular style of rule and was determined to prevent the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. Inter-ethnic conflict within the republic was suppressed through a firm approach, with the nationalist Birlik party suspended and the Erk Party hounded. Communist Party cells were banned from the armed forces, the police, and the civil service, and the UCP changed its designation, becoming the People's Democratic Party of Uzbekistan (PDP). Nevertheless, the former UCP apparatus and personnel remained very much in control, with opposition groups either harassed or, in the case of the Islamic Renaissance Party, banned. A coalition of clergymen, led by the mufti of Tashkent, called for fresh multiparty elections and an end to communist domination, but without success.

Karimov's encouragement of anti-Russian nationalism persuaded as many as four-fifths of the country's two million ethnic Russians, formerly preponderant in the industrial workforce and bureaucracy, to leave the republic. This had adverse economic consequences. In January 1992 several people died in student-led food riots in Tashkent after prices had been liberalized.

Opposition parties were banned from participating in the January 1995 assembly elections, which were won by the ruling PDP, and in March 1995 Karimov's term was extended by plebiscite for a further five-year term by plebiscite. In January 1997 a new law prohibited political parties based on ethnic or religious lines and required prospective parties to have at least 5,000 members, spread over eight provinces. President Karimov was re-elected for another term in January 2000 and again in December 2007, despite the constitution only allowing a president to serve two terms.

Relations with neighbouring states

In 1994 Uzbekistan agreed to form a single economic zone with neighbouring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and a treaty on economic integration and policy coordination was signed with Russia. Links with Turkey were also strengthened, with Turkish being taught in schools alongside Uzbek and English and in place of Russian. In May 1995 he called for the five former republics of Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) to form a unified Turkic republic of ‘Turkestan’. In August 1996 an agreement was signed with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to create a Central Asian single market economy by 1998. A border delimitation agreement was also signed with Kazakhstan, in 2001.

Challenge from Islamic fundamentalists

Aided by an inflow of funds from Saudi Arabia and despite the secularist stance of President Karimov, a revival of Islamic teaching and studies commenced in the 1990s. The government announced a crackdown on Islamic fundamentalists in 1993. This continued and intensified, but from the later 1990s militant fundamentalist missionaries from Afghanistan and Tajikistan hlped popularize a radical interpretation of Islam.

In February 1999, President Karimov escaped an attempted assassination involving car bombs in Tashkent.The government claimed that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) had been responsible. In September 2000, Islamist rebels, allegedly funded by international terrorist organizations and involved in drug trafficking, crossed into Uzbekistan from Afghanistan, via Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. They were reportedly seeking to establish an Islamic state in east Uzbekistan.

From September 2001, after the al-Qaeda attacks on New York City, President Karimov supported the USA in its war on terror, which made Uzbekistan an increasing target for terrorists. In October 2001, Karimov gave the USA permission to use Uzbek airspace for its military action against the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It was claimed that 6,000 troops from the rebel IMU were fighting alongside the Taliban regime and in November 2001 the IMU leader, Djuma Namangani, was killed in Afghanistan.

In March 2004, the cities of Tashkent and Bukhara were hit by a series of terrorist explosions, including suicide bombings, and in July 2004 the Israeli and US embassies in Tashkent were bombed. The attacks claimed several dozen lives. The Jihad Group in Uzbekistan, which had links to al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility.