The Laughable Spy

Moscow yesterday accused my former Tashkent roommate, British diplomat Chris Bowers, of being a spy. I've exchanged emails with Chris, and he's taking it with his usual good humor.

The Russians claim that Chris, the U.K.'s trade envoy in Moscow, has been a spy for years, even when he was the BBC's correspondent for Central Asia in the early 1990s. Meaning even when he was my roommate on Ivleva Street in the Uzbekistan capital.

If Chris was a spy, he was a terrible one. Having spent much of two years with him, I can say he didn't collect much information, apart from a lot of chatter from Tajiks intent on killing each other in a civil war. Indeed Chris refused to do so. Once, he actually reversed an order I had given to our office manager, Aziza Nuritova, to start news files on all the major topics in the region. "I've got it all in my head. We don't need files," he said, pointing to his curly locks (now short and gray, by the way.).

Most of the time, in fact, Chris was wooing the girl next door. Whom he married by the way.

Chris is about to leave Moscow anyway on to his next diplomatic posting. The Russians know that and are simply targeting the easiest game.

The Same Old Game in Uzbekistan

As they say, hope springs eternal. But when it comes to Uzbekistan, it's getting ridiculous.

Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov, the former Soviet Union’s most malignant president, is engaged in one of his customary mid-rule alliance shifts. After a few years of bedding with Vladimir Putin, he’s showing some leg to his former intimate, Washington. He has released some political prisoners. He’s allowing Human Rights Watch to re-open its Tashkent office. He's again allowing NATO to use Termez as an entry point to Afghanistan.

All of this has triggered remarks by some human rights activists and State Department officers that Western sanctions against him are working.

But Karimov’s about-face is predictable. He has with regularity shifted between Russia and the United States since the 1991 Soviet breakup. What does not change are his main policies – iron-fist rule, torture and repression of his people, and impoverishing, Soviet-like economic policies.

It seems a quaint notion now, but in 1996, for instance, Karimov desperately wanted what was then regarded as the ultimate recognition in this part of the world – an official state visit to the White House. Washington rubbed its hands with glee, getting Karimov “in exchange” to agree among other things to currency reform, and to allow exiled opponents to return home. Within months of his Oval Office visit with President Clinton, however, it was back to the old Karimov – the currency reform was canceled, and opponents were arrested or forced back out of the country.

Now, Human Rights Watch says that Karimov’s release of political prisoners just before last week’s visit of a European delegation to Tashkent is proof that “sustained international pressure on Tashkent is effective.”

It means nothing of the sort. What it does mean is that Karimov remains a cynical – and shrewd – geopolitical player who knows precisely how to push the right buttons in both Moscow and Washington.

Photo: DGtal Plus Art & Photo
Rights: Creative Commons

Becoming Quieter on the Caspian

The prize in the Pipeline War is Turkmenistan. Russia and China -- especially the former -- are far ahead of the West in the contest. One reason has been their willingness to look the other way on the issues of human rights, rigged elections and presidents for life.

Chris Chivers of The New York Times weighed in over the weekend on the American response, which is to lower the volume on the moralizing.

There has been a U.S. policy shift on the Caspian, and that's to tell the presidents that they don't have to be like Norway to get along with Washington. As long as they stay on the good-behavior -end of the spectrum of the generally badboy former Soviet states, they're all right.

Some quiet diplomacy is needed in the region. The U.S. is right to give the benefit of the doubt, for instance, to Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov as long as he continues to methodically dismantle the legacy of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov.

The aim of the U.S. policy is to help to continue to carve out some long-term breathing room for the region from Russia by championing the trans-Caspian and Nabucco natural gas pipelines to Europe. So far, Turkmenistan has been more favorable toward Russia's competing system, the Nord Stream and South Stream pipelines.

Yet there's a line not to be crossed.

One is pandering. Chivers provides an astonishing public remark by Julie Finley, U.S. ambassador to the OSCE. Speaking to Kazakhs in Europe a couple of years ago about their seizure of unflattering newspapers, Finley said, “Maybe you saved some readers some waste of time, anyway.”

And a second is Uzbekistan. Chivers describes a recent visit to Tashkent by the apparently irrepressible Admiral William Fallon, commander of the U.S. Central Command. Fallon is seeking to help thaw currently frozen relations with Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, who holds the distinction of being the former Soviet Union's most brutal dictator.

“I told them that we couldn’t do much about the past, but that we could look at the future,” Fallon said of his discussion with the Uzbeks.

With respect, that's incorrect, Admiral Fallon. There is no respectable future relationship with Karimov until, for starters, he proves that he has stopped torturing and killing his people.

Unlike some of the region's other leaders, Karimov took no road to post-Soviet ruthlessness. He began there. My own initial sign of that was back in January 1992, two weeks after the Soviet collapse, when I crossed the street from the Hotel Uzbekistan to talk to the Pulatov brothers at Birlik, the then-Tashkent-based opposition group whose office was across the street. At the bottom of the stairs was a pool of blood. Inside, I learned from the more active of the two Pulatovs -- Abdumanop -- that his brother Abdurahim had been knocked on the head with a pipe by an unknown assailant.

The situation has declined since. Karimov regards entreaties by westerners such as Fallon not as an opportunity to re-open a perhaps positive economic path for his people, but a display of weakness, evidence that he still calls the shots in the dance with the foreigners.

It will probably require Karimov going the way of Niyazov before normal relations with the West can resume.

Photo: saidanddone
Rights: Creative Commons

What it Takes in the Former Soviet Union: Assassination, Theft, Corruption

I've seen multiple references in recent weeks to Richard Ben Cramer's classic account of the 1988 presidential campaign, What It Takes. Inveterate footnote-and-index readers such as myself miss having neither, yet it is a wonderful read, all 1,051 pages of it, narrating in colorful detail what campaign shenanigans were required to win that year. Cramer's descriptions of George H.W. Bush are particularly unforgettable.

Cramer comes to mind because of the latest news out of the former Soviet Union: Another apparent assassination plot, this time between presidential campaigns in Georgia; another stolen election by Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan; and a report that the good times attributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin may in fact not be as advertised.

Georgia: In a story published yesterday by The Sunday Times in the U.K., David Leppard, Anna Mikhailova and Mark Franchetti report on a possible assassination plot against Boris Berezovsky's former business partner, Badri Patarkatsishvili. The news peg is a 14-minute audio tape that's surfaced in which a Georgian Interior Ministry official apparently attempts to hire a Chechen killer to off Patarkatsishvili. The killer, according to the paper, is Uvais Akhmadov, "a member of a notorious gang of Chechen brothers who specialised in kidnapping and murder," as the writers put it. There's a snap presidential campaign under way at the moment, and Patarkatsishvili is challenging former president Mikheil Saakashvili. Only, Patarkatsishvili is doing so from London, where he says he fears for his life if he goes home. The thing is, we need not sympathize with Patarkatsishvili as a sort of Goldilocks -- he is a tough businessman with a long career of dealing with some of the former Soviet Union's most unsavory sorts. The important point here is what the report might imply about Saakashvili, Georgia's Columbia University-trained former leader. What has his campaign got up to in order to win election Jan. 5th?

Uzbekistan: My former Baku roommate David Stern at The New York Times reports that Karimov won yesterday's election with a reported 88.1% of the vote. Some people are calling it fraudulent since Karimov shouldn't be running -- he was constitutionally forbidden to seek a new term -- and he allowed no real opponents. In addition, there are the usual forebodings that Uzbekistan is headed for instability either during Karimov's continued rule or after he dies (the only way these fellows leave). I personally have sympathy for the stolen election crowd, but have my doubts on the instability part. Equally undemocratic Turkmenistan, for instance, just went through a transition after a presidential death without a hiccup. There's an argument that Uzbekistan isn't Turkmenistan, meaning that it already has produced a home-grown rebellion based in the Fergana Valley. I personally adhere to the muddle-along theory, meaning that even the apparently least likely states tend to muddle along.

Russia: My former Washington Post colleague Fred Hiatt weighs in today with a tart salvo at Time magazine's selection of Putin as its Person of the Year. Against Putin's unwillingness to face serious electoral competition, Hiatt writes: "Why would a leader of such steely confidence, heroic achievement and massive popularity be so afraid of political competition? Perhaps he will explain at Time's awards banquet." Hahaha, Fred. But Hiatt's central argument is serious, based on paraphrases from a must-read report in the new Foreign Affairs by my former colleagues at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies, Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss. This report challenges the prevailing wisdom that, under Putin, crime has fallen, economic activity has improved and corruption lessened. McFaul and Stoner-Weiss detail at length how in fact the opposite is true in all three cases and that, specifically, Russia's economic growth is near the bottom of the 15 former Soviet states. "Whatever the apparent gains of Russia under Putin, they gains would have been greater if democracy had survived," they write.

Photo of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics: pingnews.com
Rights: Creative Commons

Merry Christmas, Alan Johnston

In a great year for me, by far the best news of all came July 4th when my former Tashkent roommate, BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, was released unharmed from captivity in Gaza. Alan, who is 45, had been hostage for almost four months. He credits Hamas, otherwise branded a terrorist organization, for his release.

I saw Alan a couple of months ago over a meal in London, and he looked and sounded great. I was reminded of this when his voice came on NPR this morning in an interview about his new book, Kidnapped: And other Dispatches. It appears not to be available as yet in the U.S., but I did find it on Amazon.co.uk. It's sure to be a wonderful read.

Merry Christmas, Alan.