[Reposted from
begemot.]
The Memory Hole has the pictures up: Bush, Powell, and Rumsfeld shaking hands with one Islam Karimov, President of Uzbekistan and one of the world's most renowned human rights violators. Human Rights Watch has the other pictures -- victims of Karimov's oppression, those who have been beaten and died in pre-trial detention.
As the Guardian noted earlier this year:
Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600 politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500 political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners were even boiled to death.
The US condemned this repression for many years. But since September 11 rewrote America's strategic interests in central Asia, the government of President Islam Karimov has become Washington's new best friend in the region.
The US is funding those it once condemned. Last year Washington gave Uzbekistan $500m (£300m) in aid. The police and intelligence services - which the state department's website says use "torture as a routine investigation technique" received $79m of this sum.
That we learn nothing from even very recent history seems to be a given with this administration. That we are unable, or unwilling, to connect the dots between cause and effect is nevertheless stunning to me each time it happens. Quick: name another secularist, Soviet-style dictator known for ruthlessly suppressing Islam with whom we formed an alliance of convenience because his opponents were Muslim fundamentalists? (Compare Rumsfeld's smile while shaking his hand with that while shaking Karimov's hand.) (Oh, and just to make it all complete, Jim Maceda of NBC News has already called Uzbekistan "a barren wind-swept expanse of land about the size of California.") (Don't we already have enough problems in California?)
Of course, it is more than just fundamentalist Islam that is attracting us to Central Asia, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the region will know. As Lutz Kleveman, the author of The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia notes in a recent Guardian article, our interest in the vast oil deposits there had developed well before September 11th.
"I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian," said Dick Cheney in a speech to oil industrialists in 1998. In May 2001, the US vice-president recommended in the national energy policy report that "the president makes energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy", singling out the Caspian basin as a "rapidly growing new area of supply".
Uzbekistan, unsurprisingly, is not the only country with post-Soviet political hiccups in the region. Turkmenistan, if anything, has an even more brutal dictator in Saparmurat Niyazov, who has instituted a Stalinist-style cult of personality and has been implicated in international drug smuggling. Azerbaijan, to the west of the Caspian and along with Kazakhstan the most important possessor of oil reserves in the region has just had a bitterly-disputed election, in which Ilham Aliyev supposedly received 77% of the vote to succeed his father as President, which was marked with rioting and the detention of hundreds of opponents. The Bush administration has already announced that it will accept the results of this election, despite the fact that it's own observers said it was an utter sham.
All of this barely needs commenting on, but Lutz Kleveman sums it up nicely:
Bush has used his massive military build-up in Central Asia to seal the cold war victory against Russia, to contain Chinese influence and to tighten the noose around Iran. Most importantly, however, Washington - supported by the Blair government - is exploiting the "war on terror" to further American oil interests in the Caspian region. But this geopolitical gamble involving thuggish dictators and corrupt Saudi oil sheiks is only likely to produce more terrorists.
We will reap what we sow.