Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (16 page)

The region reputed for religious conservatism is the Ferghana Valley, separated from the Uzbek capital by steep ridges of flame-colored rock, the easternmost spur of the oddly zigzag-shaped, diagonal country. “The province of Ferghana is in the fifth clime, situated on the edge of the civilized world,” wrote the sixteenth-century Timurid emperor Babur, who was crowned there and remained enamored of the valley for the rest of his life.
¹
Watered by the Syr Darya River, it has been known in centuries since for its lush fruit and fragrant blossoms.

To me, it felt like paradise. Ferghana was the picture of what next-door Afghanistan might have been, without thirty years of war. Uzbeks’ love of gardens matches that of their Afghan neighbors—their open-plan houses built around sprays of apricot and plum trees, breakfast tables set within reach of their branches. Grapevines shade neighborhood streets, growing thick across arbors that span the lanes. Flowing canals thread through the towns, cooling them. Dripping boys laugh and shove each other aside as they compete to jump in.

Compared to that of Kandahar or even secular Tunis, Ferghana’s religiosity is just about invisible. Gold-toothed women in short-sleeved frocks of flowery cotton, their heads covered with matching kerchiefs, sell rounds of bread and vegetables in the lively outdoor markets. Women excel in university studies and serve as doctors or in the police. Only once in several days did I see a man leave a conversation to perform his
sundown prayers in a dedicated room of his house. “People don’t show they’re religious,” comments a journalist, “but they feel it.”

O
N
M
AY 13, 2005,
as dusk was falling and with it the rain, soldiers lay prone behind sandbags that blocked the main street of Andijan, the Ferghana Valley’s easternmost town. A crowd of panicked civilians lurched toward them, keening in fear. The soldiers opened fire. Women and children in the center of the melee, where they had thought they might be safer, crumpled to the blood-soaked pavement.

“We were just shocked,” recounted one survivor. “It was like a bowling game, when the ball strikes the pins and everything falls down. . . . There were bodies everywhere. I don’t think anyone in front of us survived.”
²
The people came under fire from the roof of the nearby cinema and apartment buildings lining the road, from behind trees and a school. No accurate body count has ever been established for the events of that day, but the best estimates range near five hundred men, women, and children.

The night before, young men had broken into the jail to free a group of defendants who were incarcerated while they stood trial in a long-running, increasingly contentious case. Crossing town, gaining reinforcements on the way, the rebels had captured city hall from the lone night watchman.
³
In the morning, townspeople began flocking to the main square in front. A podium was set up; someone came with a sound system, and people took turns at the microphone to voice their complaints against the Uzbek government.

Armored personnel carriers appeared and sped down Navoi Prospect, the street that forms one side of the square, firing random shots into the crowd, killing at least one child. Asked later by human rights investigators why people had braved such violence, why the crowd kept growing all day, survivors recounted a rumor: “There was a TV where people allegedly saw on the news that the president would be coming to Andijan” to hear them out. “People were waiting for the president to come. They wanted to meet him and explain their problems.”
⁴

They wanted Karimov to
listen himself, without intermediary, to what his
subjects had to say to him
. Specifically, they “wanted to know if the problems came from the local level, or if they came from the top.”
⁵

Such a notion—that government misconduct might be the fault not of the ruler but of subordinate officials gone rogue—is not necessarily baseless. A chorus of mirror writers across the cultures and centuries warned their royal readers to do whatever they could to prevent just that tendency.

“It is absolutely necessary,” Jonas d’Orléans admonished Emperor Charlemagne’s grandson in 831, “for [the king] to scrutinize with the greatest attention every one of the subordinates installed under him.”
⁶

Writing around 1090 for a sultan whose empire stretched almost to Andijan itself, Nizam al-Mulk repeated the instruction incessantly: “It is indispensable to know the conduct of every one of the judges in the kingdom.” “Information must be gathered on the situation of the tax collector, that of the judge, the military commander, and the head of civil administration.” “For . . . if the minister does ill . . . the kingdom is delivered to troubles and agitation.”
⁷

Andijan residents seemed almost to hope that their local officials were running amok. For in that case, they had a chance of obtaining recourse. Many had been convinced that Karimov was on his way to provide it: to listen to their side of the story and to discipline his offending subordinates.

Instead, his troops shot the townspeople down.
⁸

At the root of the turmoil was the drawn-out trial of two dozen local businessmen who had formed a community emphasizing solidarity and business integrity. They are believed to have been inspired by a jailed religious thinker named Akram Yuldoshev. In his twenties, he had briefly been part of an Islamist group with a strong presence in Central Asia called Hizb-u Tahrir. But Yuldoshev broke away from it around 1990, to begin preaching his own interpretation of Islam, which, if his writings are any guide, emphasizes the quality of believers’ faith rather than the details of their practice.
⁹

The businessmen, referred to collectively as the Akromiyya, were branded as militant extremists.
¹⁰
Their arrests were based on such charges as “attacks against the constitutional order” and criminal
conspiracy.
¹¹

“I declare that according to information we have,” pronounced Karimov at a press conference the day after the massacre, “they are a branch of Hizb-u Tahrir.

Their ideas and goals, in fact, do not differ from HT’s goals. Their final goal is to unite Muslims and set up a so-called Muslim caliphate, with all shari’a laws, which they preach. The first task was to overthrow the existing constitutional order, bring down the local authorities and then to establish the order.
¹²

And yet the demands and grievances the demonstrators took turns venting at their makeshift podium that May 13 never referred to religion. What they referred to was corruption. According to one report, “People spoke about social and economic problems (lack of transparency, corruption in the government, unfair trials, abuse by police . . .).”
¹³

The protesters used the session to confront some of the local officials they blamed for the abuses. “They brought the head of the prosecutor’s office and the head of the tax department . . . to the podium,” one witness told Human Rights Watch. The officials pleaded that they were ordered to do what they did. “The prosecutor said . . . he knew [the defendants] are good [people], but ‘we can’t do anything, we were ordered to do it [convict them], we are like puppets in the hands of the power.’ The head of the tax inspectors also said they were compelled to do what the government ordered.”
¹⁴

Researchers differ as to how religiously conservative the Andijan businessmen and their families were. But the group clearly did seek guidance in religious reflection for how to conduct their affairs differently—at least within the bounds of their community—from the corruption of the prevailing system.
¹⁵

The main challenge the accused seem to have posed to the Karimov government was not so much ideological as economic—and ethical.

The defendants’ businesses—which included furniture factories, business supply companies, bakeries, tailoring firms, construction companies, and transportation firms—employed thousands of
people in impoverished Andijan. . . . They established a minimum wage that exceeded the meager government-mandated wage, paid employees’ medical expenses and sick leave, and provided free meals to staff.
¹⁶

After interviewing refugees from Andijan, Alina,
^*
an oddly soft-spoken investigator who would later be forced into exile for her work, concluded that “they had an honest business attitude, there was no corruption or bribery, and they were prospering. New businesses were joining the network; they were hiring more people, and they worked under a code of ethics.”

“They kept their distance from political parties,” affirms Alisher Ilkhamov, of the Open Society Foundations. “But they had a social network; they were doing charity work, addressing social issues. They would tax themselves, about twenty percent of their income, and devote the money to charitable goals.”

Expenditures from the fund included: “paying for members’ prescriptions or doctor bills, or helping them out in a financial crunch, providing medical supplies to the local hospital, or organizing a kids’ soccer tournament.”
¹⁷

Akromiyya “was an alternative to the corruption system,” says Ilkhamov. “At least in terms of how they treated each other. To survive, they sometimes had to give gifts to local authorities, but still, they represented a challenge to the regime’s moral authority.”

Alina deems that “if you are honest in Uzbekistan, if you don’t want to take bribes, you are a threat. The government hated them for that. This group was gaining respect and the trust of local people. It was
spreading throughout Ferghana. The government thought that if let alone, it would grow in stature and power, and it could make a big political movement.”

Human Rights Watch puts it this way:

Operating outside the government-controlled banking system, the businessmen were beyond the usual levers of state control. In many areas of commerce and industry, they successfully undercut the market share of pro-government monopolies. They enjoyed the loyalty of thousands of employees who were generally paid better and had better working conditions than most others in Andijan. The entrepreneurs’ popularity on these grounds presented a challenge to Uzbek authorities.
¹⁸

What the Akromiyya’s practices were implicitly challenging was a post-Soviet, Central Asian version of Mubarak’s or Ben Ali’s kleptocracy.
^†

In Uzbekistan, the flashy moneygrubbers who had suddenly appeared at the top of the pyramid were symbolized not by the aging dictator’s son or his wife and her clan but rather by his oldest daughter, Gulnora Karimova. “She’s the most hated person in this country,” affirms a professional interpreter. U.S. officials agree. “The fear and loathing that many alienated businessmen in Uzbekistan have for her suggests that her life in a post-Karimov Uzbekistan would be less than secure,” reads a 2008 diplomatic cable.
¹⁹

Alina recounts a conversation with a businessman, himself notorious for less-than-straight dealing. “He told me: ‘I hate Gulnora because she is the most greedy person and she took most of my businesses. When Karimov dies, we will put her in a cage and drive her around.’ She has attracted so much hatred of businesses for her greedy, greedy ways.”

Like Egypt’s Gamal Mubarak or the Trabelsis in Tunisia, Karimova established herself as an unavoidable intermediary for major private investment in Uzbekistan, with an emphasis on the telecommunications sector. “Telecom was always her hobby,” says Alina. “She was running the licensing department. The ministers were not really deciding.”

In one of the most spectacular scandals to result from Karimova’s practices, the Swedish-Finnish firm TeliaSonera, the main cell phone provider in the two Nordic countries, was under scrutiny for allegedly paying up to $400 million in bribes to obtain a license for its Uzbekistan-based subsidiary. Related probes for money laundering were launched in Switzerland and France, with police combing through suspect bank accounts and luxury properties.
²⁰

John Davy, a former chief financial officer for TeliaSonera’s Uzbek subsidiary, told a Swedish documentary team that authorities would regularly interrupt phone service to pressure the company for additional payments.

What happens is . . . down goes the switch, and all of a sudden we lose a hundred base stations. We would have thousands of subscribers screaming about why they don’t have their service. So after two-three days we have to make a $100,000 payment to a charitable organization, of the choice of the—whoever. . . . We would pay our donation and up goes the base station again. This would happen every month.
²¹

Many such “charities” are operated by Karimova, who as early as 2005 had “established a network of three umbrella grant-making institutions to disburse a wide range of social, cultural, and educational programs.”
²²
One woman, herself an NGO administrator, told me in early 2013: “My mother wanted to start a small business, a shop with two employees. The tax authorities told her she had to contribute to Karimova’s ‘charity,’ and then she obtained her authorization.”

“The picture you get,” says Swedish reporter Fredrik Lauren, who coproduced the TeliaSonera documentary series, “is that Gulnora owns the telecom sector. To save labor, she and her cronies established a kind of blueprint for all investors: Beeline, VimpelCom, MTS. Gulnora says,
‘Yes you can get a ticket—for twenty-six percent of the company, and a compulsory sell-back for a fixed price.’”

TeliaSonera CEO Lars Nyberg, who resigned in the midst of the scandal, insisted that the payments the company made to Karimova were investments in local industry, not bribes. “Of course!” retorts Lauren. “That’s why they structure it this way. So it all looks very businesslike. But the money doesn’t deliver anything except the right to play.”

Gulnora Karimova mastered the art of “circumventing law by law.”