Up Close And Personal in Uzbekistan

As people were dying in the streets of Uzbekistan, I had the opportunity to talk to a young couple from there. (I'm being deliberatly vague about the circumstances, because Uzbekistan is not a free country.)

The couple said the riots were not about what the Uzbek president said they were about. Here's how the NYTimes put his excuse:

Mr. [Islam A.] Karimov blamed Friday's violence on Islamic extremists, claiming that they wanted to overthrow the country's secular government and impose one ruled by Islamic law. ... "Their aim is to unite the Muslims and establish a caliphate. Their aim is to overthrow the constitutional regime."

Not true, the young man said. "Islamic extremism" is always used by Karimov whenever he wants to imprison someone who is a perceived threat to his regime ... except the Christians he imprisons for leaving the Islamic faith.

"The riots was started by mothers and fathers who wanted their children freed from prison, where they were being held for saying things against the state," he said. "Anyone who speaks against the regime is at risk of imprisonment."

The Associated Press report paints a picture that sounds hauntingly like Lebanon or Belarus:

One after another, men and women [in Andijan]took the makeshift podium and shared their anger about unemployment and living in poverty. Many of the thousands of demonstrators crowding the city square cried - it was their first public forum in many years in this tightly controlled former Soviet republic.

Could the Bush doctrine be claiming another despotic victim? Are the seeds of rebellion being spread globally on the whispering breeze of freedom?

Especially now that the unrest has crossed the Uzbek border into Kyrgyzstan (here), there is hope that we are looking at the start of the end of more repressive dictatorships. But these countries are ruled by harsh men with strong armies.

And Karimov is a despot who has allowed us to stage operations from within his borders. Under the old rules, that would have bought him the right to continue to exploit his people. The president needs to follow the new rules, letting Karimov know that being an ally of the US now comes with strings attached.