Translated material
Karimov and the duumvirs
The President of Uzbekistan faces difficult negotiations in Moscow
Yesterday evening, President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov (pictured) arrived in Moscow for a two-day official visit. Today he will be received in the Kremlin by Dmitry Medvedev, and before that Russian-Uzbek negotiations will take place in an expanded format. Then, in the late afternoon, Karimov will meet with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, after which the Uzbek leader will leave the Russian capital. The last time he was here on a visit, the seventh in 20 years of his presidency, was in early February 2008, shortly before the presidential elections in Russia. Those days are remembered by many for Mr. Karimov's very temperamental attempt to once againpersuade then-Russian President Vladimir Putin to run for a third term . “No one would regret it,” the Uzbek guest assured his listeners in the Kremlin at the time.In January 2009 , Dmitry Medvedev made his first visit to Tashkent as head of state. He was received warmly, and it seemed that mutual understanding had been established between the leaders, one of whom was old enough to be the other’s father. Moreover, the Russian president supported the position of Tashkent, which insists on conducting an international examination of hydroelectric power station construction projects in neighboring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. This led to a cooling of relations between Moscow and Dushanbe - to the point that Tajik President Emomali Rahmon canceled his visit to Moscow.
However, the rapprochement of Russian and Uzbek positions on the water and energy problem did not in any way affect Tashkent’s attitude towards the creation of the Collective Rapid Reaction Force (CRRF) within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Islam Karimov then conditioned his agreement to join the CRRF on a number of provisions that would make this idea unworkable in the conditions of the Central Asian region. As a result, the Uzbeks did not join the CRRF.
Shortly after this, Tashkent reacted sharply to agreements reached between Moscow and Bishkek on the deployment of another Russian military base in the south of Kyrgyzstan. According to the leadership of Uzbekistan, such militarization of the region will contribute to destabilization of the situation there. And at the end of 2009, Russian-Uzbek relations became even more tense. Their aggravation is connectedwith the history around the monument to the Soviet soldier , “defender of the southern borders of the Fatherland,” installed in 1975 at the Tashkent Museum of the Armed Forces of Uzbekistan. The sudden night dismantling of the monument caused a wide resonance in Uzbekistan and beyond, which forced the country's authorities to promise, after reconstruction, to return the monument to its place by the 65th anniversary of the Victory in May this year.
However, already in January of this year, Islam Karimov personally unveiled a completely different monument on this site. Moscow’s attitude towards the incident was obviously irritated, as evidenced by the pickets of the pro-Kremlin movement “Nashi” organized at the Uzbek embassy in Moscow, accusing the Uzbek ambassador Nematov of not fulfilling his promises to return the “copper soldier” to his place. It is worth noting that the ambassador was soon recalled to Tashkent. Only a few days before Islam Karimov’s visit to Moscow, the new Ambassador of Uzbekistan Ziyatulla Pulathodzhaev presented copies of his credentials to the Russian Foreign Ministry. Before that, he was ambassador to Kyrgyzstan.
Russian-Uzbek relations were also aggravated by the problems of Russian business that arose in Uzbekistan. The story of the indefinite closure of a subsidiary of the Russian company Wimm-Bill-Dann in Tashkent in December 2009 received a loud response. This was done at the request of the Uzbek sanitary and epidemiological inspection and obviously had a political context (just like the recent milk wars between Russia and Belarus). Serious problems have arisen for Russian companies operating in Uzbekistan due to restrictions on the conversion of the Uzbek national currency, the soum. According to the Uzbek uncensored website uzmetronom.com, the Uzbek representative office of the Russian Aeroflot alone had $15 million stuck in local banks last year. Russian automakers GAZ and AvtoVAZ experienced similar difficulties in Uzbekistan.
True, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, during a visit to Tashkent at the end of January last year, said that he “does not see any big problems” for Russian companies cooperating with Uzbekistan, in particular in the fuel and energy sector. He also asserted that in general “companies with Russian participation operating in Uzbekistan have no problems.” The Russian Deputy Prime Minister declined to comment on whether the issues with the conversion had been resolved. Perhaps this issue will become clearer now.
Finally, the agenda of today’s meetings between the President of Uzbekistan and the Russian ruling duumvirate will definitely include a topic related to the change of power in Kyrgyzstan. The events in the neighboring country, where popular riots toppled the ruling regime, caused concern among the Uzbek leadership. Evidence of this is the lack of information in the Uzbek press about the bloody riots in Bishkek. Of course, the interlocutors will also discuss the situation in Afghanistan, where Uzbekistan’s efforts to reconstruct infrastructure facilities are supported by the United States. It is known that in Moscow they always listen with special attention to Islam Karimov’s assessments of Afghan realities.
In the Kremlin today, the presidents will certainly touch upon preparations for the upcoming summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which will take place in June in Tashkent. Uzbekistan chairs the SCO this year and seeks to organize the summit in close cooperation with Russian partners. Here, too, the “Kyrgyz problem” will have to be discussed: who will represent Kyrgyzstan at the summit, since the current leadership in Bishkek has not yet officially received international recognition.
It is also possible that Tashkent will try to lobby the United States’ desire to obtain observer status at the SCO. This follows from some humorous remarks made recently in Tashkent by former senior American diplomat Thomas Graham. “Five years ago we already expressed a desire to become an observer, which we informed Russia about,” the aforementioned Uzbek website quotes Mr. Graham as saying. - They told us that we are not against it, but what will the Chinese comrades say? Then we turned to our Chinese comrades. They said that they are not against it, but they are not sure whether Russia thinks so.”
Yesterday in Moscow, near the Novokuznetskaya metro station, a kilometer from the Uzbek Embassy, an authorized picket of Uzbek human rights activists took place, in which six people took part, protesting against Islam Karimov’s visit to Moscow. They held banners in three languages: Russian, Uzbek and for some reason Arabic. The police demanded that the latter be removed, apparently due to the impossibility of translating its text. The rest of the banners were easier to translate; they called the Uzbek president “a murderer of Andijan residents - an enemy of Russia” and “an oppressor of Muslims.”