Uzbekistan and the United States Authoritarianism, Islamism & Washington’s Security Agenda by Shahram Akbarzadeh (London: Zed Books, 2005. 165 pages.)

Abstract

Uzbek president Islam Karimov has gotten away relatively easily with his
brutal suppression of the Andijon uprising (May 13-14, 2005), in which the
state security forces opened fire on protesters and killed about 700 of them.
Despite the fact that this book was written before this event, Shahram
Akbarzadeh’s Uzbekistan and the United States: Authoritarianism,
Islamism & Washington’s Security Agenda articulates quite well how
Karimov came to the point where he could find the courage to become
increasingly authoritarian despite Uzbekistan’s bad record of human rights
abuses and failed democratic reforms. The author argues that Karimov’s
already existing authoritarianism has intensified and yet has been relatively
ignored as a result of his close cooperation with the United States in the
American-led “war-on-terror.” He argues that the common threat of Islamist extremism has brought the United States and Uzbekistan together
and has become a pretext for the latter to continue its repressive policies,
which have caused Uzbekistan’s human rights and democratization records
to falter even further.
Akbarzadeh takes the reader through a series of sociopolitical transformations
by which Karimov has sought to consolidate his power. These
include the domestic restructuring of the Uzbek political system in the post-
Soviet era; regional alignments and power struggles, most notably against
Russia; and, finally, Tashkent’s long-sought bilateral relations with the
United States, which gained a whole new dimension after 9/11 and throughout
the American-led “war on terror.” The author concludes that the cooperation
between Tashkent and Washington in the fight against Islamist
extremism and, consequently, the latter’s downplaying its concerns about
democratic reforms in Uzbekistan, would only encourage Karimov to be
more repressive and less accountable toward the citizens of Uzbekistan.
The book contributes to the understanding of political developments in the
newly independent states by probing the interaction between Uzbek domestic
politics and the international political and security agendas ...