The Calvert Journal: Tashkent's first documentary photo gallery is striking out into new and untested waters

Following the death of president Islam Karimov in 2016, Uzbekistan has liberalised some of its social, economic, and political life. Meaningful change, however, still needs time to take root. In a country where visual art is nascent and official censorship still exists, encouraging free expression is a crucial yet often risky task. The 139 Gallery, therefore, is a badly needed forerunner. [...]

But Karpov’s vision is wider than the 139 Gallery. Apart from showcasing the work of local and foreign artists, the space will also provide a platform for discussions about art, social and cultural issues, and the changing reality of Uzbekistan. “Our goal is to build a space where everyone — artists, journalists, filmmakers, communities, and the government — everyone can work together on issues that concern us. It will be a place of dialogue. I have chosen art as a kind of mediator,” he says.

Karpov believes that out of all the visual arts, documentary photography is uniquely positioned to help Uzbek society start to discuss issues facing the country today, as well as to act as a stepping stone to open up new forms of art. “The moment you start doing something uncommon, there are always misunderstandings and criticism from society,” Karpov says. “But from my experience, when you show people documentary photography, very true photography, in which they see the reflection of their own lives, they understand. They see it as part of their being. This is what is so great about documentary photography.”

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The Atlantic: An Aging Autocrat's Lesson for His Fellow Dictators

The most immediate ramifications of Kazakhstan’s experiment may be in Russia, where Vladimir Putin will need to decide on a path forward before 2024, when he finishes his second consecutive term as president, the maximum allowed by the constitution. According to Kendall-Taylor, Putin’s options are to choose a successor, amend the constitution, or abolish term limits altogether, like Chinese President Xi Jinping. Putin toyed with a division of power in 2008, when he and Dmitry Medvedev switched roles as prime minister and president. The key difference is that the upcoming decision may be Putin’s final play—the Russian leader will be in his 70s by the time his second term finishes. As two former Soviet countries with similar economies, comparable GDP per capita, and personalized political systems, Kazakhstan and Russia share a great deal, making the current transition an important test case for the Kremlin. [...]

Research done by Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz, an assistant politics professor at Michigan State University, found that the scenario in which regimes were most likely to survive was for dictators to die in office. The same data showed that when dictators, especially in personalized regimes like Kazakhstan and Russia, left office by other means, the regime had a high likelihood of collapse. Nazarbayev’s hybrid model, where he has created a new position that allows him to pull the levers of power from the sidelines, is tough to categorize, but it hints at an eventual settled outcome. “My assumption is that this will look more like a death in office in practice,” Kendall-Taylor said. [...]

Beyond protecting his family’s future role, Nazarbayev, 78, is also motivated by securing his own place in history. As Kazakhstan’s first leader since it gained independence in 1991, he has painted himself as the country’s founding father and has often spoken of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s former prime minister who also stepped aside before his death, as a role model for a type of enlightened authoritarianism. While Kazakhstan remains distant from Singapore in nearly every key metric, cementing his legacy is clearly on his mind, Deirdre Tynan, a senior adviser at PACE Global Strategies and a longtime Central Asia watcher, told me: “Nazarbayev knows Kazakhstan must shake off its post-Soviet mantle, and the reputation of its neighbors, and have a succession process that is, at the very least, not embarrassing.”

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openDemocracy: The strange connections of Tashkent City’s “British investor”

Corso Solutions LP appears to be an unusual property developer. The Edinburgh-registered company has no website, no contact details and no obvious business activity. And yet it was named last autumn as a foreign investor on the Tashkent City project, a giant property redevelopment in the centre of Uzbekistan’s capital. openDemocracy has found that Corso Solutions has connections to an opaque international network that provides company formation services, including to apparent money laundering vehicles.[...]

According to the UK companies registry, Corso Solutions has not logged any activity or accounts since its formation. As reported by Scottish newspaper The Herald, the company should have disclosed its beneficial owner (“Person of Significant Control”) after new UK legislation on Scottish Limited Partnerships came into force in 2017. Concerns about this situation were raised in September last year. [...]

Corso Solutions was first mentioned in a September 2018 report by Uzbek media on investors in Tashkent City. Since then, we have been unable to find any information on the exact nature of Corso Solutions’ investment, and it is not mentioned on Tashkent City’s official website. When Radio Ozodlik contacted Tashkent City in October 2018 regarding Corso Solutions, an official responsible for foreign investment stated that information on approved foreign investors, including Corso Solutions, was a “commercial secret”. When we contacted Tashkent City project administration to confirm Corso Solutions’ role in the project in January and February 2019, we received no response.[...]

OCCRP and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists report that the GT Group has set up offshore corporate networks used by Russian organised crime, Hezbollah and the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel to launder funds and hide ownership. Companies House records that Ian Taylor has been disqualified as acting as a company director until 2021 under section 6 of the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 (Duty of court to disqualify unfit directors of insolvent companies).

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Vox: The New York attacker was from Uzbekistan. Here's why that matters.

Saipov also seems to have been radicalized after he came to the United States, and not back in Uzbekistan. But ISIS and other militant groups have been actively recruiting Uzbek migrant workers in the US, Russia, and Europe. A two-year federal terrorism investigation led to charges against five men from Uzbekistan, and another from neighboring Kazakhstan, for providing “material support” to ISIS. Uzbeks have also conducted attacks in Russia, Turkey, and Sweden over the past year, killing 57 people.

However, “it would be a terrible mistake to draw negative conclusions on Uzbekistan because of this one crazed individual,” Frederick Starr, a Central Asia expert at Johns Hopkins University, told the radio program 1A in an interview today. “In terms of Islamic extremism, [Uzbekistan is] quite quiet today — quieter than most of the region.” [...]

From then, the country suffered under the authoritarian rule of dictator Islam Karimov until his death in 2016. He held a tight grip on the state, controlled the media, and centralized the economy. The state’s brutal security service spread its authority throughout the country, even into small neighborhoods. And Karimov ran a secular government, even though the majority of the population is Muslim. [...]

“Patterns of radicalization for Uzbeks are somewhat similar to that of migrants from other countries, an inability to fit into the society where [they] live, an inability to live the American dream,” she said. “So they are looking for ways to belong and extremist narratives seem to be the most attractive.”

ISIS and other terrorist groups have taken advantage of that feeling of disenfranchisement to recruit Uzbeks and other Central Asians abroad, promising a more lavish and purposeful lifestyle for those who join their ranks. The Financial Times reports that around 80 to 90 percent of ISIS fighters from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan radicalized while they were working in Russia.

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The Atlantic: Why Does Uzbekistan Export So Many Terrorists?

A beard would be considered a sign of religious extremism in Uzbekistan, which has a long and notorious record of restricting the religious practices of its majority Muslim population. All clerics are government vetted; all madrassas are government controlled and infiltrated by undercover informants. Pilgrims to Mecca have to go through a rigorous government vetting process and are then accompanied on the journey by government minders. The communal marking of the end of each day of fasting during the month of Ramadan is banned, as is the celebration of Eid al Fitr, the feast marking the end of Ramadan. Until recently, children under 18 were banned from attending mosques. The authoritarian regime of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet ruler who died last year, outlawed Islamist political parties and imprisoned and tortured dozens of religious activists. The government keeps a “black list” of people it has decided are religious extremists. According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, “Those on the list are barred from obtaining various jobs and travel, and must report regularly for police interrogations.” Until the new president shortened the list in August, it contained some 18,000 names.

The ostensible point of all these restrictions was to fight the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, a jihadist movement that emerged just after the collapse of the Soviet Union—Uzbekistan was, until 1991, a Soviet republic. The IMU wanted to impose Islamic law in Uzbekistan, and was quickly banned by the new Karimov government. IMU fighters scattered throughout the region—to Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and, after the U.S.-led invasion of  Afghanistan in 2001, to the tribal areas of Pakistan—from where they have launched multiple raids into Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In 2014, the IMU pledged its allegiance to ISIS. [...]

In 2014, seemingly acknowledging that government restrictions on the practice of Islam weren’t working, Karimov asked Russia’s Vladimir Putin for help in dealing with his extremist problem. Putin shared Karimov’s concerns, but he was in the process of exporting his own Islamist threat to Syria, turning a blind eye to thousands of Russian citizens going to join the fighting as long as they stayed out of the way during the 2014 Sochi Olympics. This year, Russia has overtaken Saudi Arabia and Tunisia to become the largest supplier of foreign fighters to ISIS. Men from Russia’s Muslim republic of Dagestan told me in April that when they ventured into ISIS-controlled territory in Syria, they found a Russian-language subculture on the streets of cities like Tabqa, where fighters and families from all over Central Asia were united by that region’s Soviet lingua franca. On the Syrian border with Turkey, they encountered busloads of Central Asian women—mothers going to wrest their children from the clutches of the Islamic State.

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