openDemocracy: In Uzbekistan, homosexuality is illegal. Here's what LGBT life is like there

This is where it got difficult. Most of the people I met refused to talk about their lives, even on condition of complete anonymity. The main reasons were distrust and fear of the consequences. Uzbekistan is one of the few remaining countries where sex between men is still criminalised, and can be punished by a three to five year prison sentence. There are no accessible statistics on how many investigations have been opened. But in the course of conversations and interviews it’s become obvious that this criminalisation is widely used to blackmail and threaten people. [...]

LGBT people living in the Uzbek capital Tashkent have it a little easier: life here is more diverse, you can get lost in the crowd. Some people don’t hide their orientation (although they don’t advertise it) – it’s just not talked about. In both the capital and outside, however, there is a total distrust of strangers and need for extreme care in the choice of partners and friends. Despite many attempts, I was only able to talk to Tashkent residents and one activist now living outside the country. [...]

I feel that there are practically no LGBT communities in either Uzbekistan or Russia. I mean the kind of community where people are friends and do things together. There is activism, of course, but that doesn’t particularly unite people – it’s each person for themselves. Gay men don’t live together as communities – no one wants to do that and basically nobody cares. There are several reasons for that, but the main thing is fear – no one wants to end up in court.

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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 Guardian: When Soviets met Stans: the tower blocks of central Asia – in pictures (3 May 2019)

Shares 544 Two Italian photographers, Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego, documented Soviet-era buildings in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – and saw how Eastern characteristics crept into the brutal USSR designs.

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euronews: Bad diets deadlier than smoking tobacco, warns new study

An analysis of almost 20 years of diet data from 195 countries found that poor diets killed 11 million people globally in 2017.

The biggest killer of them all is salt, which was found to have shortened the lives of 3 million people, according to the global burden of disease study published by the Lancet on Thursday.

Cardiovascular disease was a major killer for approximately 10 million out of 11 million food-related deaths.

Consuming not enough fruit was found to have contributed to the death of 2 million people, while a diet of too little whole grains contributed to the death of 3 million lives. [...]

China in particular had the highest rates of diet-related cardiovascular disease deaths (299 deaths per 100,000 people) and the highest rates of diet-related cancer deaths (42 deaths per 100 000 population).

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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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Scientific American: Abortion Is a Problem to Be Solved, Not a Moral Issue (September 1, 2018)

Abstinence would obviate abortions just as starvation would forestall obesity. There is a reason no one has proposed chastity as a solution to overpopulation. Sexual asceticism doesn't work, because physical desire is nearly as fundamental as food to our survival and flourishing. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health entitled “Abstinence-Only and Comprehensive Sex Education and the Initiation of Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy” found that among American adolescents ages 15 to 19, “abstinence-only education did not reduce the likelihood of engaging in vaginal intercourse” and that “adolescents who received comprehensive sex education had a lower risk of pregnancy than adolescents who received abstinence-only or no sex education.” A 2011 PLOS ONE paper analyzing “Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates” in 48 U.S. states concluded that “increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates,” controlling for socioeconomic status, educational attainment and ethnicity.

Most telling, a 2013 paper entitled “Like a Virgin (Mother): Analysis of Data from a Longitudinal, US Population Representative Sample Survey,” published in BMJ reported that 45 of the 7,870 American women studied between 1995 and 2009 said they become pregnant without sex. Who were these immaculately conceiving parthenogenetic Marys? They were twice as likely as other pregnant women to have signed a chastity pledge, and they were significantly more likely to report that their parents had difficulties discussing sex or birth control with them.

When women are educated and have access to birth-control technologies, pregnancies and, eventually, abortions decrease. A 2003 study on the “Relationships between Contraception and Abortion,” published in International Family Planning Perspectives, concluded that abortion rates declined as contraceptive use increased in seven countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Turkey, Tunisia and Switzerland). In six other nations (Cuba, Denmark, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea and the U.S.), contraceptive use and abortion rates rose simultaneously, but overall levels of fertility were falling during the period studied. After fertility levels stabilized, contraceptive use continued to increase, and abortion rates fell.

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Al Jazeera: On the reform path: Uzbekistan opens up after years of isolation

Since President Shavkat Mirziyoyev took power in December 2016, following the death of Islam Karimov, who ruled the country since independence in 1991, Uzbekistan has been on the reform path.

The rule of law reform, aimed to enhance the transparency and accessibility of the allegedly corrupt courts, has been just one of the steps to improve Uzbekistan's image.

Faced with a collapsing economy, international isolation, and a growing number of unemployed youth following years of Karimov's misrule, the country had little choice but to open up. [...]

"Fairly quickly, he (Mirziyoyev) set a new tone. And that new tone has been the main factor driving change because the system has had to adapt both to the new president's expectations and to his willingness to make the state more responsive to citizen concerns," said Uzbek VOA journalist Navbahor Imamova, noting that her views shared here were personal and did not represent her employer's. [...]

"The most notable developments on human rights in the little more than two years of Mirziyoyev's presidency has been the release of approximately 30 or more high-profile political prisoners, the easing of some restrictions on the freedom of speech and assembly and in that area we've seen the emergence of a fairly dynamic media environment as compared to what used to exist," Steve Swerdlow, Human Rights Watch Central Asia researcher, told Al Jazeera. [...]

Forced cotton picking, obligatory for all public administration workers, medical and educational staff, students and schoolchildren has been abolished.

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The Guardian: Uzbekistan's secret underground – in pictures

After the ban on photographing the Tashkent metro in Uzbekistan was lifted this summer, Amos Chapple, RFE/RL’s photographer went underground to reveal the art, architecture and nuclear-blast protection in Central Asia’s oldest subway system.

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Nautilus Magazine: When Climate Change Starts Wars

This has been the situation in this borderland since March, when Uzbek troops cut off the road to the town of Ala-Buka, near the reservoir. This move was sparked after Kyrgyz authorities denied an Uzbek request to repair the reservoir in Kyrgyz territory using Uzbek engineers. The security situation escalated from there and culminated in August with the seizure of a Kyrgyz communications relay tower on a disputed mountaintop by helicopter-borne Uzbek police, who detained a number of Kyrgyz technicians.  [...]

But this is all in flux. Climate change will continue to increase the area’s “environmental insecurity,” with the densely populated Fergana Valley being the most vulnerable, reads a 2014 report by the World Bank, which is funding economic research into how climate change will alter how people live around the world. Some 22 million people in the valley depend on irrigation for their livelihoods, and shortfalls in water—due to increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures and because glaciers are disappearing—are predicted to become a bigger problem. [...]

“We keep telling these guys about climate change,” Kadyrov, the USAID agricultural specialist, said. “There are some good farmers who understand they need to worry about it, but they do nothing.” Because their plots are small, most farmers in the Fergana do not have the money to invest in new equipment or infrastructure, and they are not trained in water conservation. [...]

Besides ethnicity, evaporation, misuse, population, and poverty, the issue of water is further complicated by the borders in the region. Before the Soviet Union’s breakup, water ran through a united country. Now the water courses through independent countries, crossing disputed borders. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan control most of the sources, while Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have to either accept what their upstream neighbors give them, pay, negotiate, or try to take it.

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The Calvert Journal: Take me home

To start with, we look for the keys in our surroundings, in the architecture of the cities which remember further back than we do. In the course of our lives, we walk miles through vast monumental spaces and imposing tower block estates, and rest in the shadows of curved modernist buildings and megalomaniac monuments. The aesthetic of these locations has been widely commodified and exoticised, but they’re much more than a backdrop — they shape the way we think, feel, breathe and remember. They also teach us how to move on. In the new world, the city is open to interpretation, invention and change. In their project Wake Up Nights, photographers Max von Gumppenberg and Patrick Bienert document contemporary Kiev going through subtle yet incredible transformation. In following the city’s burgeoning rave movement and a tightly-knit community of local creatives, they explore disused factories and river banks, graffiti-covered skateparks and hectic streets, idyllic countryside and the intimacy of flats in the early hours of the after-party. Wake Up Nights is a tender love letter to the city. 

The study of unique architectural settings is one of the main preoccupations of the new generation of photographers from eastern Europe. At the same time, the visual narrative they construct goes much further than just documentation. It’s not about capturing the existing space, but about contributing to the ever-shifting character of the environment. In her project Disco Polo, Paulina Korobkiewicz studies the urban aesthetics of eastern Poland after 1989, focusing on the peculiar signs of its transition to global capitalism. Plastic palm trees make streets into a globalist non-place. A patchwork of colourful advertising and pastel shades over tower block architecture illustrates the contemporary collision of influences from East and West. [...]

At the same time, in these pictures the sense of locality doesn’t always dominate over broader artistic experiment. Based in Moscow, photographer Masha Demianova incorporates cinematic influences and the iconography of classical art to create a completely dislocated visual space. Through her lens we travel to dark lakes and poppy-coloured fields, places forged by ancient myths, and, most importantly, the inner space she shares with her subjects. Demianova is also one of the pioneers of female gaze photography in Russia, challenging prevailing representations of female sexuality and desire. [...]

The dimension of space, however, is not the only category the new generation of image-makers take on in their work. Time is another preoccupation, the future much more than the past. Portraiture serves as a way of understanding global history and the rise of new national identities. Hassan Kurbanbaev’s project Tashkent Youth was partly inspired by Uzbekistan’s 25th anniversary of independence — he documented the generation that has come to adulthood over the course of this past quarter century. For them, he points out, the Soviet Union is no more than distant history.  

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The New York Review of Books: A New Dawn in Uzbekistan?

NATO officials have long confirmed that there are hundreds of Uzbek and Tajik fighters in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and many of them are now returning home to their countries of origin. Together with ISIS and the Taliban, these fighters are trying to create bases in northern Afghanistan and infiltrate back into Central Asia. In early March, ISIS released a video in which its fighters boasted of establishing a “caliphate” in northern Afghanistan. Another ISIS and Taliban goal is to capture Kunduz, a city on the Uzbek border that fell to insurgents last year but has since been recaptured by Afghan Army forces.  [...]

Everyone expected Mirziyoyev to continue the same repressive regime as his predecessor, but instead, he has surprised even his own countrymen. Under Karimov, the jails were packed with an estimated 10,000 political prisoners, and international humanitarian organizations were banned from visiting the country for years. Last year, though, a thaw became apparent when long-time political prisoners and journalists in detention began to be released from jail. This included one of the world’s longest-serving political prisoners, the journalist Muhammad Bekjanov, who was freed after eighteen years of hard labor. Releasing prisoners was possible only after Mirziyoyev dismissed his much-feared rival and powerful head of the secret police, Rustam Inoyatov. Since then, Mirziyoyev has removed other high-ranking officials, replacing them with political allies. [...]

After years of maintaining an aggressive posture toward its neighbors, Uzbekistan is using this week’s conference to project its image as a more friendly and responsible state. Already, Mirziyoyev has visited all the countries in the immediate region, promising to work with them closely. In March, he traveled to Tajikistan and pledged to scrap an unpopular visa system that prevented family visits on both sides. Uzbek officials have also stopped haranguing Kyrgyzstan for its political liberalism. All the Central Asian states have excessive apparatuses of centralized control and repression and are effectively still police states—with the exception of Kyrgyzstan, which has a parliamentary form of government and is the most democratic country in the region. Uzbekistan, by comparison, has a long road to reform. Only two dozen political prisoners have so far been released, and thousands of Uzbeks remain on a security blacklist as potential enemies of the state. The secret police and judiciary need a complete overhaul, and the press remains fully under state control. The country has never held a free and fair election.

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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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Bloomberg: Central Asia Is Less Stable than It Looks

"Fasten your seatbelts," Gleb Pavlovsky, a former policy adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin who is now one of his opponents, posted on Facebook after Karimov was reported dead on Monday night. The reports, which first surfaced on the Fergana News portal -- a Russian-language site that is probably the best source of day-to-day information on the authoritarian black-box state -- were later denied by the Uzbek authorities. The latest available official information is from the presidential press service, which says that Karimov is in the hospital, and from Karimov's younger daughter Lola's Instagram account, which says he's had a stroke and is in intensive care.  [...]

According to the Soufan Group, about 500 Uzbek citizens were fighting with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq late last year. That's the highest number of all ex-Soviet republics except Russia, and it doesn't include the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan since most of its fighters have long lost any ties to Uzbekistan. [...]

Karimov kept Uzbekistan secular by the sheer force of his security apparatus and military, which is, depending on the source, either the strongest in Central Asia or the second strongest after Kazakhstan's. Russia has been aiding Uzbekistan, training its officers and providing its military with modern weapons, because the country is an important buffer between the boiling cauldron of Afghanistan and Russia's sphere of immediate interests. Now that Karimov's grip on power is weakening and succession is not assured, all the pent-up tension -- some of it of the jihadist kind -- may erupt in violence that could involve some of Russia's Uzbek population. If Uzbekistan becomes unstable, Islamic State will be encouraged and empowered. [...]

Beyond these obvious tactical considerations, though, the tension accompanying Karimov's stroke is a reminder that in a large part of the former Soviet Union, including Russia's two major allies, Kazakhstan and Belarus, there are no reliable democratic methods of power transfer. In Russia itself, should Putin fall seriously ill or die, the transition is unlikely to be smooth. The whole vast region is kept relatively peaceful by a handful of aging men, most with Soviet leadership experience, who have turned into authoritarian nationalist leaders. Should any of them go, instability arises immediately. The bloodless revolution of 1991, which destroyed the Soviet Union, is unfinished in many ways, but perhaps primarily in this one: The current regimes are placeholders for true statehood and, as such, ticking time bombs.

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