Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (17 page)

Along with telecoms, ritzy restaurants and bars were also her domain. Tashkent residents told me the best restaurants and nightclubs in the city were divided between Gulnora and her younger sister Lola, who also shares her sister’s interest in fashion. With a guilty start, upon hearing this, I checked the label of an elegant if overpriced jacket sewn from a renowned local weave of yellow and burgundy silk, which I had bought in a shop inside the best traditional restaurant in Tashkent. Sure enough, the label read “Lola.”
²³

When Alina was arrested and had to flee Uzbekistan, she was looking into Karimova’s apparent involvement in another kind of nightlife: the trafficking of women for sex. “She became very close to a prince from the United Arab Emirates, who used to go to Uzbekistan to hunt. She would host him. Then she started a travel agency that would take charge of obtaining visas for tourists from the former USSR traveling to the Gulf. It was a cover for trafficking.”

Alina recalls that one day when she was at the airport to meet her uncle, she was startled by the allure of passengers boarding a Dubai flight. She queried a friend in customs and border control. “I asked him, ‘Is there a fashion show or something in Dubai’ Ninety-five percent of those passengers were beautiful women, younger than me.”

Alina’s friend shot back a “Don’t you know?” and led her outside on the pretext of taking a cigarette break. “He told me that flight was part of Karimova’s prostitution business.” She began checking with tourist company managers and discovered that many had recently lost their licenses, as Karimova tightened her grip on the industry.

To be rapacious and usurp the goods and the women of his subjects, that is above all else what will make [the prince] hateful
.

Part of what may have made Karimova’s behavior especially hateful
to Uzbeks was the shock it delivered to sensibilities still influenced by the vestiges of a communist ideal. That ideal, of shared resources and the subordination of personal ambitions to the needs of the many, may have been corroded with hypocrisy, but it had powerfully conditioned the outlook of millions of Soviet citizens for decades, including Uzbeks. And it had delivered a quite decent, and broadly comparable, standard of living across the far-flung USSR.

When the Open Society Foundations’ Ilkhamov reflects on Uzbekistan’s own moment when “everything changed,” around the turn of the millennium, he describes the shift in those terms: “The elite was released from remaining checks left over from the culture of the Soviet period.”

Gulnora Karimova was not alone at the summit of Uzbekistan’s kleptocracy. As in other countries, rival networks seemed to respect an uneasy division of spoils. Gold, one of the country’s main exports, belonged to President Karimov, according to numerous Uzbeks. Gulnora had telecoms. For its part, the powerful National Security Service (SNB) controlled exports and cross-border trafficking.
²⁴
“The SNB takes a cut of every export,” judges Marlene Laruelle, Central Asia expert at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

“I once watched an Uzbek officer get onto a truck on the Kyrgyz side of the border, ride across, then jump down,” says Alina. “They have orders as to which trucks to check and which not to check. Not only do they not check them, they actively protect them.” According to a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency official working in the region, Uzbek authorities draw attention to drug trafficking into and through neighboring Tajikistan while facilitating trafficking themselves, especially via barge, across the Amu Darya River, which marks the border with Afghanistan.

As in Egypt, public tenders represent a significant revenue stream. “All the stadiums, all the sporting complexes they build are a government racket,” asserts a local journalist, who insisted we meet in a nondescript chain restaurant, also citing security concerns. A short man, his hair graying at the temples, he spoke in a persistently humorous tone, despite the pressures. “Local businesses have to donate materials and sometimes labor,” he explains. “Hospitals are required to perform
renovations every ten years. The director will submit a million-dollar repair budget, say, and the health minister will demand two hundred thousand dollars.”

Uzbek cities—especially those that attract visitors, such as Tashkent, the capital, or Bukhara and Samarqand, legendary way stations on the historic Silk Road—give the odd impression of being built in layers. Lining the clean, well-maintained avenues are freshly painted new buildings, often in a classical Russian style. But behind them stand rows of Soviet-era apartment blocks, each more squalid than the last. The expropriation of property to make way for the new buildings is a source of widespread consternation among city dwellers.

“I know of people who bought their apartments, but the buildings were torn down shortly afterward and the land was transferred to private developers close to Karimova,” recounts one woman. “The government knew of the plans to destroy the buildings when it sold the apartments. Some people had heart attacks!” Compensation for seized property is widely agreed to be derisory.

Like their Afghan, Egyptian, or Tunisian counterparts, however, Uzbeks’ most frequent contact with their kleptocracy is through everyday shakedowns, especially at the hands of the police. Doctors routinely require extra payment to provide service. And the education system had nearly everyone I met in fits. A driver told me he had to pay his children’s teachers for grades; there was no way around it. A historian explained he had resigned his teaching position because he did not want to take bribes. And the journalist who asked to meet in the anonymous restaurant was wringing his hands that very day over whether to sell his car to secure a place for his son at a university.
²⁵
Uzbeks have to pay bribes to get on the list to buy a new Chevrolet Spark or Cobalt—and sometimes just to receive their government salaries.

“No deed and no word is free of charge, no one keeps still except for a price.”
²⁶
John of Salisbury, as usual, nailed it.

As in other kleptocracies, those at the bottom of the Uzbek ladder are not committing such larcenies purely out of personal greed. They are locked into a system that requires them to pay off their superiors. It is the system that the whiteboard diagram at ISAF depicted: the money-flow arrow is pointed stubbornly upward.

Within this kleptocratic structure, the purchase of office is a key vehicle for the transfer of money from subordinate to superior. “Every government job is for sale,” says George Washington University’s Laruelle. “The prices are known. I have seen a neighborhood or village take up a collection to buy a young man’s position in the police—so they would have one of their own ‘inside.’ Then the kid is doubly indebted: he owes a monthly kickback to his superior, and he has to reimburse his neighbors.”

No general or judge, no commander or courtly official, not even a herald or huckster, is appointed except for a price
.

“It’s a very vertical system,” confirms Alina. “Back in 2003, people were paying between two and three hundred dollars for a job in the traffic police—depending on where they were stationed. Checkpoints in neighborhoods with a lot of cars and wealthy people cost more than others. Then the precinct boss says, ‘At the end of the month, pay me two hundred or three hundred or lose your job. I take your money because I’m under pressure from my boss.’ So a certain proportion of the money they make every month they pay to their boss, and up and up all the way to the minister. And this is true in all sectors.”

At General Motors, Alina asserts, which builds and sells the vast majority of the cars on Uzbek roads, bribes are paid to get on an expedited list to purchase a car and then are shared between local dealerships and the Agency of Automobile and River Transport, which sends a cut to the office of the first deputy prime minister in charge of economy and finance.

In Nizam al-Mulk’s
Siyasat Nameh
, the Persian king Anushirvan wishes out loud that his father had rejected such corrupt gifts from underlings with some sizzling rejoinder like:

I have established for you, military commander or provincial governor, the sum that should suffice for your salary and that of your soldiers. I know you received that money. This surplus that you are presenting to me does not come, I’m sure, from your father’s heritage. It comes from what you have illegally exacted from my subjects.
²⁷

Most Uzbeks believe the authorities also allow the taking and giving of bribes in order to collect violations—as in Tunisia—to hold over people’s heads. Rustam,
^‡
a trade union representative in Tashkent, tells me, “There are so many taxes it is impossible to pay them all: payroll taxes, business income taxes, taxes for the equipment you maintain. . . . So people make a connection in the tax office to pay less. You employ ten people, but you say three. But then you’ve broken the law and they know it, and you are afraid of the government. The whole government is set up that way—to make you do wrong—so then they have you on a hook. And when they want”—Rustam leans back and jerks his hand upward, mimicking the gesture of a fisherman—“they yank you out of the water.”

The doings of local officials—including their corruption—are carefully monitored from the top. The journalist in the chain restaurant describes regular nighttime video conferences between the prime minister and local officials, down to the district level: “They can use these sessions to dramatic effect. Sometimes they haul people off to jail, right on camera. They shout at people, insult them. It’s a way to embarrass and intimidate them.”

One feature that stands out in the Uzbek kleptocracy is its reliance on forced labor. The country’s most important economic output, along with gas and gold, is cotton. Uzbekistan is among the world’s top producers and exporters of the fiber, which, along with related industries, constitutes between 13 and 25 percent of GDP, according to estimates.
²⁸
But oddly, the mechanization of the centrally controlled sector has
declined
since independence in 1991.

“In 2011 and 2012, they started calling more people up from the big cities” to work in the cotton fields, says trade union representative Rustam, “doctors and teachers—people from a level of society that is unsuitable to fieldwork.” He himself was drafted. Asked what it was like, he emits a puff of disdain. “I paid someone to go.”

“Parents understand they can pay to get their children out of it,”
says Matt Fischer-Daly of the Cotton Campaign, a consortium of human rights groups advocating an end to forced labor in the Uzbek cotton industry. “They bring the money to the principal. They are told that it pays for someone else to go pick. But who knows?”

Millions are forced to work each year, for periods ranging from two to six weeks. Conditions are rudimentary—and the pretext for extracting more payments from the laborers. “If you don’t want to stay in the dormitories or tents they provide,” says Rustam, “you have to pay locals for a bed in their house and for transport to the fields. You’re supposed to pick fifty kilograms of cotton per day, but no one can. You pay a fine, or you buy cotton from someone else.”

“Businesses get a call from the mayor,” confirms the reporter in the restaurant. “They’re told to send five people to the cotton fields. Houses nearby have to make room for them to sleep. Restaurants have to send food.”

Human rights advocate Elena Urlaeva observed the 2012 harvest. “Doctors, teachers, everyone who is paid by the state was sent to Jizzakh by train. The orders go down from the prime minister to the governors and mayors. One person out of six in a given office has to go. Sometimes they stop drivers on the road and make them pick for a few hours. In 2012 all high school students were called up, about one million kids.”

A U.S. embassy official visited a military academy for noncommissioned officers in the fall of 2011. “There was no one there. They were all out picking cotton!”

As the angry William of Pagula put it to England’s Edward III in the fourteenth century: “They made the servants of Christ work day and night in your service . . . if [the people] had another head, they would rise up against you.”
²⁹

Urlaeva suggests that the recent increase in adult cotton harvesters may be a result of international human rights campaigns targeting child labor: “There were fewer cases of children in the fields last year. They’ve been replaced by adults, by teachers and doctors. It shows that international attention has some impact, anyway.”
³⁰

And it is not just the conscripted laborers who suffer from the government control of the cotton sector. Farmers are squeezed almost as painfully, by means of some holdovers from the Soviet economy.

“All land in Uzbekistan belongs to the government,” says the journalist. “Farmers only rent it. They get a quota for how much cotton they must produce. And instead of bank loans for agricultural inputs, the government deposits advances on the purchase price in a bank account in tranches. For fertilizer, for machinery, and for labor at the time of harvest. Then the farmer has to sell his cotton at the government rate. At the end of the year, he breaks even at best.”

Many Uzbeks speak of farmers grown desperate, of suicides, or migration to Russia or Kazakhstan.
³¹

Two consortia of gins buy raw cotton from farmers, says the Cotton Campaign’s Fischer-Daly, and three majority state-owned organizations control exports: Uzprommashimpeks, Uzmarkazimpeks, and Uzinterimpeks. “No one knows who owns the ‘private’ shares of these companies. And the proceeds of the sales are not transparent.”
^§
32

Unlike Egyptians, with their patriotic tolerance for military abuses, few Uzbeks have kind words for any of the networks that make up their country’s kleptocracy. And yet they are not actively protesting it. As human rights activist Surat Ikramov remarks, young people are staying away from groups like his.

Where they are going, he notices, is to the mosque. “I live right by the Hast Imam mosque, and I watch people going to prayer. Most of them are between sixteen and thirty years old. People are becoming devoted because they are more and more frustrated with the government. They are turning to God for recourse.”