Since the dawn of the 1990’s when Uzbekistan becomes an Independent State on the ruins of USSR, all the requirements for the viability of a national democratic State are not met, which brings the Secretary of the communist party, Islam Karimov, to power on a euphoric nationalist project nurtured on expectations of a society made vulnerable by the influence of perestroïka and the progressive decline of the Soviet welfare state. With a pluri-ethnic population, disputed frontiers, the heritage of USSR is politically problematic and the construction of the national identity becomes a necessity, even if it means re-writing history. Islam Karimov gets down to this task zealously, which gradually transforms him later into an autistic nationalist dictator.
A nationalist rhetoric of power, dignity, and cultural values is brought to the forefront while the capitalist economy and the « reforms » expected by the multilateral authorities and the society keep others waiting. The nationalism functions like a smokescreen that gets dispersed over a stretch of about 15 years as the population is getting impoverished, the industries are closing, the businesses are being monopolized by power, the educational, social protection, health, systems are deteriorating to give in to State mafias, built on an unbridled corruption. It is in this way that the State slowly becomes a family business, disqualified by the people, manipulator of an electoral pseudo-pluralism that even the OSCE observers do not manage to believe. But the system carefully organizes the absence of the alternative by banning all _expression of the civil society, all real opposition party, all freedom of the press, by victimizing the NGO’s designed to promote democratic evolution. During this time, the prisons are filled with Islamic suspects, tortured in a big scale.
In fact the very hypothetical and de facto Islamic danger, confined to this massive repression, serves as a pretext to abolish all _expression except the voice of the State power. Skillfully playing the reconciliation with Moscow or with Washington, as one did during the time of the cold war, this system is nevertheless confronted with an increasing disapproval in the West. Having a military base useful for Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, the United-States is really embarrassed by this undemocratic ally and temporarily remains in a wait-and-see position.
Three symptomatic crisis fields of the status of the society and State can be recalled.
- In the first place, the work and production sphere appears to be marked by a strong decline, the social players being strongly aware of it, against an official rhetoric based on a brazen denial of any difficulty. The economic fabric, agriculture and industry - dating back to a Soviet époque - was de-structured and partially destroyed by the economic depression that preceded the dismemberment of the USSR and got strengthened over the years, unlike the situation in certain neighboring countries. A moment safeguarded from privatizations, the industrial park was partly struck by obsolescence, while another part was progressively given up to foreign capital, the investments of which were however feeble, even below the mark. The companies, even private ones, remain subjected to a haughty political and administrative control. Besides they encounter great difficulties in stocking up liquid assets that were being retained in the banks due to a makeshift restriction policy on money supply. Today unemployment is massive and due to this policy of increased scarcity of the liquid assets, the salaries are frequently paid late, even in cash and they have plummeted to a level so low that the job, that has itself become unattractive, cannot constitute the only source of income for a family or a single individual. At the same time, the old social security systems have disappeared while access to lodging, health care or education proves to be costly and problematic today.
In this context of persistent economic shortage, women and women’s work have become major social stakes, in all their economic, political, and symbolic dimensions. Even though the USSR had attempted to generalize women’s work, it seems to regress under the effect of a re-traditionalization process and become a survival condition simultaneously. For example, a feminine economic initiative is remarkable, especially in business; the privatizations and the setting-up of new companies, with foreign capitals, simultaneously bring about a proletarianization of young women from peri-urban villages, reputed to be a bigger taskmaster than their counterparts in the cities; what’s more, the dramatic impoverishment of the rural zones accentuated by the recent dismantling of the kolkhozes — the lands are held back by a small minority of notables — leads many people to migrate towards the cities in an endeavor to find some source of income. The markets, sometimes lining the streets, have become places where the rural people, more and more in number, try to sell their work force. These « job markets» in the most practical sense saw an increasing number of women entering them during the last five years. They depend, as it is the case in China at a more elevated level, on the building-up of a « floating population », maintained in an all the more greater economic precariousness given the fact that it is, administratively, in a situation of illegality for want of getting a residence and work permit outside the provinces of origin.
- The second field that one can recall is that of scientific research: in a symptomatic continuity with the USSR, it is granted a supposedly major but to a large extent fictitious role. The setting-up of a system of contracts on disciplinary and thematic bids from the State with a generalized removal of the employee status as a corollary, shapes a specific landscape: the extreme economic precariousness which is the fate of the researchers and all the intellectuals strengthens the injunctions of their ideological mission. Far from being abandoned, the notion of ideology is being equipped with a new aura; Islam Karimov has actually pointed out the risks that could engender « the ideological vacuum», in his numerous works subjected to compulsory examinations at all levels of teaching, and has undertaken to build an « ideological immunity» according to its own terms. Thus the social and human sciences have the duty of laying the historical, archeological, cultural, philosophical and ethnic foundation stones of the legitimacy of the « Independent State» and counter the « ideological attacks» conveyed by Internet and identified as a « weapon of mass destruction » that one should contain. In the past as in the present, the researchers, insignificant workers of ideology, finding themselves right now in deteriorated social and economic conditions that seem close to survival, are seriously and rigorously getting down to their task - but not without the fear of paying a price for any deviation.
The disintegration of the economic structures, the distraught quest for means of subsistence, the brutal unemployment of men and the migrations have lead to changes in family relations that can be easily noticed in all the strata of the population, from the rural people and workers to the intellectual and social fringes. The current retraditionalization under the aegis of the State gives rise to contradictory processes particularly touching the status of women: on the one hand they are projected on an extremely fragile embryonic job market, and on the other hand they are treated as the object of a return to old standards fought against by the Soviet State in accordance with various rungs, in the name of modernization and destruction of « traditional » societies. In all the cases, they feel like hostages of a new legitimizations of coercion that are regarded as sacred in the incantation of the o’zbekchilik (Uzbek traditions), transcending the social classes and their past and present differentiations. Thus one is witness to the production of new modes of unification in the particularization, regarding marriage rules henceforth thought of as timeless. Consequently, marriages are the object of essential social, economic, and symbolic investment: ostentation and manifestation of power and wealth, inflation of ceremonial costs, dowries and matrimonial compensations, scarcity of marriages between spouses of different « nationality » (in the Soviet sense: it is always written in the passport), reinforcement of arranged and negotiated marriages between families.
These transformations in a context of economic tensions and continued hardening of political oppression indicates a generalized and very pronounced fallback on the family sphere as a refuge in the face of the threat of the State’s brutality on the one hand, economic uncertainty on the other hand. At the same time, the State magnifies the concept of marriage and family and also tries to abolish the possibility of divorce. Understandably enough, the State sees the mould for positions of submission to any form of authority and a strengthening of dependent economic and political relations in the exaltation of Uzbek family unit. Consequently, the desire to leave the country— and go to Kazakhstan, Russia or the Western countries — appears very common in all the social categories, as escape appears to be the only way out. « Uzbekistan is damned» is a leitmotif tirelessly repeated, as a reversed echo of omnipresent presidential slogans promising a « grandiose State (as) the future of Uzbekistan ».
- The NGO’S are also undergoing crisis after a relatively upward course since independence. Until 1995, in the euphoria of independence hundreds of NGOs are born more or less conforming to this notion. All that was non-governmental was declared NGOs, including the political parties. The international sponsors have put a little bit of order in this jumble where one observes the strong presence of women, several leaders trained in the Soviet structures, a marked tendency towards family employment in the quite frequent « in-house NGOs». During this period we expected everything from the victorious West and everything seemed possible, including the emergence of a civil society equipped with a voice and ecological miracles to fill the Aral Sea. In spite of the funds received from abroad, up to 80% from the United-States, very few civil societies in 1995 and even less in 2005 because the governmental nationalist rhetoric has little by little gagged the opinion in the name of the « Uzbek specificity ». This trap functioned well and even the intelligentsia was taken in, who discover today a political field monopolized by the State power. Even at this level no voice is authorized except that of the President’s who has thus managed to incarnate the society by putting it in a state of « cerebral death ». Vexed by the meager development of the civil society, wrongly attributed to the society instead of the State, the sponsors (USAID, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, PNUD…to cite the main ones) have gradually accorded the NGOs a more focused target, more modest, on socio-economic or humanitarian projects of low importance, multiplied without capitalization or real strategy, without talking about the State’s multiple attempts to harness one part of these resources through the Gongos (governmental NGOs) against which the institutional sponsors show so much leniency as with the system.
The brutal closure of the Soros foundation in 2004, specialized in the emergence of the civil society and well-known facilitator of the calm « revolutions » in Georgia, and later in the Ukraine, has very seriously reduced the funds earmarked for this forbidden civil society. The sponsors became silent and pretend not to have seen anything… until Andijon maybe. The full extent of this event is strong in the West and almost stifled inside a country that discovers the « world cup». The government has clearly formulated its vision of the NGOs in 2005. Through a national association of the NGOs, its objective is to take explicit control of all the NGOs (whose number has reduced by two-thirds since 2004) with the aim of fully running the objectives and programs. This « nationalization » of the NGOs would probably be a world’s first and would be realized with the foreign funds (quite problematic) and the resources of the State.
For the time being the funds received from abroad are frozen in the State’s bank, which monopolizes them. About one third is sent to the addressees, the rest is returned to the senders with the words: « this project is not one of the priorities of the government ». Alarmed by the role of the NGO’s and the civil societies in the political evolutions of the neighboring countries, since 2004, the Uzbek system has chosen to neutralize them brutally. The fear causes the threat, which generates fear. One can then wonder if the seeds sown could grow at the foot of the machine guns, without the intervention of strong international pressures likely to corner the system… but to what extremes?
Today the nostalgia of USSR is shared by a large part of the society while the country knows neither market economy, nor democracy. It is poorer with less freedom than in 1990 and undergoes the sad experience of a so-called « transition » in the form of regression, indeed a descent into hell. Till where?
In these circumstances, some major sociological and anthropological questions are raised concerning domination, its reproduction and especially its modes of incorporation. The negative representation that the players have of themselves — by identifying themselves through the speech of submissive and passive animals (sheep), or henceforth through others deprived of speech (fish) both credited with the old prevailing Russian — designates the conscious and unconscious efficiency of power over a long time. According to a now well-established pattern in all the Muslim countries and well beyond, the « struggle against Islamic terrorism», by eradicating all the germs of political opposition, contributes to this collective subjection.
Laurent Bazin est Chargé de recherche au Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) – Centre Lillois d'Etudes et de Recherches Sociologiques et Economiques (CLERSE), Chercheur associé à l' Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), UR 003 « Travail et mondialisation »
Bernard Hours est Directeur de recherche, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), Département Sociétés et Santé (DSS)
Monique Selim est Directrice de l’unité de recherche R003 - Travail et mondialisation, Département Sociétés et Santé (DSS), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD |
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30/12/14
from 01/04/12 to 31/03/13
