Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan Geographically and historically at the heart of central Asia, its Uzbek people, who are also the most numerous of central Asian peoples, have tended to consider themselves the leading nation of the area, much to the annoyance of their neighbours. Uzbekistan came under the sovereignty of the Russian Empire in the 1860s and 1870s. It was transformed into a Soviet Republic in 1924, and became formally part of the Soviet Union in 1925. In 1944 the country was forced to accommodate 160,000 Mekhetian Turks expelled by Stalin from Georgia. From the Stalinist era onwards, the country's economy was concentrated on the production of cotton, and until the 1980s it accounted for over two-thirds of the total Soviet cotton production. A further characteristic of the later Soviet era was the endemic corruption of the local party hierarchy.

Under the leadership of the self-styled ‘Father of the Nation’, Sharav Rashidov (1959–83), production figures of cotton were manipulated to such an extent that in 1978–83 alone around 4.5 million tons of cotton went ‘missing’. The full extent of the network of corruption and bribery, which extended to Brezhnev's son-in-law in Moscow, was only unravelled gradually from the Andropov years after 1983. Rashidov was found guilty posthumously, while the former Minister of Cotton was sentenced to death. However, the dismissal of most of the party hierarchy and their replacement mostly with Russians led to a nationalist backlash, as Uzbeks felt that foreign rulers were being imposed upon them.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, and external independence on 31 August 1991, led to an extensive search for a unifying cultural identity for a heterogeneous people. While Islam was used as one unifying factor, another was periodic xenophobia, which led to massacres of Mekhetian Turks in 1989. In other ways, some continuity was maintained through the autocratic rule of President Islam A. Karimov (from 1991). The former Communist leader banned virtually all political opposition, and was thus—not surprisingly—re-elected in 1995 and 2000. Karimov's foreign policy focused on greater regional cooperation with his neighbouring republics of Kasachstan, Kyrgiztan and Tadjikistan, as well as cooperation with Turkey. Meanwhile, his relatively slow programme of economic reform led to a stagnant economy in the 1990s, offering little prospect for the poverty-stricken Uzbeks, over 80 per cent of whom lived below the poverty line.