LONDON—A quick glance at a map of Asia reveals the geostrategic primacy of Uzbekistan. The country has common borders not only with the four former Soviet “stans”—Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—and but also Afghanistan. And its population of 32 million exceeds the total number of people in the rest of the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia.
Little wonder that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli, acting as special envoy of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping, attended the funeral service of Islam Abduganievich Karimov, Uzbekistan’s ruler for 27 years. On Sept. 3 President Barack Obama issued a statement reiterating America’s commitment to “partnership with Uzbekistan.”
Overall, the event highlighted how Karimov succeeded in getting the better of all three world powers, offering them what each needed at a particular time: local oil and gas resources for energy-hungry China; participation in the waging of Washington’s “war on terror;” and joining the Moscow-led military alliance to back up Russia’s insistence on maintaining influence on its “near abroad.”
The Uzbek Constitution mandates that the senate chairman become acting president until a presidential poll can be held within three months. But on Sept. 8, the Uzbek Parliament elected Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the country’s premier since 2003, the interim president. Backed by long-serving intelligence chief Rustam Inoyatov, Mirziyoyev will likely be the official candidate set to garner the usual 90-plus percent of the vote. Though lacking Karimov’s brutal cunning, he will likely follow his master’s policies of repressing Islamists at home and making opportunistic decisions in foreign policy.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, its founding ideology of Marxism-Leninism collapsed. To fill the vacuum, two alternatives emerged: ethnic nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. A diehard secularist, determined to reassure the non-Uzbek minorities forming a third of the population, Karimov set out to eliminate these challenges.
