Guest Post on Cotton Embargo

Here’s another one from David Walther–a great essay on his experiences in Uzbekistan and why he supports an embargo on Uzbek cotton. –Nathan

I find this September 1, the 14th Anniversary of “Uzbek Freedom” very quiet. It’s partly because it is a quiet day, and partly because I don’t particularly want to leave my apartment to go where it’s not quiet—where noisy, scripted “celebrations” are surrounded by nervous and heavily armed police who anxiously wait for someone to dare to break the staged programs with protest, violent or otherwise.

My time in this country is soon coming to a close—my wife and I, expecting our first child, have decided that since we have other options, this is no place for him or her to start a life. Poor public health conditions, the equal danger of violence from or against the government, and the thinning welcome for even foreign aid workers (and Americans in particular) combine to drive us away, at least for now.

On the occasion of this day, and particularly relevant to the proposal of an embargo against Uzbekistan, I want to share with those who might have the patience to dig their way through this long post some of my first experiences here and the lasting impressions they have made—impressions that move me to enthusiastically support an embargo on Uzbek cotton without taking the time to sift through all the economic numbers and run those analyses that I know someone else can and hopefully will do better than I could. Partly because I am leaving soon, I’m going to take the chance today to publicly talk about the part of Uzbekistan that I know the most about firsthand—its government orphanages. I have never talked too much about this in the past, specifically because talking about things I know from firsthand experience could make it too easy to identify me, even writing under a pseudonym, and could put the future our relief work and the work of others in danger. But after the events in Andijon and the brutal and bloody cover-up that continues, and as we have watched the diplomatic relationship between our countries sour, I feel strongly that it’s time to take stronger measures and I’m personally ready to take more of a chance in support of those measures.

I came here for the first time just over three years ago, and though I was here for only two weeks, what I saw shook my life and even my beliefs almost down to the core: I came with a small team of relief volunteers to spend a short time in an orphanage for “invalids,” and to evaluate further involvement from the organization I came with. Of two small groups of volunteers who came that year, three of us were so moved by what we saw that we dropped our lives in the U.S. and moved here to work specifically in that orphanage.

It’s hard for me to describe accurately what we found in that orphanage that houses over 300 children—what came to mind over and over again that week were the pictures my grandfather took at a concentration camp in Austria in 1945, which he showed me only once in all the years I knew him.

What we found in several of the seven groups at the orphanage were literally living skeletons, children who were being systematically starved to death. It’s hard to say why: it seems to have been a combination of apathy on the part of the workers, a shortage of food supplies that were routinely stolen by both government workers and a little gang of thugs that came every month and took half the food rationed for the children, and perhaps a kind of sick sense of mercy from the state workers—some workers defended their policy by saying that what awaited the children at the adult version of the institution was supposedly so much worse that the children might as well die now.

The general conditions of the orphanage were very similar to what the West discovered with shock and horror in the homes for the “irrecoverables” in Romania in the early 90s.
That said, however, in my research on these institutions in the former Soviet Union, I have never come across accounts before of the children being systematically murdered through starvation as they were at this one. I do not want to imply concretely that this is a trend throughout Uzbekistan, I have only observed it at this one particular institution, and the practice was stopped about two and a half years ago under monitoring by another local non-government aid agency.

While blame for many of the conditions in the orphanage could rest directly on the staff working there, their thievery from the already meager government-provided supplies, their cold attitudes, and their physical and verbal abuse of the children (which they made no attempt to hide, interestingly enough), blame for the conditions also rested and rests on the government, who allowed these things to go on with no intervention, provided and provide completely inadequate funding for properly trained workers (“nannies” make some $12 a month and there are no programs for training new employees), medical personnel, medical needs of the children, physical needs of the grounds, or even remotely adequate nutrition.

In only those first two weeks, I saw many things I never thought I would see, or had even imagined: naked children crammed two to a bed, forced into sleep by a women who patrolled their hallways literally with a club in her hands; children, already born with mental disabilities, driven so far from sanity by hunger and neglect that they chewed holes in their own hands in order to experience some kind of stimulation; a child so desperate and sick that he defecated on the floor and began to eat his own feces.

The ultimate tragedy in all this, if all this isn’t bad enough already, is that in this facility and others like it all around Uzbekistan, there is no distinction made between those children who have mental disabilities, and those why have physical disabilities. Scattered side by side with children born with serious mental retardation are scores of children born with missing limbs because of chemical pollutants or mis-prescribed pharmaceutical drugs that their mother ingested during pregnancy, many children paralyzed from spina bifida, many others with Cerebral Palsy (classified uniformly as “retarded”), and others with only minor physical birth defects or others who were completely misclassified at birth.

For these children, the orphanage is a prison and a hell—the government provides no education for them whatsoever, and at the age of 18 they will be freed for the walls of the institution completely ignorant of the world outside it (most of them live in such complete ignorance that they don’t even know their own age and can’t count to ten) with only the promise of $15 a month in government aid—not even enough to buy a transport pass.

I could go on for a long time, there is so much more to tell in order to give an accurate picture of the of the life of a ward of the Government of Uzbekistan. I am leaving out the incredible and at times belief-defying inertia in the system when any change is suggested on behalf of the children, leaving out all the quack-like medical practices that endanger their lives even further in the care of state-trained and employed medical personnel, and glossing completely over the incredible difficulties that anyone trying to adopt one of these poor children can encounter from three separate levels of government.

While it is true that much of this particular institution is an inherited trait from the Soviet Union and communism, in a sense a congenital birth defect that the 14 years young Uzbekistan has to overcome, I don’t believe that this mutes the issue or makes it less applicable to discussing an embargo.

I believe that this concrete issue is particularly relevant because my experience in this country has been that the total apathy and neglect shown towards “the least of these” in Uzbek society reflects the Uzbekistani government’s general apathy towards the well being of all of its people. The opinion that I have formed after three years of experience here, traveling to a few different parts of the country, listening to aid worker’s stories and more importantly to the stories of many Uzbeks, Russians, and Koreans alike, is that this attitude of neglect and abuse is symbolic of the attitude towards the entire population of this country—all those who cannot stand up for themselves, who have neither money nor power.

A second important corroboration that I see between the situation of disabled wards of the state and the general needy population of the country at large is that, perfectly according to Soviet tradition, what is not seen does not exist. My experience in the orphanage led me to understand that the administration there is only concerned with how things appear—to the extreme extent that a facility that routinely killed its own wards by starvation dared to clean up a few of its residents and send them to the Special Olympics in Canada in 1996 to “represent their country with pride.”

The situation with the rest of the country is the same—much to the detriment of the ordinary citizens of Uzbekistan. The worst disservice we can do to not only the victims of Andijon, but the millions of daily victims of government apathy, would be, as Russia has, to swallow the government’s propaganda whole and nod along with the pretend version of what happened there and what happens elsewhere in the country. While the United States has stood up to this bluff to some extent, it has gotten us nowhere in terms of gains for Uzbek civil society or U.S. interests. While in the past it was argued that our strategic interests were served in Central Asia by treating the Karimov government gently and diplomatically, even our thus far quiet refusal to cooperate with their fantasy version of the Andijon massacre has infuriated the Uzbek government and led them to make far more vicious attacks on us in the local press and wild allegations towards us in the public sphere than any criticism we have voiced of their policies.

Our strategic relationship with Uzbekistan is over. The effectiveness of any programs that remain in place for combating drug trafficking or the spread of terrorist organizations with a specifically global agenda is dubious at best. It’s time for us to call a spade a spade—it’s time for us to bring the plight of cotton workers in Uzbekistan, on whose bones and blood this corrupt and brutal system of government (I do deliberately do not choose the word regime, because what I believe is most important here is not the head of the government, but deep reform of the whole system itself) is founded and funded. The blood of the Uzbek government is not black gold, as the left in the U.S. conveniently wants to believe, it’s white gold, and the plight of all the people of Uzbekistan is linked to this industry. By publicly shedding light on the unfair and even sometimes inhuman treatment of the cotton workers, we have a chance of shaming the government into making meaningful reforms. The Uzbeks are a proud people, and government is a proud government. It can justify the repression and even murder of protesters by claiming that it only defends its sovereign national interests—but though they may well try, I cannot imagine a good defense for robbing and starving its own people who work peacefully in the fields.

The embargo, of course, is a double edged blade, and shaming the government is only the weaker edge in this case—the economic effects would be borne chiefly, and perhaps almost exclusively, by those who control the cotton economy. The economic control of the government is so far reaching that I think it’s truly impossible to say that any economically meaningful aspect of this product is not deeply buried in the pockets of members of government.

While it’s quite possible that these same individuals and this same government will only turn their backs completely on us and shift their exports to China and Russia, who are willing to turn a blind eye on the conditions of the Uzbek people, at least the real threat of a concentrated cotton embargo is the only meaningful option that we have left to play in Uzbekistan without full cessation of diplomatic relations—a step that would certainly be too far.

As a government, we have nothing left to lose. It’s time now to finally bring the conditions of the Uzbek people into the light and stop criticizing the lack of human rights here with one hand and patting the government’s back with the other. It’s time for us to threaten to put some real meat behind our criticism—it’s time for us to put our money where our mouth is. I believe it was never enough for the Uzbek government to only keep terrorists at bay—I believe I have personally seen the utter contempt that the government has for the well being and even the lives of its people. I believe it’s time for this to end.

This post was written by...

Nathan Hamm – author of 2991 posts on Registan.net.

Nathan is the founder and Principal Analyst for Registan, which he launched in 2003. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan 2000-2001 and received his MA in Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington in 2007. Since 2007, he has worked full-time as an analyst, consulting with private and government clients on Central Asian affairs, specializing in how socio-cultural and political factors shape risks and opportunities and how organizations can adjust their strategic and operational plans to account for these variables. More information on Registan's services can be found here, and Nathan can be contacted via Twitter or email.

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