‘Tamerlane’s Children’

Some parts of these stereotypes may be true, but more often than not a visit to a country reveals how wrong our preconceptions are. It is extremely rare to see a bowler hat in London, although the pinstripe suit is fairly common. Australians do eat in restaurants and indoors, not just food cooked in a garden barbecue. Similarly, the only people wearing a fez in Turkey are the tourists.

With the rise of multinational companies, you can also still visit your favorite stores anywhere in the world. A friend of mine visiting Budapest for the first time texted me from the taxi from the airport to say “Just gone past Metro and Praktiker -- seems like I am still in İstanbul.” Stores like Benetton, restaurants like McDonald’s and hotels like the Hilton cater to clientele across all the continents with the exception of Antarctica, and probably that will not be long coming.

On a short visit to another country this is just what we tend to do. We either see the extremes that are totally opposite to our usually accepted norms, or we just see things that match up to them. It takes time living in a place to understand that life and people are much more complicated than that. Though there may be similarities or differences on the surface, digging deeper may reveal an entirely different story.

One of the jobs of a foreign correspondent for television, radio or a newspaper is to help us to understand what the people of a country are really like, how their society works and how they view life. Journalist Robert Rand found himself in Uzbekistan as a trailing spouse, for his wife was posted to work in Tashkent for the United Nations. Uzbekistan is the most populous country in Central Asia, a region that is somewhat of a black hole for the average Westerner. We think we know about Russia, China and India, but the countries they encircle are a hidden mystery. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, the only “-stan” most people could name was Pakistan!

Rand’s dispatches from Tashkent have been gathered together to help us see what life is like in contemporary Uzbekistan. He says his aim was to give “the reader a sense of what it is like to live there -- part narration, part transcription, part illustration. Subjective, fascinating, difficult, maddening, frustrating, occasionally uplifting and often sad -- what it is like for an American living there.” The main impression you get from Rand is that Uzbekistan is a land of contradiction. He describes a Muslim secular state with an authoritarian government. Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) -- the 14th century warrior -- is the nation’s father figure, and he has supplanted Lenin and Marx. This is the first contradiction Rand sees in Uzbekistan -- a country poised between Lenin/Marx and Tamerlane.

In Soviet times, Tamerlane was portrayed as a feudal villain. After all, he did kill thousands of the proletariat, and so it was easy to cast him as a cruel anti-socialist predator. With the fall of communism, his statues have begun to fill the void where statues of Lenin and Marx and other Soviet heroes used to stand. Today the shrines around Tashkent venerate him as an empire builder and administrator.

Now apparently, Timur came from a tribe other than the Uzbeks, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He did after all reach international fame. One young Uzbek exclaimed to Rand, “Our father Timur was the first to build Uzbekistan -- and he saved Europe from the Turks!”

Think Uzbekistan, and the first thing to come into your mind would probably not be tennis! But tennis is a central strategy of the president to counter the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. So we could call Uzbekistan a country poised between tennis rackets and military rockets. Uzbekistan is the “welcome mat to South Asia -- it neighbors Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.” If kids play tennis -- the thought goes -- they won’t get into smoking, drugs, prostitution, religious extremism or terrorism, so the government has built more than 400 courts across the country. The ex-chairman of the KGB is now the president of the Uzbek Tennis Federation, and President Islam Karimov is a fanatical player, even thrashing the visiting presidents of Kazakhstan and Latvia on the tennis court.

Uzbekistan is also a country poised between Westernization and Islam. In downtown Tashkent Nike vies with French boutiques. But in the old town tradition reigns, and there you can find the oldest copy of the Quran in the world. You can still see the bloodstains on the Quran of the third caliph, that show he was reading it when he was killed. Think Uzbekistan and you should think of cotton. It is the world’s second largest exporter of this product. This is the principal legacy of communism there, as Stalin turned the whole country into one large cotton plantation to supply the whole of the rest of the Soviet Union. Cotton is known as “white gold.”

The history of cotton shows that Uzbekistan is a country poised between Soviet repression and Uzbek repression. There is a saying that “Uzbekistan is two-thirds desert and one-third cotton.” This is an exaggeration, but certainly the focus on cotton has led to an ecological disaster. Eighty-six percent of the cotton is harvested by hand -- mostly by the women.

In the ’70s and ’80s Soviet party officials overstated the cotton yields by millions of tons, and the excess crop payments from Moscow were embezzled by the political elite. When Gorbachev found out about this, his crackdown was hard and swift -- and is rightly seen by the Uzbeks as an act of Soviet repression.

But with a new Uzbek government, there is still repression related to cotton. The pressure to produce leads to the mandatory drafting to the cotton fields of students and soldiers, often living in terrible conditions. University classrooms are empty at harvest time, as the students have all been taken on field trips. The same is true of younger children, although Rand finds that public discussion of child labor is taboo. The government also pursues a policy of buying low and selling high, thus squeezing its farmers and keeping them subjugated.

As with all popular writers, Rand weaves in the comic stories. How the police stopped the car he was traveling in and breathalyzed the driver because Rand was wearing a seatbelt in the front passenger seat (why else would a passenger do this unless he knew the driver had been drinking?). How when he moved his possessions back to the West at the end of his wife’s assignment he had to get specific permission to export all of his antiques -- which the official deemed to be the old Uzbek rug, the Uzbek oil painting, but also a picture of Winnie the Pooh his nanny had drawn to decorate the nursery.

But thankfully Rand goes deeper than these funny anecdotes. He introduces us to characters like Sevara Nazarkhan -- a modern pop superstar -- and Rustam Samibekov -- a trainer of Akhal Teke horses. Through their eyes, and the eyes of many others, we begin to see how Uzbekistan is fascinatingly poised between not just two worlds, but a whole myriad of possibilities.