A baker stencils patterns into dough to make non, a traditional Central Asian round flatbread, in Bukhara in July 2013. Russian speakers from all former Soviet republics, including Uzbekistan, can now obtain citizenship in Russia, where 2.3 million Uzbek migrants are alreayd working, according to Russia’s Federal Migration Service. Credit: Dean C.K. Cox/EurasiaNet

By Murat Sadykov
TASHKENT, Jul 15 2014 (EurasiaNet)

Judging by the long line outside the Russian Embassy in Tashkent one recent afternoon, new Russian legislation offering citizenship to Russian-speakers is prompting lots of individuals in Uzbekistan to ponder emigration.

Some see a chance to escape economic woes; others, stymied by Uzbekistan’s own Byzantine bureaucracy, want to seize on an opportunity to obtain a proper passport.Many in Uzbekistan still watch Russian state television and are influenced by Kremlin propaganda.

Following Moscow’s March annexation of Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered citizenship basically to anyone hailing from the former Soviet Union, so long as they speak fluent Russian and renounce their current citizenship.

For migrant workers from Uzbekistan, Russian citizenship offers a solution to the status quo. Uzbekistan sends millions of migrants to Russia annually, who often work with semi-legal status.

According to Russia’s Federal Migration Service, there were 2.3 million Uzbek migrants in Russia as of March. (The real number is thought to be higher). A Russian passport can ease problems with police and employers.

Tashkent does not offer legal or other support to its citizens working in Russia. And though migrants’ remittances make up a sizable portion of the Uzbek economy – at least 16 percent according to Russian Central Bank data – Uzbek officials actively denigrate them.

Last year President Islam Karimov branded migrant workers “lazy” people who “disgrace” all Uzbeks. In May, Uzbekistan-based websites cited Uzbek consulates abroad as stating citizens permanently residing in foreign countries without consular registration could have their citizenship revoked.

The fact that Russia retains a generally positive image among Uzbek citizens is helping to spur interest in the citizenship programme. Many in Uzbekistan still watch Russian state television and are influenced by Kremlin propaganda.

A visit to the Russian consulate off Nukus Street in Tashkent one scorching afternoon recently vividly demonstrated just who is interested in Russian citizenship. Apart from a few Russian citizens trying to resolve consular issues, most people queuing in an alley outside the consular section were Uzbek citizens of various ethnic backgrounds, or stateless persons, many of them of Uzbek ethnicity.

“I want to get Russian citizenship to make it easier to work in Russia and live in Uzbekistan,” an ethnic Uzbek who moved from Tajikistan to Uzbekistan’s southern Kashkadarya Region in the early 2000s told EurasiaNet.org.

Since his arrival in Uzbekistan, he’s been living as a stateless person, making it difficult even to leave Uzbekistan, let alone obtain a Russian visa. (Russian visas are required for stateless persons, but not Uzbek citizens).

Indeed, many people in line were stateless people from other former Soviet republics who have been trying for years, and failing, to obtain Uzbek citizenship. Uzbekistan does not publish data on how many people it grants citizenship each year, but the number is thought to be in the single digits.

An ethnic Korean woman said she and her Tajik partner, who holds an Uzbek stateless person’s document, were queuing to obtain Russian citizenship to make it “easy” for him to live with her in Kazakhstan. She moved to Kazakhstan last year and intends to obtain a residence permit there. Living in Kazakhstan as a Russian citizen, in her opinion, is the best option for her partner.

Uzbekistan does not publish reliable figures on the country’s ethnic breakdown and has not conducted a census since 1989. According to figures published in the Ethnic Atlas of Uzbekistan in 2002, Uzbekistan was home to about two million members of ethnic minority groups in 2000, including 1.2 million ethnic Russians and sizeable numbers of Ukrainians, Koreans, Armenians, Tatars and others.

Many minorities are primarily Russian-speakers, and, thus, are prime candidates to apply for Russian citizenship.

One requirement that should be simple for many Uzbeks to prove – fluency in the Russian language – is difficult to demonstrate in Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan does not have an authorized center for language testing, thereby requiring Uzbek residents to travel to neighbouring countries in order to take the 3.5-hour-long language exam.

In the line outside the Russian Embassy, an ethnic Armenian who is an Uzbek citizen and received an engineering degree in Russia four years ago said he hopes to use his diploma to obtain Russian citizenship and eventually find a job in Russia.

The Kremlin may have devised the new scheme to help boost its population after a state program on voluntary settlement of ethnic Russians abroad failed to attract immigrants from the former Soviet Union. That programme has managed to attract fewer than 150,000 people since its inception in 2007, according to the Russian Federal Migration Service, despite state support offered to qualified migrants. The Russian government had hoped for 700,000 by 2012, according to the Kommersant daily.

The new legislation may prove more successful in attracting skilled immigrants, as the queues outside the Russian Embassy seem to testify: In June the Embassy was accepting appointments for no earlier than October.

Editor’s note:  Murat Sadykov is the pseudonym for a journalist specialising in Central Asian affairs. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Two of the most despotic leaders in the world sit atop the governments of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, according to rights groups. But in sharp contrast to the way they regard their respective peoples, Turkmenistan’s Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov seem to treat each other with courtesy and respect when they get together.

At their most recent meeting, held in late November in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, Berdymukhamedov and Karimov reportedly signed agreements outlining economic and humanitarian cooperation. They also discussed Central Asia’s water disputes, though, as usual, details about that conversation were scarce. Even so, the overall tenor of the meeting was upbeat.

“Today Uzbek-Turkmen cooperation is developing dynamically,” Uzbekistan state media declared on November 25. “The present meeting in Tashkent between the heads of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan is the logical continuation of an efficient and active dialogue.”

The official view is echoed by local political observers. Bilateral relations are “quite stable, businesslike and trustworthy,” said Farkhad Tolipov, a Tashkent-based political analyst.

The relationship today is markedly different than just over a decade ago, when, following a supposed coup attempt in Turkmenistan in November, 2002, Turkmen-Uzbek ties entered a deep freeze.

Back then, Turkmen authorities accused Uzbekistan of aiding the alleged coup plotters; one of whom – former Turkmen Foreign Minister Boris Shikhmuradov – supposedly hid inside the Uzbek Embassy in Ashgabat for about a week before ultimately being captured. Shikhmuradov has had no contact with friends or relatives since 2007.

When he came to power after then-president Saparmurat Niyazov’s sudden death in 2006, Berdymukhamedov promoted a thaw between Ashgabat and Tashkent. Apparently, the new Turkmen leader believed better ties with Uzbekistan would help him consolidate his own hold on power, Andrei Grozin, head of the Central Asia Department at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ CIS Institute, told EurasiaNet.org.

“Berdymukhamedov […] needed legitimacy in the region as a new leader of Turkmenistan. And Uzbekistan sought normalisation of its relations with Turkmenistan because it was hard for Uzbekistan to be in a state of conflict with almost all of its neighbours,” Grozin explained.

During the latter stages of Niyazov’s tenure, Turkmenistan tightened border controls with Uzbekistan, stymying trade. Turkmenistan’s ethnic Uzbek community also was virtually cut off from their kin across the border.

Berdymukhamedov has relied on personal diplomacy to ease bilateral tension. “Annual meetings between the presidents […] point to a higher level of cooperation than under the previous leader of Turkmenistan,” Tolipov, the political analyst, told EurasiaNet.org.

Though few these days see Turkmenistan as a regional leader, neighbouring states are increasingly trying to cultivate stronger ties with Ashgabat, Grozin said. Ashgabat’s growing popularity is linked to its role as an energy and transit hub. In the months prior to the Berdymukhamedov-Karimov meeting, the presidents of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and China all visited Turkmenistan.

In May, Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev visited to help launch a railway connecting Kazakhstan with Iran via Turkmenistan along the Caspian shore. In June Tajikistan’s Imomali Rahmon and Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai attended a ceremony in Lebap Province in eastern Turkmenistan marking the start of construction on a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Tajikistan railway line that bypasses Uzbekistan.

In September, Xi Jinping of China, which in 2009 opened a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan and sources over half its gas imports from the country, signed a deal to buy even more gas and helped launch processing facilities as the world’s second-largest field, Galkynysh.

Karimov these days may be hoping Ashgabat can help ease Uzbekistan’s problems with petrol shortages and help build a railway to Iran and the Persian Gulf. Such a rail route would allow Uzbekistan to become a transit link between China and the Gulf.

(With Chinese support, including a 350-million-dollar loan inked on Nov. 29, Uzbekistan has started building a railway between its central regions and the eastern Fergana Valley that may eventually link to China via Kyrgyzstan. But Beijing and the Kyrgyz have not yet agreed on the route).

Transportation experts are skeptical that Tashkent’s rail plan will pay off. “The railway corridor from Uzbekistan to the Persian Gulf is only a complementary branch of [other north-south routes], which will be developed with or without Uzbekistan,” noted Jacopo Pepe, a researcher at the Free University Berlin’s Center for Caspian Region Studies.

For months, state-run media propaganda in Uzbekistan has warned about the supposedly detrimental effects of foreign media and culture on young people.

Now President Islam Karimov’s administration seems intent on trying to legislate morality.

On Jul. 9, the Uzbek Agency for the Press and Information, the government body responsible for regulating media outlets, announced that “in cooperation with interested state and non-state organisations” it had drafted a bill that would protect minors from information deemed harmful to their “physical and spiritual development”.

Citing vaguely similar legislation adopted in the United States and in EU countries (mostly relating to pornography), the Uzbek agency’s chairman, Amanulla Yunusov, claimed that adopting laws against the distribution of print, audio and video material, as well as computer games, “promoting violence, cruelty, drugs, pornography and other harmful information” would enable Uzbekistan to comply with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Such a claim raised the hackles of international human rights activists, who quickly pointed out a stark dichotomy in the Uzbek government’s attitude toward the welfare of its youngest citizens.

When it comes to keeping foreign influences out, the Uzbek government seems ready to take a tough, proactive stance. But when it comes to the domestic economy, specifically the use of forced child labour in the country’s cotton fields, the government is far less interested in the best interests of children.

Observers point out Tashkent has been reluctant to allow an International Labour Organisation mission to inspect whether forced child labour is used during cotton harvesting, despite ratifying the ILO Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention in 2008.

School children were not seen in cotton fields during last year’s harvesting, but human rights activists said that teenagers aged 15 to 17 were forced to work in fields in the autumn instead of attending classes. Anticipating likely criticism of their practices, authorities reportedly coerced parents into signing a pledge agreeing to their children’s cotton picking.

The morality bill is expected to be debated in Uzbekistan’s rubberstamp parliament – where its passage is almost certain – by the end of 2013. It builds on earlier efforts by the Uzbek government to limit public access to independent sources of information, especially on the Internet.

Those efforts have been on-going since the country gained independence in 1991. They were significantly expanded following the large-scale killing of mostly peaceful protesters in the eastern city of Andijan in May 2005.

New life was breathed into the government’s desire to shape public attitudes after the beginning of the Arab Spring in December 2010. A massive campaign was launched in the Uzbek media against social-networking sites, the Internet and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), along with foreign cultural imports – elements that the government feared could be used to foment social unrest in the country.

“We must pay attention to the fact that some destructive forces are seeking to control young minds and use the Internet in their own narrow goals, and this leads to negative consequences,” Karimov said in connection with a holiday celebrating media workers in June 2011.

That was two years ago, but the state propaganda barrage has continued. In July 2012 a documentary aired by the Yoshlar state-run television channel described social networking as a tool used by foreign powers to foment colour-coded revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine back in 2003 and 2004 and, more recently, in some Middle Eastern states.

To counter “destructive forces” on the Internet, Uzbekistan, which has been continuously ranked as an “Enemy of the Internet” by Reporters Without Borders in the past few years, has developed its own social-networking sites, including Muloqot.uz, Youface.uz (now defunct) and Sinfdosh.uz to “improve the moral and physical health of youth and form high morals”.

The campaign against foreign influence hasn’t been limited to the Internet. In the recent past, authorities have declared war against toys that supposedly represent foreign values, censored rap music and banned five musical acts from singing for undermining Uzbek “moral heritage and mentality.”

In addition, authorities have discouraged the observance of Western-oriented holidays, in particular Valentine’s Day and Christmas.

Internet penetration is steadily growing in Uzbekistan: The number of Internet users increased by over 250,000 to 10.1 million during the first quarter of 2013.

Meanwhile, Karimov has acknowledged that it is impossible to completely seal Uzbekistan off from outside influences.

“The Internet cannot be fenced off by an iron wall or banned – this is unthinkable,” he conceded in a speech in April.

Uzbek media outlets are nevertheless keeping up a steady drumbeat against Western culture. For instance, ahead of the announcement of the morality bill earlier this month, two flagship state channels – Uzbekistan and Yoshlar – carried separate shows on the harms of the Internet and Western influence on Uzbek children.

“There are many websites on the Internet that disseminate false information and we can observe websites that aim to manipulate social consciousness. We can also see websites that aim at racism, discrimination, and cyberterrorism, and aim to deprive people of their historical memory and destroy the historical memory.

“Of course, our young people are surfing these websites when they are using social-networking sites,” MP Shuhrat Dehqonov fumed on the “Munosabat” (Attitude) programme, posted on Uzbekistan TV channel’s website on Jul. 9.

Speaking on the evocatively-titled “Bogeyman on the Screen” programme, posted on Yoshlar’s website also on Jul. 9, actor Hojiakbar Komilov joined ranks with those seeking to hold back the Western cultural tide: “We won’t notice it [influence] right now but children are growing. What nurturing are they receiving? … [Foreign] films show violence, blood and murders. What kind of nurturing will children receive after seeing this?”

Armed with the new bill, the Uzbek government appears to be gearing up for a long battle for the minds of its youngest citizens.

Editor’s note: Murat Sadykov is the pseudonym for a journalist specialising in Central Asian affairs. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Uzbekistan has introduced sweeping new banking and import regulations that appear designed to keep hard currency from leaving the country.

Observers say residents and entrepreneurs should expect a bumpy ride in the coming months, as the cumbersome new measures are expected to drive up prices for basic goods and encourage an expansion of the shadow economy.

At the beginning of February, new rules regulating foreign currency exchange basically made it impossible for Uzbeks to get their hands, legally, on hard currency. Under the new rules, residents can only trade Uzbek sums for virtual hard currency loaded onto plastic banking cards for use abroad or online, not cash.

At the same time, authorities began arresting the currency traders who operate in a thriving black market, where the U.S. dollar fetches approximately 40 percent more than banks offer in exchange for sums.

While the exchange regulations received widespread attention, on Jan. 30 customs authorities also quietly introduced new import rules requiring mountains of paperwork. According to the State Customs Committee, importers must now submit “preliminary” customs declarations for all imported goods 30 days in advance.

Along with the preliminary declaration, importers are also required to procure certificates showing goods’ compliance with Uzbekistan’s strict and oft-changing hygienic, conformity and veterinary standards. The new steps add more paperwork to an already burdensome process.

And in Uzbekistan – routinely classified as one of the most corrupt countries on the planet; Transparency International ranks it tied for 170th out of 174 countries surveyed in its most recent Corruption Perceptions Index – paperwork often gives authorities a chance to find errors, perceived or real, and solicit bribes.

Officially, the new customs regulations stated aim is to “further fundamentally improve the business environment and provide greater freedom to entrepreneurship” and to “liberalize” foreign trade. But with the regulations announced so suddenly, after no public discussion, few are taking authorities at their word.

Instead, some regional media outlets have suggested authorities are trying to keep hard currency from leaving the country; others speculate that authorities are protecting the business interests of a well-connected individual or family (not unheard of in Uzbekistan).

Either way, analysts say it is difficult to imagine Uzbekistan’s limited domestic manufacturing base offering substitutes of sufficient quantity and quality to offset the expected price fluctuations as goods disappear from store shelves.

Import restrictions in Uzbekistan are hardly news: In 2000, Tashkent banned individuals from importing goods for resale. In 2009, the maximum value of goods that could be imported duty-free for personal consumption was reduced to 10 dollars per person.

These rules turned travel abroad for the average Uzbek into a troublesome experience. Long lines are now routine at border crossings, as customs officers sift through bags to identify items subject to customs duties or seizure (or another chance to solicit a bribe).

Because high import tariffs already make consumer goods in Uzbekistan expensive, many Uzbeks have long preferred to shop in neighbouring countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. This practice is growing increasingly difficult under the existing regulations.

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to facilitating cross-border trading, the World Bank recently ranked Uzbekistan as the worst performer out of 185 countries surveyed in its Doing Business report for 2013.

Coupled with the latest foreign currency restrictions, analysts believe the new import regulations aim to prevent Uzbekistan’s foreign exchange and gold reserves from dwindling. (By limiting imports, the idea is the authorities are limiting the outflow of precious foreign cash and gold. Most analysts consider current account statistics unreliable).

Tashkent does not publish data on its reserves, or what share of its export earnings are channeled into replenishing reserves. But given the government’s reluctance to borrow, the restrictions on the circulation of hard cash suggest Tashkent is having trouble balancing the books.

“Coming on the back of the recent changes to currency regulations, one reason for the import restrictions is likely to be that the government is seeking to protect the country’s foreign-exchange reserves,” Anna Walker, a Central Asia analyst at the London-based Control Risks consultancy, told EurasiaNet.org.

“It also probably reflects a long-standing policy of encouraging import-substituting industrialization, though this policy has failed to foster a dynamic, domestic industrial sector that produces goods capable of competing with imports.”

Walker doubts the Uzbek government can achieve its economic goals by administrative fiat alone.

“Given the prevalence of imported goods in most sectors, it is highly unlikely that domestically produced goods will be able to substitute for imports. The government’s attempts to attract foreign investment in sectors other than natural resources have been largely unsuccessful, and the domestic manufacturing sector does not have the capacity to fill the gap left by the new import restrictions,” Walker added.

The stifling import and currency regulations often force Uzbek entrepreneurs to operate in the shadows. Privately, many confess they can only survive by bribing tax and customs officials.

One entrepreneur, a jeweler, who agreed to talk to EurasiaNet.org on condition of anonymity, said he thought any new import restrictions were done for one reason only: “To prevent the outflow of foreign currency from the country.”

The new restrictions are likely to backfire, driving up prices and pushing more entrepreneurs into the shadow economy, Walker said: “The immediate result is likely to be an increase in prices, as the availability of goods diminishes, as well as growth in the shadow economy as consumers and retailers attempt to get round the restrictions.”

While there has not yet been a visible impact on the prices for essentials in the capital, Tashkent, the restrictions have started hurting supplies. One shopkeeper told EurasiaNet.org that he was having trouble sourcing chocolate and candy. While other items were still in stock, he explained, his local suppliers have stopped accepting and delivering orders.

Editor’s note: Murat Sadykov is the pseudonym for a journalist specialising in Central Asian affairs.

This story was originally published by EurasiaNet.org.