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Indeed, some Uzbek human rights advocates say that Mr. Karimov has increased the pressure on them since the warming with the West began. In December the authorities arrested a poet, Yusuf Juma, on what human rights advocates and family members say were trumped-up charges, after he and his sons held up hand-lettered signs in a one-family protest against Mr. Karimov’s candidacy. In April, Mr. Juma was sentenced to five years in prison.
In March the authorities broke up a small group of protesters who had been gathering for weekly demonstrations since last year. The government then seized the offices of the group, Human Rights Movement of Uzbekistan. Two members fled.
“The silence of the West gave a good opening to Karimov to arrest my father,” said Alisher Yusufjon Ugli, the poet’s son.
Andrea Berg, an expert on Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, said that without the threat of sanctions, “Tashkent has no incentive to improve human rights.”
But at a time when the United States is fighting an increasingly complicated war right next door in Afghanistan, some analysts argue that realpolitik must prevail.
“It’s a really bad set of choices that the U.S. faces,” said Martha Brill Olcott, a Central Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “If we didn’t have a war in Afghanistan we might have the luxury to take a moral stance.”
Nor is Uzbekistan quite the prison colony it is reputed to be. Despite the political arrests and brutality in prisons, the overwhelming majority of citizens are more concerned with making ends meet than with fears that the secret police will knock down their door.
“You can’t compare Uzbekistan and North Korea,” said a European who has lived in Tashkent for years, and who was not identified for safety reasons. “Not every right is violated all the time. It’s not that systematic.”
In Tashkent, a glittering city of clipped lawns and fountains, an Uzbek in his 20s, who is expanding his fashionable nightclub in central Tashkent, noted that there were long lines of Uzbeks in banks to apply for credit cards, and construction was booming. He said he did not read newspapers, but believed that Uzbekistan had press freedom because “there are fresh newspapers every day and they seem to be writing something.”
But good mojitos are far easier to come by than independent political articles. By the end of 2007, after Andijon and the ensuing crackdown on civil society, a large portion of foreign nongovernmental organizations and news outlets were forced to stop their work. Ms. Innoyatova, the human rights worker, estimates about 900 organizations closed. In an Orwellian twist, government-controlled nongovernmental organizations sprang up.
Yet, with the economy outside the capital stagnating, wages below subsistence level and millions of people migrating to Russia and Kazakhstan for work, most Uzbeks do not count freedom of expression among their top concerns. “None of this will work until there’s a critical mass of people who feel they have rights and are ready to protect them,” said the ecologist turned human rights advocate, making the point that, under Soviet rule, no one had rights.
Even the plight of the poet, Mr. Juma, left some residents from his southern town, Karakul, unmoved. “He had money. Why did he do it?” asked one young unemployed man.
Uzbeks have become poorer, less educated and more isolated in the 17 years since the Soviet Union collapsed. At the same time, the most religious parts of society have been brutalized by the government. It is a combination that has proved poisonous in other countries, including Iraq.
Ms. Olcott argues that Uzbek society is much less inclined toward secular values than it was 10 years ago, a shift that could eventually lead to Uzbekistan’s becoming a religious state. “There’s a lot riding on transition,” said Ms. Olcott, who has researched the role of religion in Uzbekistan. “I think you’re going to get another Islamic state down the road. The question is whether it’s going to be tolerant or intolerant.”
The Bush administration’s counterterrorism practices since 2001 have eroded its moral authority with countries like Uzbekistan, analysts said. “The U.S. doesn’t have the kind of leverage it had,” said Sarah Mendelson, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “We’ve got this elephant in the room.”
In Andijon, the policy of forgetting is rigorously enforced. On the anniversary, newspapers ran headlines about sports competitions and the grain harvest. Even those who took part in the uprising seemed to have rehearsed the government line.
“The past is in the past,” said one participant, who lived in Baltimore as a refugee but returned to Uzbekistan in 2006. “People don’t want to remember.”