Around the end of June, I went on an eight day trip to Uzbekistan covering Tashkent, Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand. I went with one other student from the London School, but that was it. Names will, of course, be changed to protect the innocent and perhaps not-so-innocent, but I'm going to draw my fake names from my now not-so-secret guilty pleasure: 80s and 90s professional wrestling. Any blogger will talk about how A said this or B said that. Where else are you going to read a sentence like "Hulk Hogan told us that he knows people in Bukhara who can read and speak Arabic"?
Our trip began with a flight from Bishkek to Tashkent. Once we arrived at the airport, I was watching the commercials on these big plasma screen TVs on the walls while we waited to get our visas processed, and I saw a commercial for UCell, one of the local telecom companies, offering an Internet plan with the Samsung Galaxy Tab for 500,000 Uzbek som (about $280). Being new to international travel in Central Asia, I didn't immediately get that ads at the airport are a good way to gauge the highest of the high end in the local electronics market. This was the kind of stuff only tourists and members of the nomenklatura (the ruling elites surrounding President Karimov) could afford. After going through customs, we were met by our guide, Hulk Hogan, and rode to the youth hostel where we spent the night. When he asked where in America we were from, I explained that I was from Boston, since almost no one knows about Maine in this part of the world. "Oh, Boston," he said. "Boston Bruins, eh? CHAMPIONS! They say their prayers, take their vitamins, and eat their vegetables. They're real Americans!" I didn't really know what to say about that, since I don't follow hockey much.
We finally arrived at the hostel where we ate a late dinner and stayed the night. Our host was Nature Boy himself, Ric Flair. He was stylin', profilin', and used to be a history professor before he started the hostel. We were eating dinner around 10pm as he played the dutar when this college-aged girl came out into the courtyard and started chatting with us in Russian. She was a Kazakh student studying there (or visiting, it wasn't clear), and she had been to America the same year Borat came out. I gave a nervous laugh when she told us this and tried to shy away from the subject, but she didn't seem as offended by it as I think most of us Americans would assume.
As Nature Boy played the dutar, we got to talking about pre-Soviet Uzbek history and Uzbekistan's Islamic past. He told us that "I know people in Bukhara who can read Arabic and speak it, Whoo! but it's not good that they can do that", and he switched back to playing the dutar. As all the articles say, Islam in Uzbekistan is tightly regulated and generally discouraged. Only a few madrasahs are open, and I think I heard the call to prayer once during the entire trip.
The next day, we visited a few sites around Tashkent with Hulk Hogan. We started talking about Western music, and he told us he likes some Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Led Zepplin, and other bands that the Soviets didn't want people to hear back in the day. I asked him how many people listen to Western music, and he said "Let me tell you somethin', brother. Everyone listens to Western music." For all of the press about the government railing against rock and rap, it's only rhetoric. Uzbekistan may be more inward-looking than Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan, but Western pop culture isn't going anywhere.
That afternoon, we left Tashkent and flew to Urgench on the other side of the country before taking a cab to an inn at Khiva Castle. We arrived about two hours before sunset, and decided to take a walk around the city. As we walked alongside the old walls, the other student I was traveling with pointed out a used syringe I luckily stepped over, and we found a used condom further down the road. We did talk in Central Asian studies about how Khiva is in one of the poorest parts of Uzbekistan (admittedly using data from 2001, see page 35). To be honest, there wasn't much to write home about outside of the various mosques and madrasahs around the city. Very few of them seemed to be used as mosques/mardrasahs, and the majority had been turned into tourist traps. We visited the Muhammad Amin Khan mosque and madrasah, and there was a sign out front advertising a cybercafe and copier center on the first floor.
It was also in Khiva that I worked up the nerve to start testing the local Internet filtering system. I started with the mobile phone I had from the London School that had a SIM card from MTS Uzbekistan. I could access a Blogspot-hosted blog and the English-language versions of the Wikipedia articles on Islam Karimov and the Andijan massacre without any trouble. I would go on to test a variety of sites as the trip went on, but I'll go into details later.
After we left Khiva, we had a seven hour cab ride through a giant stretch of desert between Khiva and Bukhara. For the first two hours or so, we chatted with our driver, Stone Cold Steve Austin. "You're from America?" he said, "Oh, I love Jodie Foster. I like Sylvester Stallone and I used to like Mike Tyson, but then he converted to Islam when he was in prison. Now he talks about his Quran and his surahs. Austin 3:16 says he lost his fighting spirit. He needs to buy himself a bottle of vodka, and drink back some of that courage he had in his prime!" Once again, I didn't know what to say to that. After a while, I started to get a little bored, and I kept trying to submit reports to Herdict from my cell phone. However, Herdict thought I was reporting from Kuwait, and even though I changed the country selected in the form, it still didn't show up on their website. So there we are, two American students on a long roadtrip between the Karakum and Kyzyl-Kum deserts, passing the occasional road crew operating Chinese and German equipment, with the occasional view of the banks of the Amu Darya to our right. About four or five hours in, we reached a part of the desert that was really barren. It was the kind of desert that you could hide a dead body in and it wouldn't be discovered for some time. This was a fun thing to think about given that I had spent the past few hours trying to learn about what the Uzbek government didn't want its people to know, and I knew almost nothing about The Texas Rattlesnake driving the car. If this seems a little paranoid, it's because it is, and I realized that during the trip.
This theme of coming to terms with my own neuroses followed me into Bukhara, but we'll come back to that later.
On our second day in the city, we met an American grad student in the lobby of the hotel in which we were staying. He was traveling from India up through Central Asia and eventually to Beijing after having completed a research project for the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF. He asked me what I was studying and what I, a Computer Science major, was doing in Uzbekistan. A few minutes earlier, I had seen a guy in camouflage walk into the big courtyard in back of the lobby, so I looked over my shoulder to make sure he wasn't within earshot. When I explained my interests in Internet censorship and surveillance, he asked me if Google Maps was blocked here, because he tried to access it in a cybercafe in town, and it redirected to MSN. When I later had access to a wired connection in Gijduvan, a town about a half hour's drive away, I could access it just fine. The only possible reason I can think of as to why it would be blocked is to make it harder to organize street protests. If a big protest breaks out in Bukhara, it's an obvious problem for Tashkent, but who cares about a little trouble in Gijduvan?
Also on the second day of our trip, we stopped by one of the holiest sites in the Church of The Great Game of Latter-Day Social Scientists: the Ark Fortress.
Somewhere outside this gate, British officers Arthur Conolly (who coined the phrase "The Great Game") and Charles Stoddart were executed by the emir of Bukhara in 1842. Stoddart was imprisoned by the emir when he came to Bukhara to negotiate a peace treaty after the first British invasion of Afghanistan, and Conolly was imprisoned when he tried to negotiate Stoddart's release. The visit to the Ark Fortress was a big event for me not just because I had read all about this in Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, but because of something that happened the day after I got back from Uzbekistan. It bears an eerie resemblance to something that happened to Conolly a few months before he left for Bukhara. I don't want to say much more about it here, because of what I learned from both of our experiences. Hopkirk speculates that Conolly, who was deeply hurt by the event, may not have cared if he never came back from his mission, and therefore took an unreasonable risk. He let personal considerations influence his political calculations. As I think some of my friends know, whenever my personal life has gotten caught up in my political adventures, the result has never been good. I hope I've learned my lesson from this, because Conolly certainly didn't.
The night before we left for Gijduvan, we were both exhausted and spent most of the late afternoon and night watching Uzbek TV, which was incredibly boring and unbelievably entertaining at the same time. It was incredibly boring, because there were only a few more than half a dozen channels, all in Uzbek, and some of them had the same content. I can't tell you how many times I saw the same ad for a local driving school or heard parts of the most popular American pop song at the time: J-Lo and Pitbull's "On the Floor". It was unbelievably entertaining because of what else we saw that night: an Indian action movie. It's easy in America to not notice that Bollywood is successfully competing with Hollywood in numerous parts of Asia. There was an article a few years ago about one of the most popular TV programs in Afghanistan, a soap opera produced in India (which, by the way, the Ministry of Information and Culture tried to ban). They're not watching Jersey Shore over there, although that might be a good thing. In some places where American soft power has penetrated South/Central Asia, it has produced a frothy mix of curry and stupid that I couldn't make up if I wrote this post on acid. A Punjabi-language music video starring a boyband dressed like the Backstreet Boys in the early-mid 90s came on late that night. They were singing something to the tune of Justin Bieber's "Baby". The only fragment I remember is the chorus, where the band sings "Gore Gore Gore" (It's pronounced "goo-ree". I say Punjabi because I looked at a couple Indian pop music websites trying to find a video, and the same word pronunciation has been used in other songs), and then something like гулять, the infinitive of the Russian verb "to walk". Джа́стин Би́бер такую красивую лесбиянку!
After that run-in with Indian (American?) soft power, we took a cab to Gijduvan, and it's here that I was able to send some reports to Herdict that finally showed up on their website. That first batch is the data from June 28th on this page and clicking "Raw Data Feed". Like I said, I was able to access Google Maps just fine, but I made the mistake of not sending in a report. Looking back at the data, Facebook and the Russian Wikipedia article on the Andijan massacre are freely accessible, but two articles I singled out on corruption were blocked. I might say some more on this when I get to my post on Kazakhstan, but the Uzbek filtering system is (or perhaps was) slightly more transparent than the Kazakh system. All requests for blocked sites in Uzbekistan (that I found) redirected to MSN, but if you try to access a blocked site in Kazakhstan, the transaction will take a really long time, and you might get an HTTP 504 error or a generic "page not found" error. It's much harder to tell if there's a problem in the network or if the site is being deliberately blocked. I'll have some more to say about the internet in Uzbekistan when we get back to Tashkent.
After Gijduvan, we went to Samarkand and spent about two days there. Honestly, the fact is it was one of the nicest places in the entire trip. I will say this: if you go to some historic site in the area and somebody says "откуда вы?", say you're from Moldova unless you're absolutely sure you can pass as a Russian. Money was starting to run low by that part of the trip, and when we were buying tickets for tours, we tried to pass ourselves off as students from a poor East European country where people likely have Russian as a second language (no offense to any readers from Moldova) instead of wealthy American tourists looking to be relieved of some excess cash. However, by our second day in Samarkand we were pretty well exhausted (thanks to the heat) and had largely given up on touring the city.
The last leg of our trip led us back to Tashkent and a long afternoon with Hulk Hogan. One of our first stops was a place in Tashkent where you can study Arabic and not have a nice chat with the SNB. We went through the usual routine of seeing this or that monument built by so-and-so in the nth century, and we got to talking about how the West views the "stans", but then, once we got to a small courtyard with no one in earshot, Hulk looked around and checked around all the corners to make sure no one was listening. He leaned in and said "You know, brother, in Chechnya they're Muslims and they wanted independence from Russia, but Chechnya has only 500,000 people, and Russia has 150 million people. They were crazy! What'cha gonna do when the biggest and baddest country in the world runs wild on you?" Hulk then flexed his arms as if posing for a photo. The tour continued from there as usual, and just after we left, Hollywood Hulk looked back at the front gate, again presumably to make sure Mr. 38-Inch Pythons wouldn't be overheard, and he might have started discussing politics again. "Listen up, Mean Gene," he said. "I've watched the news, and you know how the people went out in Egypt and the Middle East and destroyed things [keep in mind that the Arab Spring was still very much in the news at the time of this conversation, even if the Uzbek media was presenting a very biased version of the events.] Well, the Hulkster watches the streets, and they don't have trees on their sidewalks like we do here. They give us Hulkamaniacs shade, and you know, it gets hot here during the summer." This was one of the weirdest moments of the trip. I couldn't tell if Hulk was making an innocent comment comparing the sidewalks in the Middle East to those in Uzbekistan, or if I was hearing a veiled political statement. I tried to tease out a clearer picture by observing that some of the trees in Uzbekistan "had been up for a long time", but I wasn't sure if he heard me. If it was a political statement, what was it? Is Karimov a strong tree that gives the country shade unlike in Egypt, where Mubarak was "cut down"? Why would Hulk Hogan need to disguise a statement like that? Once I got back to Bishkek, I was lucky enough to get a copy of Cyber Chaikhana, and I read Borderless Borderguard's post on how and why people don't openly discuss politics in Uzbekistan. He writes:
"Politics is obviously a very well guarded territory where people of the country have no access to. Moreover it is for the many seen the same like crime, if people enter political territory, they are being criminals."
Has politics become so taboo that you can't even reference events like the Arab Spring, even if your statement supports the president, without checking to see who's looking?
After that big Turkic question mark, I asked if we could stop by a cyber cafe for half an hour, because, I said, the other student I was with told me he wanted to check something. It was here that I generated the July 2nd reports in Herdict's raw data feed. I remember trying to think up what I would say if I got caught looking up stuff that the Uzbek government didn't want me to see, but fortunately the whole thing went off without a hitch. The censorship in this cybercafe was much more heavy than what I saw in Gijduvan. Entire domain names were blocked (e.g. Eurasianet), and blogs relating to the Andijan massacre were blocked, but I could still get to Wikipedia to read up on it. My overall reading of Uzbek internet censorship is that the government was, at the time, concerned about a possible spillover from the Arab Spring, and so potentially damaging information and access to online organizing tools was blocked on a location-specific basis (e.g. the blocking of Google Maps in Bukhara). The government appears to have changed its approach as we get closer to the 20th anniversary of independence, but see my comment on the topic at neweurasia.
We left Tashkent for Bishkek that night. Looking back at what Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold said about America, whenever we talked about American pop culture, everyone referenced celebrities or films from the early to mid-90s. If I include my conversations with various people in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, there seem to be two big demographics in Central Asia when it comes to demand for American media. There's the people in their 40s and 50s who remember when American TV and music was the "naughty stuff" that the Soviets didn't want them to see (see also this video from Belarus), and for whom, due to the turmoil of the post-Soviet period, time stopped in 1991. Then there's the younger demographic in their late teens and twenties who listen to whatever is on the Top 40. This is the best explanation I have for why, while at the airport waiting for our flight, we saw an Uzbek music video, B.o.B and Bruno Mars' "Nothing On You", and well, this. Yes, I will watch my videocassettes.
In the next post, I'll talk about my visit to Kazakhstan, *makes thumbs up like Borat* greatest country in the world! In the meantime, train, say your prayers (but not too much), take your vitamins, eat your plov, support President Karimov, and be a real Uzbek! *flexes* Foo!
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