Nikolai Mitrokhin, a human rights activist working in Uzbekistan, discussed the deep-rooted corruption of Uzbekistan's Interior Ministry. He described conditions there as so deteriorated that gradual reform is impossible. The system can only be reformed through radical change, Mitrokhin said.
Event Summary
Uzbekistan’s Interior Ministry, according to a human rights activist, is plagued by such deep-rooted corruption that gradual reform has become impossible. "To my mind, we now have in Uzbekistan a system like [the one the Soviet Union used] in Stalin’s time or Brezhnev’s time," human rights activist Nikolai Mitrokhin told a New York audience recently. "We can never improve this system. We have to break this system."
But the activist, who monitors Central Asia for Moscow’s Memorial Human Rights Center, implied that Uzbekistan’s leading officials had no intention of seeking such radical change. Mitrokhin, addressing an open forum at the Open Society Institute on June 13, said the Interior Ministry, or MVD, has become "the primary collector of shadow taxes from entrepreneurs" and has eliminated organized crime only to replace it as an engine of extortion. He said an effective ministry would be one-third the current ministry’s size and would consist of graduates from a new police academy employing Western-trained teachers.
None of these changes can occur, he acknowledged, without "political will" from President Islam Karimov, whom he described as certainly aware, and possibly indulgent, of the agency’s corruption. The MVD’s ability to extract money from entrepreneurs and private businesses seemed to suit Karimov’s strategy, he said. "Since Karimov seeks a closed economy," he told the audience, "Uzbekistan already has all the [private] industry it needs."
Mitrokhin has traced the agency’s rise in power, like that of the parallel National Security Service, to a tactical decision Karimov made in the early years of independence. In a 2002 paper that served as the basis for his talk, Mitrokhin argued that seeking to prevent civil war, "the frightened ruling elite" hired police in huge numbers but paid them paltry salaries. This led police and security officials to seek "new sponsors," but the corrupt system had already tethered legitimate businesses to other officials. After successfully attacking organized crime, Mitrokhin said, the police began a racketeering system.
"Every person in Uzbekistan knows that it is best to pay up at the first threat of imprisonment," he explained. Even though a standard bribe – extracted, for example, during a traffic stop – is small, Mitrokhin says the bribery system is so thorough that it supports many officials. "People consider paying for police protection a form of tax," he said, noting that small payouts can add up over an officer’s eight-hour shift.
The system, Mitrokhin said, perpetuates itself. By way of illustration, Mitrokhin told the audience that officers had detained him and planted drugs on him at Samarkand’s airport in 2000. They freed him only upon discovering that he was a Russian journalist, he said. "The establishment of moral standards resistant to corruption is impossible," he declared. He despaired of reform on the grounds that Uzbekistan’s citizens had lived with systematic corruption for so long that "there is nobody left in Uzbekistan who remembers a code of honor." In his paper, he concludes that "every arrested person is a hostage in the system of …criminal investigations and trial proceedings. The hostage can be bought out at any stage."
Efforts to adjust such an entrenched system, Mitrokhin argued, would topple the economy. He told listeners that all businesses in Uzbekistan’s economy – already saddled with an inconvertible currency, high unemployment and environmental devastation – have to routinely pay bribes in order to operate. "Every combine in the field is in control of the policemen," he said. "Only if everyone in Uzbekistan will die, will corruption end," he joked.
Uzbekistan’s allies, chiefly the United States, may be able to elicit some measure of reform. The State Department has condemned the country’s rights abuses in its most recent annual report. Moreover, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development hosted its annual meeting in Tashkent in May, airing intense criticism of Karimov’s authoritarian policies. These criticisms, while they have not altered policy, may encourage Karimov to tolerate more open protest. On June 5, picketers called for a criminal investigation against Interior Minister Zohirjon Almatov, according to the website Uzland.uz, in connection with the imprisonment of members of the International Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan. That group’s leader, Talib Yakubov, told the web site that police had tolerated the protest, which they had not done at an earlier picket.
Still, Mitrokhin’s presentation suggests that even if dissent becomes more vocal, the country’s elite will still operate on a system in which bribery and specialized protection are taken for granted. In such a system, the sort of overhaul Mitrokhin invoked might serve as an occasion for violence.