Avuncular American

Israel's Long Straw, Palestine's Trickle

The Biblical "land of milk and honey" and the "wilderness" of the holy book are one and the same.  There's the freshwater Sea of Galilee, the saltwater Dead Sea (getting deader by the minute), and the Jordan River in between.  There is rocky desert, chaparral, and the occasional verdant spring.

Until the rampant development of urban Israel, suburban Israeli settlements on occupied Arab land, and the increasing gerrymandering, walling off, and bypass-roading of what is left of "Palestine" thanks to the Oslo Accords, there was basically enough water.  Enough even to build a swimming pool in the then sleepy West Bank town of Ramallah, where I went in 1972 to dig its foundations out of solid rock.  Even during those early years of The Occupation, Israelis and Palestinians managed to share the region's precious water resources.

"Share" is a word that would be difficult to justify in the current circumstances.  Today's release by Amnesty International of its damning "Troubled Waters" report elicited a predictable official Israeli response, essentially saying "Water? ...what water problem?"  After denying there is a problem, the Israeli MFA, in a reaction that is remarkable for its brevity and chutzpah, goes on to say that if there is a problem, it's the Palestinians own fault.  For a more realistic account, see the BBC's report from Gaza.

Better yet, watch "Drying Up Palestine," the short documentary film on how Israel has been sucking on a long straw, digging deep under future Palestinian independent territory and depriving currently-occupied Palestinians and future "independent" Palestinians of one of the very requisites of statehood: water resources.  Maybe Peter Snowdon and Rima Essa's film (you can see a clip here) should be up on the Amnesty site.

Image: AppleWorks clip art.

Kafka, Or the Half-Life of Black Lists

Brussels was the venue for a very important human rights conference this past week, but it took place in an academic setting, out of the spotlight but hopefully not entirely unnoticed.

ULB’s October 20 conference, “Terrorism Lists, Executive Powers, and Human Rights,” organized by the European Centre for Constitutional & Human Rights” (ECCHR), aimed very high. It gathered internationally-known jurists from academia and the human rights community, but also “practitioners” from both sides of the bar.

The day-long program started with a debate, Gilles de Kerchove, the EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator versus Mark Muller QC, Chair of the prestigious UK-based Bar Human Rights Committee (BHRC). De Kerchove garnered general admiration for his willingness to appear before a generally critical audience, before which speaker after speaker denounced the politicization of justice represented by the widespread creation, post 9/11, of no-fly lists. Muller stressed the disproportionate impact on open exile groups, whose freedom of expression has been hard hit by the blacklisting by EU member states, often simply copying each other’s lists, or worse, taking verbatim “toxic” lists coming out of the crusading Bush White House.

Kafka in Canada

“Kafkaesque” was used more than once to describe travesties, not of justice, but of what de Kerchove called “administrative procedure.” Those two chilling words have condemned people to much more than getting bumped from flights. In the case of Sudanese-Canadian Abousfian Adelrazik, it resulted in exile, torture, and brushes with death, before concerted legal, civil disobedience, press, and ultimately domestic political pressure shamed the Canadian government into granting a passport to one of its own citizens. “A black man, in a black site, on a black list,” is how Professor Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa described Abdelrazik, who only escaped death because his case went beyond the courts. He had fallen into the black hole of the black list: “too innocent to charge, too guilty to fly.”

Such a gathering of legal brainpower would not be so rash as to condone terrorism, indeed one speaker denounced terrorism as one of the worst crimes against human rights. But the “craven arbitrariness,” as Attaran called blacklisting, risks subverting separation of powers and the rule of law, through extending and generalizing states of emergency.

“Proscription regimes,” as they are referred to in legal circles - black lists or no-fly lists if you will - give inordinate power to intelligence agencies, and have led to mistakes, misinformation, and deliberate disinformation changing (and ending) lives of sometimes innocent people. Blacklisted people wind up living a sort of non-life, deprived of means of earning a living, or even conducting basic economic activities (ever try to live without money?). Remember, we are sometimes talking about people whose only crime was to oppose dictators in their home countries, often quite peacefully. And once on Country A’s blacklist, it is extremely difficult - even when “cleared” - to be removed from those of Countries B through Z.

How Terrorism Ends (hint: not through war)

One of the most potent arguments opposing the wholesale, and sometimes unquestioning, inclusion of individuals and movements on blacklists came from Oliver Wils, the Director of Berlin-based NGO Berghof Peace Support, active in conflict resolution. Wils cited (as did the US Congress) a 2008 RAND Corporation study How Terrorist Groups End:

The evidence since 1968 indicates that most groups have not ended due to military pressure but because (1) they joined the political process or (2) local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members and that few groups achieved victory within this timeframe.

The ending of most terrorist groups requires a range of policy instruments, such as careful police and intelligence work, military force, political negotiations, and economic sanctions. Yet policymakers need to understand where to prioritize their efforts with limited resources and attention.

The RAND study, noted Wils, shows that only 7% of terrorist groups that operated in the last four decades were put out of action by military force.

The Obama Administration wants to apply “smart power” solutions to problems exacerbated by the Bush Administration’s kinetic “War on Terror.” This week’s conference on the dangers of blacklists highlighted a number of key issues which should be of interest to smart American negotiators, and to European policy makers. With increasing focus on diplomatic solutions, will the Obama Administration pause before acceding to some dictator’s demand to put a legitimate opposition movement - even a liberation movement - on a black list? How many “peace processes” have come to a screeching halt, because one of the parties - The Outs - are declared “terrorists” by The Ins?

This post first appeared in Blogactiv.eu.

Treading Water, Under the Radar: Maldives & Diego Garcia

Dots in the Indian Ocean (image: DuniyaLive.com)

The Maldives stand an average of 7ft above sea level, and the government says they face being wiped out if oceans rise.  The government of the Maldives has held a cabinet meeting about 16ft underwater to highlight the threat of global warming.

BBC, 17 October 2009

The island has an area of approximately 10.5 square miles with an average natural elevation of four feet above sea level.  The British wish you an enjoyable stay on Diego Garcia. Upon your arrival, please familiarize yourself with BIOT [British Indian Ocean Territory] regulations and try to preserve the island's ecology.

US Military Sealift Command (MSC) website briefing for US personnel

-----------------

How nice that the US Navy is concerned about the "island's ecology."  No such care was extended to the Island's human inhabitants, who were summarily exiled by an Anglo-American pact that denied their very existence (see my post about the long-suffering Chagos Islanders).

But the Maldives President's worries about being swamped under the rising tides of climate change are starting to have their impact in strategic circles.  Here's Senator John Kerry in September:

Diego Garcia Island in the Indian Ocean, a vital hub for our military operations across the Middle East, sits on an atoll just a few feet above sea level.

Kerry's concerns about the security impact of global warning (from the Boston Globe) were echoed weeks later by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, speaking to an audience that probably cares more than most about catastrophic effects of global warming - Lloyd's of London:

Rising sea levels will have a clear effect on the ability of our armed forces to do their jobs.  Look at Diego Garcia.  It is an important logistical hub, including for this country; it is also only a few feet above sea level at its highest point.  A one metre rise in sea levels and most of it would be flooded.   We need to assess the impacts that these kinds of events would have.

Now, though it's gratifying that these two gentlemen are concerned about the planet's health and its defense, I wish that something other than the prospect of a B-52 runway getting flooded would galvanize them into action.

The upside for the Chagos Islanders, who have been quietly rotting away in distant Mauritius for upwards of forty years, is that their native Diego Garcia and other Chagos Archipelago islands might start taking water, and therefore send the US and UK scurrying for other lily pads (how about those in Central Asia?).

Maybe the Chagossians should team up with the Maldivians to drum up support for their respective causes.  With his underwater cabinet meeting stunt - "What else could I do to attract attention?" - the Maldives President appears to be on an effective public diplomacy strategy.

Setting the Stage for Uzbek Elections

Uzbekistan, as far as I know, has no official national motto, but the phrase you hear most often when officials describe the country's relationship to democracy is "step by step."  In the almost 18 years since the country became independent with the breakup of the Soviet Union, "step by step" has sometimes been translated as "one step forward, two steps back."

Over the past years, elections have been held, parties have emerged, and foreign observers have taken note.  But some of the country's potentially most popular "public movements" which arose in the late '80s and early '90s never received official status, so their vote-getting ability as political parties was never tested.  At the same time, concerns about the rise of political Islam made Uzbek authorities wary of instability and worse spreading across borders with neighbors like Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

Is Uzbekistan further along the road to democracy than it was in late 1991, when the hammer and sickle came down and the crescent and stars went up?  Probably, but largely in an institutional sense rather than a mass democratic one.

I'm not a frequent flier to Uzbekistan, but I have been to Tashkent twice now in as many months.  In July, it was a conference on responses to the international financial crisis.  Last week it was to compare experiences on political parties and parliamentary elections.  Uzbekistan has scheduled elections to its Oliy Majlis or Parliament for December 27.

With the cooperation of the OSCE's Democratization and Rule of Law program, Regional Dialogue (Slovenia), and the US National Democratic Institute (NDI), the Academy of State and Social Construction (ASSC) convened a two-day program on September 29-30.  Election experts and Central Asia analysts from a number of OSCE member states, plus Asian neighbors from as far away as Japan and India shared their observations on organizing elections.

Uzbek officials from the Central Election Commission and from a variety of government think tanks outlined Uzbekistan's preparations for the elections, which included a rather impressive study of international best practice in a number of areas.  Uzbekistan, noting that other countries have set quotas for the representation of women in national parliaments, has maintained its 30 percent figure, but has put the onus on the political parties to implement the recruitment of female candidates.

A more unusual quota has emerged: 15 seats in the new parliament will be reserved for the Ecological Movement of Uzbekistan, not a political party as such.  Though this development should give an impetus to the country's efforts to confront grave environmental problems such as the drying up of the Aral Sea, the move was not without its critics among the international observers.  Why limit Uzbek greens to 15 seats?  Other than their ostensibly "green" approach to environmental issues, where do they stand on, say, human rights, or Uzbek foreign policy?  Questions that remain unanswered, but worth tracking once the new Majlis starts legislating in the new year.

Worthwhile as it usually is to expose Uzbek officials to (mildly) critical observation by international
experts, the amount of "apparatchik speak" in evidence was still quite high.  Sometimes a Western skeptic might ask a party official for his campaign slogan or theme to rally popular support, only to be answered with a timid observation on the need to increase tourism into this distant Central Asian state.  Not the stuff of rousing stump speeches, but a safe bet in a country where being outspoken is still a risky proposition.

By the looks of things, the elected officials around the conference table seemed more at ease in expressing opinions than their party chiefs.  I have a feeling that they have gotten beyond the stage where - according to Dilip Hiro in his new book Inside Central Asia - Uzbek parliamentarians in the early Nineties "had taken to reciting poems honoring [the president] in the chamber."

"Democracy is not a state, it is a process," said one of the Uzbek participants, and I couldn't agree more.  Democracy can be won - hard won - and then lost, if its beneficiaries cease to defend it.  This holds for countries with long democratic traditions, and highlights how difficult the democracy-building process is for countries with no such tradition.  At least by creating the institutions associated with democracy - representative assemblies, political parties, elections - Uzbekistan is further along than certain countries (among them some of the West's "best friends") which have yet to even acknowledge the need for such institutions.

"Step by step" - neither giant steps nor great leaps forward - is at least movement in the right direction.  While the conference was still in session, Uzbekistan submitted its formal invitation to the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) to observe the December elections.

--------

(Photos: top left - former madrassa now an artisans' colony; bottom right - Amir Timur (Tamerlane) Museum)

Harkis - Reminder Of Those Left Behind

A chance flick of the radio dial reminded me that today, 25 September, is the "Journée Nationale d'Hommage aux Harkis" in France.  The radio program is the excellent daily show "2000 ans d'histoire" on France Inter, and you can listen to a podcast of today's rebroadcast of the 2006 interview with author Tom Charbit.

The Harkis were Algerians who served the French cause in what British historian Alistair Horne called the "Savage War of Peace," Algeria's war for independence from 1954 to 1962.  Several films have touched on the torn allegiances of Algerians during that dark period, including L'ennemi intime and La trahison.  They only hint at the violence meted out to Harkis upon independence, meriting Horne's use of "savage" in every sense of the term.

Those who escaped, and there were over 100,000 with their families, were interned in camps as isolated and forlorn as that of Camp Joffre in Rivesaltes, pictured here.  The camp, which was used originally to house Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, is on a dusty coastal plain at the foot of the Pyrenees.  Some Harki children were born and grew up in camps like this, finally protesting their plight in the mid-Seventies.  Check this excellent French government site for more photos and historical notes on Camp Joffre.

Whatever your political stance on Algeria's war for independence, you'd have to be pretty hardcore and hard hearted not to admit that the Harkis got a bad deal.  Scorned (when they weren't massacred) by fellow Algerians, they got little of the honor they deserved by the country they served.  President Chirac started their rehabilitation, calling them "brothers in arms," when he established the day of commemoration in 2001.  Two years ago, just after returning from a trip to Algeria, President Sarkozy acknowledged the "debt" owed those who had given up everything for the lost cause of "Algérie française."

But it's an uphill battle, and the political debates of a half century ago still echo.  In 2006, Socialist politician Georges Frêche of Montpelier referred to Harkis as "sous-hommes" ("sub-humans") when some rallied to the UMP successors of de Gaulle.

A half century after their war, France's Harkis still have to struggle to get recognition for their role.  Let's see how historians, fifty years hence, will judge the West's contemporary allies in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Will they get to write the official history, or will it be someone whose eduction was in a madrassa?

Barak Bulldozes Chances For Israel-Palestine Peace

"The Bulldozer" was Ariel Sharon's nickname, but current Israeli Defense Minister and onetime Camp David peace processor Ehud Barak was the one who today gave the green light for the construction of hundreds of additional homes in West Bank settlements.  Building cheap housing for Russian immigrants would appear to outweigh building goodwill with Palestinians who own (or owned) the land where these fortress-settlements are sited.

Running roughshod over Palestinians and other Arabs was par for the course for Sharon, but you might expect more of Labour man Barak.  Then again, he is part of the most right-wing government in Israel's history.  But what of the impact on the negotiations (or talks about negotiations) brokered by US envoy George Mitchell?  It would appear that this is a rather provocative Israeli poke in the eye of the Obama Administration.  Will the President blink?

Chutzpah is a commodity in plentiful supply in the Netanyahu government, but yesterday's op-ed by Jimmy Carter in the Washington Post detailed an Israeli practice that has to take the world record for gall:

I visited a family who had lived for four generations in their small, recently condemned home. They were laboring to destroy it themselves to avoid much higher costs if Israeli contractors carried out the demolition order.

Demolishing your own house to avoid an Israeli bill for same?  That's like having to pay for your water from the very people who drain your wells - another Israeli-imposed practice.  Or how about paying for the "losses" of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, should it lose a court battle (highly unlikely) over confiscated Palestinian land, as lawyer Raja Shehadeh recounts in his award-winning book "Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape."

Those of us who live in countries where rule of law is generally applied to residents in a fair way, whatever the plaintiff's race or religion, will have difficulty even comprehending the daily lot of Palestinians in the West Bank, where confiscated Arab land may not be sub-leased to "non-Jews," as Shehadeh writes.

Shehadeh and other non-violent rights activists deserve our admiration and support.  Who among us would stand for years of niggling harassment over bypass roads (for Jews only), checkpoints (for Arabs only), and Separation Walls (which not only separate Jew from Arab, but also ensure that Palestinian farmers are cut off from their fields).

The poke in the eye, repeated enough, will result in self-defense mechanisms.  Have we not gotten beyond "an eye for an eye... ?"  How about "what goes around, comes around?"  Are a few hundred more houses really worth that much to Israel?

 

Earth To America: Chill On Health Care

Breaking my internet connection-less silence for a brief moment from a cyber cafe, to reassure my fellow American readers: universal health care is good for your health.

My inspiration for writing this truism comes from a glimpse - and it was only that; I am rather cut off from news sources at my current location - of poor Senator Arlen Spector fending off rabid reactionaries at a recent town hall meeting on health care reform.  This item was presented on the evening French TV news as another example of the American eccentricity.  Because for French people, the only argument about health care is how to maintain its already world class position.  It's a given that everyone must have access to that care.

TPM recently carried a post by Jane B., an American in Paris who recounted her recent (and I take it, ongoing) encounter with cancer.  Her real life account is another attempt to reassure Americans that their fears about supposed Stalinization of health care are unfounded.

The truth is that in many developed countries, people take health care, and its universal provision, for granted.  It's just not a matter for debate - in Britain, even the opposition Conservatives consider the National Health Service to be a political third rail.  Whatever the horror stories about long waits in Britain for NHS specialists, this much I know: if you are sick there, you will be treated, no questions asked.

As in other European countries, France has a national health insurance card, an attempt to rein in on needless care (the country consumes pills at an unhealthy rate).  Politicians fret about the "hole" in the social security budget (of which health care is a part), the result of people gaming the system of benefits.  But cheaters are everywhere, and stronger safeguards need to be instituted.

In the US, the gaming of the current hodgepodge of health care appears to be largely an insurance industry specialty.  Create a maze of coverage options and insurance policies, interpose non-medical gatekeepers between patient and doctor, then impose horrendous paperwork requirements on the corner medical practice.  In the name of what?  Certainly not better health care results.

Back in Brussels, here is the situation when we need to see our neighborhood doctor: we go to her office, she gleans useful information during an initial chat, performs her examination, goes to her computer where our files are stored, and prints out prescription and receipt after charging us her fee (much cheaper than her US counterparts).  No secretary, no mountains of paper folders in some sixties-era "retrieval system," just our doctor and her computer.  According to a recent Business Week article, only 17% of American doctors have such an electronic records retrieval system.

What's scary about the current debate in the US is not President Obama's proposal, but the know-nothingism that he has inspired.  Good health care for all should be in everyone's interest, right?  Then why are we even debating about the very notion of universality?  Check a little and you'll find that the manipulators, the reductionists of the absurd, are those with a vested interest in the status quo.  Namely the medical insurance complex and their lobbyists and paid legislators.

Spurious issues have occupied the national consciousness before, but arguing over what other countries have long accepted as a human right shows how much the US is out of sync with the world.  It's not that difficult, people.  Follow Dr. Obama's prescription, and get a reality check.  For your own health.

US Health Care: What's So Difficult?

Anyone passing through Brussels and interested in the history of medicine would do well to visit Notre Dame à la Rose in Lessines (photo, left), a town to the west of the city.  Given over to historical tourism since the 1980s, as a "hôtel Dieu" it served to heal the poor for hundreds of years.  You'll be forgiven if you think you're in a cloistered monastery: nuns dispensed treatment for body and soul in a self sufficient complex, replete with its own river and mill, vegetable garden, and farm.

You'll never complain about your doctor again once you've seen the wax image of his 17th century forebear (photo below, right).  Just take a look at his instruments (those were the days of bleeding and trepanation) and count your lucky stars that you only have to say "aahh" on a dry popsicle stick tongue-depressor.

Basic as the care was, it was the best that was on offer at the time, and the nuns, doctors, and other personnel knew that if they didn't care for the sick poor, no one would.  Not only would they care for body and maybe save souls, but they would have the personal satisfaction of salvation, and of doing the right thing.

----------------------

Okay, fast forward to the US Congress this week, where Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said this of President Obama's efforts to make health care available to all Americans:

You will have to call a bureaucrat and hope to God his calculator is more compassionate and smarter than your doctor. (NY Times)

Obviously Rogers hasn't checked with his doctor, who may be one of the 450,000 clamoring for health care reform.  Nor has the good Congressman had to deal with an insurance company "gatekeeper" whose job it is to find every conceivable excuse to disallow treatment of patients.  Give me a government bureaucrat any day.

Here's what I can't understand: all the statistics show that the US spends way more than other advanced countries on health care, but gets results that are sub-prime, to say the least.  The same Republicans who decry "government" intervention passed a massive giveaway to private insurers via Medicare during the Bush years.  Their defense of health care appears to exclude dispensing it to anyone save the insurance industry lobbyists who finance their campaigns.

Do they just want to send people to the Poorhouse, that other institution from a bygone era that has gone the way of the hôtel Dieu?

Come on, people, it's not so difficult.  Other countries spend far less, with better results, and it's just not an issue in politics.  It's a human right.  Something that the good nuns and doctors of the hôtel Dieu understood centuries ago.

White House Beer Moment: Let's Rethink Restraints

Here's to President Obama, Professor Gates, and Sergeant Crowley when they meet at the White House for that beer tomorrow.  Cheers!

After oceans of ink analyzing the racial aspects of the unfortunate encounter between Crowley and Gates at the latter's home, I will add my two cents from the vantage point of an American expat.  American cops often inspire the creeps, even among those of us who are the most law-abiding of citizens.  Other than police in totally corrupt places or in what used to be known as "police states," encounters with police in most reasonably stable countries (they don't even have to be full-fledged democracies) tend to be benign, even reassuring.  Many times, police are unarmed.

Consider your typical American cop, decked out with sidearm, nightstick, Taser®, cuffs, mag flashlight, walkie-talkie... the list goes on.  Add the above to an often generous waistline, and you have the stuff of caricature.  Superimposed against a background of racial relationships where "driving while black" (or existing while black) predated post 9/11 instant suspicion of people of color, you have the makings of daily Gates/Crowley-type episodes that pass beneath the radar.  "Contempt of cop," or being insufficiently obsequious to an officer of the law, can, as Prof. Gates' case shows, get you into trouble.  And handcuffs.

Colin Powell ("Don't Argue With Cops"), who knows something about race and power relationships, said this to the NY Daily News:

I would have thought at that point some adult supervision would have stepped in and said, "Okay, look, it is his house. Come on, let's not take this any further. Take the handcuffs off."

Yes, the whole thing did go too far, and President Obama's "brewski diplomacy" (NYDN) is to be commended.  But can we talk about the other aspect mentioned by Powell: the handcuffs?

Cuffing, frog-marching, or otherwise restraining even the most inoffensive of arrestees may be so routine and commonplace in the United States that people think it's a matter of course.  Check out CopQuest.com (above photo: Peerless handcuffs) for the entire panoply of restraints, including one with particularly horrible overtones for African Americans, the "spit mask" or "transport hood," which has been compared to the masks used by 18th century slavers when abducting people for the plantations.  For many people, a black man in handcuffs is not a racially-neutral image.

I refer you to the Human Rights Documentation Centre (HRDC) of India:

Handcuffing for the purpose of humiliating or intimidating individuals violates numerous international conventions, elaborate model standards and resolutions and one of the precepts underlying international human rights law – that the dignity and worth of every individual must be respected.

Humiliation and intimidation...  Put aside Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley for a moment, and consider Susan McDougal.

In 1996, white, middle-class McDougal, former business partner of then-President Bill Clinton, was jailed in connection with the Whitewater controversy.  Her crime: contempt (not of cop, but of court).  Her treatment: handcuffed and in leg shackles, shuffled out of court in her miniskirt (she was later put in an orange prison jumpsuit) for the press to duly document.  There was absolutely no doubt at the time that the extreme restraints for a wayward businesswoman were for any reason other than humiliation - in this case, hope on the part of the vindictive Special Prosecutor to humiliate both Ms. McDougal and, by association, the Clintons.

So beyond the race relations "teaching moment," let's use the Gates arrest to reconsider the almost automatic use of handcuffs, shackles, or worse for anyone other than violent criminals or suspects.  Their use for people arrested in their own homes for forgetting their keys - and myriad other instances of peaceful confrontation - is the stuff of police states, not the State of Massachusetts.

Global Economic Crisis: Uzbekistan Engages Constructively

A prosperous and democratic Uzbekistan could be an extremely important bridge between the Western and Muslim worlds.

AbduMannob Polat, former chairman of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, writing for the Jamestown Foundation

-------------------

Last week I participated in a conference in Tashkent, the capital of post-Soviet Central Asia's most populous country, Uzbekistan.  Hosts were the Uzbekistan Institute for the Study of Civil Society (ISCS), who provided the photos in this post.  Full disclosure: the Brussels-based European Institute of International Relations (IERI, for which I do pro-bono work) was a co-sponsor, as were the OSCE and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), organizations with strong democracy-building and rule of law credentials.

The round table was primarily focused on how Uzbekistan has coped with the international financial crisis.  Rather well, it would appear: the IMF (whose Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn visited Uzbekistan and other Central Asian states last month) forecast 7% GDP growth for the country in 2009, down only slightly from 2008's 9% figure.

Some of Uzbekistan's success in weathering the financial storm is down to its isolation; "double land-locked" among other land-locked Central Asian neighbors, it had already survived the wrenching transition from Soviet central planning after the breakup of the USSR in the '90s.  As one Uzbek banker said, the country's mere 6% of mortgage exposure meant there was "no bubble to burst."  It has also helped that the country's President, Islam Karimov, is an economist by training, and has recently penned a book on the crisis.

Though economic in thrust, the conference's sub theme of political reforms was ever-present.  That picture of me on the right is of a very jet lagged neophyte's first hours in Tashkent, trying to answer the local press' insistent questioning about my opinion on Uzbekistan's upcoming (December) parliamentary and local elections.  "Langue de bois" or diplospeak comes in handy at times, but I was honestly able to plead ignorance based on my almost total lack of information on the question.

Other participants were more forthright, with probably the best line from the NDI director: "democracy is the best defense against extremism."  The extremism is Islamic, and was a reference to Uzbekistan's darkest hour in 2005, when long-simmering tensions came to a head in the city of Andijan.  A bloody confrontation between government forces and opposition elements - over which the jury is still out, though a 2007 Jamestown Foundation report provides dispassionate analysis - resulted in Uzbekistan's sidelining by Western governments and NGOs, which is only now starting to be relaxed.

Part of the thaw is plain power politics: Uzbekistan lies astride a critical supply route leading to Afghanistan, and can be a much-appreciated island of stability in a turbulent region.  As AbduMannob Polat, former chairman of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan (and author of the Jamestown study), writes: "A prosperous and democratic Uzbekistan could be an extremely important bridge between the Western and Muslim worlds."  A truism, to be sure.  The conditional tense is crucial: we aren't there yet.  But Uzbek bodies like the Civil Society Institute, with crucial assistance from institutions like the OSCE and NDI (also from the European Union and the Council of Europe), are engaging with the outside world.

As longtime campaigners for the rule of law in Uzbekistan know, the transition from centuries of Czarist then Communist rule does not come overnight.  There are ups, and there are downs.  Dialogue helps, and "constructive engagement" - though dismissed by purists as providing cover and abetting repression - can also be a way of maintaining a positive influence, and has born fruit.  Uzbekistan has an active ombudsman in the person of a respected parliamentary deputy, and the country banned capital punishment in 2008.

I have no illusions that the ways of Uzbek politics are every bit as labyrinthine as those of the Middle East, of which I know enough to know what I don't know, to paraphrase an ex-US Secretary of Defense.  But there is a window opening up, as much for Uzbekistan as for the West.  And it's not just the West: Uzbekistan still must deal gingerly with overtures from its former overlords in Moscow, and President Karimov currently chairs the SCO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

"Great Game" aficionados will put this down to East-West jockeying for influence in a resource-rich, strategically located country, and that cannot be denied.  But that will happen anyway.  Uzbekistan, despite what a NY Times correspondent intimated recently, is not Chechnya.  The question is: are ordinary Uzbek citizens better off with - or without - the presence of Western institutions pressing for rule of law and human rights?  How "righteous" is it to leave them on their own?  Engagement, however problematic and trying on the nerves, can bring results.