5 Nations in Search of Identity

OK, so he built towers of human skulls from Baghdad to New Delhi. If Soviet history portrayed Tamerlane as nothing but a bloodthirsty conqueror, so what? In this long-forgotten capital of his 14th and early 15th century empire, history can be--and is being--rewritten.

Tamerlane is back--on equestrian statues proclaiming “My Strength Is in Justice.” In a bizarre revival, post-Soviet Uzbekistan has repackaged the Mongol tyrant as an enlightened prince and national role model.

Rare is the Uzbek wedding toast or school day without a politically correct tribute to his administrative genius, his patronage of art and astronomy, his advocacy of women’s rights. Rarer still is any mention of his unpleasant side in the Uzbek media--which has shortened his Turkic name to Timur, omitting the suffix that means he was maimed.

The new Tamerlane had a coming-out party in Samarkand’s immense square, the Registan, for his recent 660th birthday. Hundreds of dancers, horsemen, musicians and poets staged a revue sanitizing his exploits and finessing the fact that Uzbekistan did not exist in his time.

Here and in the four other Central Asian republics born as Soviet colonies seven decades ago, today’s leaders are supplanting Lenin with pre-Soviet heroes--famous and infamous, legendary and real--to stamp contrived new identities on independent states.

“The auspicious one, who always keenly felt the pain and suffering of his people, turned a land trampled by occupying forces into the most powerful sultanate on Earth,” said President Islam Karimov, opening a Tamerlane museum. “Let us, living in peace, turn Uzbekistan into a great state that is the envy of the world.”

The Central Asians’ conjuring up of pre-colonial histories is one belated step toward statehood. Warming to the independence thrust on them five years ago, they also are reviving languages and Islamic customs that the Soviets tried to suppress; opening to trade, investment and know-how from all comers; and resisting Moscow’s lingering urge to treat them as subjects.

But the new states are vulnerable. Ruled by holdovers from the Soviet era, they have a long way to go before achieving democracy, economic vigor or inter-ethnic accord. Any of them could sink into disorder when the leader departs.

Few places were shut off as thoroughly in this century as the lands of Soviet Central Asia. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan now embrace 54 million people--most of them poor--in a landlocked, mineral-rich area half as big as the continental United States.

The Soviet Union’s collapse in late 1991 threw open this region, drawing a volatile fault line between East and West.

With Russia in retreat, Muslim but secular-ruled Turkey--backed by the United States--moved in with aid and scholarships to counter a perceived Islamic fundamentalist threat from neighboring Iran. Western oil giants and Far Eastern conglomerates joined the rush to do business.

Within a year, civil war was raging in Tajikistan between Communists and a group led by Afghan-backed Islamists, prompting Russian troops to put that nation back under Moscow’s control.

But rather than engulf the region, the long-simmering Tajik conflict has made it easier for leaders of the four other “stans” to demand obedience at home. The building of those independent nations, however flawed, proceeds in peace.

A 5,700-Mile Journey

A 12-day, 5,700-mile journey through those four countries offered a sampling of forces shaping their new identities.

The voyage, which began in the Kara Kum desert in Turkmenistan, followed the old Silk Road route through the Turkmen city of Bayramaly, built on the site of ancient Merv, Bukhara in Uzbekistan and Samarkand. It crossed the steppe to the snow-capped Tian Shan peaks of eastern Kazakhstan, winding through one inland nation after another.

“Isolation is the mother of all our problems,” said an official in Uzbekistan.

Yet no place feels entirely cut off.

Deep in the rippling Kara Kum, hours from the nearest town, Iranian truckers dodge stray camels on a moonlit highway to deliver Japanese electronic goods from Dubai. A new railroad from the east fills hotels in Almaty, the Kazakh capital, with Chinese traders.

“Macarena,” beating from loudspeakers at the outdoor rug market, is a bestseller in Ashgabat, the Turkmen capital. At an outdoor mall in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, pedestrians line up to sing along with a Russian-language karaoke machine. President Askar A. Akayev, whose 10-year-old son roams the Internet and idolizes software mogul Bill Gates, has ordered Hewlett-Packard computers for every high school in Kyrgyzstan.

Korean banking, electronics and auto-making ventures are so ubiquitous to Uzbeks that some call their country “Daewooistan,” after the South Korean conglomerate. Multibillion-dollar oil deals are made in the $1,500-a-night executive suite of Almaty’s new Hyatt Regency, which has a soaring atrium shaped like a desert tent.

Not all traffic is welcome. A growing caravan of opium moves through the region from lawless Afghanistan, corrupting officials and addicting people in its path toward Europe.

Of course, the Soviet legacy persists--in chunky cityscapes inflicted on nomadic societies, in elephantine factories that died with the last five-year plan and in slavish dependence on cotton, still harvested on collective farms by forced student labor.

The Russian language, which brought literacy and culture to many, remains the regional lingua franca.

But the dominant ethnic tongue is gaining favor in each country, along with English. Uzbekistan’s elite University of World Economy and Diplomacy teaches logic in Uzbek, law in Russian and economics in English. The United States and Malaysia are favorite destinations for study abroad.

Billboards in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan herald changeovers to the Roman alphabet, which had been used across the region until Moscow imposed the Cyrillic alphabet in 1940.

“Our Islamic leaders preferred Arabic script, and most people wanted to keep Cyrillic,” said Aman Khanberdiyev, a Web-surfing astronomer who provoked a debate in Turkmenistan in favor of the Roman alphabet and won. “English is the language of information technology,” he argued. “Either we adopt its alphabet or we lag behind.”

Faith Is on Display

The religious revival is a more sweeping assault on the Soviet legacy. Islamic holidays are on the calendar again, the Koran back on sale. Throughout the journey, faith was on display in the feverish construction of mosques and the shepherds who stopped their flocks exactly at prayer time and faced Mecca--even when they blocked the highway.

Not so visible in this picture of bubbling transformation are the front lines of ethnic bigotry and their recent eruptions.

Stalin divided remnants of Turkestan into the current Central Asian republics in 1924, stranding minority enclaves in each one, and pushed Russians to settle the region. Resurgent nationalism has put each post-Soviet leader under huge pressure to elbow Russians and other minorities aside and rule for the exclusive benefit of his ethnic kin.

Akayev acknowledged as much over afternoon tea at the leafy 250-acre Kyrgyz presidential estate. “Probably more than one decade will pass before we achieve a unified nation, when everyone has a feeling of belonging,” he said.

Akayev and his Uzbek and Kazakh counterparts rose to power late in the Soviet era after ethnic riots had toppled their predecessors one by one. All three preach multiethnic inclusion, and this is where heroes like Tamerlane come in; they’re supposed to be for everyone.

Any Kazakh fifth-grader can sing a song composed by the 19th century philosopher Abai and tell you that he wanted people not to hate each other. Abai now enjoys the status in his land--the father of its modern literature--that Russian colonizers had usurped for poet Alexander Pushkin.

In Kyrgyzstan, a land of nomads with almost no written history, Akayev has elevated the epic of a warrior-liberator known as Manas to something of a national ideology.

The 1,000-year-old poem has been passed down orally in Kyrgyz by generations of “Manas-tellers” with prodigious memories. The long version is about 500,000 lines and takes three weeks to recite.

Urkash Mambetaliyev, 62, a professional “Manas-teller,” is riding a boom in public recitals, and he agreed to do a private one at his home. Wearing a burgundy velvet suit and white felt cap, he sat cross-legged on a rug, closed his eyes and filled the living room with a monotonous chant. His wife, who has to hear him recite almost constantly, fled to the kitchen.

The saga began:

His mother was nine days in labor,

Eight midwives were at hand,

A sound of screaming rang out, and everyone rushed to see,

Was it a boy or a girl?

When his mother saw Manas’ penis, she was so glad she swooned.

Recovering consciousness, she lifted Manas,

But he was as heavy as a 30-year-old man.

Greedily, he ate three sheeps’ stomachs filled with butter. . . .

No one knows for sure which real-life warrior inspired this legend (the word “Manas” is Kyrgyz for God), but Akayev has stamped a Manas image on the currency and the Manas name on the airport.

What’s important, the president said, is that this figure “united all ethnic groups, clans and tribes that used to live here” and recaptured their homeland from Chinese aggressors. “He did not destroy, and he did not conquer. Those very simple and clear ideas can help us a lot.”

But not everyone is listening. Central Asia’s newly packaged ideals, its multiethnic cabinets, parliaments and popular assemblies, have done little to loosen the ethnic majorities’ grip on scarce property and jobs.

A Tense Ancient City

Osh, the ancient city in southwestern Kyrgyzstan where Solomon is reputedly buried, remains tense more than six years after Uzbek-Kyrgyz clashes over a farm in the area left 300 dead. On the border with Uzbekistan, Osh has been an Uzbek enclave, but the Uzbeks are becoming a minority as ethnic Kyrgyz migrants pour in from the countryside.

In Osh’s central bazaar, where the smell of grilled lamb fills the air and all politics is local, Uzbek merchants lose the best stalls to Kyrgyz competitors in daily skirmishes mediated without formal rules by the all-Kyrgyz city police. Ethnic rivalry is said to extend to the city’s flourishing opium trade.

“The open enmity of the early ‘90s is gone, but all disputes are resolved in favor of the Kyrgyz,” said Umarkhon Umurzakov of the Uzbek Cultural Center in Osh, who warned an interviewer that his office might be bugged.

Two million ethnic Russians have fled to their motherland under similar pressures across the region. A new ethnic frontier bisects Kazakhstan, where Russians outnumber Kazakhs 4-to-1 in the north and harbor latent separatist sentiment.

That frontier is now under assault. In the boldest step to reshape any Central Asian nation, President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev is building a new Kazakh capital 600 miles north of Almaty in swampy Akmola--the heartland of a Soviet campaign in the 1950s and 1960s to put the barren steppe under the Russian plow. The capital’s transfer, due to start next year, aims to draw Kazakh settlers and resources northward and “politically stabilize” the area, a presidential aide explained.

Viktor Mikhailov, who settled the steppe in 1964 and now leads the Republican Slav Movement in Akmola, sees the move only as a new effort to push his fellow Russians out of Kazakhstan.

“One Kazakh--he used to be a good neighbor--has asked for my garage,” Mikhailov said. “His argument is, ‘Look, you’ll soon be leaving for Russia, and nobody is going to buy it, so why not just give it to me?’ ”

Presidents Are Shrewd

What keeps such tensions from boiling over, for now, are shrewd presidents with broad powers and an instinct for compromise. Three of them have eased language-proficiency laws that had upset minorities; Akayev vetoed a bill depriving non-Kyrgyz of land-ownership rights.

Proclaiming their own faith, all nurture Islam’s revival while overstating the fundamentalist threat and banning religious political parties. Scores of Islamic leaders have been jailed in Uzbekistan, where imams feel obliged to praise Karimov’s regime as “Allah’s shadow on Earth.”

But these strong men rule weak states.

“So much rests on the presidents,” said Neil J. Melvin, a specialist on Central Asian politics at Leeds University in England. “The crunch will come when they die or are forced out, because there are no democratic mechanisms for replacing them. At that point, the minorities will be as vulnerable as they were in the early ‘90s, when central power was weak.”

There is a world of difference between President Saparmurad A. Niyazov’s eccentric personality cult in Turkmenistan, which brooks zero dissent, and Akayev’s freewheeling Kyrgyzstan--the only one of these countries to reelect its leader in something other than a Soviet-like referendum with a “yes” vote of more than 90%.

But even Akayev has gagged his peskiest media critics. With his counterparts he shares an obsession with stability and what one diplomat calls “an Asian need for consensus and respect, even reverence, for position and age.”

Karimov makes no apologies for running a brutal police state in Uzbekistan “while the new house is being built”--his metaphor for economic independence. Now his grip is easing as the country nears self-sufficiency in oil, gas and grain.

“The government feels more secure than it did a few years ago,” said Abdumannob Polatov, the leading Uzbek human rights activist, who was jailed in 1992, forced into exile and then invited home during Karimov’s state visit to Washington in June.

In return for such steps toward political reform, Karimov is getting access to Western credit and U.S. training for his growing army--which makes his neighbors wary of Tamerlane-size ambitions to dominate them. “Karimov understands that none of these things is available to a neo-Soviet Uzbekistan,” said a diplomat in Tashkent.

A More Secure Region

The region as a whole is also more secure than it was five years ago, less of a geopolitical battleground for outside powers.

Iran sends trade delegations, not Islamic subversives. And Turkey, mired in troubles at home, has shelved ambitions to revive a pan-Turkic “commonwealth” across Asia. Less threatened in its backyard by either rival, Russia is ambivalent toward the Central Asian countries, still trying to dominate them but tolerating defiance.

Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have fought off repeated Russian claims to share their Caspian Sea oil and gas deposits. Karimov refuses to let Russian troops patrol Uzbek borders.

“Russia is still the biggest power here,” said a Western ambassador in the region. “But the Central Asians are doing much better contending with it, developing their own personalities and policies without poking the bear in the eye.”

This game is meaningless to most people here--those who scrounge daily for food, water, medical care and work. Some interviewed during the journey described themselves as “Soviet citizens” abandoned by Moscow and these new backwater states, whose economies imploded after independence.

Yet what was more striking is how quickly the Soviet mind-set is fading, especially among the young.

Guzira Djumamuratova, 18, rolls her eyes at the mention of Tamerlane, a hero imposed on her university class in Tashkent the way Lenin had been. “They made us do this musical about Tamerlane,” she said. “But he’s not important.”

What matters to her is Karimov’s effort to build an Uzbek state with a new economy and legal system. It’s the reason the first-year student chose to major in law.

“Here’s what changed,” she said. “In the Soviet era, people would withdraw and say, ‘I work only for myself and my family.’ Now we have independence, so we say, ‘I work for this country.’ ”

Thursday: The Aral Sea, once Central Asia’s lifeblood, is a shriveled shell of itself. Its dying pains have devastated much of the region.

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Where Conquerors Once Roamed

The Central Asian nations became independent in late 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. They had once been united by such medieval conquerors as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in a region known as Turkestan that stretched from Turkey to China, Russia gradually absorbed chunks of Turkestan in the mid-19th century, administering it as a single unit with the old name until after the Bolshevik Revolution. Fearful of a pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic challenge to Soviet communism, Stalin divided the region into the current republics in 1924.

“Stan” is an Persian word meaning “land of.”