Uzbekistan’s Reformist President Makes a U-Turn

In the Uzbek language, the phrase musaffo osmon—“clear skies”—can refer to a sense of stability. Applied to the country’s political system, it reinforces the notion that a stable autocracy is better than a volatile democracy.

This summer marked seven and a half years since the country’s president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, came to power and looked poised to eschew the dominating “clear sky” authoritarianism of his predecessor, lifetime dictator Islam Karimov. Since the early days of his presidency, Mirziyoyev has been seen as a reformer, promising to improve Uzbekistan’s human rights record, open up the country economically, and craft an image of Uzbekistan as a modern nation on the international stage.

And he did—for a while. He ended forced labor in the Uzbek cotton industry and pushed for regional economic integration. A report released in June by the Germany-based Uzbek Forum for Human Rights recognized that Mirziyoyev’s presidency was initially marked by progress on numerous fronts in the country. The Economist named Uzbekistan the most-improved country of the year in 2019, and Tashkent received a $1 billion loan from the World Bank in 2022.

But recent developments fuel concern that he’s making a U-turn, and this year offered the starkest evidence yet that Mirziyoyev is abandoning the path of reform. After leading a massive constitutional referendum in April of this year, Mirziyoyev cleared the path to extend his rule to a Vladimir Putin-like 2037. On July 9, he was reelected in a snap election, garnering 87 percent of the vote and effectively leapfrogging previous constitutional constraints on consecutive terms. One of the largest external watchdogs monitoring the election, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said in a statement that it took place in an environment that “lacked genuine political competition.”

The Uzbek Embassy did not respond to Foreign Policy’s request for comment for this article.

Uzbekistan’s stalled road to reform matters for the country, for the region, and for Washington. Like many of its neighbors, the majority of which were also Soviet republics, Uzbekistan’s first inheritance was autocracy, oppression, and stagnation. Mirziyoyev’s arrival in 2016, after 27 years of the heavy-handed rule of Karimov, seemed to herald a new age when Tashkent could sidle away from its past and toward a new future.

For Washington, which stubbornly keeps faith with Mirziyoyev despite the recent backsliding, Uzbekistan has for years been a critical square on the Central Asian chessboard. During the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan provided a key logistics lifeline. Even after the war, the country could be a beachhead in a low-intensity war for influence between the United States, Russia, and China in the region. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was recently there, touting Uzbekistan’s role in “ensuring stability, prosperity, and security in the broader Central Asian region.”

But Russia and China like clear skies, not messy democracies. “For these two countries, the most important thing in Central Asian domestic developments would be that the authoritarian regimes that exist in the region are a) friendly, and b) stable and predictable,” said Temur Umarov, a fellow in the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “As long as the regime is going in this direction, Moscow and Beijing are happy.”

The U.S. has so far voiced support for the Mirziyoyev regime in public statements. After the election, the State Department acknowledged that real political opposition was absent, but that “the United States stands ready to help advance his agenda of reform and improved governance.”

However, the Uzbek Forum concluded in its report that “In the last two years … the initial hope tied to President Mirziyoyev’s reform agenda has dimmed as the situation for freedom of expression, assembly, and association has taken a turn for the worse.”

Karimov—the country’s first leader after the collapse of the USSR—ruled an Uzbekistan where imprisonment on politically motivated charges, religious persecution, and torture was common. He closed the country to outside scrutiny, curtailed civil society, and put the state in charge of media. When he died in 2016, the New York Times wrote that Karimov presided over “one of the most brutal reigns to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

His replacement, the already politically seasoned Mirziyoyev, entered the presidency after serving as prime minister for over a decade. He defied low expectations, reversing course on many of Karimov’s most brutal and oppressive policies. The constitutional overhaul and election this year were designed to cement popular support for a “New Uzbekistan” and give him a further mandate to rule.

The veneer of stability was blown open last year when the government moved to limit the autonomy of the large western region of Karakalpakstan. Protests erupted across the region and the government met them with force. In the end, 18 people were killed and more than 200 were wounded. Since then, many have wondered whether Mirziyoyev would continue down the path of reform or page through the authoritarian playbook.

“Unfortunately, we see that the Uzbek government is resting on the laurels of some of these quite meaningful changes that were made five, seven years ago, and that, in addition to there not being progress, there’s actually momentum moving backward,” said Matthew Schaaf, the advocacy director for Freedom Now, a Washington-based human rights organization.

Since the protests in Karakalpakstan, press freedom has come under the microscope. Under Karimov, there was total censorship. Mirziyoyev hasn’t done that—yet—but under his watch progress appears to have recently stagnated. Mirziyoyev previously pledged to create a new relationship with the media, even claiming that he has fended off pressure from within his own government to take a harder stance: “My aides tell me: ‘Close them down.’ But I won’t close [the media],” he said earlier this year. Yet the report from the Uzbek Forum highlighted the cases of 10 journalists, bloggers, and activists who, it said, have been pressured by the government.

“There seems to be freedom of speech as well as freedom of the press,” said Darina Solod, head of the independent news outlet Hook.Report. “But at the same time, it exists up to a certain point, and no one understands what will happen if this threshold is crossed and how quickly censorship will tighten more.”

In March of this year, a group of journalists in the country published an open letter addressed to the president. While acknowledging the strides that the country has made in media freedom, the letter nonetheless articulated a major obstacle: there is tacit pressure not to report on some topics. “The state institution responsible for information control continues to pressure editors and bloggers to change the tone, form, nature of the information, or not to release the information in its entirety,” the letter read. Just this summer, two concurrent journalism trials have highlighted the ongoing tension in the country’s media industry.

There are “unwritten rules,” according to Dilfuza Kurolova, a human rights lawyer based in Tashkent. “You may not know where the red line [is].”

The treatment of the media is, in some ways, Uzbekistan’s canary in a coal mine: The country could yet recoup the reformist momentum of years past, or revert to form entirely. “The government took their low-hanging fruit,” Kurolova said of Mirziyoyev’s previous reforms. Nevertheless, she’s hopeful that the pace of change will continue. “This is the reason I’m still in Uzbekistan,” she laughed.