Scions of Tamarlane: [Not applicable]

By Peter Boehm

A fascinating description by German journalist Peter Boehm of his experiences and findings upon extensive travels to the Muslim former republics of the Soviet Union. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Nov 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781071519295

Peter Boehm

Peter Boehm worked as a foreign correspondent for the Berlin daily paper die tageszeitung (taz) for almost ten years, based in Nairobi, Tashkent and Los Angeles. He has also worked for a number of well-known German-language newspapers and has produced features for public radio stations. He has also written (in English) for the Independent newspaper and for the Christian Science Monitor. Peter's experiences from his travels have also formed the subject-matter of a number of books and plays, of which Africa Askew - Traversing the Continent is just one. Peter Boehm can be found on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Peter-Boehm/121666391323734

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Scions of Tamarlane

Peter Boehm

––––––––

Translated by Robert E. Anderson 

Scions of Tamarlane

Written By Peter Boehm

Copyright © 2019 Peter Boehm

All rights reserved

Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

www.babelcube.com

Translated by Robert E. Anderson

Babelcube Books and Babelcube are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

SCIONS OF TAMERLANE

By: Peter Boehm

Text Copyright © 2013 Peter Boehm

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

§ 1 – HELLO! SPANISH INQUISITION HERE: A Journalist in Central Asia...1

§ KAZAKHSTAN.................................................................................................................4

§ 2 – KAZAKHSTAN – MESS YOURSELF UP IF IT MESSES YOU UP: AIDS in the industrial city of Temirtau  5

§ 3 – IF THE LAKE GOES, WE GO: Lake Balkhash is drying up.......................11

§ 4 – KUSTANAI – TO ESPELKAMP AND BACK....................................................17

§ 5 – ASTANA – NEW CAPITAL, WHITENED SEPULCHER: The President is building a new capital  20

§ TURKMENISTAN.........................................................................................................28

§ 6 – TURKMENISTAN – THE BASHI: Long Live the Boss!...............................29

§ 7 – BASHI'S ENEMIES: Don't mess with the Boss!...........................................45

§ 8 – IN THE EMPIRE OF BASHI: Visiting the Boss.............................................51

§ UZBEKISTAN................................................................................................................60

§ 9 – THERE WAS ONCE A CITY ON THE SEA: The Aral Sea quietly says goodbye  61

§ 10 – HOW DO YOU SEDUCE A FISH? Bone crusher, take over!..................68

§ 11 – THE CHIEF IS BUILDING HERE: Samarkand and its builders...........73

§ 12 – BRIDE SNATCHING IS FUN: A marriage proposal in Central Asia....80

§ 13 – HOW TO BREAK YOUR LUNGS: Some vital advice for driving in Uzbekistan  86

§ 14 – BLOODY FRIDAY: How Karimov gunned down hundreds of demonstrators in Andishan  92

§ KYRGYZSTAN.............................................................................................................102

§ 15 – THE MAN ON HEAP No. 7: Living with nuclear waste........................103

§ 16 – THE SOCIALIST AMBER ROOM: Soviet uniformity and Asian playfulness  108

§ 17 – SOKH, LIKE THE HIGHLANDS OF BERNE: An Uzbek exclave in Kyrgyzstan  111

§ 18 – FAT LIVING: Food in Central Asia..............................................................117

§ TAJIKISTAN.................................................................................................................120

§ 19 – I AM POOR! – NO, I AM RICH!: It all depends on who you speak to121

§ 20 – AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN: The Soviet Union lives on in Dushanbe  130

§ 21 – HOTEL LENINABAD: And the Soviet Union lives on in Khujand......134

§ 22 – LET ME BE YOUR TORCH: The self-immolation of women................140

§ 23 – Buzkashi: The Riding Game of the Steppes..............................................145

§ 1 – HELLO! SPANISH INQUISITION HERE: A Journalist in Central Asia

It's not easy being a journalist in Central Asia. The Soviet bureaucracy has survived almost without reform here, of course, along with the associated state of mind: fear. Everybody, up to the closest deputy of the highest party hack, feels it, and such a bureaucracy, of course, is obviously not accountable to anybody.

During the summer of 2003 – and this is just one example out of many – the Uzbek government shut down every pool hall in the country from one day to the next. Everybody could see the result on his own street corner. Nevertheless, a government spokesman unabashedly denied that they were even closed. And nobody knows exactly why they were, even to this day.

It is simply impossible to fool around with such an organization. Even post-Soviet journalists know as much. They've been conditioned by it for years. They're a pathetic lot. They're all underpaid, many are alcoholic, and their most important working assets are a few personal contacts within the system, whom they guard like the apples of their eyes and who occasionally throw out little crumbs of information to them out of pity.

Then, there are the Western journalists. These lack the deformities of Soviet Man. They often ask insolent questions and delight in making the party hacks sweat, often shamelessly, as this reporter once witnessed for himself.

He was writing about the vanishing Aral Sea and wanted to get a statement from the Uzbek government. For that purpose, he thoughtlessly used the strategy of the local journalists: he carefully approached a civil servant there through the personal contacts of a German aid organization and made an appointment for an interview with the Deputy Minister of Agriculture. His subordinate must have still been new, however, because his boss had suddenly fled the office by the agreed time. Hah!, his secretary said in astonishment: He was still here just five minutes ago.

In Central Asia, however, this was not only the case with deputy ministers, but also with those who did not belong to the machine, and sometimes even Western UN staff and other non-governmental organizations. When I showed up, everybody suddenly just clammed up.

That's just not how we do it among ourselves, my Uzbek colleague Artur Samari explained to me at some point. I asked him to make some interview appointments for me in Samarkand. He said: We'll go in and surprise them and get the interview before they can even think about it. If we make an appointment first, they'll just start thinking. Then they'll get scared, and we can just forget about an interview.

It's particularly bad in Tajikistan. Here, the machine has cowed everyone so much that if you are a journalist, you feel like a torturer. If you have hinted at your interest in a subject, the apparatchiks begin to cringe as if under thumbscrews. They admit they can't say anything, and they don't. Therefore, they prefer to resort to stalling tactics.

Weeks of telephone calls were necessary in order to speak with a doctor in a Tajik hospital – and that led to nothing. The head doctor of the largest hospital in Dushanbe, for example, said that I needed permission from the Health Department. The Health Department then said that the chief physician had just left on a business trip. Since I had already learned all the connections at the hospital and the Health Department inside and out within three minutes on the phone and that the supposed mission of the chief physician was simply untrue, the Health Department then told me that I needed permission from City Hall.

Thus, it's not easy to work here, but it's absolute torture in Turkmenistan. It's almost impossible for a journalist to get a visa. And you must understand agony in a literal sense, whether you want to or not, because the SNB secret service has, above all, the habit of harassing people who have been identified in the media by name.

Interviews are only possible under conspiratorial circumstances and, as a journalist, you absolutely must conceal the identity of your contacts. It's best not to write down their names at all, so that they won't run into difficulties if your notes should fall into the hands of the authorities.

However, you probably have to be understanding about it. Because the media have the bad habit of spreading dirt and lies about Turkmenistan. It is therefore probably only reasonable that the Bashi denied journalists as much access as possible so that they couldn't work in his country and uncover the truth.

§ KAZAKHSTAN

§ 2 – KAZAKHSTAN – MESS YOURSELF UP IF IT MESSES YOU UP: AIDS in the industrial city of Temirtau

If scars could tell stories, then Alexander Pasko's body would be a thick book. He has them everywhere. Short and in rows on his arms and legs, and scattered about, as if at random, over his head and back.

They tell of the life he has lived on the edge of an abyss for more than five years. Of drug addiction and despair. Of several suicide attempts and deliberate, self-inflicted mutilation.

One time at Easter – the 25-year-old doesn't remember what year it was any longer – he was celebrating with his friends. At some point he stood on the table with a glass of his blood in his hand and lifted it up to his mouth to quaff it down with the words Christ is Risen!

He told the local newspaper in Temirtau that this is embarrassing for him now. I was pretty crazy back then, he himself admits. And his scarred body also bears witness to a past he's left behind.

Five years ago, after learning that he was HIV positive, he changed his life. One morning, I woke up and thought: What are you actually doing here?, he says today. After all, I realized that I wanted to live and that what I really wanted, what would really make me happy, would be a family of my own."

HIV/AIDS has now arrived in Eastern Europe and Central Asia after more than a decade's delay. But it has now arrived in all its power, however. According to the latest information of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the virus is spreading faster here than anywhere else on the planet. Eighty percent of newly infected patients are under the age of thirty. That makes HIV/AIDS the number one health problem for young people.

UNICEF sees deficiencies, above all, in educational work. For example, only one out of ten young women in Tajikistan has ever heard of the virus. The data of the Kazakh government office for the fight against the virus (the RCA) confirm this. Only thirty percent of people under 25 in Kazakhstan use condoms.

Alexander Pasko is one of 1107 officially registered HIV positive persons in the Kazakh city of Temirtau, 200 km south of the capital Astana. Because more than three-quarters of Kazakhstan's HIV-positive population still lived in this run-down industrial city in the late 1990's, the media sometimes still refer to it as Ground Zero for the AIDS Epidemic in Central Asia. However, the RCA estimates that, as in the country as a whole, the actual number of people infected there is five to ten times higher than what has been officially recorded.

As in almost all countries in the region, the original and most frequent path of transmission in Temirtau was the exchange of syringes between heroin addicts. But, this has now shifted to unprotected sex. And the rest of Kazakhstan has now caught up.

Seven years ago, a self-help group for addicts helped Pasko get free from his heroin addiction. In 1998, its members founded the non-governmental organization Shapagat. Funded by donations from the West, Shapagat distributes syringes and condoms and does educational work in schools and clubs. Pasko is one of seven social workers there. He visits places where addicts live or meet and goes out on the streets of the city.

Shapagat's office is housed in a ground-floor apartment in a drab-looking apartment block on one of Temirtau's main highways. There are old sofas there, a desk with a computer in one room, and a sofa and small table with a kettle and a coffee machine in another.

In the morning, the social workers, all of them former addicts, come to the office to discuss their schedule for the day. They sit in a circle and tell their stories. Pasko speaks first. He has shoulder-length hair and is wearing a black woolen cap with the golden emblem of a heavy metal band and a brown leather jacket. He has a pale, boy-like face.

Speaking in a firm, self-confident voice, he briefly notes that he is HIV-positive, that he has known this for five years, and that he has accepted his illness.

Half an hour later, the first addicts come to trade their used syringes for fresh ones. Pasko has known most of them for a long time and quickly notes that he moves in this society of outcasts, as he will later call them, without feeling alien to them.

Dimitri, in his late twenties, brings a whole plastic bag full of used syringes to the Shapagat office. His bloodshot eyes lie within deep caverns, and his face manages to look patchy and pale at the same time. He works in construction, he says – and, upon being questioned, he says: No, drugs don't handicap me. On the contrary: The strengthen me for my work.

Dimitri's wife died a few weeks ago, Pasko says, probably as the result of AIDS. But Dimitri, when asked about it, just says: AIDS? That's all just a lot of nonsense: It doesn't even exist! And Pasko, who stands next to him, shows no sign of surprise.

An hour and a half later. A 22-year-old prostitute waiting for customers on a side street in a residential neighborhood says heroin makes it easier for her to live her life – and Pasko again doesn't raise an eyebrow.

And, when he stops by an apartment an hour later – a girl is drawing on a syringe at the kitchen table, with moldy pots scattered all around her and a little boy sitting on a pile of clothes scattered about on the floor, his nose running slightly – , Pasko calmly talks with another girl, accepts best wishes for someone, and doles out news from mutual acquaintances.

In the meantime, however, the 25-year-old has to find his own way in normal society. So when he's supposed to talk about his own past, he does that first, enthusiastically and building up the story, so that it sounds almost nostalgic; but then, when he realizes that someone from the other, older society is speaking again, he pauses, laughs a little sheepishly, and begins to justify his actions. With this mixture of naturalness, because he has experienced it himself, and of ambivalence, because somebody from normal society and even he himself sometimes no longer understand it, he stumbles from sentence to sentence.

He begins with his entirely typical Soviet childhood: school, the communist Young Pioneers movement, and summer camps just outside the city. His family – his father, mother and older sister – still live in Temirtau today. At the age of thirteen, however, he began to slip when he started selling marijuana by the kilogram to soldiers from the local garrison. He doesn't say what threw him off track. A big hole remains in his story because he doesn't mention what triggered that change. He seems to take it for granted: namely, that the city of Termirtau fell apart a few years after the end of the Soviet Union.

Temirtau is a typical Soviet city, artificially contrived on a drawing board. It was only built sixty years ago because the country needed steel from its blast furnaces. Because of the coal mines in Karaganda, twenty-five miles away, many workers like Pasko's parents came here from Ukraine to build the new steel mill and the accompanying city. They built hundreds of apartment blocks from identically-sized concrete slabs all over the country and designed wide boulevards and large squares with concrete monuments. Today, the wind whistles unimpeded over the memorials for the soldiers who fell in World War II, and for the Heroes of Soviet labor.

What could it have been like to live in such a city? When the 25-year-old tells of it, his voice suddenly mixes with sentimentality. People in Temirtau would often put out chairs in the evening, and there was almost always something to celebrate. People helped each other out in a completely natural way.

But then you also realize that Pasko doesn't want to say much more about that time, as if talking about it to a stranger would spoil the memory and steal something from that precious time.

After the end of the Soviet Union, Temirtau, which had been cobbled together by many nationalities, suddenly showed signs of disintegrating. The steel plant laid off a third of its workforce and was only able to pay out wages sporadically. Almost a third of the 240,000 inhabitants, particularly Germans and Russians, left Temirtau. Whole areas on the outskirts of the city suddenly lost their inhabitants. Today, the wind off the steppe whistles around these abandoned, eviscerated apartment blocks.

During the decade after independence, Kazakhstan lost a million and a half inhabitants, so that only fourteen million people still lived in this already thinly populated country. Electrical power became scarce in Temirtau, and running water became scarcer still. Conditions were very bad during the years 1995 and 1996, since no central heating worked here, where temperatures can drop