Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

The first time I thought we might be in some trouble in Uzbekistan was on the grounds of a historic madrasah at the center of the Silk Road city of Bukhara. A young Islamic scholar openly challenged my colleague and traveling companion, Andrei Polikanov. Challenged him, that is, to a Ping-Pong match.

But I digress. A 10-day jaunt through Uzbekistan is not your usual journalistic endeavor. Not these days, anyway. Uzbekistan is one of the most undercovered countries in the world. A mostly Muslim country at the heart of Central Asia, Uzbekistan is vital to the transport of the region's vast energy resources to ravenous markets both east and west. It was an early, critical staging ground when the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan after 9/11, but now has had a bitter falling out with Washington, thanks to a human-rights record that has gone from bad to worse to indefensible. Uzbekistan's government is a target for radical Islamists, and just over a year ago, Tashkent's security forces carried out one of the bloodiest assaults any nation has inflicted on its own population since Tiananmen Square.

But under-reported Uzbekistan is—because that's just how Islam Karimov, the dictator in place since the Soviet crack-up in 1991, likes it. Ever since independence, the country has been a suffocating police state. Just how ruthless Karimov is became brutally clear to all the world in May last year. In the eastern city of Andijan in the Ferghana Valley, the most devoutly Islamic and economically stagnant part of the country, a large public demonstration against the imprisonment of 23 Muslim businessmen turned into a bloodbath. After members of a little-known Islamic group broke into the jail and freed the men, Uzbekistan security forces shot and killed hundreds—possibly as many as 750, according to the International Crisis Group—of the protesters in the city's central square. (Uzbek authorities say 187 died and that the demonstration was provoked by "terrorists.")

Karimov had already ratcheted up the repression in the wake of the so-called Rose and Orange Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, former Soviet republics where public demonstrations helped usher in democratically elected governments; he didn't want their freedom fever to spread to his land. But the Andijan massacre has turned Uzbekistan into a nation of fear. Karimov, 68, has intensified a crackdown at home, and has tried to eliminate, as best he can, any influence from what he regards as a meddlesome West—ngos that accept funding from the West have been targeted, from human-rights groups to shelters for battered women. Uzbekistan is a place where Stalinist control is a reality. People are rounded up and jailed, often charged with violating government laws against "extremism,'' and sometimes, as we discovered, never heard from again. For Andrei and my other traveling companion, photojournalist Yuri Kozyrev, Russian nationals both, it was all too familiar: they were back in the U.S.S.R.

Karimov hasn't shut the place down completely, though. The historic Silk Road cities of Bukhara and Samarkand are too important to the outside world—particularly to those who practice Islam. Both are home to stunning mosques and madrasahs, built after Marco Polo's father lived in Bukhara for three years, then brought his son back on their historic trek from Venice. Hosting tourists allows Uzbekistan to maintain a semblance of normalcy toward the outside world.

So that was our opening, too. Russians don't need visas to visit Uzbekistan, and I managed to obtain a tourist visa. It was our only way to get in and do even a modicum of reporting on Uzbekistan. One June morning, I met Yuri and Andrei in Tashkent, the country's bland capital; that night we hit the road, taking the overnight train 450 km southwest, to Bukhara.

Continued...