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Independence Day. No, not the familiar July 4. This was the day that Uzbekistan became independent from the Soviet Union. I was looking forward to this day for a while, to see the tanks and planes on display for the public to see, a manifestation of the power of the state. Yet, as fate would have it, I was on a bus headed for Tashkent.  Termez, a city famous for its border with Afghanistan was slowly becoming a distant memory. Gone were my fast impressions of the sinister OVIR police responsible for immigration in Uzbekistan, and the port from where I could see the land of Mazar-i-Sharif and the Taliban.  The bus crawled slowly on the night of Bayram-Istiqlal, the Independence Festival. When we reached Sheriabad, more people boarded so that now we were postively packed. A "Baba" sat cross legged on the floor pondering his fate of having to sit for six hours on a crowded bus. Old women hollered, too, about having to sit in the aisle. For a moment I thought about getting up for these old people but my conscience was outweighed by my realistic understanding that I would be sitting for hours uncomfortably on the floor.

Hafez

Uzbeks are an irritating race, if I had to be candid. Their behavior is motivated by a peculiar combination of baseless tradition, infantile curiosity, and poverty. Any one who has been in this country for some time will tell you about the standard five questions that faces the foreigner: "Where are you from?, How old are you?, What do you do for a living?, and What is your occupation?" Then you hear the chuckling about dollars. 

People here don't believe in tourism. It is just hard to understand why anyone would come to their country. Sure there is some public talk about history and the greatness of Amir Timor. To help people understand something about the greatness of America, I like to compare George Bush to Amir Timur, the great hero of Central Asian history who assembled mounds of skulls of his victims and named villages in the vicinity of Samarkand after conquored cities like Damascus and Baghdad. Honestly, there is a lack of historical sense in this country. 

Thus it is assumed I am here on work. Exactly, what kind depends on me to determine. I like to say I work for an oil company or the Peace Corp. Sometimes when I am really irritated I simply say that I am an agent of the CIA or of the KGB. The problem occurs when my humor is misunderstood and I am directed towards the nearest office of the militsia, the local police.

Uzbekistan is a police state. I give the country's dictator credit because he doesn't keep his portrait hung up all over the place like some others(Assad, Saddam). But this is still a dictatorship. The police are everywhere, especially in Tashkent, and today on the numerous road blocks leading from Termez.
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Termez is after all a border city. Today it is a closed border. President Karimov calls it a fortress. But to me it seemed that the fortress was more of the extended kind, going for hundreds of miles away from Termez. At our first internal border, it was the standard passport check. Uzbeks( Tartars, Kipchaks, Tajiks, Kirghiz, Ukrainians, Armenians etc.) all carry international passports as indentification even though few of them can afford to travel beyond the borders of this once great Central Asian country. As an American, I suprisingly got only a brief notice. The policeman asked my seat mate if he was my translator and when he understood that he was not, he simply gave up with me. Others were not so lucky. Old women and men wearing kirchiefs and cute Bukharian caps were summoned off the bus for examination. One man faced particular problems because he had only a picture id and not a passport. This was situation as usual.

And now to the next border post. This was the most infuriating because here the police decided that it was against public morality for old people to be sittting on the aisle floor. And so we were stuck. Now the numerous people on the floor simply refused to get up. What really was their alternative? The driver, an Armenian, tried to convince them with threats and shouts to get off the bus and wait for the next one. These were experienced people and not willing to be stranded on their Independence Day in the Uzbekistan desert and so they refused. The police also were unwilling to let the bus pass. The alternative, after two hours of wrangling, was to go back to Termez.

It all seemed a waste of time. After two hours again in the direction of Termez, the bus suddenly changed course and was headed back towards Tashkent. It seemed like a stroke of lightening that changed our circumstances and when we got to the internal border post, we were allowed immediately to pass.
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The next stop on our trip was the $4000 Sum restaurant. It was on my first visit to this restaurant located in the mountanous area of Kashkurgaria that I was treated to Uzbek hospitality. Like a gentleman, I sat down to dine and was offered the choiciest dishes of national staple - Laghman, Pilov, and Katlig. After choosing and eating, I was loaded up with the bill - 4000 Sum or four dollars. This would be a reasonable price in New York City, but this is Uzbekistan, the land between the rivers, home to Avicenna and Al Biruni, and one of the world's poorest countries. This is typical behavior in Uzbekistan to overcharge foreigners. I yelled at the waiter, called him a thief, and suggested that he should be locked up in jail. He backed down, and this episode became the subject of conversation for the rest of the bus ride.  This time, things were a bit more relaxed as I was with my friends from Termez. There was Hamid, the Master's student in Tashkent who unusual for an Uzbeki spoke fluent English and his friend Sergei, a high school student also in Tashkent. Hamid was an informative friend in Termez. He showed me the works of a famous Uzbek artist from the Sirchodaria region who painted subjects like old men in beards and the working class. He also told me a little about the history of Termez, as a border post of Europe in Asia on the edge of the Indian subcontinent.

When I finally got back to Taskent I was greeted warmly by Alana, my Russian tutor and massage therapist..

That's another story..

To contact Hafez Click HereTo 
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