Gwynne Dyer, Contributor
THE FIGURE of 500 dead sounds suspiciously round, but it will stick. The regime's troops fired heavy machine-guns into the crowd of protesting Uzbeks in the eastern city of Andijan last Friday and launched rockets from helicopters: the death toll was certainly at least in the low hundreds.
Besides, practically everybody hates President Islam Karimov (who gave himself another term in shamelessly rigged elections last December), so they are more than willing to believe the worst.
The question is whether that really means he is finished. Precedent says yes. Three other autocratic rulers in three other post-Soviet republics have gone under to non-violent democratic revolutions well, more or less non-violent in Kyrgyzstan's case, and wholly so in Georgia's and Ukraine's in the past two years.
CHALLENGING THE STATE
Late last year, Karimov arrested 23 prominent businessmen in Andijan and put them on trial for being members of a party that is allegedly allied to a London-based radical Islamist group, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which is banned in Uzbekistan.
However, these men collectively provided a large chunk of the jobs in Andijan, a desperately poor city of about one-third of a million people, so last Thursday night a mob broke them out of jail (and let around 2,000 other prisoners out as well).
It was really mostly about jobs down to that point, but it was also a direct challenge to the authority of the state, so in came the troops, and up to half a thousand people died. The consensus says that having commissioned such a terrible massacre, Karimov should now be finished. But it ain't necessarily so.
The regime's two closest allies and supporters, the United States and Russia, were quick to come up with statements of support for Karimov.
The U.S. had been gradually trying to take its distance from the worst of his crimes, despite the importance of its air-base at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan to its operations in Afghanistan last July the U.S. government cut $18 million from its annual $86 million in aid to Uzbekistan as a warning to Karimov to be more discreet in his repression but faced with the possibility of losing him entirely, Washington quickly shifted its ground.
CONCERNS ABOUT 'TERRORISTS'
"We have had concerns about human rights in Uzbekistan," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan on Saturday, "but we are concerned about the outbreak of violence, particularly by some members of a terrorist organisation that were freed from prison."
The 'terrorists' are presumably the 23 businessmen who had been arrested, and the 'outbreak of violence' well, that's trickier, since there are no dead soldiers in Andijan but hundreds of dead civilians.
Karimov may get away with it, because there is an aspect of these now commonplace non-violent revolutions that is not often recognised: they do not work if the regime they are trying to overthrow is not to some extent self-deterred by its desire not to be seen as mere thugs and murderers.
In particular, they do not work when the regime is confident that it will not face international isolation even if it slaughters the non-violent protestors.
The Burmese generals got away with slaughtering thousands of non-violent student protestors in Rangoon in 1988, and they are still in power. The Chinese Communist regime did the same on Tiananmen Square in 1989, and it is still there, too.
Karimov is confident that he can get away with murder, and he may well be right.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
