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Life imitating
art: Mamadali Makhmudov
by Siobhan Dowd, International P.E.N. Writers
in Prison Committee
(November 23, 1999)
In April this year, President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan told
journalists that he was “prepared to rip of the heads of
two hundred people, to sacrifice lives, in order to save peace
and calm in the republic.”
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Silenced
Voices, a monthly column about imprisoned authors, is
written by Siobhan Dowd of the Writers in Prison Committee
of International P.E.N. This column originally appeared
in the Literary Review (London).
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His gory turn of phrase
might justifiably send a chill down the spine; and, if one examines
his record during his illegally prolonged term of office as president,
the inevitable conclusion is that Uzbekistan today has indeed
become a place of fear.
A rich literary
tradition
A former Soviet republic
in central Asia, Uzbekistan is intensively farmed (it produces
much cotton) and thickly planted with orchards and vineyards.
Flanked by Turkmenistan, it is part of the rich Turkic culture
of the area which boasts a remarkable, if rarely heeded by the
west, literary tradition.
The dastan,
an ornate form of epic verse with distinctive narrative motifs,
has for centuries been the main mode of poetic expression. To
this day the Turkic peoples recite some fifty or more old dastans,
each set by a poet known as an ozan and featuring a hero,
known as an alp, who is often endowed with such magical
qualities as being able to speak when only a few days old. The
dastan celebrates victories in battle, love, and the surmounting
of treachery.
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Mamadali
Makhmudov, Uzbekistan’s most famous poet, is serving
a 14-year prison sentence. Photo courtesy International
P.E.N.
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A cunning disguise
It is no surprise,
given President Karimov’s hatred of all opposition to his
rule, that Uzbekistan’s most famous modern-day ozan, the
writer Mamadali Makhmudov, is today in jail, at the start of a
14-year sentence.
Makhmudov, aged about
50, is apparently enjoying a similar fate to the “alp”
in his own dastan.
His 114-page Immortal
Cliffs, his first major work as a writer, appeared in 1981
in two issues of the Uzbek literary journal Shark Yildizi.
Makhmudov, who said it took him four years to complete, presented
it as a historical fiction, crafted in general conformity to the
Soviet guidelines for artists in those days and displaying the
requisite “socialist realism.”
However, literary experts
such as H. B. Paksoy, writing in a 1987 issue of the academic
journal Central Asian Survey, saw otherwise.
The tale is in fact
a cunning disguise from start to finish — even in its being
a dastan in form, which only readers steeped in the literary traditions
of the area would have readily appreciated.
 Makhmudov’s
alp, Buranbek, becomes inspired by the spirit of his ancestors,
seeks to unite the Turkic peoples, fights the invading Russians
of the late 1800s, is captured and tortured, and at one point
finds himself the victim of treachery of his own kinsfolk. The
structure of the story and much of the language echoes the older
dastans; and at the same time, had Makhmudov been writing a coded
form of his own life, it could not have been more pertinent.
Soviet persecution
The Soviet rulers realized
belatedly the anti-Soviet message concealed in the story; in 1952
the official Literaturnaia Gazeta had already dismissed the dastan
as being “impregnated with the poison of feudalism.”
On realizing that Immortal Cliffs was a modern-day dastan,
they put pressure on Makhmudov to “repudiate” it.
He did, in the mid-1980s,
issue an opaque statement: “Rating my creative potentials
higher that I should have done,” he said, “I took up
my P.E.N. to write about a very complicated historical period.
As a result I allowed some shortcomings. What is the reason for
this? Because I could not convey the spirit of that age precisely.”
A critic, claiming
to speak for him, added that he was “revising” the work
and wanted to stress the “positive influence” of Russia
on his homeland.
Paksoy has pointed
out that, in fact, Makhmudov’s work could not have been more
exhaustively researched and is heavily footnoted; the characters
may be fictional, but the backdrop in which they operate is real,
and certainly not the doctored “Soviet” version of history
that was available in the encyclopedias of that time.
Enemies in his
midst
Makhmudov, like his
alp, Buranbek, had lived in Russia for several years in his youth.
Despite the problems his book caused him in the 1980s, he continued
to write both poetry and short stories. After the collapse of
the Soviet Union, he became a less marginalized literary figure,
and in 1992 Immortal Cliffs retrospectively won the country’s
Cholpan Prize.
| Makmudov's
only crime seems to be owning a few copies of an opposition
newspaper. |
Like Buranbek, though,
Makhmudov was destined, having seen the back of the invading “foreigners,”
to fall prey to the venom of enemies in his midst.
During the 1991 presidential
elections, he chose to support “Erk,” a political party
founded by his fellow-writer Muhammad Salih. The party lost the
elections to President Karimov and, since 1993, the party and
its newspaper have effectively been banned; Salih has had to flee
the country. Erk supporters have repeatedly been targeted with
arrest, and there have been many reports by Erk detainees of torture
and beatings in custody.
Makhmudov’s first
arrest was in 1994. His house was raided and a firearm produced
as evidence of his “terrorism.” This charge was subsequently
dropped when it was greeted with general disbelief.
He was next charged
with embezzlement and abuse of his position as chairman of the
Cultural Foundation of Uzbekistan and sentenced to four years’
imprisonment. However, after investigating the case, human rights
groups from Amnesty International to the United Nations’
Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions concluded there was not
a shred of evidence. After an international campaign, he was released
early in a presidential amnesty.
An unjust arrest
His current imprisonment
dates from last February when he and several others were rounded
up a few days after a series of bombs went off in the capital,
Tashkent. Security officers drove him and his wife away in a car,
stopped after a few kilometers to let his wife out, and then drove
on to an unknown destination.
| While
on trial, Makmudov sneaked a note to a human rights organization
saying police had brutally beaten him. |
For three months, his
wife and daughters were not told where he was. A letter from the
government to Amnesty International during that period seemed
to indicate that he was not in official custody. However, in May,
he “reappeared” in a jail, facing serious charges.
He and five others
were eventually brought to trial. Makhmudov had only two opportunities
to talk to a lawyer beforehand and the trial was held in camera.
One of the defendants managed to pass a testimony to a Human Rights
Watch representative which turned out to have been written by
Makhmudov. “In the basement,” he wrote, “they regularly
beat me … they burned my legs and arms. They put a mask on me
and cut off the air and hung me up by my hands… They told me they
were holding my wife and daughters and threatened to rape them.”
The evidence against
the six seemed to rest entirely on their possession of banned
copies of the Erk newspaper. This led to charges of “threats”
to the president and to the constitutional order. The sentences
handed down ranged from 8 to 15 years in jail, with Makhmudov
receiving his 14-year term.
International human
rights groups have protested against these sentences and the flouting
of international standards of due process during the trial and
the detention proceeding it. The government has in the past shown
itself sensitive to international opinion — it has, from
time to time, for example, sent faxes and e-mails to the writers’
association P.E.N. in answer to the latter’s queries; readers
may like add weight to the campaign on Makhmudov’s behalf
by writing letters appealing for his sentence to be quashed to:
His Excellency Zakirszan
Almatov
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Ul. Novruz 1
700 029 Tashkent
Republic of Uzbekistan
Fax: + 73712 395 525
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