Clinton to Pay Landmark Visit to Uzbekistan

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Uzbekistan as part of a tour of Central Asian states reflects the gradual warming in relations between Washington and Tashkent, experts say.

Clinton will meet President Islam Karimov towards the end of her regional tour from November 30 to December 3, after visiting Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan.

The agenda of Clinton’s talks with Karimov has not been made public, apart from the fact that they will cover "bilateral relations and regional affairs".

Her visit was planned last December, following the first round of Uzbek-US political consultations held in Washington.

Relations between the two states cooled in 2005, when Tashkent responded angrily to US demands for an independent investigation into the Andijan violence in May that year in which hundreds of demonstrators were shot dead by government security forces. The Uzbek government evicted the US military from the Khanabad-Karshi air base, which had served as a supply route for Coalition operations in Afghanistan since 1991.

The rapprochement again focused on supplies for Afghanistan, and in February 2009, Tashkent officially offered NATO the use of an overland route to the border town of Termez.

According to Farhod Tolipov, a political analyst in Tashkent, “Hillary Clinton’s visit to Uzbekistan demonstrates that Uzbek-US relations are making progress, and that the period of coolness has been left behind. Relations between Uzbekistan and the US will develop dynamically."

This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.