A Playwrights Unsolved Exit

By Robert Rand

Los Angeles Times News Service

At first glance, Uzbekistan looks like a peaceful place. Hospitality abounds, as plentiful as the melons and grapes that color the stalls of markets there each summer. My Uzbek friends would rather loll away the afternoon in neighborhood cafes called Chaihannas, swirling and sipping green tea, than confront the prickly realities of life. Breaking bread is such a sacred communal rite that placing the national loaf upside down on a plate amounts to an affront.

But this is a country with a barbed-wire past and a bleak present. Uzbeks find a national father figure in Tamerlane, the 14th-century warrior who killed hundreds of thousands of people in a quest for empire. Joseph Stalin executed thousands of Uzbeks during the 1930s. In 2005, when President Islam Karimov ordered an assault on hundreds of civilians demonstrating in the city of Andijon, Uzbekistan suffered one of the most deadly bursts of state-sponsored violence since China's Tiananmen Square massacre. After that, according to Human Rights Watch, conditions continued to deteriorate. And last month came a street crime with political overtones: the killing of avant-garde playwright Mark Weil, the latest tragedy in a country that harvests anguish along with gold as a natural resource.

Weil, a Jew born and raised in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, knew the dangers of exercising his freedom of expression in Karimov's Uzbekistan. He was a gentle but outspoken artist who founded the country's only independent theater, the Ilkhom, or ``Inspiration." From its stage, Weil spread innovation, fresh air and above all freedom to Uzbekistan's artistic and intellectual world. His productions even took delicate aim at Karimov and his clan, despite the fact that publicly insulting the 69-year-old former Communist Party boss can land you in prison.

Weil's theater, housed in the basement of an old Ministry of Tourism building in Tashkent, often tackled Anton Chekhov and Shakespeare. But the Ilkhom was also known for the politically risque: Weil staged plays involving homosexuality, nudity and _ even though 88 percent of Uzbeks are Muslim _ heretical interpretations of the Koran.

I once asked him whether he limited the theater's activities for fear of government reprisal. ``No," he declared. ``We are really free. We say to our students (at the Ilkhom acting school), `No personal censorship, no censorship around you.' I don't want to be a dissident again like I was in Soviet times."

Weil was killed Sept. 7 outside his apartment building in Tashkent. The Ilkhom's management reported that two unknown males beat his head with a bottle and stabbed him in the stomach. His death occurred hours before the Ilkhom's premiere of ``The Oresteia," Aeschylus' classic Greek tragedy about justice and civil society." `The Ocesteia' in the Ilkhom is practically a story of our life," Weil had written on the theater's Web site, ``where we are being manipulated, we manipulate, but who will win - nobody knows till the end."

No one knows who killed Weil. The Uzbek national press agency hasn't covered the case. Bloggers speculate that the assailants were driven by anti-Semitism or fury about the homoerotic themes of his plays and his freewheeling treatment of Islam. Then again, they say, maybe Weil simply died in a random act of violence by drug addicts.

Could this have been a government-sanctioned hit? It is a troubling question that naturally arises in an authoritarian state when an independent thinker is killed. But Karimov had tolerated the Ilkhom during all 16 years of Uzbekistan's independence, so it's hard to understand why he would eliminate Weil now. ``It was a kind of agreement," Weil said about his theater's relationship with Karimov's government. ``They don't touch us, but they don't support us."

In short, Weil said, the Uzbek leadership tolerated the Ilkhom's antics while collecting 40 percent of its box office receipts in taxes and avoiding the worldwide outrage that a showdown with the theater would have triggered. The Ilkhom has performed in 21 countries and enjoys international prestige. It is also wildly popular among Tashkent's intellectual elite _ including Karimov's daughter Lola, a frequent theatergoer whom Weil considered an ally.

Weil's death has not altered the Ilkhom's fall schedule, which ends in November. Then the theatrics will shift to a bigger stage, with the constitutionally mandated presidential election on Dec. 23. Karimov will be the choreographer, of course, but he is also poised to take the leading role.

He has already served two terms, the maximum that the Uzbek constitution allows. The second officially ended last January, but a technicality _ a constitutional provision setting the election on the first Sunday in the last 10 days of December _ allowed Karimov to stay on an additional year.

With the ``campaign" now underway, one of Uzbekistan's five state-sanctioned political parties recently flouted the constitution and named Karimov its presidential candidate. In a move of theatrical coyness, Karimov has not said whether he will accept the nomination. But it's hard to imagine he'd turn away. This is a political environment where one man dominates the stage. He has no understudy.

Come Election Day, Karimov will have maneuvered himself into a third term of office - a third act that will read like a play called " President for Life." Even for an Ilkhom without Mark Weil, such political gamesmanship provides fine fodder for a lampoon that would bring down the house.

Rand is author of ``Tamerlane's Children: Dispatches From Contemporary Uzbekistan."