Professor Jamal Mirsaidov, a member of the Samarqand Society and a member of the organising committee of the National Association of the Tajiks in Uzbekistan gave a speech at the World Congress of Tajiks in Dushanbe in September 1992. "Upon his return to Uzbekistan, Dr. Mirsaidov was charged with violating Article 62 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Uzbekistan." (Human Rights in Uzbekistan, 1993: 10).

Dr Uktam Bekmuhammadov, senior secretary and committee chairman of the Samarqand Social-Cultural Association and chairman of the organising committee of the Samarqand Helsinki Group, "has numerous times been subjected to arrest on fabricated charges and to arbitrary administrative detention on several occasions for his peaceful activities." (Human Rights in Uzbekistan, 1993: 12).

Benig Bagdesarian, an ethnic Armenian honorary member of the Samarqand Society, "was arrested together with Dr. Bekmukhammedov on June 4, 1991, on fabricated charges in connection with his participation in a hunger-strike demanding attention to the rights of Tajiks in Uzbekistan." (Ibid.)

Those who tried to make their voices heard in the wider world paid dearly. One of the incidents constitutes the core subject of Murder in Samarkand, the much talked-about book by Craig Murray, the British ex-Ambassador to Uzbekistan. He had simply listened to Professor Mirsaidov’s grievances over Tajiks’ situation in Uzbekistan. The next day, Jamal Mirsaidov’s adolescent grandson was found tortured to death through beating with iron bars and boiling his body parts.

"Despite their public emphasis on more rights within Uzbekistan not union with Tajikistan, independence has led to increase state pressures on Tajik activists, who have been repressed or forced into silence." (John Anderson, The International Politics of Central Asia, p. 144).

Not all the victims of Karimov’s repression belonged to the nationalist Tajik movement. Some of them were ordinary people, like thousands of ethnic Tajiks of the Surkhan-Darya region who were deported to central Uzbekistan in 2000. (Lena Jonson 2004: 163).

According to Mary Lee Knowlton, books in Tajik have been burned following an edict in 2002 (Uzbekistan 2005: 62). The act has been justified as a measure of the post-Communist library cleansing of undesirable books. But Tajik activists claim that many books by Persian classic poets in Cyrillic have been destroyed along with the unfortunate Leninist literature. The Sughdion publishing house in Samarqand produces limited material in Tajik (Foltz 1996: 215).

There has also been a substantial drop in the number of Tajik-language classes in Uzbekistan. "According to Mirsaidov, the 1996-7 academic year saw a two-to three-fold increase in the number of classes being transferred from Tajik language to Uzbek." (Stuart Horsman in Ethnicity and Democratisation in the New Europe, 1999, p.204).

Bukhara-i Sharif, the first Persian (Tajik)-language paper of the region, bent under economic pressure and fell victim to Uzbekisation. It received governmental grants to re-emerge as an Uzbek-language paper.

Throughout the years of Karimov’s anti-Tajik repression in Uzbekistan Tajikistan was engulfed in its internal political stand-offs that culminated into a full-fledged civil war (1992-1997). Uzbekistan was amongst its major players as well. But earlier Tajikistan had taken a keen interest in the welfare of the Tajiks in the neighbouring country.

"In 1988, Loiq Sherali, the secretary of the Tajik Writers’ Union, attacked Uzbek intellectual imperialism. He accused the Uzbeks of attempting to abrogate the work of Tajik or Farsi philosophers and poets. Though perhaps esoteric, the complaint publicly aired ethnic hostilities. Authorities were concerned. In January 1988 the editor of the Tajik party newspaper, Komsomoli Tojikiston, was dismissed for allowing ethnically divisive articles to appear in the paper. During debates over the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, Gorbachev explicitly tied the Azeri-Armenian dispute to his concern that Tajiks might be encouraged by Armenian success in Nagorno-Karabakh to press claims against Uzbekistan. As Gorbachev feared, violence erupted in 1989 among villagers along the borders with Kyrgyzstan, and there were calls in the press for the rectification of the frontier with Uzbekistan. However, a parallel problem existed, raising the possibility of counter-territorial claims: a million Uzbeks reside in Tajikistan." (Bernard A. Cook. Europe since 1945: An Encyclopaedia, 2001, p. 1232).

At that time Islam Karimov received a letter signed by a group of scholars from the Tajik Academy of Sciences entitled "An Address to Academics and Creative Intelligentsia of Brotherly Uzbekistan". "The address referred, in part, to the necessity of rejecting the ongoing policies of assimilation of the Tajik population, eliminating the idea of a common cultural heritage with Uzbeks, expanding opportunities for studying the Tajik language, adopting the Tajik language in Bukhara and Samarkand, and maintaining a ‘fertile basis for the further development of Tajik culture’ in the name of the ‘traditional brotherhood and friendship’ of the two peoples." (Aleksandr Jumaev in Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported? 2001, pp. 339-340).

At times Tajikistani intellectuals took the initiative to provide the schools in Tajik-populated areas of Uzbekistan with Tajik textbooks in order to turn them into Tajik-language schools. They had succeeded in some cases and the author had witnessed a couple of those transitions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It did not take too long to see the reversal process.

Simultaneously, Tajikistan had been eager to show examples of tolerance to Tashkent:

"The late Soviet-era regime in Tajikistan made several conciliatory gestures towards the republic’s Uzbek minority. Bookstores specifically for Uzbek-language publications opened in three southern cities. A new Uzbek-language weekly was launched; two other Uzbek-language newspapers were already published in the republic. For years, schools which taught Uzbek had operated in districts with a high concentration of Uzbek inhabitants. Roughly a tenth of the republic’s radio broadcasts was in Uzbek." (Karen Dawisha, Bruce Parrott, Conflict, Cleavage, and Change in Central Asia and the Caucasus, 1997, p. 299).

Even during the civil war some of Tajikistani political activists did not cease heeding the concerns of their languishing brethren in Uzbekistan.

"Almost all the opposition parties and movements of Tajikistan contend that the problem of Tajiks in Uzbekistan remains unresolved. This is emphasized in the statements of the leaders of opposition parties and movements, such as Mirbobo Mirrakhimov, Shodmon Yusupov, and others." (Conflicting Loyalties and the State in Post-Soviet Russia and Eurasia, 1998, p.183).

But it was the Tajik civil war that discredited the Tajik movement in Uzbekistan and provided the Uzbek authorities with a justification to suppress it in the name of stability. Stuart Horsman reports about the traumatic impact of the Tajik war on Tajik intelligentsia in Uzbekistan and quotes a member of Samarqand Cultural Society as saying that "the internal conflict in Tajikistan is the main cause of cultural problems for Uzbekistan’s Tajiks." (Horsman 1999: 202).

"In the Uzbekistani conservative analysis of Tajikistani events, the proliferation of political movements and demands for ‘radical’ political reforms are responsible for the civil war. Domestic groups were to be associated with external enemies attempting to destabilise Uzbekistan. As the war escalated, Uzbekistan’s opposition movements faced increased harassment (Brown 1993: 3-4). The ability to associate Uzbekistan’s Tajik community with instability in the neighbouring republic was emphasised by the regime." (Ibid.: 207).

As soon as Tajikistan engulfed in civil war numerous Tajik-language schools in Samarkand province were closed in July 1992 (Nissman 1995).

In the same way, L. M. Drobizheva considers that Tajikistan’s civil war has dampened overt desires of Uzbekistani Tajiks to unite with Tajikistan, "as many prefer the relative stability of life in Uzbekistan and its comparative prosperity." (Drobizheva 1996: 293).

Meanwhile, many in Tajikistan believe that Uzbekistan took an active part in destabilising its neighbouring country in order to keep Tajiks of Uzbekistan away from pursuing reunification.

The French expert Olivier Roy believes that the civil war in Tajikistan has considerably weakened the country and removed any threat of Tajik irredentism over Samarqand and Bukhara. In his book "The New Central Asia: Geopolitics and the Creation of Nations" Roy points out that the war has "distanced the Tajiks of Uzbekistan from notions of pan-Tajikism… In fact today it is only Tajikistan’s status as a Russian protectorate that prevents it falling into the Uzbek orbit." (Roy 2007: 178).

Uzbekistan’s anti-Tajik policies have been accompanied by Islam Karimov’s ‘friendship’ rhetoric. After assisting the present Tajikistani regime to come to power he had said: "I have spoken about this in the past and again state: basically we are one people that speaks two languages: Tajik and Uzbek." (Jumaev 2001: 340). But the reality remains too bitter to believe in his words.

There are still some functioning Tajik-language schools and papers in Uzbekistan that have survived Karimov’s racist approach. Many excuses are cited to justify their gradual disappearance, starting with economic regression. Nevertheless, nothing could justify the plight of Tajiks in Uzbekistan whilst poorer Tajikistan is doing its best to maintain the Uzbek minority’s rights by publishing Uzbek textbooks compared to a better off Uzbekistan who evades observation of Articles 4 and 18 of its Constitution that guarantee respect of and equal rights to all citizens of the country.

Officially, only 5% of Uzbekistani population are Tajik. The figures are totally misguiding. Therefore, most of directories, even tourist guides like World 66 refer to unofficial data: