Local Rebel

The BBC's Tim Whewell gives a fascinating portrait of Uzbek local rebel Bakhtior Rakhimov, one of the so-called "Islamists" currently being imprisoned and tortured by the Uzbek government:

He took me on a tour of the farm. He fondled his prize calves.

He jokingly lifted me over a ditch showing off the strength he has built up as a keen wrestler.

Afterwards I drank green tea under the plum tree and he puffed away on a spliff of green weed - a natural and Islamic alternative, he told me, to the devils of tobacco and alcohol.

He stood once, he said, in an election for parliament but had been heavily defeated because people were afraid to vote for him.

He denied belonging to any organised political or religious group.

He said that if President Karimov sent his troops back into the town, he would stand and fight, with his ceremonial dagger or with a gun.

But all that I could tell was just bravado, just as it was bravado when he said his supporters had gone around persuading liquor stores to close.

I found no difficulty at all locating vodka or brandy in Korasuv.

This week in newspapers all over the world, you can read that Mr Rakhimov proclaimed an independent Islamic state.

The truth, of course, is more subtle and confusing.

As far as I can see, Mr Rakhimov did not proclaim anything and I met few people prepared to agree openly with his ideas.

He was simply the head of an important local family, a big man in a very small town. A town terrified of the consequences of its moment of defiance.

But the Uzbek government does not trade in subtlety, any more than headline writers do. And when a few hours after I left it re-took Korasuv - as everyone knew in their bones it would - Mr Rakhimov was seized by the troops and taken away.

I do not know what has happened to that brave and weirdly quixotic man, but I am afraid the intensity of the Uzbek government's punishments fully matches the intensity of Bakhtior Rakhimov's dreams.