Whose disaster is it anyway?: Romancing world heritage in Uzbekistan

Over the past two decades, four Uzbek historic cities and four "intangible cultural heritage" traditions have been raised to the World Heritage List. Yet none of these is in Karakalpakstan, and a painful disconnect appears between the zeal to protect the cultures and monuments of southern Uzbekistan and inaction in identifying and addressing the huge cultural as well as environmental losses most directly associated with the death of the Aral Sea. In this chapter, a U.S.-based cultural historian and conservation-preservation practitioner offers impressions and cultural and spatial material analysis of some of the historic places included on a recent study team tour of Uzbekistan to explore the impacts of the Aral Sea disaster. It is apparent that three-term president Islam Karimov has made culture a linchpin of his program of Uzbek growth and security, cultivated a higher and higher profile for his regime within UNESCO, and focused intensely on interpretation and material conservation of historic sites favoring the themes of his own regime. The focus of this chapter is the disconnect between the emerging national and achieved Aral Sea narratives.