With the help of western companies and the locally created subsidiary, UzBAT, Uzbekistan became Central Asia’s regional leader in tobacco sales. Slick, efficient advertising paved the way for its new brands. Florescent stickers appeared on kiosk and shop fronts. And overnight, trolley busses were transformed into mobile cigarette packets advertising UzBAT’s very own new flagship brands. In a major marketing error, UzBAT chose the name Saraton as the trademark to lead Uzbekistan into smoking history. Saraton turned out to be Arabic for the Zodiac month of Cancer. The irony was lost on most people.
UzBAT’s public relations department worked overtime to massage the image of a company whose reputation at home was flagging. A Kent fashion show with attendant freebies became a popular event. UzBAT’s unstinting philanthropic zeal on behalf of the handicapped and under-privileged was highly regarded and its reputation for responsibility and care in its “adopted” country grew steadily. Prizes of cigarettes, of course, were awarded to those who collected empty packets. The very luckiest winners of an UzBAT-run lottery could win a top of the range Daewoo car. Uzbekistan was relishing in the excitement that after 70 years of communism it was at last joining the rest of the world on the smoking front.
IMPLICATIONS: Karimov’s vision was for Uzbekistan to be the proud hub of cigarette production in the whole Central Asian region. UzBAT projects annual sales targets of 25 billion cigarettes by the end of 2000. No longer would Uzbekistan be the region’s poor cousin churning out only 4 billion cigarettes a year. When journalists have attempted to expose the cynical exploitation of an Uzbekistani population largely ignorant of the risks, they have been vigorously opposed. One reporter was warned after she had tried to write an article about the new tobacco product, and was told that adverse publicity concerning the company would be tantamount to flouting government policy. She was further warned that her job, if not her own health, could be seriously in jeopardy if she persisted in her quest.
Anti-smoking health warnings are very few and far between on the ground. Cigarette advertising on television and billboards is of the tacky, “beautiful-boy-meets-glamourous-girl-and-they-all-live-happily-ever-after-in-a-smoke-filled-haze” variety, with not a health warning in sight. The glossy international brands such as Lucky Strike, Hollywood and Kent carry either no cautions at all or offer their advice to steer clear from cigarettes if you are pregnant. And when the warnings are offered, they are written not in Uzbek or Russian, but in the English language, and very complicated English at that.
Students in a desperate attempt to raise their concerns to the outside world even wrote to UzBAT’s British headquarters with a powerful plea: “Are you aware that you are poisoning our lives and our generation with your tobacco business? You are using the peoples’ naiveté for your own benefit. They have no power to protest against the power of a western company.” The most the government has done in reaction to the small public outcry against cigarettes is pass a new law banning charitable donations by cigarette companies in a move designed to prick the consciences of western firms hitherto unshackled by the inconvenience of moral debate into their multi-national dealings in Central Asia.
CONCLUSION: A rather worrying large number of young Uzbeks and other Central Asians are being lured by luminescent heroes sporting the latest craze to hit Central Asia dangling from their glistening white teeth and taking up the cigarette habit. Similarly, girls and young women are also being seduced. Central Asia has become the latest battleground for tobacco users as the markets in western countries rapidly shrink. The battle between UzBAT and its rivals Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds/Nabisco, and the Marlborough Cowboy seems likely only to grow ever more fierce for shares of the Central Asian spoils.
The lives of Central Asia’s youth are up for grabs. If President Karimov and the Uzbekistani government fail to put in their own stronger bid for the lives of its young people, there are plenty of others waiting in the wings ready to do so. The government sponsored health warnings and cigarette company bashing may have come too little too late for the majority of youngsters who are already victims of the bright lights and clever packaging of western tobacco companies. These companies have been given too much freedom for too long in this fledgling but increasingly beleaguered Central Asian republic.
AUTHOR BIO: Jennifer Balfour is a long-term educator is former-Soviet Central Asia.