WASHINGTON -
This week's outburst of apparently Islamist-related
violence, which has killed more than 40 people in two
major cities in Uzbekistan in the past three days, could
spur renewed attention to the strategically located
Central Asian country's deplorable human rights record.
In a new report whose release coincided with the
bloodiest day yet in three days of bombings and gun
battles, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged
that the government of President Islam Karimov had
arrested and tortured thousands of non-violent Muslim
dissidents who practiced their faith outside
state-controlled mosques, and called on Uzbekistan's
Western allies, of which the United States is the most
important, to apply real pressure on Tashkent to improve
its human rights performance.
"The Uzbek
government is conducting a merciless campaign against
peaceful Muslim dissidents," said Rachel Denber, the
acting director of HRW's Europe and Central Asia
Division. "The scale and brutality of the operations
against independent Muslims makes it clear that these
are part of a concerted and tightly-orchestrated
campaign of religious persecution."
Both the
319-page report as well as the violence in Tashkent and
Bukhara pose major dilemmas for Washington and other
Western donors that have treated the Karimov government
as a close ally in the US "war on terrorism".
In
the aftermath of the September 11 al-Qaeda attacks on
New York and the Pentagon, Karimov provided Washington
with access to strategic bases from which US
intelligence and military operations were run during and
after the US-led effort to oust the Taliban government
in neighboring Afghanistan in late 2001. Hundreds of US
troops and intelligence officers are still operating
from the Khanabad air base, which also acts as a supply
facility for US operations in Afghanistan.
In
exchange, President George W Bush publicly denounced the
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) as an affiliate of
al-Qaeda and sharply increased military, security and
economic assistance to Karimov's government. Two years
ago, Karimov, who also ruled over Uzbekistan when it was
still a Soviet republic, was received by Bush himself at
the White House, and Tashkent has since become a regular
pilgrimage site for senior administration officials,
most recently Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who
visited last month.
Washington and other Western
countries have long warned Karimov that his failure to
respect human rights and implement serious political and
economic reforms, and his repression of independent
Muslims in particular, could destabilize the country.
But he has responded mainly with only token gestures,
while insisting that any far-reaching relaxation of his
control would likely lead to a major upsurge of
terrorism by the IMU and another, much larger group, the
Hizb ut-Tahrir, which has called for the replacement of
his regime with a Central Asian caliphate, albeit by
non-violent means.
As a result, the Bush
administration has tried to walk a tightrope with
Karimov by, on the one hand, condemning human rights
abuses and urging reforms, and on the other by
supporting him as a strategic ally in the "war on
terrorism".
This balancing act - reminiscent of
US alliances with anti-Soviet autocrats during the Cold
War - has been on display in just the past week, with
the White House expressing its solidarity with Tashkent
on Monday by declaring: "These attacks only strengthen
our resolve to defeat terrorists wherever they hide and
strike, working in close cooperation with Uzbekistan and
our other partners in the global war on terror," while
on Tuesday, the State Department stressed that "more
democracy is the best antidote to terror".
The
government has blamed the violence, which has reportedly
included at least two suicide bombings, apparently by
women, on the work of "international terror", as well as
members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group that, according to
the HRW report, has been the principal target of the
regime's brutality and repression.
A series of
detailed eyewitness reports by a pseudonymous EurasiaNet
correspondent with access to radio communications by the
state security forces, stressed that the fighting may be
the work of a "home-grown insurgency, rather than a
strike by international terrorists", with many people in
the streets asserting that the attacks were in response
to police abuses.
The HRW report also lends
credence to the notion, as suggested in its title,
"Creating Enemies of the State: Religious Persecution in
Uzbekistan", that the revolt could indeed be homegrown,
given the nature and extent of Karimov's repression. It
estimates that some 7,000 independent Muslims are
currently in prison and subject to torture and other
abuses. "Uzbekistan cannot hide behind the global war on
terrorism to justify religious repression," said Denber.
A particularly notorious case came to light last
year when Fatima Mukhadirova, a shopkeeper, persuaded
the British Embassy in Tashkent to investigate the
August 2002 death of her son, Muzafar Avozov, in prison
based on photographs of his corpse. An independent
examination carried out by the University of Glasgow
concluded that the father of four and member of Hizb
ut-Tahrir had died after being immersed in boiling
water, although the photographs also showed that he
suffered serious wounds around the head and neck and
that his fingernails were missing.
For her
efforts, Mukhadirova was herself sentenced to six years
of hard labor, although she was released after a major
international outcry on the eve of Rumsfeld's visit.
Avozov, however, was hardly the last to suffer
torture, which the HRW report describes as a routine
action against detainees and prisoners in Uzbekistan but
whose practice is particularly severe against
independent Muslims in order to force confessions or
testimony against others. The report documents 10 deaths
from torture over the past five years, although that
toll excludes cases for which there is no direct
evidence, such as the death under suspicious
circumstances of a 44-year-old independent Muslim
prisoner, Abdurahman Narzullaev, just two weeks ago
after he participated in a prison hunger strike.
Based on five years of research throughout
Uzbekistan, including some 200 interviews with victims
and their relatives, as well as other witnesses, human
rights defenders and government officials, the report
notes that independent Muslims are arrested on vague
charges of "subversion", "encroachment on the
constitutional order", or "anti-state activities", tried
"in grossly unfair proceedings", and routinely sentenced
to up to 20 years in prison. Those targeted for arrest
include people whom the state deems "too pious", a term
that may include those who pray at home or wear a beard.
The report details cases of numerous prisoners
who were tortured by methods such as beatings, rape,
electric shock, asphyxiation, suspension from wrists or
ankles, and burning with cigarettes or lit newspapers.
The regime has also used mass public
denunciations of the families of independent Muslims in
which they are paraded before their neighbors to be
denounced as "traitors" or "enemies of the state" in
demonstrations that recall the Stalin period. In
addition, police are known to arrest and torture family
members of alleged "extremists" or "Wahhabis" in order
to gain their surrender.
The report noted
Western countries, including the US, have conditioned
some of Uzbekistan's aid on improvements in the human
rights situation. Denber called on them to strongly
denounce such abuses and withhold aid pending
substantial progress.
"It is shameful that the
international community has stood by and allowed this
[repression] to continue," she said. "If Uzbekistan's
allies want the world to believe that they are against
the persecution of Muslim dissidents, they are going to
have to take some action to show where they stand."
