RIGHTS-UZBEKISTAN: Stability Campaign Cloaks Crackdown — Critics

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Blagov

MOSCOW, Jul 25 1999 (IPS) - Uzbekistan authorities say they aim to uphold political stability, but activists say a campaign against dissent is aimed at silencing criticism of the government’s crackdown on religious Muslims and other opponents.

“The Uzbek regime seemingly cannot be more hard-line than it is now,”Abdufattah Mannapov, assistant director of Human Rights Center – Moscow-based Asia Committee, said in an interview.

The latest blow to Uzbekistan’s image overseas was the July 14 sentencing of independent human rights activist Mahbuba Kasymova, 48. Kasymova was sentenced to a five-year term in the latest in a series of government attacks on the Independent Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan (NOPCHU).

The prosecutor reportedly referred to the NOPCHU as “an illegal organization”.

“Mrs Kasymova’s conviction is a farce,” said Holly Cartner, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Division. “It appears the government of Uzbekistan’s goal is to silence all the independent human rights activists.”

Kasymova’s conviction follows the June 19 death in detention of NOPCHU member Akhmadkhon Turakhonov, the June 25 arrest and beating of the group’s chairman Mikhail Ardzinov, and the July 12 arrest of NOPCHU activist Ismail Adylov.

Critics say police allegedly planted leaflets of a forbidden Islamic organisation during a search of Adylov’s home. Human Rights Watch has interviewed nearly 100 persons in 1998 and 1999 who tell similar stories of evidence planting by police.

“There is a great risk of torture during pre-trial detention in Uzbekistan, particularly in cases where suspects are held incommunicado,” said Alexander Petrov, deputy director of the Moscow Office of Human Rights Watch Russian Federation.

To these critics, Uzbekistan is one of the most closely policed states in the former Soviet Union, though its officials say they are just trying to preserve stability.

Opposition leader Muhammad Salikh says 95 percent of the population of Uzbekistan, the most populous of the five Central Asian states with 24 million people, is mired in poverty, according to opposition leader Muhammad Salikh.

In many places official salary amounts to just one U.S. dollar a month, he added.

The global economic downturn wiped out billions of dollars off the value of cotton, copper, gold, and grains, upon whose exports Uzbekistan heavily depends. The country faces a hard currency shortage, which brought imports down by nearly a third in 1998.

On top of economic woes, the government of President Islam Karimov is worried about a shift to an extreme revival of Islam in Central Asia and religious and ethnic fighting in nearby states.

Uzbekistan has responded by emphasising there can only be one power – the state – during its emergence from its Soviet past. Karimov appoints all ministers, and the Uzbek parliament is largely ceremonial.

In May 1998, the Central Asian states of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan formed a “troika” with Russia to fight fundamentalism and Wahabism, a conservative brand of Sunni Islam they said threaten Central Asia and Russia’s North Caucasus.

Karimov has warned that the religious fanaticism of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement and the Iranian-supported Hezbollah have spread to undermine stability in the country.

But Mannapov says Karimov is not combatting fundamentalism but is using that campaign to fight for life-long absolute power.

The government also launched an anti-Islamic crackdown in apparent response to the Feb 16 explosions that rocked Tashkent.

Uzbekistan’s Supreme Court sentenced six people to death after convicting them of involvement in the bombing of government buildings that killed 16 people. Eight of the 22 people convicted of were sentenced to 20 years in prison, while the remaining eight got 10 to 18 year terms.

Karimov has implied that the head of Erk opposition party, Muhammad Salikh, was responsible for the Tashkent bombings.

“I can tell you that practically all of the persons detained on charges of organising deadly bombings in the capital, went through training in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Tajikistan,” he added.

According to Erk News Centre, more than 2,000 people who were suspected of being involved in the attempt to assassinate the President have been detained.

The explosions were probably organised by Uzbek regime and its secret police, Mannapov claims. “It is technically impossible to carry out terrorist actions in the country’s most heavily secured area without government complicity,” he argued.

Reports say that thousands of Erk supporters, independent Muslims and self-proclaimed members of Hizb ut-Takhrir (Party of Liberation), a group allegedly advocating the re-establishment of the global caliphate, have been arrested in recent months.

On Jun 14, Tashkent police detained Farkhod Usmanov, reportedly for possession of an incriminating leaflet. The son of a well-known Mislim cleric, Nosir-kori Usmanov, he was held in incommunicado detention for 11 days.

On Jun 25, his body was returned to his family with a death certificate claiming the 42-year old died of heart failure, though the body was covered with bruises.

“The Uzbek crackdown looks very much like notorious reprisals by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in late 1930s,” Mannapov said.

Critics also say the government appears to be intensifying a crackdown on political and religious dissidents not only Muslims, but also Christians of different denominations.

On Jun 24, the pastor of a Pentecostal church in Tashkent, Ibrahim Yusupov, was sentenced to one year in prison on charges of conducting missionary activity since 1991 — a criminal offense under Uzbekistan’s controversial 1998 law on religion.

On June 30, a Bukhara district court sentenced Christian pastor Na’il Asanov to five years in prison for possession of drugs and spreading extremist ideas.

All activity by unregistered religious groups is illegal under the 1998 law which gave churches until August 1998 to re-register provided they had 100 members and paid registration fees.

Earlier this year, Uzbekistan enacted even harsher amendments to laws on religious activities, hiking fines for unregistered groups and prison sentences as high as 15 or 20 years.

Although apparently a reaction to February’s bomb attacks blamed on Islamist hard-liners, the legal changes could equally be applied against Uzbekistan’s small Christian congregations, most of whom are unable to get government registration.

“We do hope that in the wake of Yugoslav crisis the international community will remember about appalling human rights situation in Uzbekistan,” Mannapov said.