RIGHTS-UZBEKISTAN: Government Accused of Abuses

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

WASHINGTON, May 26 1998 (IPS) - A leading U.S. human rights group has accused the Uzbekistan government of committing serious human rights abuses in its drive to subdue alleged Islamic extremism.

In a report released here and in Toshkent Tuesday, New York- based Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged the government of President Islam Karimov with carrying out “unchecked repression” against Muslims who had opposed the state-controlled Muslim Board of Uzbekistan.

Based on a fact-finding investigation in March, the 31-page HRW report focused on the “widespread, brutal sweeps by police and security forces” that began in December 1997 in the Farghona Valley.

“The government is subjecting Muslims on a mass scale to beatings, show trials, expulsions from universities and jobs, and lengthy prison terms,” said Holly Cartner, director of HRW’s Europe and Central Asia division. “The government is painting all Muslims with the same brush – those who may have criminal intent, and average Muslims who simply wear a beard or go to the mosque.”

The group urged the European Union to suspend implementation of its Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with Uzbekistan and the United States to curb aid to government security forces believed to have committed abuses.

Uzbekistan, sandwiched between Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 but has made little progress in moving away from “Soviet-style repression” since that time, according to HRW.

Bordered by the conflict-ridden states of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, the Karimov government has long seen its principal threat coming from what it calls the “Wahhabis,” or Islamic fundamentalists, but which HRW sees more as “independent” Muslims who reject the authority of state-regulated Islam.

Already considered highly repressive, the situation took a turn for the worse last December in the Farghona Valley, a densely populated and very poor region of the country, which has “retained a relatively high degree of cultural integrity, including centuries-old Islamic traditions.” The report also noted that the region was the site of inter-ethnic violence in 1989 between ethnic Uzbeks and Meskhetian Turks.

The Valley, located near the border with both Tajikistan and Afghanistan, also lies along major smuggling routes for drugs and guns. Arrests and harrassment of Muslims have gone on since 1996, when the government closed the central Jo”mi mosque in Andijan and allegedly carried out the “disappearance” of its spiritual leader, Abudvali Mirzo.

The mass arrests carried out by the authorities in December, were triggered by the murder in Namangan of three people, including an interior ministry official, with a one-week period, and the killing of three policemen in a shoot-out ten days later.

These events were followed by the arrests by security forces of more than 1,000 men in just two towns, Namangan and Andijan. Similar sweeps were carried out subsequently in other cities in the Valley in January, February and March.

HRW believed that the government’s “overreaction” to the violence was related to some extent to a sharp deterioration in the security situation in neighbouring Tajikistan, where heavy fighting broke out between the government and opposition forces last August and was later resolved by an agreement to form a coalition government that would give some power to an Islamic political group.

“With the threat of armed conflict close to home, it is likely that the Uzbekistan government perceived the murder of a single civil servant as a threat to the stability of the state as a whole and therefore sent in large numbers of police forces,” the report noted.

It found that police arrested men indiscriminately, so that many were picked up simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time or as targets for extortion. The police also singled out openly pious Muslims, dissidents or their relatives, to intimidate and silence them. They were identified by their attendance at mosques not under the direct control of the Muslim Board, their support of Islamic schools, or for wearing a full beard, often consider a sign of piety.

Suspects typically were people detained without an arrest warrant, according to the report, which noted the police’s practice of often planting drugs or guns in detainees’ cars or homes. The evidence for such a practice, according to HRW, was “overwhelming.”

Suspects were often beaten and sometimes tortured until they confessed to a crime, according to the report which noted the use of pyschological pressure as well. Police have often used threats – of torture and against relatives of detainees – to coerce confessions.

Trials then took place quickly, often without defence lawyers or in the presence of lawyers who were too frightened of retaliation to challenge the proceedings or evidence. “Scores of men are thus already serving prison terms of four or five years without justification or the right to seek redress for their physical mistreatment,” according to HRW.

Karimov repeatedly justified the arrests by asserting that the country was being destabilised by “estremists and terrorists, actually killers and butchers,” many of whom are alleged to have received military training in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He also had taken an increasingly hostile position against human rights groups which have denounced the repression, the HRW report said. Several activists in Toshkent, Andijan, and Namangan have reported that they are under close surveillance and had been threatened with professional blacklisting or even imprisonment if they continued gathering and publicising information about abuses.

While all of the detainees are men, HRW said it had received reports that local police harassed, detained, and intimidated women who wore veils in public. In addition, religious women, many of whom are wives of men who have been arrested, had lost their jobs, thus impoverishing entire families.

The repression may have a counter-productive effect on a population that already had difficulty in coping with a poor economy, HRW says. The report was meant “to sound an alarm that the government, by committing serious, wide-scale human rights abuse in this volatile area, runs the risk of provoking precisely the radical and even criminal response it has vowed to avert.”