Clashes, bombs in Uzbekistan claim 23 mo

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Registered: 03-23-2003
Clashes, bombs in Uzbekistan claim 23 mo
10
Wed, 03-31-2004 - 2:29pm
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/167039_uzbekistan31.html

Clashes, bombs in Uzbekistan claim 23 more

Wednesday, March 31, 2004


By SETH MYDANS
THE NEW YORK TIMES


MOSCOW -- As many as 23 people were reported dead yesterday in bombings and gunbattles during a third day of violence in Uzbekistan, a strategic ally of the United States that borders Afghanistan.


Bombs and shootings took the lives of at least 19 people on Sunday and Monday in the Central Asian nation, where the United States has maintained a military base since shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.


The Interior Ministry issued a statement that seemed to oversimplify the violence yesterday. "In the process of being detained, 20 terrorists blew themselves up," the statement said. "Along with this, three policemen died and five sustained wounds of various seriousness."


There were many other reports from witnesses and local reporters of suicide bombings aimed at police officers and of a gunbattle that lasted nearly five hours. The Associated Press reported that five bodies lay on the ground after that battle.


In one attack, two witnesses described a female suicide bomber chasing police officers who shot her and detonated her bomb.


The identity of the attackers was not immediately known, and it is also unclear whether they included fighters from outside Uzbekistan. Reports of the number of deaths varied.


The government immediately blamed local Muslim militants with ties to international terrorism. Human rights groups and independent analysts said they feared a new crackdown in a nation that already holds an estimated 7,000 political prisoners.


Human rights groups and other analysts say the Muslim organization blamed by the government, Hizb ut-Tahrir, does not have a record of violence and has been the target of repression for years.


"What we are afraid of now is, are we going to see an intensified crackdown as a reaction to today's events," said Acacia Shields, the author of a 319-page report by Human Rights Watch on religious repression that was released yesterday in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.


"Since Sept. 11 the government has tried to characterize its campaign against these non-violent, independent Muslims as part of its program of counterterrorism," she said in a telephone interview.


The United States has described torture in Uzbekistan as systematic and is scheduled to review the country's human rights record in April to determine whether it is eligible for $50 million in new aid, including military assistance.


Domestic repression has created fertile ground for recruitment into militancy, said Alain Deletroz, an expert on Uzbekistan with the International Crisis Group, an independent monitoring organization.


"By destroying any normal lay political parties in that country," he said, "the only opposition groups which have structures and know-how to operate underground are not the 'normal' Western-like parties."


A number of the attacks in the current violence have targeted police officers, particularly at checkpoints. Deletroz said that could be intended to touch off a government crackdown that would in turn inspire increased opposition.


During the current violence, witnesses described chaotic scenes involving combatants who appeared to be ready to die. In one case, Agence-France Presse quoted a witness named Marina who said she had seen a female suicide bomber trying to kill police officers.


"I saw a woman chasing after a group of policemen," the witness was quoted as saying. "Then a bus came between them, a policeman shot her in the leg and she exploded."


A security officer was quoted as describing another bombing in which two men had jumped from a car at a checkpoint and killed themselves and three police officers.


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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 03-31-2004 - 4:55pm

Uzbekistan appears to be another Iraq, Zimbabwe or other brutal repressive regime. Must have learnt some of their 'tricks' from the KGB.


Uzbek police widely feared for brutality.


http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/lateststories/index.ssf?/base/international-5/1080769755162030.xml


TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (AP) — Uzbek police are widely feared for their brutality and despised for being the government's tool in suppressing any form of dissent — a pattern of abuse that appears to have made them the main target in this week's suicide attacks.


On Sunday — the day before bombers struck the Chorsu bazaar in central Tashkent — police allegedly beat to death a 60-year-old garlic trader from the capital's largest market.


The merchant had angered police by speaking out against their harassment of a porter at Chorsu, according to witnesses, rights groups and opposition members. His death sparked a confrontation between police and traders and porters at the market.


The next day, a suicide bomber blew herself up at Chorsu during a morning police briefing — part of a chain of attacks that killed at least 42 people, including nine police, and persisted for a fourth day Wednesday. The U.S.-allied government said the attacks were acts of terrorism and blamed Islamic militants.


For centuries, Uzbeks have gone to bazaars not only to shop but to socialize and exchange news. These days, Chorsu is also a place where many share their frustration over worsening living standards that come amid complaints that tight government control has stifled the Central Asian nation's development.


As frustration grows, Chorsu is becoming a frequent scene of violence, invariably involving police.


It is a place for Muslim women to make their feeble attempts to protest the jailing of their husbands, brothers and sons for alleged religious extremism. The attempts are quickly and harshly suppressed by police.


Chorsu also is where traders clashed with police for their heavy-handed enforcement of stricter trading rules last summer.


In the eyes of many ordinary people, the police are an embodiment of the country's repressive regime.


Called "frogs" or "crocodiles" for their green uniform, police are ever-present on Tashkent streets. Their employer — the Interior Ministry — is the most powerful state institution and the biggest armed organization in the country.


Citing independent lawyers and rights activists, the International Crisis Group says about 200,000 people work for the ministry, with up to 25,000 men policing the capital of about 2.5 million people.


Police have been instrumental in the government campaign against what it sees as religious extremism, launched in the late 1990s, capturing and jailing more than 6,000 Muslims on charges of plotting to overthrow the secular government.


(Me: post# 1 mentioned 7,000 political prisoners)


Police abuse has helped give Uzbekistan one of the worst human rights records in the region. After a 2002 visit, a U.N. official reported that torture was systematic in Uzbek jails, and that two inmates were allegedly killed after being immersed in boiling water in the country's most notorious jail, Zhaslyk, the same year.


Authorities usually don't investigate deaths in custody.


"Police here are used by the state to (make) the arrests, to carry out the torture which is used to carry out confessions, to carry out the repression," said Allison Gill, Uzbekistan researcher for Human Rights Watch.


Police officials boast of their efficiency in solving crimes, but Uzbeks say they routinely squeeze out confessions from the innocent to keep the conviction rate high.


Drivers face extortion by traffic police on a daily basis, and people do not always report robberies.


"There's a sense of frustration at the arbitrariness of police activity and law enforcement in general, it's arbitrary and it's brutal," Gill said.


The International Crisis Group said in a recent report on police reforms in Central Asia that "abuse has become an integral part of police control of society" in Uzbekistan.


"In effect, the police are beginning to become a second power base, which may contain the seeds of a future authoritarianism," the report said.

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Wed, 03-31-2004 - 7:32pm
Here's my contribution.

With friends like Uzbekistan ...

By Jim Lobe

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 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."

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FD01Ag01.html

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 03-31-2004 - 10:46pm

>"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."<


>"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". "<


Karimov seemingly has the support & financial backing of Bush to act in this deplorable manner. Bitter fruit of this War on Terror.

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Thu, 04-01-2004 - 9:46am
Same old pattern. Enter a country for our own purposes, choose a side (generally a repressive leader) and equip them to fight a civil war. This to me is the prime reason we shouldn't view the world through selfish lenses, ie, what's good for America. The proclaim that democracy is the best solution. This is short sighted and gets us into trouble.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Thu, 04-01-2004 - 2:52pm
Washington Editorial

The Bombs of Tashkent

Thursday, April 1, 2004; Page A30


FOR THE PAST several days the capital of the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, has been rocked by the sound of explosions and gunfire, and authorities have described a series of suicide attacks or firefights involving terrorists. President Islam Karimov's authoritarian government, which has been virtually the only source of information, has reported at least 43 people killed in the bombings and clashes in Tashkent and in the city of Bukhara, most of them insurgents.

Mr. Karimov, who aspires to a strategic alliance with the United States, has portrayed the violence as another episode in the global struggle against terrorism. In one sense he's right: Uzbekistan has been a target for Islamic extremists, some of them allied with al Qaeda or the Taliban movement of neighboring Afghanistan. The trouble is that Mr. Karimov may have done as much to produce the terrorists as he has to combat them.

Mr. Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan since it was part of the Soviet Union, has never abandoned police-state tactics, despite repeated appeals from his new allies in Washington and in Europe. For at least a decade he has persecuted independent religious activity in his Muslim nation, on the pretext that imams and followers outside the state-controlled mosques are practicing fundamentalism. According to a new report by Human Rights Watch, an estimated 7,000 people have been arrested in "this campaign of religious persecution," some for such offenses as praying at home or wearing a beard. Many have been tortured or are being held under inhumane conditions; the State Department recently estimated there were at least 5,300 political prisoners. Meanwhile, the government has refused to allow the emergence of a free press, an independent judiciary or opposition political parties, despite Mr. Karimov's commitment to do so in a partnership agreement he signed with the Bush administration two years ago.

This is not the first time that bombs have gone off in Tashkent. In 1999, following a series of explosions in the capital, Mr. Karimov intensified up his crackdown on independent Muslims and political opponents -- in particular a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir, which espouses an extremist agenda but has never been implicated in violence. The group's spokesman denied responsibility for this week's attacks, but human rights groups fear another wave of repression aimed at that group as well as other opponents of the government will sweep across the country.

Even if he holds back, Mr. Karimov may seek to use this week's attacks to his advantage. In the coming weeks, both the Bush administration and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development are to decide whether to suspend aid programs to Uzbekistan because of its failure to implement political and economic reforms. The Uzbek regime can now be expected to argue that the latest attacks make impossible the steps that Washington has demanded, such as the registration of opposition parties for coming parliamentary elections. While not discounting the threat from Uzbek extremists, the Bush administration should reject such excuses. If Mr. Karimov is allowed to perpetuate his police state with U.S. support, he will merely ensure that terrorists continue to breed in his country -- and that Uzbeks blame the United States as well as their dictator for their misery.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40777-2004Mar31.html




Edited 4/2/2004 8:41 am ET ET by hayashig

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Thu, 04-01-2004 - 3:21pm
Well in some instances it is a "you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't" scenario.

Sometimes you don't know which way things are going to progress unless you try.

Not condoning it in any way, but just throwing that out there for some fodder.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Fri, 04-02-2004 - 7:46am
In a sense you are correct--which side to choose. However, we should have learned from history that supporting ruthless dictators isn't in our best interest. Perhaps we should forego supporting either one. We did the same in Iraq.

"Mr. Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan since it was part of the Soviet Union, has never abandoned police-state tactics, despite repeated appeals from his new allies in Washington and in Europe."

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 04-02-2004 - 8:11am

>" However, we should have learned from history that supporting ruthless dictators isn't in our best interest. Perhaps we should forego supporting either one. "<


ITA These actions always come back to bite the US in the posterior.

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Fri, 04-02-2004 - 11:32am
The 'bitter fruit':

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Fri, 04-02-2004 - 3:37pm
Sad isn't it!