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Extreme Fan
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 2,169
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If you follow this link there are some awful, awful pictures of one of the prisoners who were immersed in boiling water - ONLY CLICK ON THIS LINK IF YOU ARE NOT EASILY DISTURBED
http://www.informationclearinghouse....rticle3943.htm
According to the State Department Website
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Uzbekistan is not a democracy and does not have a free press. Several prominent opponents of the government have fled, and others have been arrested. The government severely represses those it suspects of Islamic extremism, particularly those it suspects of membership in the banned Party of Islamic Liberation (Hizb ut-Tahrir). Some 5,300 to 5,800 suspected extremists are incarcerated. This represents a decline from previous years, as hundreds are amnestied and fewer arrested. Prison conditions remain very poor, particularly for those convicted of extremist activities, and a number of such prisoners are believed to have died over the past several years from prison disease and abuse. The police force and the intelligence service use torture as a routine investigation technique. No independent political parties have been registered, although they were for the first time able to conduct grass-roots activities and to convene organizing congresses. Following the visit of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, the Government of Uzbekistan drafted an Action Plan to implement the Special Rapporteur' s recommendations. The government has begun to enact a number of its provisions.
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From the BBC website, about the former British Ambassador:
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Uzbekistan was Craig Murray's first job as ambassador. Top of his year's Foreign Office intake, he was a veteran of many difficult postings. He was known as a hardworking, talented, but forthright diplomat. From the moment he was formally accredited in the Uzbek capital, he drew attention to human rights abuses in the country. Uzbekistan retains one of the most repressive regimes in the former Soviet Union: constantly criticised by agencies like Human Rights Watch.
In private correspondence within the Foreign Office, Craig Murray drew parallels between the record of Uzbekistan and that of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But it was his comments in October last year which drew most attention.
Before an audience of Uzbek dignitaries and other foreign diplomats, at the opening of the American-backed 'Freedom House' foundation in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, he launched a full scale attack. He spoke of prisoners tortured by being boiled alive. Of thousands detained for political or religious reasons. And he said that Uzbekistan was not a functioning democracy, nor making sufficient steps towards that.
According to those who were there, the American ambassador looked uncomfortable. The Uzbek Foreign Ministry summoned Craig Murray on a Sunday to explain himself. But to human rights activists like Talib Jakubov, this was support they'd only dreamt of. "It was like a flash of lightning" he told me in Tashkent. "It made the American ambassador's speech look pale, watery by comparison".
Over the next 10 months, Craig Murray continued to mention human rights at every opportunity, to meet activists, and the families of those in prison. But as he came to the end of a month's leave this summer, he was abruptly called back to London.
There, friends say, he was told he had a week to resign or be recalled. He was told of possible disciplinary charges arising from his conduct.
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Local journalists say they'd heard gossip about the ambassador's alleged private life. Human rights activists believe such rumours were deliberately spread by the agencies of the Uzbek government.
The leading human rights lawyer Surat Ikramov told me he'd heard from his own government sources that the Uzbek Foreign Ministry were running such a campaign. He was so concerned that in June he wrote to Jack Straw to try to warn him. The letter was hand carried to London, but the Foreign Office say they have no record of receiving it.
The Uzbek Foreign Ministry strongly deny any such activity and there is no evidence to connect them to the rumours. They say only that they are sorry the ambassador is unwell.
The deputy foreign minister said he believes Uzbekistan is generally misunderstood, especially in western Europe. He told me of improvements in the prison system and a drop in infant mortality. He said "we know we have problems ... we are not dumb," but he said Uzbekistan welcomed criticism when accompanied by concrete help (he cited American aid to train prison and police staff). However when asked about the prisoners boiled alive, the cases singled out by Craig Murray, he claimed that other prisoners in the same jail had confessed to the murders. Craig Murray had commissioned an independent report from photographs of the body before coming to his own conclusion.
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Even the National Review have emphasised the importance of rejecting the past precedents of turning a blind eye when allies abuse human rights.
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On one hand, there is no doubt that the U.S. must provide vigorous assistance to the government of Uzbekistan in its fight against the jihadists. Uzbekistan has played an important role in counter-terrorism operations in southwest Asia and currently hosts a number of U.S. and NATO troops at the Khanabad airbase near the Uzbek-Afghan border.
On the other hand, the U.S. cannot be seen to support or underwrite the government of Uzbekistan, a repressive regime that has barely changed since the Communist-era. Uzbekistan is run by the same political machine that took power in the then Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in the late 1950s — men who in the 1980s regarded Mikhail Gorbachev as a dangerously radical reformer.
Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, has been in power since 1990. During the 2000 presidential elections his only opponent was Abdulhafiz Jalolov, the head of the ruling party, who publicly announced that he was voting for Karimov.
Thanks to Karimov, Uzbekistan has become a propaganda victory for Islamist radicals and human-rights groups seeking to discredit the war against terrorism. Uzbekistan's appalling human-rights record is a disgrace. Islamist prisoners are routinely tortured; some have disappeared. One, Muzaffar Avazov, was boiled alive.
The problem for the U.S. is that it needs Karimov's assistance even while it knows that his regime is part of the problem. There is no basis for Islamic fundamentalism in Uzbekistan, a largely secular country where women are more emancipated than in most majority Muslim states. Yet the population is dangerously indifferent to the fate of its government. There is little room for legitimate dissent, and as a result politics has been reduced to the struggle between the unreformed neo-Communist state and a few hundred Islamist radicals.
Uzbekistan remains an overwhelmingly rural and poor country with a large, inefficient state sector and an economy that has attracted little foreign investment. Although the government likes to blame radicalism on foreign incitement, it is clear that government policies make some young Uzbeks receptive to Islamist appeals.
Moreover, the Karimov regime has been immune to change. All reform initiatives tend to be window dressing, grudging changes that follow considerable U.S. and British pressure. The best example of non-reform came in May 2002, when the abolition of press censorship was announced. The difficulty was that, formally, there had never had been any censorship in independent Uzbekistan: Article 67 of the 1992 Uzbek constitution states that "censorship is impermissible." Still, the government celebrated the annulment of a policy it had always denied existed.
To date, U.S. efforts to encourage reform have borne little fruit. On July 13, 2004, the State Department told Congress that Uzbekistan had failed to make the "substantial and continuing progress" on human rights required to receive $18 million in U.S. aid.
There are still those in the U.S. government who prefer the old Cold War technique of turning a blind eye to allies' human-rights abuses, as happened in Latin America and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, trading off counter-terrorism assistance in return for ignoring human-rights violations is precisely the bargain that Karimov's diplomats are offering.
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