Fresh Allegations Continue Pattern of Repression in Uzbekistan

Uzbek President Islam Karimov has tried to temper his reputation for intolerance toward Islamic groups in recent months. In February, his courts imprisoned four police officers for beating a suspected seditionist to death. In March, his government registered a human rights organization. But a May 1 statement by Human Rights Watch charges that Karimov's campaign to crush the nonviolent Islamist movement Hizb-ut-Tahrir has started authorizing the detention of women and children. On April 23, the agency reported, police rounded up women at protests in Tashkent and Margilan and detained more than 18 of them, some with babies. This report suggests that despite some visible changes, Karimov still authorizes an ongoing crackdown on peaceful Islamists.

Uzbekistan's crackdown on independent Muslims has subjected many suspected members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir party to torture and imprisonment. The organization, which seeks the restoration of an Islamic caliphate in Central Asia but does not advocate violence, is illegal under Uzbek law.

Karimov seemed to affirm the principle of due process for suspected members in the weeks surrounding his March visit to the United States. In a landmark case in February, a court sentenced police officials for the torture and killing of suspects of outlaw parties held in detention. [For more information see the EurasiaNet Civil Society archive]. Since March, investigators have been tracking a number of security officials from Margilan who are accused of killing Alimukhammad Mamadaliyev, 24, in November 2001.

According to Mamadaliyev's father Gulamjan, a police inspector took the young man from his home on November 4; his body surfaced in the Ferghana Canal on December 5. A man who claims to have witnessed the security officials in action claims that they beat Mamadaliyev to death and then threw his body into the canal to conceal their crime.

According to the dead man's family and families of similar cases, security officers warn surviving relatives against lodging complaints to the authorities. After BBC's Uzbek Service reported on Mamadaliyev's murder, his family claimed to receive intense surveillance.

Human Rights Watch's new claims about women echo a quieter but equally antidemocratic pattern. According to the May 1 statement, the rights group observed two trials of women accused of belonging to Hizb-ut-Tahrir. In an ongoing trial in Tashkent, Human Rights Watch says, four women say that authorities rounded them up on an hour's notice and gave them a copy of an indictment after "several days of trial hearings."

In the other trial, which ended April 24, a woman testified that police had threatened or beaten them to extract confessions – though all four convicted women said they only met privately to pray. While the women escaped with relatively light sentences for Uzbekistan – the stiffest was a four-year prison term – their stories make it hard to believe that Karimov is serious about promoting freedom of religion to honor his alliance with the United States.

One new story echoes Mamadaliyev's. Human Rights Watch says that Musharraf Usmonova disappeared after April 14, when "a group of policemen and close to 40 unidentified men in civilian dress" took her from her house after a fruitless search for contraband. Authorities notified her lawyer that she was in custody eight days later, according to the release. "It's hard to imagine a more dangerous situation," Human Rights Watch regional director Elizabeth Andersen said. "There's a real threat of torture during pretrial custody in Uzbekistan, particularly when the detainee is held incommunicado."

Before and after the February trial, according to one Hizb-ut-Tahrir member, the government has pursued the group with cruel methods. Independent human rights monitors in Uzbekistan say that over 4,500 Hizb-ut-Tahrir members are in prison, more than half of them from the Ferghana Valley. Many say that police planted drugs or leaflets on them or coerced false confessions with violence.

According to Marie Struthers, who directs Human Rights Watch's Tajikistan office, many Hizb-ut-Tahrir members said they met each other for the first time in detention – even though the government detained them as participants in a revolutionary conspiracy. Struthers also said that planting of evidence and coercion continued after Karimov's trip to the United States.

State law enforcement officials dispute these claims, saying that falsified cases are merely fabrications by Hizb-ut-Tahrir members. They claim that prosecutors, judges and other law enforcement employees work honestly and fairly. But the level of detail in recounted by Hizb-ut-Tahrir members and their families makes it difficult to discount their stories. The man who claims to have seen police dumping Mamadaliyev's body in a canal also says police beat him for practicing Namaz – the religious ritual for praying five times a day. He also claims security officials tortured him, sodomizing him with a steel stick, because of what he had seen. The parents of another young male detainee say they heard a Margilan City officer of the national security services say he would infect all such "enemies of the state" with tuberculosis and have them die in prisons.

American officials have said that they expect Karimov to live up to his commitments on human rights reform. But the recent Human Rights Watch allegations, amid unanswered charges from Hizb-ut-Tahrir members, suggest that such reforms lack a reliable timeline. And the antiterrorism agenda that sparked the US alliance with Karimov may not prioritize humane treatment of Hizb-ut-Tahrir members. So far, Karimov has managed to link Hizb-ut-Tahrir to the expressly violent Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which maintains links to al Qaeda and which nearly assassinated Karimov in Tashkent in 1999. But one Hizb-ut-Tahrir member says that comparison will soon look false to Western observers.

Since Uzbekistan gained independence, says this person, leaders have squelched any opposition within the country that gave objective and vocal criticism of the government. "The development of such religious movements in Uzbekistan, where Muslims make the majority of the population, is natural," he said. "That is because Muslims trust their like-minded fellow Muslims more than deceitful politicians whose decisions are all empty promises."