Central Asia: UN Chief Tours Region To Discuss Cooperation, Environment

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon began his first official Central Asian tour in Ashgabat on April 1. He is expected to focus on improving regional cooperation, disarmament, and environmental issues.

Yet advocacy groups fear Ban will miss an opportunity to address the region's dismal human rights record.

In a letter dated March 30, Human Rights Watch urged the secretary-general to press the region's five presidents, whom he is scheduled to meet, to improve their rights records.

"There has never been a more important time for you to embody the role you envisioned as the 'voice for the voiceless' by engaging governments in the region on human rights concerns and signaling to the public that the United Nations will work to promote human rights," the letter said.

Ban met Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov on April 1. "This is another clear demonstration of the ever-increasing role of the Central Asian region, where our country occupies a key position in the global coordinate system and, secondly, the special interest of the international community in an independent neutral Turkmenistan," the state news agency opined.

Ban's next stop will be Kyrgyzstan where he is expected to meet President Kurmanbek Bakiyev on April 3.

Cholpon Jakupova, head of the Adilet Clinic, a legal advice center in Bishkek, said Ban should "express great concern" when he meets Bakiyev because "the rights situation in our country is going strongly backwards."

The Kyrgyz government organized Ban's schedule to keep him away from human right's activists, she claimed.

"Real problems will not be addressed, which are elections, the situation with journalists and human rights activists, and the right to freely obtain and distribute information. I hope that this visit will not be merely another formal visit, of which we've had so many before," Jakupova told EurasiaNet.org.

From Kyrgyzstan, Ban will travel to Uzbekistan to inspect "first hand" the Aral Sea crisis and meet with President Islam Karimov, according to a UN press release.

Local activists say Ban should use his meeting to discuss a recent report by the UN Human Rights Committee condemning the use of torture, child labor and a biased judiciary in Uzbekistan.

"Human rights are a huge issue, a huge problem. They are a political issue. That's why I think the UN will not intervene," Uznews.net quoted Tashkent-based activist Abdurakhmon Tashanov of the human rights organization Ezgulik (Benevolence) as saying.

On April 7, the secretary-general will wrap up his visit in Kazakhstan, where he will visit the Soviet nuclear test range at Semipalatinsk.

The opposition website Uzmetronom.com compared Ban's mission to a "tourist trip," while cautioning that "each Central Asian president will try to use the visit of Ban Ki-moon to lobby national interests of their own state."