Central Asian Human Rights Get a Light Touch at Congressional Hearing
As The Bug Pit noted, recent U.S. Congressional hearings on Central Asia primarily reflected the Obama Administration's focus on the war effort in Afghanistan -- which dovetails with the interests of the budget-slashing Republican-dominated Congress in not touching military aid.
Meanwhile, human rights concerns got rather a light touch in the testimony from Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake, Jr. at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on March 10.
In fairness, the topic was included, although it tended to be phrased in more low-impact terms as a dialogue about "democratic reform" -- and with egregious human rights violations referred to more diplomatically as "the many challenges" in this region. The U.S. has just completed the second round of Annual Bilateral Consultations (ABCs), instituted in 2009, with Uzbekistan and just had a mid-term review of the first round of such ABCs with Turkmenistan.
On Uzbekistan, Blake noted:
We continue to hold a dialogue to encourage the Uzbek authorities to address significant human rights concerns including ending forced child labor in the cotton harvest, opening up the media environment, curtailing abuses by security forces, and ending harassment of civil society and international NGOs.
The emphasis on the ongoing problem of forced child labor in Uzbekistan's lucrative cotton industry was indeed welcome; the U.S. Department of Labor has included Uzbek cotton in its list of products produced by forced labor as part of its obligations in monitoring such human rights violations.
But in his list of concerns, Blake didn't include religious freedom, and arguably this issue is the human rights problem that affects the most people in Uzbekistan, as thousands of devout Muslims have been jailed, tortured, tried behind closed doors and sentenced to lengthy prison terms without adequate defense although their groups were not proven to have committed any violent acts.
Protestants have been targeted as well in Uzbekistan, with many short-term jail sentences, according to Forum 18 News Service, an independent organization monitoring religious freedom.
Interestingly, on Tajikistan, which came in for the hardest comments in this testimony of all the Central Asian countries, Blake did note concerns in his testimony "on restrictions on religious and media freedoms."
On Turkmenistan, valued for its hydrocarbons, its subsidy of electricity for Afghanistan, and cooperation with the U.S. on providing air terminals for refueling flights with non-lethal freight en route to Afghanistan, Blake was most brief -- and vague:
We continue to encourage the Turkmen government to take concrete steps to fulfill its international obligations on human rights and have offered assistance to help advance Turkmenistan’s stated goals of developing a democracy.
Forum 18 has amply documented numerous violations of religious liberty in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. For example while literature controls were finally lifted for the Russian Orthodox church in Turkmenistan, they remain in place for other faiths and materials continued to be confiscated from travellers entering or leaving Turkmenistan. None of the nine known religious prisoners of conscience in Turkmenistan were freed in the February amnesty. Protestant Pastor Ilmurad Nurliev, whose case was the subject of a Human Rights Watch appeal on the eve of the ABCs, remains in prison, and is denied a Bible.
To be sure, the State Department's own International Religious Freedom Report is quite frank about Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The problem has always been syncing the State Department's own critical findings with the diplomatic rhetoric directed at the countries involved.
Uzbekistan is already designated as "a country of particular concern" (CPC) for its abusive practices; Turkmenistan is not, although the bi-partisan Commission on International Religious Freedom has recommended to the State Department that it include Turkmenistan as well as Uzbekistan in the CPC list.
Lately, however, State seems to have stalled on making these designations, possibly due to the geopolitical sensitivities involved.
In the first year that the State Department issued the annual International Religious Freedom Report (IRF), it simultaneously issued the updated list of CPCs.
Last November, when Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner issued the IRF report, a reporter asked him if there was a CPC list. Posner replied:
No. The report is a separate exercise from that, but we will be designating countries of particular concern in the next couple of months.
Well, now "a couple of months" have elapsed...and still no CPC list.
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