Al Jazeera, the Qatar-owned TV station that has gained prominence for its coverage of the revolutions in the Middle East, aired a program on the plight of Uzbek exiles abroad March 30.
"Cruel but Not Unusual," a report by Simon Ostrovsky for the show "People and Power" describes how Uzbek refugees forced to flee persecution at home to other neighboring countries are hounded and intimidated.
The former Soviet state of Uzbekistan has become an important ally for both the US and NATO; its border with Afghanistan providing an invaluable supply route for the West's war on the Taliban.
But its government, led by Islam Karimov, the country's president, has a dreadful human rights record. It is a country where political and religious expression is heavily restricted, and where security services allegedly use torture and murder indiscriminately.
Those who manage to obtain asylum in Western countries are relatively safe although the Uzbek secret police can continue to intimidate them and their relatives. But many of those who flee can only get as far as Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, countries with "questionable human rights records of their own," says Al Jazeera. There, they are vulnerable to arrest and return to certain torture in Uzbekistan.
The video contains seering testimony from a woman who was tortured in Uzbekistan for information about her husband and son-in-law, who died in detention, and the stress she and other asylum-seekers experience after fleeing to Kazakhstan, as Kazakh authorities arrested their husbands. Al Jazeera follows the story of the 29 Uzbek refugees who have been held for months in detention in Kazakhstan, facing court proceedings, whose fate is still not determined. Despite its obligations under the UN Convention on Refugees, Kazakhstan has already sent 4 Uzbek refugees back home, one of whom reportedly was given a 10-year prison sentence, and the other 3 are said to have disappeared.
A former morgue worker who escaped abroad also provides chilling testimony about how he concealed the evidence of the shooting of 500 victims during the Andijan massacre in 2005. Natasha Atayeva, head of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, an exile who lives in Paris, describes her work trying to bring attention to torture victims in Uzbekistan.
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