President Islam Karimov's daughter, Lola Karimova-Tillyayeva is pursuing her libel lawsuit against the French website rue89.com. A French court continued to hear testimony in the case which is examining whether it was libelous to call Karimova-Tillyayeva "the dictator's daughter." Karimova-Tillyayeva is Uzbekistan's envoy to UNESCO and also known for her charitable activities.
Augustin Scalbert, a rue89.com journalist, is charged with libel for an article he wrote a year ago, "AIDS: Uzbekistan Represses at Home but Parades in Cannes," on a fund-raising event involving Tilyayeva-Karimova. Scalbert is optimistic, says the Telegraph:
"It will be interesting to discuss in court whether Islam Karimov is dictator or not," he said. "If we're not condemned, it will set in French law that we can write that Uzbekistan is a dictatorship. If it goes the other way, we're going to make all possible appeals up until the European Court of Human Rights, and at every new moment the lawsuit will give again and again more coverage to the problems in Uzbekistan."
Scalbert's lawyer evidently plans to use the "truth defense" and show the court the ways in which the term "dictator" was appropriate.
As the Karimov family was once more in the news, the blog neweurasia.net wrote that a Twitter parody account appeared, @GulnaraKarimova, who wrote: “Fashion is my passion, dahling! Don’t believe the lies about our family in Uzbekistan. We don’t really boil our critics to death as often as they say we do.”
Yet after a few more irreverent tweets in this vein, the account was removed, likely in response to a complaint from the real Gulnara. While Twitter allows spoofs of public figures with fake accounts, they must be clearly marked so as not to be confused with the real person.
Another account appeared with the same picture, @GuliKarimova, seemingly real, but was suspended as well by Twitter administrators. Now @NotGuliKarimova seems to have picked up the baton with a profile description saying, "Uzbekistan only boils to death some critics not all." Yet another account @GooGoosha2 has appeared saying, "Twitter asked me to say I’m NOT Gulnara Karimova. But I agree with her: Uzbekistan does not boil as many of our critics as they say we do." This GooGoosha further elaborated in a tweet that Twitter administrators sent her a notification, ""We have received a valid report that your account, @GulnaraKarimova, is engaged in non-parody impersonation." Twitter offers certain celebrities the option of validating their accounts and marking as such, but the real Gulnara does not seem to have appeared on Twitter.
A Twitter account without a picture, Lola_Karimova, contains only links to Karimova's official site and description of her charitable activities, but it is not known if it is authentic.
News media has so often capsulated Uzbekistan's appalling human rights record with the vivid description that the government "puts dissidents in boiling water," that inevitably some people become skeptical about the claim. The story originates with actual documentation by local human rights advocates and Human Rights Watch in the case of Muzafar Avazov, an inmate of the notorious Jaslyk prison. His corpse was returned to his relatives for burial after his death in detention. Medical examiners found severe burns over much of his body, which they believed to be the result of immersion in boiling water.
A two-part analysis by Ushida Hashimova that appeared in the conservative Jamestown Foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor maintains that negative US government reporting on child labor in Uzbekistan could threaten the US military's supply lines to Afghanistan arranged through Uzbekistan in the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), EurasiaNet's The Bug Pit reported. With the increase in US drone attacks on Pakistan's tribal areas, the Pakistani government has threatened to withdraw the transit facilities allowed to NATO and Coalition forces, says The Bug Pit. About 40% of NATO's non-weapons supplies move by truck from the Pakistani port city of Karachi to two crossings along the Afghan border, but this has increasingly been under attack. The proportion of cargo to be shipped to Afghanistan via the NDN is scheduled to rise to 75 percent by the end of 2011.
The articles appear to have been prompted by a recent position taken by the US through the government’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, known as G-TIP. G-TIP publishes a comprehensive report on trafficking in 175 countries each year, and has been critical of Uzbekistan, placing it in the category of “tier 2,” countries needing improvement. The issue currently under debate in the government is whether Uzbekistan will be downgraded further to "tier 3" due to its persistent refusal to take substantive action against the exploitation of child labor. Hashimova objects to the inclusion of forced child labor in the list of G-TIP, which was established to implement the UN Trafficking in Persons Protocol, on the grounds that ostensibly the UN treaty would apply only to forcibly taking persons across state borders. Yet as the G-TIP web page explains, for the last 15 years, “trafficking in persons” and “human trafficking” have been “used as umbrella terms for activities involved when someone obtains or holds a person in compelled service” – regardless if they are transported.
The advocacy website cottoncampaign.org notes that Hashimova has also misrepresented the position of UNICEF, which in fact has recently begun to break a long-standing silence on the issue of child labor, admitting that its methodology for examining the problem has been incomplete and acknowledging that the problem persists in Uzbekistan. (Both Uzbekistan News Briefs and cottoncampaign.org are supported by the Open Society Foundations—Ed.)
Hashimova also invokes the cultural argument often cited by Uzbek officials, that Soviet collective farm system encouraged children to help their parents and relatives in the fields. Yet in Uzbekistan, the state, not families, organizes and coerces students’ labor, and at the expense of their time in school. Whatever the ruling of G-TIP, the US is likely to issue a waiver on sanctions due to the imperative of cooperation with Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan itself has recognized the illegality of forced child labor by ratifying the conventions of the International Labor Organization. Uzbekistan stands to gain as much from the US in terms of trade and security as Washington seeks from the relationship with Tashkent. The revolutions in the Middle East have starkly illustrated that US foreign relations ultimately fail if they are structured on a concession to authoritarian governments of their oppression of their citizens and civil society.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick compiles the Uzbekistan weekly roundup for EurasiaNet. She is also editor of EurasiaNet's Choihona blog. To subscribe to Uzbekistan News Briefs, a weekly digest of international and regional press, write [email protected]
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