UZBEK GOVERMENT USING BRUTAL TACTICS TO GLOSS OVER ANDIZHAN MASSACRE
28 September 2005

Human Rights Watch has documented a massive and intensive campaign of intimidation across Uzbekistan, designed to gloss over the government's massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Andizhan, in May of this year.

The Andizhan demonstrations were intended to voice criticism for one of the region's most despotic and brutal regimes, and to call for democratic reforms. Events, put within context, could have mirrored closely the peaceful "revolutions" that have taken place in various former Soviet republics, such as Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in recent years.

But the government of dictator Islam Karimov has sought to overwhelm and eliminate dissent at all levels and viewed the demonstrations as a direct threat to the government. On 13 May, Uzbek troops stormed the square and shot dead hundreds of demonstrators and bystanders (the full number is not known and has been obscured by the government's unwillingness to allow international press or agencies to do research or to report from the country).

Hundreds of participants in the demonstrations were forced to flee the country that same day, and have since been treated by the Karimov regime as enemies of the state, seeking to carry out a foreign-backed coup. The few refugees who were "extradited" and returned to Uzbekistan in the weeks after Andizhan have disappeared, and an international lobbying effort has been waged to try to stop host countries from returning more Andizhan refugees to Karimov's regime.

Prosecutors now seek to paint the entire affair with the broad brush of a war against Islamist extremism. HRW reports that government forces have been harassing witnesses and using violence against (perhaps random) citizens, in order to extract "confessions" of having participated in the Andizhan demonstrations, to their having been a "violent uprising", and to their being backed by international "terrorists".

Amnesty International has also released a report calling on Uzbekistan and Pres. Karimov to condemn torture and end its use in official law enforcement and military activities. The report notes that the government's new wave of violent crackdowns targets "human rights activists" as terrorists, and urges that all recourse to the "war on terror" to support "torture and ill-treatment", which appears to include disappearances, be stopped.

Currently, there is underway in Tashkent a startling show-trial, in which the nature of these tactics is made clear. The government of Mr. Karimov seeks to remove itself from all respnosibility for the bloody attack it committed against its own citizens, using religious and nationalist bias, as well as torture and intimidation to excuse acts of arbitrary violence. [For more: HRW]