Mick Hartley

Human Rights Watch are reporting a massive crackdown in Uzbekistan as trials begin of those accused of instigating the demonstrations in Andijan, when hundreds were shot by government troops. The prosecution is expected to blame “terrorists” with an Islamic agenda.

The government…unleashed a crackdown on civil society, the ferocity of which is unprecedented even in Uzbekistan’s fourteen-year history of repression since it became independent from the Soviet Union. The authorities have aggressively pursued human rights defenders, independent journalists, and political activists who attempted to convey the truth about the events of May 13 and the days that followed. These individuals have been arrested on spurious charges, detained, beaten, threatened, put under surveillance or under de facto house arrest, and have been set upon by mobs and humiliated through Soviet-style public denunciations. As this report went to press, at least eleven activists had been imprisoned, and at least fifteen had been forced to flee the country into exile.

The present report documents the coercive pressure for testimony, which the government is using to rewrite the history of what happened on May 13. Almost immediately after that date, Andijan residents were placed under the close surveillance of their neighborhood committees, or mahallas. Beginning in June, police detained for questioning hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of people with any connection, no matter how remote, to the May 13 events: protesters, their relatives, relatives of those who fled to Kyrgyzstan, people who lived in the vicinity of the main square, and the like.

Those interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that police kept them in custody under false pretenses, usually by fabricating misdemeanor charges against them, and used the time in custody to beat or threaten them into signing the false confessions and statements described above. Once police got what they wanted, and only then, they released the detainees, on condition that they sign statements saying they had no complaints about their treatment.

During the summer months, Uzbek television broadcast a series of scripted public confessions in which people say they were misled into going to the protest, attest that they have repented, beg for forgiveness from President Karimov, and are then shown being handed over to their parents and mahalla committee for rehabilitation.