The Uzbek government’s decision to withdraw from the pro-Russian Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC) is not only a signal of Tashkent’s commitment to the “Uzbek Path.” It also suggests “a new openness to the West” that may eventually generate openings for reform, says Uzbek reformer Gulam Umarov.
Umarov cited the case of his father Sanjar Umarov, the former head of the Sunshine Uzbekistan Opposition Alliance, amongst others, to insist that it is “extremely important” that human rights be on the agenda of any dialog with one of the world’s most repressive regimes, he told a recent Washington meeting co-hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy and the Center for International Private Enterprise. His father’s condition remains a cause for grave concern after 13 months in solitary confinement.
“Those classified as political prisoners, such as practicing Muslims or government critics, face ill-treatment and torture” while in Uzbek prisons, says human rights activist Mutabar Tojibaeva, herself a political prisoner for several years. “They are subject to verbal abuse, as well as physical and psychological pressure. Prison workers treat them like animals.”
Uzbek dissidents are limited by the realities in Uzbekistan today. Despite these limitations, they seek a dialog that will be effective in assisting with processes that ”open, reform and democratize” the country, such as the programs to improve transparency and minimize corruption on which he had worked with CIPE.
The country had experienced a cycle of tentative openings to the West followed by repression, said Miriam Lanskoy, NED’s senior program officer for Central Asia and the Caucasus. But the strategic partnership agreement with the U.S. was short-lived and the regime had stifled domestic civil society and pressured foreign NGOs to leave even before the Andijon massacre.
Civil society activists had been jailed and exiled, NGOs subsumed into GONGOs, and the few remaining independent actors were limited to “pushing the envelope” of incremental political reform. Youth activism was one sign of hope, said Lanskoy, a welcome contrast to the graying of the human rights community elsewhere in Eurasia.
The regime has a dedicated Center for Monitoring Mass Communications for violations of Uzbek laws and cultural norms. Since 2002, over 10,000 political prisoners have been held on charges such as “encroachment on the constitutional order,” “anti-state activities,” and “infringing the honor and dignity of the president”. In one of his “more comic attempts to disguise his regime from the prying eyes of the west, Karimov once established his own human rights organization, but when its president went to Bishkek for a conference, had him abducted and charged with sedition.”
Engaging such authoritarian regimes is a delicate business. Human rights groups condemned as “a disgrace” the visit of the head of the Uzbek Security Service to Germany in October on the same day that an Uzbek court sentenced a prominent dissident to 10 years in prison on politically motivated charges. Azam Turgunov, the head of an unregistered rights group called Mazlum was sentenced days after the European Union praised Uzbekistan for its “improving rights record.”
But German officials respond to such criticisms by insisting that long term engagement with Uzbek officials and the Uzbek military is a far more fruitful strategy for promoting reforms than publicly criticizing Tashkent, notes analyst Alexander Cooley. In dealing with Uzbekistan, as with other authoritarian Central Asian states, the West must maintain a “precarious balance” between strategic access and democratic values, he argues.
Maintaining such a balance is further complicated by Russia’s “pushback against the democracy promotion agenda of the West”, contesting the spread of transatlantic democratic institutions, and the Central Asian states’ alternative regional mechanism in the form of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Cooley advocates “a more coordinated and reinvigorated transatlantic” approach on the part of the West “to promote both its interests and its democratic values throughout this changing and now critically important part of the world.”
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