Appeal for victim of Uzbek ‘official democracy’

Caption: Jailed dissident Sanjar Umarov was a founding member of the Sunshine Uzbekistan opposition coalition

Gulambek Umarov yesterday made a personal appeal to Uzbekistan president, Islam Karimov, for the release of his father, jailed dissident Sanjar Umarov. The founder of the Sunshine Uzbekistan opposition coalition is in poor health and his life endangered. Family members who visited him last week noted visible signs of torture.

Meanwhile, Uzbek authorities today banned Human Rights Watch’s representative, in defiance of the European Union’s request that the group’s Tashkent director be accredited. HRW notes that, halfway through the current EU sanctions cycle, initiated following the May 2005 Andijon massacre and subsequent crackdown on civil society, the regime has backtracked on human rights standards in a number of respects.

Sanjar Umarov “sought to establish a coalition of independent civil society groups that could engage in a dialogue with the [government] to bring about democratic and much-needed economic reforms through gradual and evolutionary means,” his son told a UN forum on political prisoners.

Although the Uzbek constitution is nominally democratic, including provisions on civil and human rights, it is a “kind of ‘official democracy’” that “serves to limit freedom and restrain the potential of Uzbekistan’s finest asset, its own people.”  His father is serving a prison term of over seven years after criticizing the authorities’ actions at Andijon. In a further instance of the criminalization of dissent, he was arrested in October 2005 on charges of embezzlement, money laundering, and tax evasion.

Uzbekistan, which Freedom House counts among the world’s most repressive regimes, is also gaining notoriety for its monitoring and censorship of the internet. The regime has a dedicated Center for Monitoring Mass Communications for violations of Uzbek laws and cultural norms. It has also mobilized a network of accomplices, as one analyst’s story illustrates:

 ”A colleague of ours went into a cyber café in Tashkent and tried to get on to a blocked website.  He could get on to the first page but when he went to click through it just wouldn’t load, so after about five minutes of trying went to leave. But the person who was running the internet café was being very coy and not wanting to let him go. Within five minutes a non-uniformed member of the security forces came and started interrogating him, ‘why were you looking at this, why were you trying to get to it?’ Fortunately, our colleague had a diplomatic passport, he got off. But it is clear there was collusion between the owner of the café and the local security forces.”

Since 2002, over 10,000 political prisoners have been held on charges such as “encroachment on the constitutional order,” “anti-state activities,” “infringement on the honor and dignity of the president,” and “membership in an Islamic terrorist organization,” loosely interpreted as any Muslim majority organization. As a report in tomorrow’s press recounts, 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.”