Massacre in Uzbekistan

Craig Murray

This is a trailer for an extremely important documentary by Michael Andersen. The complicity of NATO and EU governments with the Karimov regime is one of the clearest glimpses of the evil motives that lurk behind the reasonable image that western politicians strive to portray. The complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring these facts is terrifying.

As NATO intensifies its logistical transit through Uzbekistan, as Britain increases training for the Uzbek military and secret services and looks to further arms sales, please bring this documentary to the attention of everyone you can, in any way that you can.

The appearance in the trailer of Pierre Morel, EU Special Representative for Central Asia, is noteworthy. He really is one of the nastiest men in Europe, with not even the slightest pretence of any concern for human rights except as a bureaucratic box to be ticked. What is the real interest of this arch European powercrat? You will hardly be surprised to hear it is Central Asia’s oil and gas.

One of the most important diplomatic developments in the last year – not mentioned anywhere in the lamestream media – has been the westward shift of the Government of Azerbaijan. Under hereditary President Aliev, son of Putin’s ex boss and mentor in the KGB, they had seemed the closest of Russia’s allies. But I noted a few months ago that remarkably on Syria they were voting with the U.S. and against Russia at the UN Security Council. Now they have agreed that an EU hydrocarbon pipeline can pass through their waters in the Caspian – thus negating Putin’s blocking move when he effectively annexed part of Georgia.

Germany now sees the eventual transit of Turkmenistan’s and Uzbekistan’s gas through Ukraine and Poland and into the Nordstream project, while bypassing Russia, as a tantalisingly close prospect. The furious courting of Central Asian dictators is therefore viewed as an unbounded success, and mangled corpses and tortured women an irrelevancy – along with the probable extinction of the sturgeon and other inconveniences. No wonder Morel looks self-satisfied.

I do hope the Central Asians who suffer grinding poverty and terrible repression will one day understand all this, and once they have their freedom will not forgive.

Uzbekistan carrying out forced sterilisations, say women

The Guardian

Natalia Antelava
Evidence of operations under cover of caesareans as doctors claim targets set to help control population

 

Two weeks after Bakhor came home with her newborn son the joy of the new baby was overshadowed by a growing suspicion that something had gone badly wrong.

"I kept bleeding heavy black lumps, and the pain was unbearable, I thought I had a tumour," the 32-year-old Uzbek says.

It took Bakhor four months to save up money for an ultrasound. She cries as she remembers the result. During the caesarean section, the doctor explained, she had a hysterectomy.

"The doctor said 'you don't have a uterus any more'. He said: 'What do you need it for? Two children is enough for you'," she says.

A two-month long investigation for the BBC World Service and Radio 4 has uncovered what appears to be a systematic state-run programme in Uzbekistan to sterilise women, often against their will and without their knowledge.

Uzbek president Islam Karimov tolerates no dissent in his country and women and doctors who told their stories did so on condition of anonymity. Over secure phone lines doctors and health ministry officials told me that while first recorded cases of forced sterilisations go back to 2004, in 2009 sterilisations became a state policy. "All of us have a sterilization quota," said a gynaecologist in the capital, Tashkent. "My quota is four women a month. We are under a lot of pressure." In rural areas, doctors say, the number can be as high as eight women a week.


"We go from house to house convincing women to have the operation," said a chief surgeon in a rural hospital. "It's easy to talk a poor woman into it. It's also easy to trick them," he admitted.

Several doctors said that in the last two years there had been a dramatic increase in caesarean sections across the country, disputing official statements that only 6.8% of women give birth that way. "I believe 80% of women give birth through c-sections. This makes it very easy to tie the fallopian tubes," said one gynaecologist.

Obama to Aid Uzbek Dictatorship

AntiWar
Steven Zunes

Karimov’s Uzbekistan Boils People Alive (Until Dead)

The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, in a move initiated by the Obama administration, has voted to waive Bush-era human rights restrictions on military aid to the Islam Karimov dictatorship in Uzbekistan, one of the most brutal and repressive regimes on the planet. The lifting of the restrictions, now part of the Foreign Operations bill, is before the full Senate and appears to have bipartisan support. The Obama administration has indicated that it intends to provide taxpayer-funded military assistance to Uzbekistan once the legislation passes both houses of Congress.

Torture is endemic in Karimov’s Uzbekistan, where his regime has banned all opposition political parties, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human rights and NGOs out of the country, suppressed religious freedom, and annually taken as many as 2 million children out of school to engage in forced labor for the cotton harvest. Thousands of dissidents have been jailed, and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literally boiled alive.

In reaction to the Obama administration’s efforts, 20 human rights, labor, consumer, and other groups signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying, “We strongly urge you to oppose passage of the law and not to invoke this waiver.” The signers encouraged the administration “to stand behind your strong past statements regarding human rights abuses in Uzbekistan” and not move toward “business as usual” with that regime.

Signatories included the AFL-CIO, Amnesty International USA, and Human Rights Watch, as well as organizations with close ties to the foreign policy establishment like Freedom House and the International Crisis Group.

White House Claims

Despite evidence to the contrary, Secretary of State Clinton, who visited Uzbekistan on Oct. 23, has claimed that the regime was “showing signs of improving its human rights record and expanding political freedoms.” Similarly, when asked about the dictator’s claim that he was committed to leave a legacy of freedom and democracy for his grandchildren, a senior State Department official responded, “Yeah. I do believe him. I mean, he’s said several times that he’s committed to this. He’s made a speech last November where he talked about this.” In response to some skeptical follow-up questions by journalists, the official replied that “we still have some quite serious concerns about the situations on the human rights.” However, “we think that there is really quite an important opening now to work on that stuff, also work on developing civil society, which again President Karimov has expressed support for. So, yeah, I do take him at his word.”

A White House official told me that Obama had spoken directly to Karimov in recent weeks about human rights concerns, noting “he said more on democracy in that call than eight years of Bush administration dealings with Karimov.” The official also insisted that the Obama administration would condition future policy on the regime’s performance and that was made clear to the Uzbek leadership.
U.S. administrations, however, have rarely followed through on suspending aid when regimes fail to improve their human rights record. Despite assertions that military aid and cooperation can be used to improve a regime’s human rights record, it usually results in the opposite. Indeed, this line has been used for decades — most notoriously as a rationale for arming the death squads and murderous counterinsurgency units of the right-wing junta in El Salvador in the 1980s — and has been repeatedly shown to facilitate rather than limit the repression.

The Obama administration is making this controversial move in order to open the Central Asian nation to transit military equipment and other supplies in and out of Afghanistan, particularly after neighboring Kyrgyzstan looks likely to close its U.S. military base in Manas when the lease runs out in 2014. Potentially of greater consequence, Pakistan has threatened to cut off supply routes to U.S. forces in that landlocked country, so there is a scramble to look for alternatives. Unfortunately, as defenders of administration policy have put it, Afghanistan is surrounded by dictatorships, leaving them little choice but to provide assistance in return for transit rights.