Germany – which has a historical weakness on human rights – prepares to push EU foreign ministers to drop sanctions against Uzbekistan on Monday. This comprehensive report is from IWPR.

Should EU End Sanctions Against Uzbekistan?

Reports from Uzbekistan suggest there is little evidence of human rights improvements that would warrant the removal of sanctions.

By Caroline Tosh in London and IWPR staff in Central Asia (RCA No. 492, 11-May-07)

As the European Union prepares to vote on whether to lift the sanctions it imposed on Uzbekistan in the wake of the Andijan violence two years ago, human rights activists and journalists in the country as well as international experts warn that any relaxation of the measures will send the wrong message to Tashkent.

Germany, which currently holds the EU presidency, appears to be pushing for awkward human rights concerns to be quietly dropped from the agenda in pursuit of a new EU strategy for engaging with Central Asia. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, RFE/RL, reported on May 11 that EU ambassadors were deadlocked on whether sanctions should be renewed, softened or dropped.

Uzbek officials have sensed the new mood over recent months, and have in turn sought a rapprochement with Europe on their terms.

If Tashkent gets a clean bill of health when EU foreign ministers meet on May 14, it will have achieved this without addressing fundamental human rights concerns, and specifically without instituting the international inquiry requested by the EU, the United Nations, and countries such as the United States.

Government soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in the eastern town almost exactly two years ago, on May 13, as people gathered in protest over the trial of 23 local businessmen accused of Islamic extremism ‘ said by their families to be innocent.

The massacre is widely thought to be the worst atrocity committed by a government against demonstrators since the Chinese army killed several hundred protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The Uzbek authorities say 187 were killed, but human rights organisations put the figure closer to 800, and argue that a determined effort by the Uzbek authorities to shut down non-government organisations, NGOs, and independent media has meant the truth behind events has never emerged.

Human rights groups are urging the EU to maintain the sanctions, and are calling for them to press for an international inquiry into Andijan and raise other human rights concerns.

See full article here

http://www.iwpr.net:80/?p=rca&s=f&o=335486&apc_state=henh

On 14 May the German Presidency of the EU will push hard again to persuade the EU to lift the limited sanctions imposed on Uzbekistan after the massacre of at least 700 demonstrators at Andijan two years ago.

Not only has Uzbekistan not agreed to the international inquiry the EU demanded, but since Andijan there have been thousands of new political arrests, including of many high profile human rights defenders I worked with. Here is a report from Human Rights Watch on the sentencing of their activist and interpreter Umida Niyazova.

Uzbekistan; Rights Defender Sentenced to Seven Years

EU Should Demand Release Before Sanctions Decision

(New York, May 1, 2007) ‘ The sentencing of Umida Niazova, an Uzbek human rights defender, should compel the European Union to make the release of rights defenders a necessary precondition for any further easing of sanctions against Uzbekistan, Human Rights Watch said today. Niazova is the translator for Human Rights Watch’s Tashkent office.

Niazova was sentenced on May 1 to seven years of imprisonment on politically-motivated charges by the Sergeli District Court in Tashkent. She was convicted of illegal border crossing, smuggling, and distributing material causing public disorder by using financial support from foreign governments (articles 223, part 1; 246, part 1 and 244/1, part 3 v of the Uzbek criminal code).

‘The Uzbek authorities are punishing Umida Niazova because she worked for groups that expose human rights abuses and they want to send a chilling message to others like her,’ said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. ‘Uzbekistan should immediately release Niazova and at least 14 other human rights activists wrongfully detained.’

Human Rights Watch also called on Uzbekistan’s other key partners, including Russia, to use their influence with the Uzbek government to insist on the release of imprisoned defenders.

A Human Rights Watch representative who monitored the trial said that at the May 1 hearing Niazova told the court that she had worked for 10 years in human rights, and that it was normal to criticize the authorities.

‘This is the idea of a democracy,’ Niazova told the court. ‘If we want to build civil society, criticism of the authorities must be allowed.’

Niazova also expressed hope for a mild verdict because her 2-year-old son had just started to talk. Niazova remained calm during the sentencing.

Niazova’s family was allowed into the courtroom, but representatives of the German and US embassies were denied entry.

‘There is already a German present,’ said Judge Nizam Rustamov, referring to the Human Rights Watch representative, who is a German citizen.

Before her arrest, Niazova was a regular contributor to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and other news agencies. She also worked with such international nongovernmental organizations as Freedom House and Internews.

Niazova is one of 15 human rights defenders imprisoned by Uzbek authorities on politically motivated charges as part of its brutal crackdown on civil society unleashed in the aftermath of the May 2005 massacre in Andijan, in which security forces killed hundreds of mostly unarmed protesters as they fled a demonstration.

EU sanctions on Uzbekistan ‘ put in place in November 2005 in response to the Uzbek government’s refusal to allow an independent, international inquiry into the massacre ‘ are to be reviewed on May 14 at a meeting of the EU General Affairs and External Relations Council. One of the assessment criteria for reconsidering the sanctions is ‘willingness to adhere to the principles of respect for human rights, rule of law and fundamental freedoms.’ But the European Union never made the release of Uzbekistan’s human rights defenders a condition for easing the sanctions, choosing instead to focus on establishing a ‘structured human rights dialogue’ with the Uzbek government.

The European Union, led by the German presidency, has also made no public statements about Niazova or any of the other imprisoned human rights defenders, nor has it called for their release.

‘Niazova’s sentence is first and foremost a disgrace for the Uzbek government, but it’s a disgrace for the EU too,’ said Cartner. ‘The EU now needs to make absolutely clear there will be no consideration of easing any sanctions until Niazova and the 14 other imprisoned defenders are released.’

Other imprisoned Uzbek human rights defenders are: Gulbahor Turaeva, Saidjahon Zainabitdinov, Mutabar Tojibaeva, Nosim Isakov, Norboi Kholjigitov, Abdusattor Irzaev, Habibulla Okpulatov, Azam Formonov, Alisher Karamatov, Mamarajab Nazarov, Dilmurad Mukhiddinov, Rasul Khudainasarov, Bobumurod Mavlanov, and Ulugbek Kattabekov.

I won’t here detail again the horrors of Uzbek jails, but I shudder at poor Umida spending years in one. Nor should we forget Sanjar Unmarov or any of the thousands of political prisoners also jailed.

Deutsche Welt has, like all foreign news organisations in Uzbekistan, been closed down and its Uzbek correspondent has fled the country. Germany maintains an airbase in Uzbekistan, at Termez, and maintains a close alliance with the Uzbek regime. The German Foreign Minister is a close protege of the “retired” ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Schroeder is the highly paid Chairman of Nord Stream, the 51% owned Gazprom subsidiary building a $8 billion pipeline to bring more Russian and Central Asian gas to Europe. Schroeder pushed the scheme through as Chancellor then moved instantly to head it on retirement. Schroeder is very close to Alisher Usmanov, chairman of Gazprom Invest Holdings. Usmanov, an Uzbek and major Russian oligarch, engineeered Gazprom’s takeover of the Uzbek gas reserves in the last two years. Usmanov is the closest political ally of Karimov and his daughter, Gulnara. Gulnara received a bribe of $88million from Gazprom Invest Holdings in return for the contacts.

The EU sanctions on Uzbekistan include a travel ban on senior Uzbek officials directly implicated in the Andijan massacre. Germany fought successfully to keep Karimov and his family off the list. The top name on the list was Almatov, then Uzbek Interior Minister. On the very first day of the ban, he was allowed in to Germany for medical treatment – which took place privately in a hospital in Gerhard Schroeder’s home town, under a doctor who is a personal friend of Schroeder.

Uzbekistan ranks with North Korea and Burma as the worst totalitarian state on earth. You would hope that Germans, with their history, would be wary of open support for a country maintaining death camps for thousands of political prisoners. But in fact the German government does not give a bollocks about human rights.

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There has been something of a stir lately over Le Monde’s revelation that France passed warning to the CIA in 2001 that Bin Laden was planning an aircraft hijacking.

Nobody has paid a great deal of attention to the fact that the French intelligence came from the Uzbek security services.

But the headlines about France warning the US of 9/11 are complete nonsense. The alleged intelligence was about a plan to hijack a plane at Frankfurt airport. Flying the plane into buildings didn’t feature.

There was then (and is) intelligence cooperation between France and Uzbekistan, but in 2001 as now the Uzbek intelligence liaison relationship with Germany and the US was stronger than with France. It seems most improbable that the Uzbeks learnt of a plan to hijack a flight between Germany and the US, and told only the French.

An Associated Press report speculates that the Frankfurt plan was disinformation spread by Al-Qaida to distract attention from the 9/11 plot. http://www.topix.net/content/ap/0152981010029215169242201015390845871804That is obvious rubbish. Bin Laden would not want to give any indication that he was switching tactics to aircraft hijack, and have people looking at aviation security.

A far more likely explanation is that this was disinformation by the Uzbek security services. I have seen a great deal of intelligence passed on by the Uzbek intelligence services. It is inevitably self-serving, and almost always untrue.

The purpose of the Uzbek intelligence services in passing intelligence to the West is to persuade us that they and the Karimov regime must be supported as a bastion against a massive Islamic terror plot. They seek to portray all domestic opposition as al-Qaeda linked.

It goes wider than that. Consider this – across a huge swathe of the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkic peoples have been struggling to emerge from colonial occupation. This belt runs from the Chechens of the West through the Tatars, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Kazakh, Kirghiz and Mongols to the Uighurs of China in the East. The wave of struggles for national liberation of these peoples is perhaps the most important political fact since the fall of the iron curtain, yet completely neglected.

The Chechens and Uighurs are being brutally suppressed by the Russian and Chinese imperial powers respectively. Those like the Uzbeks who have achieved nominal nation status are suffering under the fierce regime of the surviving indigenous colonial cadres.

As it happens, these Turkic nations engaged in a struggle for liberation are Muslim. By one of history’s unpleasant chances (and I would argue it is no more than that – there are transactions, but almost no causal relationship either way) their efforts at national re-emergence have coincided with a surge in fringe Islamic radicalism. This has enabled their opponents to attempt to tar them with that brush.

Uzbek intelligence is therefore primarily aimed at portraying Uzbek dissidents as Islamic terrorists, and linking them to Al Qaida and to Chechen and Uighur “terrorists”. The governments of Russia and China are enthusiastic co-participants in building the same story to discredit their own Chechen and Uighur dissidents, and the other authoritarian governments of Central Asia join in too. The most important diplomatic entity in the region – the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement – functions entirely on this principle.

The sad thing is that, such is the appetite of Western intelligence agencies for any material that stokes the so-called “War on Terror”, MI6, the CIA and others accept this self-serving dross as true, even when it is fabricated in Uzbekistan’s notorious torture chambers. That is the issue over which I resigned from the diplomatic service, as detailed in my book “Murder in Samarkand”.

The clue in the 2001 French intelligence causing the current stir is that the Uzbeks claimed that Bin Laden met with Chechen terrorists to plan the Frankfurt hijack. Of course there was no such plot. This so-called Uzbek/French intelligence was just part of the propaganda campaign to link the Chechen cause to Bin Laden.

Much saddened by the death of Paul Bergne, one of my three predecessors as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.

For most of his career Paul worked for MI6, but he was John Buchan not Ian Fleming. He spoke a vast array of Central Asian and Middle Eastern languages, and was a qualified and genuine authority on the archaeology of the area. He could read ancient as well as modern languages. You suspected he could speak them too.

Paul was in many ways the archetypal establishment figure. He was from exactly the stock of most British Ambassadors – Winchester (one of Britain’s most expensive private schools) and Cambridge. He had A’Court as a middle name. In many ways he represented the privilege that I so disliked in the Foreign Office. But I really liked Paul.

He was the only diplomat I ever met who truly shared, not just understood, my gut revulsion at the horrors of the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan. In his time he had been almost as forceful and diplomatically unconventional as I. The Uzbek government had put out feelers about having him removed. In a conversation at the University of Michigan he told me he felt I had crossed an absolute line when, on occasion, I had physically jostled the Uzbek security services. What would happen, he asked, if foreign diplomats started striking policemen in London? I pointed out that the cases were different – I was trying to save life: Uzbekistan was a dictatorship, we were a democracy. His eyes twinkled: “Really, Craig, you’re such an imperialist!”

Paul was called out of retirement to be the liaison with the Northern Alliance in the war in Afghanistan. It was a dashing adventure so late in his career. In the Foreign Office at that time we referred to him as “Greenmantle”, only half in jest. He had no illusions at all about General Dostum and his thugs, and though keen to see the Taliban removed, remained deeply ambivalent about the consequences of Western intervention. He opposed the War in Iraq.

His last publication was a review in “Asian Affairs” of Murder in Samarkand, which I have not seen yet. It is not, I am told, entirely friendly, but Paul’s views will remain worth considering.