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Boston Globe
December 20
 he police came for Anvar Rasulov because once, long ago, he read the wrong magazine. They came for Orif Rakhmanov because he argued with a man who did not want to pay a two-cent fee at an outdoor market. They came for Basit Abdullayev because he worshiped at the local mosque. And when they had taken him away, they came back to get his brother, Jabar.
The charges were the same as they usually are in Uzbekistan: religious extremism and conspiring to overthrow the state. The trials were short, the guilty verdicts a foregone conclusion, as were the lengthy sentences to a labor camp.
These men are among thousands of people who have been arrested in Uzbekistan's sweeping crackdown against Muslim rebels whose stated aim is to establish an Islamic state in this secular and authoritarian Central Asian republic.
Security Council OK's sanctions on Afghanistan, cites terrorist training. A37.
But family members and human rights activists say that many of those arrested are innocent victims, caught up in a purge that people here find reminiscent of Josef Stalin's Great Terror of the 1930s.
They describe a cycle of repression in which police and security forces use beatings and torture to extract confessions from detainees, a legal system that seldom grants acquittals and never brings torturers to justice, and prison camps in which torture and death are on the rise.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch, in a report released yesterday, detailed dozens of accounts by victims and their families of brutal and systematic torture at the hands of police and security forces. The report alleged that police use beatings, suffocation, electric shock, rape, and other sexual abuse to coerce victims to confess to such crimes as ''religious extremism,'' and to force them to incriminate others.
The report said that Uzbek government officials hold families accountable for the actions of any of their members suspected of illegal religious activity. It said relatives of those accused or sought are often detained, held as hostages, threatened with torture, or are tortured themselves. Rights activists say authorities have set up a series of concentration camps in the Karakalpakstan region of western Uzbekistan.
''You are supposed to go to the camps and die,'' said Acacia Shields of Human Rights Watch, who has spent 20 months documenting abuses in Uzbekistan. She described the case of Numan Saidamirov, a leader of the banned Islamic group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, who was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment this fall. His body was returned to his family Oct. 8, bearing cuts and bruises and signs of abuse with a blunt object, such as a bottle. The official cause of death was heart failure.
The purge has created an atmosphere of suspicion and fear in Uzbekistan. Neighbors inform on one another. Friends and colleagues of those detained are assumed guilty by association. Naturally, people are afraid to talk to strangers.
''This is a Stalinist regime,'' said an analyst for a Western think tank in the region, who did not want to be named because he is an Uzbek with family in the capital, Tashkent. ''They've arrested all my friends, where is the guarantee that they won't arrest me?''
Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan's former Communist Party boss who became the country's first elected president in 1991, began clamping down on dissent almost immediately. Arguing that Uzbekistan had to avoid the chaos and civil war that enveloped Tajikistan and Afghanistan to the south, Karimov has banned opposition parties, set heavy restrictions on the press, and imposed state control over mosques.
The big roundups began in 1998, and increased in February 1999, when five car bombs ripped through central Tashkent, killing 16. The targets of the crackdown became supporters of a guerrilla group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which fought government troops in August and September. In November, Uzbekistan's Supreme Court convicted its leaders in absentia in the 1999 car bombings.
Nowhere has the crackdown been more acute than in Namangan, in the heart of the Fergana Valley, flatlands wedged among the Tian Shan mountains that are the center of Uzbekistan's post-Soviet Muslim resurgence.
Akhmat Abdullayev, one of the few human rights activists in the region, says that someone from every fifth family in Namangan has been convicted of Article 159, attempting to overthrow the state.
But to be arrested, one does not need to be a Muslim or a dissident. This was the case of Orif Rakhmanov, a cashier at a street bazaar in Namangan who refused to let a man enter without paying the two-cent fee. The man wrote a letter to the police, denouncing Rakhmonov as a religious extremist.
Rakhmonov's wife, Saida Eganbeddiyeva, said 11 officers searched their bare, tiny house and found nothing. Finally, they put a sawed-off shotgun behind the refrigerator, she said, and arrested Rakhmonov for illegal possession of an assault weapon, and therefore, religious extremism and attempting to overthrow the state. Neighbors pleaded Rakhmonov's innocence, saying he did not even attend mosque. But to no avail.
''There is no system of appeals,'' said Demira Nebjanova, whose husband, Basit Abdullayev, was arrested in 1999, then pardoned, then arrested again in May. ''If they arrest you, and charge you with Article 159, you are guilty. Court cases are a formality.''
Abdullayev was charged with extremism because he once met with foreign Islamic missionaries, which was enough for Uzbek authorities to start rounding up his family members, too.
Nebjanova, who lives with her five children in a half-completed home in a rundown neighborhood in Namangan, said her husband has been beaten and isolated by prison authorities.
She said that the government refused to pay child support, and that she was forced to take odd jobs to survive. Some wives of those convicted of religious crimes have been forced to endure worse: Local officials often hold rallies where speakers denounce them as traitors and demand they beg Karimov for clemency.
Karimov has granted amnesty to political prisoners on several occasions. But the most recent amnesty in September did not cover people convicted of religious crimes.
Committing such a crime can be the result of the most innocuous act. Anvar Rasulov was detained because he had a radio in his house that police found suspicious. The radio later checked out, but during his interrogation Rasulov mentioned that he had read an Islamic magazine in 1992. That led to a conviction.
''Many innocent people sit in jail,'' said Musafar Iskhakhov, a rights activist in Andijan, an hour's drive south of Namangan.
''All police need is to plant four bullets in your pocket to put you away,'' Iskhakhov said. ''No one knows how many people have been arrested - there were 3,000 cases last year, and this year we estimate the same amount. They are arresting people all the time, we can't keep up.''
Appearing in religious clothing, or even wearing a beard, is enough to draw the police's attention. Men have begun sewing their pockets shut to try prevent police from planting evidence on them.
But if the authorities target someone, they can easily fabricate a case. Kamillidin Satarov, a lawyer who defended suspected dissidents in court, was arrested for bribery recently. Police had coerced a woman, whose son was serving a 12-year sentence on a drug conviction, to dump marked bills on Satarov's desk. Satarov received a nine-year sentence.
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Torture called problem in Uzbekistan
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UPI
December 20
 xecutive Director of Human Rights
Watch Kenneth Roth on Wednesday characterized the situation regarding
torture in Uzbekistan as "very serious."
Roth said torture of detainees in criminal investigations was widespread
in Uzbekistan because persons detained by militia are subjected to physical
and psychological abuse in pre-trial detention. He said that sometimes
militia torture defendants to force them to incriminate other people.
Human Rights Watch, a watchdog body, reports that detainees' allegations
of torture are on the rise in Uzbekistan.
According to the Human Rights Watch report, torture victims may be those
suspected of committing ordinary crimes, or accused of membership in banned
political or religious organizations, or those alleged to have committed
crimes having to do with religious beliefs or activities.
Human Rights Watch reports that the most common form of torture is
prolonged beatings, involving punching, kicking, or blows with clubs or
other implements. Other methods include asphyxiation through the use of gas
masks or plastic bags, electric shock, burning, cutting, sexual violence,
and denial of food and water.
Human Rights Watch quotes a letter from executed Dmitri Chikunov to his
mother in which he wrote in Russian, "Immediately after arrest, even before
we arrived at the UVD [Department of Internal Affairs], one of the
operatives (whose last name I later learned is Grigorian) caught my head in
the car door and kicked me several times in the abdomen."
"When we arrived -- throughout the whole way he beat me with all his might
with his fists and elbows -- they led me to a big office where there were
seven or eight operatives," Chikunov wrote. "Without letting me say one word
they tore off my necktie and pressed me up against the wall to beat me --
each of them beat me in any way he could."
Chikunov lost consciousness. "The last thing that I remember is the voice
of two of them -- Grigorian and one other (later I learned that he was the
investigator Makhamatkulov) -- were shouting at me that I was faking it, and
that they should give me some more," Chikunov wrote.
Human Rights Watch gives the names of eight persons who died in pre-trial
detention and seven persons who died after conviction from torture in prison
Uzbekistan's international commitments and its domestic law contain
numerous protections against torture. The Supreme Court issued a plenary
decision in 1997, stating that, "any evidence obtained unlawfully shall be
devoid of evidential value and cannot form the basis of a judgment."
However, neither the international agreements, nor domestic law are
observed.
Sometimes Uzbek senior officials insist that international agreements
embody European standards not fully applicable to Uzbekistan or imply that
the security threats faced by the country somehow excuse or explain the
failure to respect human rights.
One security threat is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, held
responsible for bomb attacks in Tashkent in February 1999 that killed 16 and
wounded more than 100 people. The IMU also organized armed incursions into
the Surkhandarya and Tashkent regions of Uzbekistan this summer. The IMU
seeks to overthrow the Karimov regime and replace it with an Islamic state.
The U.S. government placed the IMU on its list of international terrorist
groups in September of this year.
On Aug. 1, Human Rights Watch wrote to Minister of Internal Affairs
Zokirjon Almatov, asking about efforts to combat torture. The ministry has
still to answer. But Roth said that Deputy Minister Sadullah Asadov.
Roth said many of the senior officials he met during his three-day visit
to Uzbekistan confirmed that torture existed in Uzbekistan.
Progress in solving the problem, Roth said, depended on the Uzbek
leadership. President Islam Karimov would be able to put an end to the
practice of torture "tomorrow," Roth said, without making any changes in
political structure.
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zbek President Islam Karimov has signed a decree on further
reforming the management of the system of public utilities.
n "anti-terrorism" campaign is under way in Tashkent Region. In all 25,539 houses, dormitories and
hotels have been inspected during the campaign. A total of 221 people have been brought to administrative
account for breaking passport regulations. The police have prevented illegal export of foodstuffs worth almost 300,000
soms and medicines worth about 2.5m soms.
esolution of the Supreme Assembly of the Republic of
Uzbekistan "On electing judges to the Constitutional Court of the Republic
of Uzbekistan"