Associated Press
November 8

The top U.S. rights envoy said Friday that there will be no expansion of relations with Uzbekistan unless the former Soviet republic radically improves its human rights record.

"The United States is deeply concerned about the human rights situation in Uzbekistan," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Lorne Craner told journalists after talks with senior Uzbek officials in the capital Tashkent.

He said there has been no fundamental improvement of the human rights situation despite the commitments made by the Uzbek government after the increased cooperation between the two countries as allies in the war on terrorism.

"We hope and expect that our relations will continue to develop and grow, however it can't happen unless Uzbekistan's record on human rights improves," he said

Craner noted some positive moves on human rights in recent months: the U.N. envoy for torture is to visit later this month at Tashkent's invitation, the government has ended its monopoly on the Internet and it has formally abolished censorship.

But he said the government's reaction to three recent cases of deaths in police custody had been unsatisfactory. He said there had been complaints about persecution from Christian groups and Uzbek authorities continued to jail members of the banned Hizb-ut-Tahrir religious group.

"We have told the Uzbek government that we don't believe that the imprisonment of Hizb-ut-Tahrir members is productive. The answer is to open up the system of religious education," he said.

On Wednesday, Deputy Foreign Minister Sadyk Safayev said Uzbekistan was pressing Western governments to declare Hizb-ut-Tahrir a terrorist organization.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir is a secretive nonviolent group that aims at creating an Islamic state. Thousands of its followers have been jailed in Uzbekistan over the past few years.

Craner met Friday with Prime Minister Otkir Sultanov, Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komilov, the justice minister and senior interior officials. He said they had discussed individual cases of human rights abuses and the need for structural changes.

Washington's alliances with the countries of former Soviet Central Asia have raised concerns that human rights are being sacrificed to the military necessity of having bases close to Afghanistan. Hundreds of U.S. troops are using a base in southeastern Uzbekistan.

Still, Western officials have repeatedly insisted they are pushing for human rights as they dramatically increase amounts of foreign aid in the region, which is still run mostly by the same autocratic leaders from the Soviet era.

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