Eurasia Insight
June 30

A series of recent disclosures about abuse has resurrected questions about the use of torture in Uzbekistan’s prisons. Following criticism from both a prominent human rights organization and a US congressman, Uzbek President Islam Karimov offered to open one of his largest prisons to outside inspection. Nevertheless, prison safeguards against the use of torture remain unclear.

The use of torture in Uzbek prisons has long been an issue complicating the international community’s relationship with Tashkent. A US State Department memorandum issued in mid May described Uzbek authorities as increasingly willing to address the torture issue. However, at the annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, held in early May in Tashkent, Karimov angered human rights activists by declining to specifically condemn the practice.

On June 3, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published an advisory detailing the apparent torture death of Otamaza Gafarov, who had been due to be released in September after serving a seven-year prison term for stealing state property. According to the HRW advisory, Gafarov died May 3 – a day before the start of the EBRD gathering. "When they [Gafarov’s relatives] retrieved his bruised body, prison authorities told them that he died of a heart attack, although one guard told the family that Gafarov’s death ‘happened differently,’" the HRW advisory said.

Gafarov’s case attracted the attention of some US lawmakers in Washington. On June 5, Representative Christopher Smith (R-New Jersey) condemned Karimov for tolerating torture. "Tragically, this has become a simple pattern. People are taken into police custody alive, and they emerge dead," he said in a press statement.

"Attempts by Uzbek authorities to explain away the mutilated bodies they return to grieving families as the victims of ’high blood pressure’ or other natural causes have failed to mask an unrelenting pattern of torture and abuse," Smith added.

Smith and HRW representatives contend that fresh reports on torture deaths undermine the State Department memo’s contention that Uzbekistan has shown "substantial and continuing progress" on human rights. The high-profile international criticism, some Uzbekistan watchers suggest, may have played a role in spurring Karimov to invite reporters from foreign news organizations to visit a major state prison on June 23.

International scrutiny of the prison torture issue could intensify in the coming weeks. In a statement distributed by the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, the father of a torture victim plans to organize a protest outside government offices in Tashkent on July 8. In the statement, Sotvaldi Abdullayev asserted that his son Shukhrat was tortured to death while in prison in 1999. "Using peaceful means, I have a right to express my protest against this outrage and lawlessness," Abdullayev’s statement said.

Human Rights Watch has written that inadequate training of police officers makes torture a relatively common practice, dwarfing efforts to document violations, much less stop them. In 1997, more than 150,000 citizens wrote official complaints about police malpractice. However, legal proceedings were started against only dozens of policemen; many were acquitted or received only light administrative discipline. The number of people writing such complaints has decreased in recent years, as conventional wisdom suggests that complaining will trigger officers’ vengeance.

Meanwhile, Uzbek law-enforcement officials describe themselves victims of a heartless system. "You should not think that all the police do is beat the arrested," says investigator Alisher. "The policemen are human beings too, and they try to convince the people without resorting to violence. There are psychological techniques. We inherited them from our Communist predecessors."

The Uzbek criminal justice system, as currently constructed, seems to encourage the practice of torture because law-enforcement officers depend on ever-improving case closure rates for advancement and job security. The same applies to prosecutors. According to Lieutenant Colonel N, a former department chief, policemen often cajole detainees to plead guilty in order to keep their numbers up. He claims that his bosses demanded constant growth in criminal case solution rates.

These pressures darken Uzbekistan’s official 80 percent success rate in solving murders. According to Sobir, a former investigator, police have a variety of methods to coerce false confessions. These include dragging detainees by their legs against the ground, often damaging internal organs. (Police call this "sitting on concrete.") Other measures include using gas masks to temporary suffocate a detainee, administering weak electric shocks, whacking a subject with a bottle or a wet towel, or keeping a detainee awake for 24 hours with endless questioning. None of these techniques leave scars, and many prompt such fear among detainees that they will sign a "confession" to obtain relief, according to several sources familiar with the workings of the criminal justice system.

Alisher described another way to produce a confession: "If the police have an unsolved case, they find a person without influential relatives or friends and arrest him for a couple of days….Then he is told that his wife was taken to the police too, and now she is going to be raped by convicts …The person is led to the lock-up and shown, through an eyehole, his wife sitting in the ward. The person gives up. In fact, his wife was only invited [and] promised a meeting with her husband. She is not arrested. She is released soon. As soon as the person is ready to ’confess,’ he is taken to the prosecutor where he …signs the protocol and real criminal proceedings are started against him."

Subjects who withstand violence rarely go free to describe it. Mr. N. of Tashkent Province says the police threw him naked in the snow, and then dragged him across a floor. He endured the torture and refused to make a false confession. Nevertheless, he ended up being sentenced to a 14-year-prison term.

Only on rare occasions are authorities held accountable for torture. In one example, Samarkand police officers told EurasiaNet that a detective once injected drugs repeatedly into a person who refused to make a false confession. The victim subsequently died of an overdose. Police officers later threw the victim’s body into a river. However, the victim’s parents pursued the case, demanding restitution. Ultimately, the investigator fled, and the two police sergeants involved in the case were convicted in connection with the death.

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