More Arrests of Uzbek Rights Activists

Arrests and harassment of human rights activists in Uzbekistan suggest the situation remains as bad as ever.



The human rights group Ezgulik reported on July, 27 that human rights activist Farid Yangeldin had been assaulted by several men in the eastern city of Andijan.



Yangeldin is the husband of Gulbahor Turaeva, a well-known human rights defender who has spent time in jail for her activities.



Turaeva believes her husband was beaten up because of the work they both do.



In a separate incident on July 28, Oyazimkhon Khidirova, who heads a local human rights group, was arrested in the Jizak province of central Uzbekistan.



Officially she was charged with “disorderly conduct”, but the real reason for her arrest appears to be political. Khidirova had been investigating violations of farmers’ rights during a process in which smaller farms were consolidated into bigger units, a policy the authorities launched late last year. Khidirova herself was stripped of her land in this process.



On July 17, Farhodkhon Mukhtarov, a member of the Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan, was arrested in the capital Tashkent in what colleagues insist is a fabricated case.



The arrest took place after Mukhtarov had complained to local prosecutors about the behaviour of police, who had intervened in the sale of his apartment.



Tatyana Dovlatova of the Human Rights Alliance witnessed an incident in which the district police chief “waved the prosecutor’s warrant for Mukhtarov’s arrest on extortion charges and warned against trusting any human rights activist”.



“This complicated case started only because Farhod is a human rights activist”, said Bahodir Namazov of the Tashkent-based Association for Prisoners of Conscience.



External observersperts on human rights are concerned that the Uzbek authorities continue to pressure human rights defenders for engaging in legitimate activity.



According to the New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch, at least 12 human rights activists are still being held in Uzbek prisons; they were jailed in the clampdown that followed the Andijan violence of May 2005, when government troops shot hundreds of demonstrators.



(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service has resumed, covering Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.)