Uzbek Prisons - A Survivor's Guide

Ruslan Sharipov in court for his appeal hearing, Sept 2003

To say that conditions in Uzbekistan's prisons are brutal is an understatement. I have spent 13 months in various detention centres and penal institutions, so I am in a position to know.

I was given a five-and-a-half-year sentence in August 2003 –reduced to four years on appeal - after being convicted on politically-motivated and fabricated charges, and then spent another 10 months in the penal system, most of the time in a prison camp. (For a report on the trial, see RCA No. 226, 15-Aug-03, Uzbekistan: One More Dissident Out of the Way )

This is an account not of my case, but of the Uzbek prison system, told from an insider’s perspective. My experience was typical in that I went through the entire cycle of penal institutions, from police cell to prison camp.

In that time I witnessed numerous cases of physical mistreatment of detainees, not to mention what I experienced personally.

Everything I describe is based on what I saw around me. Only the information on mistreatment of women is drawn from what I was told by my prison guards and fellow inmates – and the screams I heard from nearby cells.

The penal system works as follows: most suspects are transferred from a local police cell to interior ministry offices pending investigations. Prior and during trial they are held at a prison in Tashkent or another city, and if convicted are dispatched to serve their term in a prison camp, known in Russian as a "colony".

Finally, in cases where a prisoner is granted easier conditions, he or she may be transferred to a more open kind of prison alternating with house arrest.

PRETRIAL DETENTION

After two days being interrogated in two police stations in Tashkent, I was transferred to police headquarters – the city branch of the Uzbek Ministry of Internal Affairs or MVD, on May 27, 2003.

Suspects can be held for up to ten days here for interrogation. I was held for the maximum period, and spent time in three different cells located in the basement of the police building.

For the first few days, I was kept in a general holding cell, just one of many in the basement of the building, with concrete walls and floor.

This one had four wooden shelves that served as bunks – but in reality there were 12 inmates, so we had to sleep in shifts, two hours at a time. The cells were both cold and stuffy as detainees were not allowed showers and the lack of windows and open toilet in the corner made it difficult to breathe.

Food is issued only twice a day: in the morning bread with boiled water and salt, and rice or soup in the afternoon.

No medical help or medicines were provided despite numerous requests by detainees in the cell.

Every day, suspects are taken away for interrogation. This takes place in various offices in the building, depending on the department in charge of the particular case.

WIDESPREAD USE OF TORTURE

Many of the worst physical violence takes place at this stage, when the suspect is entirely in the hands of the police. They are generally seeking a signed confession – a document that in court is always sufficient to produce a guilty verdict, even if the accused recants and says he or she signed under duress.

The level of pressure applied to detainees means that most will sign anything after only two or three days – even confessing to a theft of which he or she is totally innocent. After the extraction of a confession – commonly the centrepiece of the prosecution’s case – the accused goes to the next stage, a prison in either Tashkent or another city.

Because confessions are such a crucial element of any trial, torture is commonplace, regardless of whether the alleged crime is petty theft or political sedition.

Methods used in the interior ministry include general beatings and more sophisticated brutality including electric shock, suffocation by placing a gas mask or plastic bag on the suspect's head, and pulling out fingernails and teeth.

I saw many examples of this, as well as experiencing torture myself. (For more on this, see RCA No. 234, 12-Sep-03, Uzbek Activist Confessed "Under Torture" )

I shall talk here about some of the cases I witnessed.

One detainee was severely beaten in front of me and then – in handcuffs and leg-irons – hung out of a third-floor window, head down, and told he was about to be dropped, at which point he lost consciousness. After he came round, he was tortured further with the gas-mask suffocation method and by having his feet placed in an iron bucket in which a fire had been started. He fainted again, and at this point he was taken away.

Two days after I arrived, a detainee from my cell, Shahruh, was taken up to the second floor for one of the regular interrogation sessions. When he came back – carried into the cell by a couple of policemen and dumped on one of the bunks – he was in a terrible state, covered in blood and with all his clothes torn. All his toenails had been ripped out. He was unable to stand, and said he thought his legs were broken from a beating with a metal hammer.

Shahruh explained that interrogators were trying to get him to confess that he murdered an 18-year-old-girl, but he had held out, insisting his innocence.

He screamed all night but was given no medical attention. In the morning, he was taken away on a stretcher and never returned to the cell.

Prisoners singled out for the most severe torture are those detained for alleged or real adherence to banned Islamic groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir. These inmates generally refuse to sign anything and are in any case regarded as enemies of the state.

As a way of speeding up the process of getting confessions, some detainees are isolated in a cell where the only other inmates are police agents who assault and pressure them.

TORTURERS TALK ABOUT THEIR WORK

The interrogators and other officers involved in physical abuse appeared to enjoy the process, laughing and swapping ideas about new methods.

I got to know two of my torturers. At first I thought Valery Lobanov and Marat Izzatulin were prisoners like me. But when the three of us were transferred to another cell I found out that they were in fact agents of the Tashkent police, from the MVD’s counter-terrorism department which deals with political cases.

They tortured me and forced me to sign dozens of documents.

But in my last week, after I had signed what they wanted, they told me a lot of stories about their work.

These covert agents are specially trained and are paid a higher salary than other policemen since they have to spend so much time disguised as prisoners.

Izzatulin told me that such agents will carry out any orders, and that he himself had killed many detainees and made it look like suicide.

In fact, he had killed a man just the previous week, he said.

The man was a devout Muslim, and refused to confess to any crime. Izzatulin received orders to get a confession at any cost. He raped the man, and then threw him from an upper bunk, head first into the toilet. The fall killed the man immediately.

Izzatulin smiled as recounted the incident, and was visibly proud of what he had done. He believes that Muslims want to overthrow the Uzbek state, so as many as possible should be killed.

That’s a view his colleagues share. Izzatulin said that interior ministry staff regard it as prestigious to have killed “hizbutchiks” - short for Hizb-ut-Tahrir member - and keep a tally among themselves. He claims he has killed six Islamists, both in the police building and in Tashkent prison. “Unfortunately, our administration does not always let us do this,” he said with a hint of regret.

Izzatulin pointed at his colleague Lobanov and said he was not sufficiently experienced yet, but that he still had a lot of time ahead of him.

Lobanov said he had not killed any “hizbutchiks” yet, but that he had dispatched three other detainees in the police basement over several years. But he was sorry he had killed these men, and insisted he only did so on the orders of his superiors.

Lobanov looked tired, and admitted he was only doing this work so as to feed his family.

He said he preferred to torture people to extract confessions but let them live; that was all that was required by the job.

SEXUAL ABUSE OF DETAINEES

A common element in the range of torture methods is sexual humiliation. One technique involves forcing a bottle into the detainee's anus.

Another is rape of male prisoners, sometimes by warders but usually by other prisoners. Taking pictures of the assault, warders threaten they will send these on to the prison camp where the detainee will go once convicted. This is an extremely worrying threat because it will automatically relegate the convict to the lowest grade of untouchables.

Even in the cramped conditions of the interior ministry cell, this class of inmate is already an outcast, known by the Russian terms “opuschenny” or “obizhenny”. By being raped, he is categorised as homosexual and is vulnerable to further assault. He cannot speak to other inmates, and in the cell he cannot walk freely around the cramped floor space, but is condemned to sit and sleep next to the toilet. (See section The Untouchables, below, for more on this special class of prisoner.)

The other detainees did not know that I am bisexual, so I was saved from this fate. (I discuss why I was granted a measure of protection below, in The Governor and His Boss.)

I did not come into contact with women detainees in the interior ministry, but I discovered that there are three cells for women in the basement. I heard them screaming at night, and it was clear that this was because they were being raped by police. Some male prisoners with access to money are also allowed to visit these cells and rape the female inmates – the warders actually invited my cellmates and me to do this, for a fee. The price is 15 to 20 US dollars – at the top end of the range of bribes that warders take.

Other standard charges which supplement warders' wages – even though detainees are not supposed to have cash – range from a cup of tea at one dollar to illegal drugs at up to 20 dollars a time.

If suspects have a lot of money, or rich relatives, they may be freed before they ever reach the interior ministry, as long as the accusations against them do not relate to the political or Islamic opposition. A bribe is paid to the right officials, and the case is closed. This has the perverse consequence that wealthy people are sometimes arrested simply in order to extract payment.

TASHKENT JAIL

After the terrible 10 days I spent in the ministry basement, I still couldn’t comprehend how people could torture and kill others for a government salary. I thought it was just about the worst thing I would ever see, but that was only because I did not know what lay before me.

As is standard procedure, after I had signed a confession, my next stop was Tashkent prison, or to give its proper title the Tashkent Investigations Isolator or SIZO. People in other parts of the country will be taken to the SIZO jail in their nearest major city. Suspects are held here until their trial is over.

Overcrowding and other conditions here were roughly similar to interior ministry cells, except that the toilets were separated off with green plastic sheeting. Although no daylight is admitted through the window because it is covered by a metal plate, the cell has a light which is on night and day.

Detainees are able to find out what is going on in the prison by talking to each other through the peephole that warders use to observe them and pass in meals.

Food is provided three times a day but it is of such bad quality that inmates often go hungry rather than eat it. Prison governor Erkin Kamilov, whom I met on many occasions, insisted that he tastes the food every day.

Medical help is limited to headache or stomach pills. In one case, an inmate held on our floor had a heart attack but was given no medicine or assistance.

The prison has a hospital but it is difficult for the average ill inmate to be admitted there. Instead, those who have money often pay a bribe to get a hospital bed – even if they are not sick – because conditions are better.

The wealthier prisoners can also buy cigarettes, alcohol and drugs – they can even get a TV in their cell.

LACK OF CONFESSION PROMPTS MORE TORTURE

In most cases detainees have already signed a confession before they reached Tashkent prison, but in cases where this has not happened, they are likely to face further torture.

This applies particularly to the Islamic prisoners, who do not break easily. Rape is widely used to humiliate them since it is so demeaning to their faith. Very often the accused in the government's showcase "Islamic" trials either fail to sign a confession or if they do, they recant in court and say they were tortured. This does not affect the verdict, but leads to more torture when they are returned to Tashkent prison afterwards.

The only thing that reduces the incidence of physical mistreatment of this vulnerable category of prisoner is when their case receives coverage in foreign media and relatives send appeals to international human rights and other bodies. Where there is no media coverage and no relatives to complain, the prisoner is liable to be abused again and again, including after his transfer to a prison camp.

In Tashkent prison, most of the abuse is carried out by other detainees – convicts who have been sentenced but are not sent to a camp because they have reached a deal to work for the authorities. They are not paid, but receive all sorts of privileges such as free movement within the jail, free cigarettes, access to female cells, and early release. In return they are used to spy on other inmates, and to assault them on the orders of the prison warders. The aim is to force confessions where these have not been forthcoming to date.

SELF-INFLICTED HARM

There is a high incidence of suicide in the prison, as inmates begin realising the hopelessness of their position. People arrested for the first time often believe that if they have signed a confession under duress, they have only to say so in court.

That's not the way it works, and when they find their statements are simply ignored by judges who convict them anyway, they frequently attempt suicide by hanging or cutting their wrists.

One cellmate of mine called Tolik slashed his wrists after receiving a seven-year sentence for stealing a mobile phone from a car. He always insisted he had no part in the crime. He attempted suicide twice, and the second time did not return from the medical unit.

Akrom, a detainee aged around 20, was on trial for raping a woman he said he had never even met. At the penultimate court hearing the prosecutor requested a 12-year sentence. I saw Akrom two days before the verdict was due, as our cells were opposite each other and we could talk through the peephole in the door. I remember his sad eyes as he talked about his final court appearance as something he couldn't face.

The next morning, Akrom's cellmates woke to find he had hanged himself. The authorities made them sign a statement that he had committed suicide, and shortly afterwards they were split up between other cells.

OUTCASTS AND WOMEN

The outcasts account for a lot of suicides, in view of the intolerable conditions they are placed in. In the Tashkent prison, they are held in separate cells, and subject to the same rituals of social exclusion as in the interior ministry, and later the camps.

Inmates are very careful not to be classed as an outcast, which would mean they were transferred to the special cells, and once in the prison camp their life would be made hell. It is an effective method of control used by the prison authorities.

At the same time, some "ordinary" detainees bribe warders to allow them to take one of the outcasts to the bathhouse for sex. The transaction is made in secret because the "client" risks becoming an outcast himself by doing so.

Women are held in a separate block at Tashkent prison, and warders – as well as engaging in rape themselves – allow male inmates to bribe their way into the women's building. There have been cases where women protested at this treatment, for example by throwing boiling water at prison guards, but this only resulted in reprisals by the staff.

As well as detainees who had raped women, the warders themselves talked openly about the practice. Often they were so bored that they chatted with inmates through the peephole.

PRISON CAMP

After a guilty verdict and sentencing, convicts are sent to a prison camp where they will serve out their sentence. My destination was Colony No. 64/3 at Tavaksay, which unlike many of the remoter locations was just 70 kilometres north-east of Tashkent. I was here from October 2003 until March 2004.

Tavaksay is categorised as “general regime”, meaning it is by no means the strictest. It’s just one of many camps scattered across Uzbekistan.

Of the 2,000 convicts held there, several hundred are “religious prisoners”, those convicted of membership of Hizb-ut-Tahrir or other banned Islamic organisations. The rest are mostly serving sentences for drugs, theft or murder. A minority are former officials and big businessmen who have fallen foul of the regime, as a result of corruption or criticising government policies.

Anyone who has read about the Soviet Gulags should have a rough idea of what an Uzbek prison camp looks like, since it has changed little from the old days.

The “zone”, as it’s called, is ringed by a concrete wall and outside that a barbed-wire fence. Beyond that lies a strip where guards patrol with watchdogs, and the outer perimeter consists of another wall. Every so often there is a high watchtower manned by armed guards 24 hours a day. The guards are MVD soldiers.

Inside, there is a two-storey administrative building, a small factory, a place for relatives to come for visits, a medical unit, a special block for HIV-diagnosed convicts, and of course barracks for the prisoners.

Accommodation at the camp consists of four blocks, each subdivided into several barracks housing 100 or so convicts. Conditions are cramped and airless, and the lack of heating leads to many illnesses over the winter.

The camp’s factory specialises in glassware, with the finished product sold to buyers who come to the camp and load it into their vehicles. The income is supposed to go to the interior ministry penal department and the camp administration itself, although much of it is simply pocketed by officials.

Whenever there is a rush job – perhaps some local bigwig needing a consignment of glasses for a large wedding – the prisoners have to work non-stop to complete it.

Meals are provided three times a day. Because the mess hall is small, the prisoners arrive in shifts of about 50 at a time and have only a couple of minutes to finish their meal and wash their dishes.

The food is of very poor quality, and causes health problems such as gastroenteritis. Much of the rations the government provides including meat, butter and other items is diverted by the camp administrators and never reaches the inmates.

TB COMMONPLACE

The camp’s clinic has only a handful of staff, and has supplies of only the most basic drugs to deal with a high temperature and head and stomach pains.

Tuberculosis is the scourge of Uzbekistan’s prison system, and Tavaksay is no exception. In cramped conditions the airborne disease spreads quickly among convicts whose resistance is already weakened by poor nutrition.

The town of Chirchik, a few kilometers north-east of Tashkent, is home to the Uzbek penal system’s only TB treatment centre. But even though it is not far from Tavaksay, few sufferers make it to the hospital and instead remain in the camp, with their condition deteriorating and infecting those around them. As usual, it is only the lucky few who have money or are otherwise favoured by prison administrators who make it to Chirchik – which in any case would not be able to cope with the numbers infected across Uzbekistan’s vast network of prison camps.

Inmates diagnosed with the HIV virus are held in a separate – unnumbered – block in a remote corner of the camp. They live in seclusion: other convicts do not go into their area, and they are instructed not to move out of it.

PHYSICAL ABUSE

To someone from outside the former Soviet Union, it might seem strange that camp guards generally let the prisoners run their own day-to-day affairs. However, that is how the system works at Tavaksay (see Thieves’ Law, below). As a result, convicts are most vulnerable to “official” acts of violence when they are placed in solitary confinement – again termed the SIZO – for some offence.

Islamic prisoners are regularly put in the SIZO and are sometimes held there for months on end because of their stubborn refusal to renounce the tenets of their faith. They may be praying openly, or they may refuse to sign a letter begging President Islam Karimov for forgiveness, a common demand made on such prisoners. Sometimes they get together and stage a collective protest, which causes a major headache for the prison management as it is mandatory for such reports to be reported to their bosses at the MVD.

Beatings and other forms of ill-treatment are common in the SIZO. Alisher, convicted for membership of an Islamic group, spent six months in solitary confinement in a small concrete cell. When he came out he was seriously ill because the cell was so cold.

Alisher said he was punished for his refusal to renounce his Islamic beliefs or to write a plea to Karimov, and for encouraging other inmates to stand up for their basic rights.

Such “religious” prisoners are tenacious and fearless defenders of their position, and mounted large protests including hunger strikes on several occasions during my stay at the camp.

At one point the government was reportedly on the point of sending in the army to quell such a protest, but deputy interior minister Rajab Qodirov visited the camp and dealt with it. He did so by employing the simple tactic of picking out a number of protest participants and sending them off to other prison camps – for one day only. Qodirov then warned the rest that if they continued to misbehave they would be split up and find themselves constantly on the move, being transferred from camp to camp.

THIEVES’ LAW

As mentioned earlier, at Tavaksay the everyday rules are made by the criminals rather than the warders, because this is a “black” camp.

The division of penal facilities into “red” and “black” is a legacy of the Soviet system, and although it is an informal, unofficial classification it is respected by prison authorities and inmates alike.

Most of the camps in Uzbekistan are now classed as red, meaning that the prison administration imposes rules and procedures, and guards carry them out with the assistance of designated “trusties”, convicts who are given a red armband to identify them.

In the two remaining black camps – apart from Tavaksay there is one at Chirchik – the authorities leave day-to-day running, and even punishments, to the convicts, specifically to mafia-style bosses. These individuals known as “vory v zakone” – roughly translating as “thieves who follow the criminal code of honour” - sit at the apex of the camp’s hierarchy of professional criminals.

Having the camp run in this hands-off way offers some advantages to the prison staff – not least because if they “commission” a beating for a convict from another inmate, they can write the incident off as a fight.

The chieftain at Tavaksay when I was there went by the name of Zokir. He was undisputed boss within the camp, although he in turn had to answer to the prison governor.

Zokir had “ears and eyes” everywhere in the camp, through a network of four “sector men” – one for each block in the camp – who in turn managed the “barrack men”. Below these officer ranks was the humble “vasyok”, a member of a class of informers organised into 24-hour-a-day shifts.

The criminal system operated a complex system of taxes. For example, a “barracks man” has to collect monthly rent from the 100 people under his control amounting to 80 to 100 US dollars plus alcohol, narcotics, cigarettes and tea. He submits this to the camp’s criminal boss together with a contribution of his own. Above him, the four “sector men” have to bring in about 200 dollars each, and this again goes to the overall boss.

The boss collects around 3,000 dollars a month in taxation, and hands most of it over to the camp governor, retaining a proportion for himself. The cigarettes, vodka and other items collected in rent are then put back on the camp’s internal market, and the retail income again goes to the prison governor.

The crime boss holds court with an assembly, or “shodnyak” as it’s called in underworld slang, convened once a week – in Zokir’s case on Saturdays.

The big weekly assembly is where “justice” is meted out. Offenders are beaten with the iron legs taken from bunk beds, or with bricks. Other penalties include suffocation with a plastic bag and the breaking of limbs.

Another punishment involves forcing one prisoner to rape another – the consequence being that both men will be sent to the “outcast” department with all that that entails (see The Untouchables, below). Anyone who refuses will be beaten unconscious.

In the five and a half months I spent at Tavaksay, these Saturday sessions resulted in at least two deaths, although there were reports of others which were covered up. In one of the two cases that were widely known, prison officials wrote the incident up as an accident in which the deceased fell out of a high tree, suffering a heart attack on the way down. In the other fatality, the multiple injuries were put down to a fall from a two-storey building.

Both men had been badly assaulted at a Saturday meeting.

The point of these communal punishments is to let all inmates know what awaits them if they step out of line.

It is my belief that the Uzbek authorities deliberately assign the problematic cases – the wealthy, the religious or the opposition-minded - to the black camps in the hope that they will be intimidated by the reign of terror. It is an effective tactic, as few would dare go against the “vor v zakone” and his henchmen.

THE UNTOUCHABLES

One of the four blocks is earmarked for the outcasts – the “obizhennye” or “opuschennye” (meaning “humiliated” and “degraded”) – who form a special group at the very bottom of a hierarchy that dates back to the Gulags.

It is easy to be reclassified as an outcast, and impossible to lose this lowest-of-the-low status. Fear of this happening acts as a powerful instrument of control on other denizens of the penal system.

All members of the outcast class are regarded as homosexual whatever their history, and people often end up there as victims of rape. This has nothing to do with sexual orientation; it is about power and caste. Outcasts have no rights, are not allowed to speak, and are used as slaves to perform menial tasks such as cleaning toilets.

As “untouchables” they are surrounded by an arcane but all too real set of ritual proscriptions. For example, other prisoners cannot talk to them, shake hands with them or even look at them. Even using the same cup or spoon is “contagious”, meaning that the offending person could himself be demoted to outcast status.

The stigma follows them even after they are released from prison, as word gets out and such men become the object of insults, especially in a conservative society like Uzbekistan.

The “opuschennye” are subject to humiliation and beatings meted out by other convicts. In the time I spent at the camp, I witnessed at least 30 cases where such inmates were assaulted by convicts or prison guards. After such attacks, only the gravest cases were sent to the prison hospital at Chirchik. These individuals, who were close to death when they were taken away, never returned to the camp.

THE GOVERNOR AND HIS BOSS

As a high-profile political case and the object of international concern, I had much more contact with the people who run Uzbekistan’s penal system than the average convict.

From the summer of 2003 onwards, deputy interior minister Qodirov met me on a number of occasions, clearly concerned at the damaging fallout that could result from letters that I had written to the constitutional court and various international organisations.

His initial tactic was to warn me that I was now within the system he controlled, and that any public criticism would end very badly for me. But later, after I sent appeals to the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and other organisations, he banned me from writing - but promised that in return, no one would touch me in the prison camp. He was undoubtedly worried that his own position would be made difficult if anything happened to me.

This made my life in the prison more secure, and free of major physical assault.

When I was transferred to a low-security jail in March 2004, it was Qodirov who personally informed me of the move.

The camp authorities were well aware of my meetings with Qodirov, and the governor, Mirmahmud Mirazimov, was always at pains to remind me how his job would be at risk if I said anything bad about the way he ran the prison.

He told me he had a family to feed and he needed to hold onto his job. “Every mistake costs me money, Ruslan, and if there’s no money, there will be no more work,” he said one day.

So Mirazimov, too, made an effort to keep me away from trouble. His assistant for political affairs, Sadullo Azimov, spoke to me nearly every day.

In my contacts with senior prison officers, I learned a lot about the working of the camp: how the prisoners pay rent to the administration through the crime boss; and about how some convicts pay a bribe to win early release. Prison guards and their commanding officers, too, are caught up in the system – if they commit some misdemeanor they have to pay off their superiors.

This system of paying “rent” to one’s immediate superior, who keeps a slice and passes the rest onto his boss, and so on up the chain, is by no means unique to the penal system, and is in fact standard practice in the hierarchy of local and national government in Uzbekistan.

OPEN PRISON AND HOUSE ARREST

In March 2004, I was transferred to a low-security prison in Tashkent to complete the rest of my sentence. This is a kind of open jail, where the convict is allowed to stay at home some of the time under a form of house arrest.

In my case, I was permitted to live with relatives in Kibrai just outside the city, with the requirement that I report to the authorities every day. But when officials discovered that I was emailing various international organisations, and meeting their representatives in Tashkent, they deemed it a breach of the house arrest conditions. I was recalled to the prison, so in fact I spent most of my time inside rather than out.

The low-security prison puts its inmates to work through contracts with outside companies. The jail receives just over 50 dollars a month per prisoner, but retains the money. The convict is supposed to receive an allowance, however most of it is withheld as payment for prison food and other expenses, so in effect he is working as slave labour.

Because the money paid by civilian firms cannot be drawn from the prison’s bank account, officials run a scam where cars and other saleable items are bought by money transfer, and then sold for cash which they divide among themselves.

Although deprived of most of their allowance, convicts are generally happy to get a transfer to a low-security jail because food, healthcare provision and general treatment by warders are much better than elsewhere.

The government has advertised the increasing use of such prisons as an example of the kind of penal reform its western interlocutors are seeking. In reality, the scheme has more than a whiff of venality about it, as the more convicts are sent here, they more money the system earns.

For convicts, the drawback is that as income-earners, they are less likely to win the early release they may be entitled to under Uzbek laws.

RETURN TO THE CAMPS A DIRE THREAT

Some prisoners rebel and either abscond or refuse to work. In the latter case, or if they are recaptured, they spend time in the cooler, the SIZO. The regulations say that anyone who has been sent to the SIZO twice and then re-offends will be returned to the prison camp.

Those who refuse to work altogether are liable to be tortured in the SIZO, and in the worst case sent back to the camps. In the period I spent there (March until June), only two men were sent back – but before that happened they were tortured and then paraded before other inmates as a warning.

Most prisoners are further deterred by the knowledge that on returning to a high-security prison unit such as the Tavaksay camp they will face “lomka” – “breaking”, a systematic and severe beating.

I myself witnessed this while still at Tavaksay: I saw warders use truncheons and iron bars to beat three men to a bloody pulp. The governor’s aide Azimov, who was also present, told me this was a standing order from the MVD’s penal affairs department in all cases where prisoners were being re-admitted after being sent back from a low-security jail. The instructions were to inflict lasting damage so that the convict “fully understands”, he said.

But in most cases, the jail authorities let convicts stay on even when they have re-offended again and again. It’s more than likely this happens because each working inmate carries a monetary value.

Rinat and Bakhtior had eight and six spells in the SIZO behind them, but were happy to stay in the prison because being used as “slaves” was better than conditions in high-security facilities.

“Look, they even close their eyes to the offences we commit,” said Rinat. “The main thing is that we work and bring in money for them.”

Few “outcasts” make it to the low-security jails. There were only three or four in the one I was held in, just enough to do the menial cleaning work. The treatment they get here is similar to that in other detention centres.

CONCLUSION

When deputy minister Qodirov told me I was being transferred to house arrest in March, he made me sign an agreement not to publicise what I saw, but to send any complaints direct to him – and he would then act on any cases of abuse. If I disobeyed, he threatened to make sure I was returned to the Tavaksay camp and never released.

Qodirov reminded me of the case of famous Uzbek writer Mamadali Mahmudov, imprisoned since 1999 with no sign that he will ever be freed.

I no longer consider myself bound by that document, signed under duress.

I was finally granted conditional release on June 23 this year. The court attached a lot of strings, insisting that I live 600 kilometres away in Bukhara and do community work to complete a further two years of my sentence on parole.

Those were the official hindrances: in secret, I was being told by security service members that I should get out of Uzbekistan if I did not want to end up back in jail, or dead. Qodirov himself told me that once in Bukhara, I would be beyond his reach – and his protection.

I left Uzbekistan shortly afterwards.

Ruslan Sharipov is a journalist and human rights activist formerly living in Uzbekistan. He has now been granted political asylum in the United States.