Uzbekistan carnage: This time we knew

Uzbek refugees fleeing the massacre to Kyrgyzstan. PHOTO: AFP

The Islam Karimov regime, known for its ruthlessness, dithered before going for a bloodbath, and proceeded only when the White House gave a green signal, clearly and unequivocally. Yes, the White House spokesman Scott McClellan did intervene to urge "both the sides" to show restraint and to resolve the issue peacefully. What does this mean other than a blanket license to the aggressor to go ahead?

The outsourcing of massacre, as the above instance has shown, is not beyond the agenda of President Bush. Admittedly, there would have been no democracy in Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltic republics if the erstwhile leadership had not known that they simply could not get away with shooting at civilian crowds. It was not so in Uzbekistan, as no such message was sent to Tashkent.

Islam Karimov wants to eliminate extremists -- good enough -- but wait a moment, have we not taken this argument too far? What if the recently convicted American accused of raping eight women before strangulating them to death had claimed that the women were actually "extremists"? What if the 46-year old cannibal in Germany accused of eating the flesh of the man murdered by him justified it on the plea that the victim was a "traitor"? What if the 24 year old Japanese, now arrested, on charges of raping a 19-year old girl for three months, makes the plea that she was actually a "radical"?

With the whole country a virtual prison, how many unarmed and peaceful "extremists" would the "peace-loving" Karimov kill, torture, or maim, to fulfill his desire for an extremist-free country. How many more people must die, be boiled alive, receive electric shocks, and be stripped naked publicly for the country to remain hostage to the personal whims of a single usurper and his family and cronies?

As a starting point, I do not dispute what Karimov alleged and Scott McClellan confirmed, that the people killed, 81 women and 67 school-age children included, were "bandits" and "terrorists." But four crimes stand testified to by multiple eye-witness sources; one, that many of the wounded were shot point blank in the head and killed; two, the agonized relatives who came to receive dead bodies were kicked, insulted, and beaten up; three, the people who were fleeing to Kyrgyzstan were shot at from behind; and four, over two scores of unexplained disappearances have taken place since the riots of persons believed to have been active in the protests. Killing the wounded, mistreating the claimants of dead bodies, firing at fleeing people, and disappearances are crimes against humanity by any standards.

The democratic credentials of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, a gentleman named Tony Blair, must now be inquired into. While Dr. Rice's diplomatically coated jargon hints at approval for the massacre, her boss's poodle, Mr. Blair, who also happens to be the Prime Minister of Britain, had the temerity to sack a career civil servant, Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Tashkent for speaking up against the most heinous of human rights abuses only last year.

The Uzbekistan economy is in tatters, thanks to mismanagement and rampant corruption. The standard of living has plummeted to levels where people do not know how to feed their families. Add to this, the government's whimsical policies, including forcing the farmers to sell their harvest to the government below cost price, crackdown on cheap goods, confiscation of merchandize on flimsiest of pretexts, closure of a popular private bank last year, and more seriously the "cotton slavery," i.e. men and women, including doctors and engineers, forced into government buses and made to do unpaid labour at the farms during cotton harvest season, each year. Life is bitter in Uzbekistan and if somebody protests, be he a journalist, a lawyer or a human rights activist, Karimov has him shot on suspicion of being a "bandit."

The consternation and anxiety among the families of 23 traders of Andijan, who were initially held on account of selling cheap goods from neighboring Kyrgyzstan, in violation of Karimov's irrational and untenable ban, but now on a mock trial for terrorism, is completely understandable. True, confessions for having links to terrorism were elicited under extreme torture, but when the judgments were going to be announced by the kangaroo courts, the families came out on the streets as a spontaneous reaction. The emotion and fury continued to rise, until the contempt and hatred for the Karimov regime, became the leading factor for the sloganeering crowds.

Karimov dithered for a couple of days, and once assured of no interference by Washington and London, he ordered a massacre. He has recently accepted the figure of 169 deaths in the carnage, including 32 security men, only to underline the latter figure of deaths from his forces. Was it an armed fight after all, where government forces lost so many men? The eyewitness accounts suggest otherwise. Only one police officer was killed when an infuriated protestor shot him dead before getting killed himself. And four troops were shot dead by a colonel for refusing to fire into the crowds. This was all of the government losses. And among the civilians, one may only make guesses, only to find to one's horror that wildest guesses were actually under-estimations.

The corpses littering the streets of Andijan were the casualties of the US obsession with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda has direct proven responsibility for less than 3,500 deaths in the past decade, but our psychological hang up with Al Qaeda has killed directly or indirectly 100,000 people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in as many years.

If we do not want to see many more American and British lives being lost, a decade hence, protecting oil and gas reserves in Uzbekistan, we need to act now. What has happened, has happened. The world community, including the United Nations, the OSCE and the Western powers, must now intervene to stem the tide of Iraqization of Uzbekistan.

First, it must ensure an immediate international inquiry to be conducted to apportion responsibility for the bloodbath. Secondly, it must help trace the missing persons so that they do not get extra-judicially eliminated. Meanwhile, thirdly, it must monitor the trials of the hundreds of persons arrested to see that the whole exercise is fair. It must, however, be borne in mind that eliminating political prisoners in stage-managed prison riots has become a fashion from Algiers to Manila, especially when all eyes are focusing on justice to be done in the trial rooms. So, fourthly, the prisons need to be monitored.

If the present leadership of the free world fails history, posterity will never forgive them, and Western journalists, businessmen, and contractors, would be among those on whom the Uzbek history will take its revenge, like what has happened in Somalia, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan in the not too distant past.

The writer is an Oxford-published analyst on issues of democracy, governance, and the rule of law in the Muslim world.