Uzbekistan: Where terror rules

There, two things are rampant at an industrial scale: slavery in the cotton fields and torture of dissidents in the state security prisons. It is the first that I will address in the column and then touch on the recent developments on the second issue.

Cotton is the staple crop in most of Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The former is rich in two of the most precious resourcesgold and uranium, while the latter is endowed with the world's largest deposits of a key energy resourcenatural gas. Yet wanton corruption and rampant mismanagement has left the ordinary population of the two nations high and dry. The revenues from natural wealth are mismanaged and the people are made to work on the farms for several months each year.

Men, women and children are taken on forced labour to the cotton farms where the working conditions are dismal, and it would not be far off the mark to compare them with banana plantations in Latin America where slaves were kidnapped from Africa for forced labour. Cotton used to be the most important production of the central Asian republics even during the Soviet times, but then, fifty percent of the work used to be done by machines. Now the machinery left by the Soviet Union has rusted and is almost entirely out of order. The security forces evacuate village after village taking the people, including doctors, engineers and other professionals, to do manual labour in the fields. Even the schools are closed and all the children get transported to the farms where they spend well over one-third of the year. For this work, they are paid $2 a month; yes, this not a typographical error, two dollars a month is the remuneration.

In both the countries, poverty is rampant and the state exacerbates it by giving wages that are exploitative and imposing taxes that are extortionist. But the first families, the presidents and their near and dear ones, have no compunction in amassing fortunes.

When, Gulnaara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbek President Karimov, got divorced in the United States, she claimed $5.4 million worth of jewelry in divorce settlement litigation, that had been left by her in her New Jersey house alone. It must not have been the only wealth that she had. Contrast this fabulous fortune of the first family with the abject poverty the ordinary people live in.

The state control over economic resources is so intrusive that every transfer of as little as $20 or above has to be reported to and approved by the central bank. Nobody is allowed to open a bank account in foreign banks. And painfully funny is the fact that the state declares the national budget as a "national secret" and the citizenry has no clue over how their money is being raised or spent. Little wonder 60% of the economy of Central Asia is black. The formal sector is mainly security services, 40,000 of them in Tashkent city alone, to give one example. It may well be a surprise that education and health are treated as "non-essential" services by the state.

And it was this black economy that had sparked the violence in the town of Andijan in Uzbekistan last year where the traders with neighbouring Kyrgyz villages were tried for treason that led to anxiety among their families and people came out and were shot.. The memory of this grand massacre of unarmed women and children is still fresh, yet Islam Karimov is going on with his shameless crimes against humanity. It is not limited to the mock trials of massacre survivors who are tortured to give evidence against their dead near and dear ones that they had been terrorists. The government is trying to declare all the dead protestors as terrorists, to "close the books." The renowned human rights activist Zainabiddinov became the latest casualty in being sent to long imprisonment for spreading "false and malicious propaganda against the government." He had refused to give evidence saying that the killed persons were armed and that security forces had fired in self defence only. Latest reports say that his whereabouts are not known and his family believes he has died under extreme torture.

Mr. Sanjar Umarov, a prominent businessman, now a US citizen, is another example of state high-handedness. A former ally of Mr. Karimov he fell out with him on his repressive policies. Umarov created a new opposition political party named Sunshine while he was in the US. He then decided to return to Uzbekistan last year to play the role of opposition within the country.

Being a filthy rich man, he thought his contacts in Uzbekistan as well as his US citizenship would save him from arrest, let alone torture, since he was too big and important a political leader, or so he thought. He was cajoled by the state security services to return, giving mixed signals that he would not be personally harmed but Mr. Umarov was mentally prepared for a certain level of harassment including phone tapping, etc. Unfortunately, he had been sadly mistaken.

He was arrested and beaten the moment he landed at Tashkent airport through a commercial flight. In the prison, he was stripped naked, heavily drugged and severely tortured so much so that he has lost his mental balance. This year a kangaroo court has found him guilty of treason and sentenced him to 14 years in prison. The foreign human rights activists who saw him in his cell testify that he is kept naked and that he is now mentally unbalanced.

Mr. Umarov's family is in US, but mind you, in Uzbekistan, imprisonment does not usually end at being locked in jails alone; forced labour, routine torture, emotional torment, gang rape and harassment to family is part of the package, though not written down expressly in the kangaroo court verdicts. The prisoners of conscience are made to stand out in the sun every morning and to shout: "We are thankful to President Islam Karimov, our benevolent leader for this food that we would receive." Any refusal to do so results in electric shocks being delivered.

Prisoners who pass half their sentence are then made to sign confessions of "activities against the state" and are forced to implicate an immediate relative as co-conspirator, and then made to sign a plea of mercy addressed to the president. Most people break under torture, do the bidding, get released, and the next of kin, on their testimony, is apprehended to go through the same experience for the next few years, only to come out after signing a confession and plea for mercy and implicating yet another relative.

There is a dawn after every night, goes the saying. But the dark night for the people of Central Asia is getting longer with no end in sight. When the whole world has embraced democracy, why the people of Central Asia are living like slaves? Russia is openly grooming the Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov as a successor for Islam Karimov, in case of his death. But the people want themselves to be sovereign, not the Kremlin to be their kingmaker.

The writer is the Middle East Editor of Cambridge Review of International Affairs and a widely read analyst on politics, governance and human rights in the Muslim world.