US, Britain call for impartial probe into Uzbekistan killing
By N.C. Aizenman
SUZAK (Kyrgyzstan): As the door to his prison cell was battered open on Friday night, Odil Maksataliev said, he jumped back in surprise. Eight armed men burst in. Maksataliev had never seen them before, but they seemed to recognize him immediately. “We know that you are one of the businessmen who was put here for no reason, and we’ve come to set you free,” he recalled one announcing. Then they hustled him outside into the early morning darkness, running past the bloodied bodies of two prison guards who lay still on the ground. A fleet of cars was waiting.
So went a jailbreak in the city of Andijon, touching off uprisings in several other cities in Uzbekistan, the Central Asian country that has been ruled by Islam Karimov since gaining independence in 1991 with the break-up of the Soviet Union.
The gunmen freed 23 local businessmen accused of forming a terrorist cell, along with about 2,000 other inmates. Within hours, the businessmen were featured guests on the speaker’s platform at an unprecedented demonstration against Karimov’s autocratic rule in the city’s central square. But the rally ended in a bloodbath when Uzbek security forces directed a barrage of gunfire at the protesters.
On Wednesday, Maksataliev stood in a tent encampment on a grassy hillside near the city of Suzak in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan with several fellow businessmen and about 500 other people who had fled Uzbekistan.
Wearing a dusty track suit and clutching a small sheet of paper documenting his application for political asylum in Kyrgyzstan, Maksataliev seemed indistinguishable from the other bedraggled escapees.
But his story addresses the continuing controversy over who is behind the revolt in the mostly Muslim country, which hosts a US air base used in the war in neighbuoring Afghanistan. US and British authorities on Wednesday demanded an impartial international investigation into the violence.
Karimov, meanwhile, has claimed that the businessmen, the men who freed them and most of the protesters were violent Islamic radicals who want to turn the country into an extremist theocracy. Restriction of worship is a common complaint in the country.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan group created by Congress, this month reported “severe violations of religious freedom” in the country. Uzbek authorities “crack down harshly on Muslim individuals, groups, and mosques that do not conform to government-prescribed practices or that the government claims are associated with extremist political programmes,” a report said.
“This has resulted in the imprisonment of thousands of persons in recent years.” But Maksataliev and others in the camp said he and his 22 fellow defendants had little interest in religion or politics.
By their account, they were simply successful businessmen, targeted by a paranoid government that perceived anyone with prestige as a threat. Most people in the square were peaceful, ordinary citizens, the men said. “They were not terrorists,” said Maksataliev, 45. “They were just people who had had enough.”
Maksataliev is a burly man with the look of a boxer. But when he spoke about the ironworks factory he founded five years ago, his voice thickened with the emotion of one speaking of a lost child.
“We employed 54 workers,” he said wistfully. “It was really professional. They were all given uniforms, a free lunch and money for transportation.” In 2003, his company and those belonging to many of the other 22 businessmen took top honours at an exposition showcasing businesses in Andijon. Maksataliev wonders if that was the moment when he aroused the suspicion of authorities.
“Maybe Karimov was afraid of us because we were growing stronger and we all knew each other and were helping each other like a network,” Maksataliev said. “I think he worries that this means we could someday take him out of power.”
Sometimes, Maksataliev added, he did think about the need for more democracy — “especially when I would watch Russian television and watch Vladimir Zhirinovsky speak about how we Uzbeks are like sheep, just led by one person.” Zhirinovsky is an ultra-nationalist Russian politician.
But Maksataliev said he was far too busy building his business to act on such ideas. So he was completely shocked, he said, when one morning last June, Uzbek officials packed in two cars forced him off the road on his way to work and bundled him off to the city’s interrogation centre.
He was kept there without being charged for more than a month, he said. Then he was transferred to a 6-by-13-foot cell in Andijon’s main prison and held there with five other inmates. One was a thief, he said, another a drug dealer. Human rights groups allege that the Uzbek government has engaged in extreme forms of torture and executions such as boiling prisoners alive.
Maksataliev said he was not physically mistreated and his family was allowed to visit him frequently. But he said he suffered the mental torture of watching his business collapse as Uzbek authorities spent seven months combing his records for evidence of malfeasance.
Meanwhile, authorities were arresting more and more prominent businessmen. Then one day, Maksataliev was informed that he was being charged with forming an Islamic terrorist network with the other 22 businessmen, and of being a follower of Akram Yuldashev, an Uzbek writer imprisoned by the government in 1999. “I had never even heard of Akram,” Maksataliev said.
Maksataliev said he is a not especially practising Muslim. “I don’t even pray five times a day,” he noted, referring to a main tenet of Islam. “I employed lots of non-Muslim Russians in my company, many of whom drank alcohol. Would I have done that if I were a fundamentalist?”
The trial lasted three months and had a farcical quality, Maksataliev said. Scores of witnesses were brought in and asked whether Maksataliev was a terrorist. Only two answered yes; one was mentally unstable, Maksataliev said, and the other was a disgruntled former employee whom he had fired. The prosecutor asked the judge to sentence Maksataliev to three years in prison. The judge’s decision was still pending when the men sprung him out of jail.
Maksataliev said that once on the street, he agreed to go to the demonstration out of gratitude to his rescuers and in hopes that Karimov would come, listen to the crowd’s concern and accept the freeing of the prisoners.
He saw his family briefly at the demonstration, but told them to go home when the shooting broke out. Now, he said, he worries he made the wrong decision. “I am here,” he said. “But they are surely being followed by the government. The government could even kill them.”
On Wednesday, with international condemnation over the deaths growing, the Uzbek government allowed foreign diplomats to visit Andijon, but only under close supervision. They were not allowed to see the main scene of violence.
US, UN and British officials on Wednesday called for an independent investigation, to be led or supported by international organizations. Information obtained by the United States portrays a “very disturbing picture” and the deaths of “very large number” of civilians by the “indiscriminate use of force” by Uzbek security forces, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters on Wednesday.
The crisis requires a “credible investigation,” he added. US officials have said privately that they think about 300 people died in the shooting.
At a speech in at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called on Karimov to immediately allow full access to Andijon for humanitarian groups and foreign diplomats and then move quickly to address the causes of discontent by introducing an “open and pluralistic society.”—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service
