Uzbek human rights campaigners will use this weekend’s annual meeting to demand a tougher stand by the international community against Islam Karimov’s dictatorship.
The US and EU must not play a game of “double standards”, Abdujalil Boymatov of the Human Rights Association of Uzbekistan told Emerging Markets. “The current sanctions are not strong enough.”
He welcomed the travel ban on senior Uzbek officials by the EU but asked: “Why is President Karimov’s name not on the list of those banned?”
The timid steps towards democracy taken before the Andijan massacre a year ago have been reversed, Boymatov said. “We had established the right of assembly. Before Andijan, the opposition could organize pickets and demonstrations. Now that is impossible.”
The opposition claims that many hundreds of civilians were massacred at Andijan; the government insists that the death toll was 187, most of whom were “terrorists”.
Boymatov told Emerging Markets that Elena Uraeva, a human rights campaigner, had last year been confined to a psychiatric institution, in a throwback to soviet methods. He gave details of other opposition politicians and human rights campaigners being imprisoned, held under house arrest and denied visas to leave the country.
Despite the use of torture in Uzbek prisons, Russia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan have all returned refugees. “Democratic” Ukraine’s return of 11 Uzbek refugees in February was especially notorious, Boymatov said.
Western European countries accept refugees, but refuse to regularize their status, Oleg Shestakevich of the Belgian-based group For Democratic Reforms in Uzbekistan told Emerging Markets. He added that, while European parliamentarians met with democracy campaigners this month, Belgian businesses held a forum attended by both state- and privately-owned Uzbek companies, and banks were financing Uzbekistan’s cotton exports as normal.
The oppositionists’ push at the EBRD coincides with mounting pressure in Washington to relax sanctions on Uzbekistan. Geopolitics is at work: earlier this month President Karimov met with Russian president Vladimir Putin and agreed to intensify political and economic cooperation – and reportedly US vice-president Dick Cheney and other senior politicians believe the US must not leave central Asia to other great powers.
The EBRD works only with private business in Uzbekistan.