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April 23, 2003
Evil outside the Axis
One of the members of the "Coalition of the Willing" against Iraq was Uzbekistan. Its human rights record is
From the U.S. State Department report on human rights in Uzbekistan:
Although the law prohibits these practices, both police and the NSS routinely tortured, beat, and otherwise mistreated detainees to obtain confessions or incriminating information. Police and the NSS allegedly used suffocation, electric shock, rape, and other sexual abuse; however, beating was the most commonly reported method of torture...On August 7, authorities returned the bodies of two men, Mirzakomil Avazov and Khusnuddin Olimov, to their families. Both men, members of Hizb ut-Tahrir held in Jaslyk prison, were badly beaten and had burns attributable to scalding water over significant portions of their bodies... Police insisted that the men died in an altercation with two other inmates and that in the course of the fight hot water from a tea caldron was spilled on them...
On November 10, three intoxicated NSS officers in Surkhandarya province tortured Musurmon Kulmurodov to death with pliers, a screwdriver, and a metal baton in front of his mother, wife, and their two children... He and his family had been stopped at a traffic checkpoint and transferred to NSS custody on suspicion of narcotics trafficking...
Prisoners suspected of extremist Islamic political sympathies reportedly were routinely beaten and treated more harshly than criminals, regardless of whether investigators were seeking a confession... Credible sources reported that Imam Abdulvakhid Yuldashev, convicted in April 2001 on suspicion of Islamic extremism, was beaten regularly in prison. In December 2001, his lawyer visited him in jail and reported that the soles of his feet were flayed, apparently from beatings. There were reports that on several occasions police beat members of Jehovah's Witnesses...
On September 4, police in Khorezm arrested Ilkhom Salayev and his wife Khovajon Bekjanova in connection with a civil complaint. Bekjanova is a relative of Erk opposition leader Mohammed Solikh. Bekjanova was reportedly raped and beaten in front of her husband, who committed suicide after returning home.
Police forcibly disrupted some protests by women demanding the release of male relatives jailed on suspicion of Islamic extremism and in some cases injured some of the protesters...
Defendants in trials often claimed that their confessions on which the prosecution based its cases were extracted by torture... Imam Abdulvakhid Yuldashev, convicted in April 2001 of organizing an underground Islamic movement, stated in court that investigators had beaten him and burned his genitals in order to extract a confession during detention.
Prison conditions were poor and worse for male than for female prisoners. Prison overcrowding was a problem, with some facilities holding 10 to 15 persons in cells designed for 4. The overcrowding may have been one of the reasons for the large-scale amnesty in 2001, but the problem remained severe. Tuberculosis and hepatitis were epidemic in the prisons, making even short periods of incarceration potentially deadly. Reportedly there were shortages of food and medicines, and prisoners often relied on visits by relatives to obtain both...
If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. I can't wait till the invasion of Uzbekistan.
Posted by Tyrone at April 23, 2003 11:19 AM