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| The US Military - A Tactical & Strategic Crisis - Andijan: Why We Must Look Beyond Double-Standards |
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As Andijan hit headline news around the world - except however in its own country - the veil that had once hidden Islam Karimov's Uzbekistan from the global public began slowly to slip, revealing one of the most repressive regimes arguably anywhere on earth. Karimov has long been engaged in a bitter campaign to silence all his opponents but particularly voices of Islamic political organisations that increasingly hold considerable support in the strategically located Ferghana Valley and he is notorious amongst international human rights organisations for his brutal approach. A report by Professor Theo van Boven, the UN special reporter on torture, in 2002 denounced torture in Uzbekistan as "widespread and systemic". In 2004, Human Rights Watch published a report, "Creating Enemies of the State: Religious Persecution in Uzbekistan", which catalogued scores of such case studies in its 300 pages. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray (2002-2004), recounts some of his meetings with victims of torture and their families: "People come to me very often after being tortured. Normally this includes homosexual and heterosexual rape of close relatives in front of the victim; rape with objects such as broken bottles; asphyxiation; pulling out of fingernails; smashing of limbs with blunt objects; and use of boiling liquids including complete immersion of the body. This is not uncommon. Thousands of people a year suffer from this torture at the hands of the authorities". His mention of death by immersion in boiling liquid is a reference to the death of Muzafar Avazov in 2002. After Muzafar's mother, Fatima Mukadirova, brought pictures of his dead body to Murray's attention, he arranged for her photographs to be sent to Glasgow University's pathology department who concluded that the marks on Muzafar's body clearly demonstrated he had been immersed in a boiling liquid. Fatima Mukadirova, aged 62, was subsequently imprisoned, "we believe... for publicising the case of her son", according to an annual British Foreign Office report on human rights, and was sent to six years hard labour. If any other evidence were needed, Karimov's reputation for dealing with Islamic opposition is affirmed by his own words: "I'm prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic… If my child chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head", were comments carried by the Agence France-Presse in April 1999 and a year earlier he suggested that: "such people must be shot in the forehead. If necessary, I'll shoot them myself".
After the news of the slaughter in Andijan came the reaction. The European Union and Britain led calls for an international inquiry into the events on the 13th May to establish what had happened and independently verify the death toll, calls flatly refused by the Uzbek regime. In sharp contrast, Russia and China provided their full backing to Karimov's strategy of dealing with Islamic opposition, fearing they would be of the first regional powers to bear the brunt of an Uzbek failure to deal with unrest. Andijan is only 200 kilometres from China and the Chinese are currently struggling with their own domestic unrest created by movements led by ethnic Uighurs in the Xinjiang province who, importantly, have a sizeable presence in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgystan. In the words of China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan following events in Andijan: "We firmly support the crackdown on the three forces of separatism, terrorism and extremism by the Uzbekistan government", while Putin expressed, "serious concerns", about regional stability in a telephone conversation with his Uzbek counterpart.
The US response was cautious, initially confining remarks urging "restraint" on both sides. Such carefully chosen comments were evidently designed not to publicly antagonise an important ally in the US led war on terror. Uzbekistan has allowed the US to open an airbase at Khanabad, used in regional operations in Afghanistan but which is also the easternmost of Donald Rumsfeld's "lily pads" - air bases surrounding the "wider Middle East". The US has also reciprocally supported Uzbekistan, giving it over $500m in aid, including $120m in military aid and $80m in security aid in 2002 and has been involved in training the Uzbek army and security services under a 2002 strategic partnership including troops whom Burt Herman (of the Associated Press) suggests may have been involved in carrying-out the bloody slaughter in Andijan. The US's sensitivity was underscored recently by Donald Rumsfeld's remarks at a NATO meeting in mid-June where he, according to the Washington Post, "emphasised the risks of provoking Uzbekistan" and "warned that alternatives to the [Khanabad] base would be more difficult and expensive." US defence officials together with their Russian counterparts, the newspaper reported, moved to block renewed calls from other NATO members for an independent inquiry into the events in Andijan.
Such a posture, however, makes mockery of Condaleeza Rice's recent comments while on a tour of the Middle East. Addressing an audience at the American University in Cairo, she declared that, "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the region. And we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of the people." US rhetoric about the future of the Middle East has increasingly led us to believe that the war on terror is now intimately linked to the process of democratisation, demonstrated by the language used against the Taliban, to justify Saddam's removal and now the need for political reform in the region. If Dr Rice is correct and the lesson the US has learnt from six decades of engagement with the Muslim world is that preferring stability over democracy is a time bomb, then surely current US policy in the central Asian republics flies in the face of that belief? And just as the Arab governments have been criticised for their authoritarianism, what separates them from Karimov's regime other than competing levels - crudely put - of repression? The case of Uzbekistan demonstrates that for all the talk, the US is still willing to do serious business with, support, and sustain violent dictators and a political culture in the Muslim world that is suffocating progress and that the process of democratisation has always featured in American foreign policy when it is expedient. While policymakers are keen to have us believe that "democracy is on the march" in the Middle East, this serves American interests more than it does those of the indigenous populations, for the reality is the regional 'democracies' now showcased are not without a heavy US political influence. Dr Rice hailed Iraq as an emerging democratic example for the region: "from regaining their sovereignty, to holding elections, to now writing a constitution - the people of Iraq are exceeding all expectations" a picture which obscures the fact that Iraq never regained sovereignty as it remains under occupation, conducted elections under occupation and George Bush's recent remarks on national television affirmed the US would be around for some time to come.
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