World>Terrorism & Security
posted May 16, 2005, updated 1:30 p.m.

Uzbek ruler: a new Saddam Hussein?

Critics of the 'tyrant of Tashkent' say US ally makes Hussein look 'like a choir boy.'

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

He's called the "tyrant of Tashkent" in a Monday editorial by The London Telegraph.

One of the rebel leaders in his country says that he makes Saddam Hussein look like "a choir boy." And Sunday, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw said there had been a " clear abuse of human rights" in rioting in his country where the CBC reports police and troops have been accused by aid groups of killing as many as 700 people, including women and children.


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But Uzbekistan's president Islam Karimov, who denies his troops opened fire on civilians, is "seen by Washington as an important ally in its so-called war against terrorism and provides it with a key air base in central Asia," and so he is unlikely to be strongly condemned, reports the Guardian.

But Radio Free Europe reports that last week State Department spokeman Richard Boucher said the US had in fact continued to criticize Tashkent's human rights record in the annual report issued by the State Department.

The Telegraph's editorial says the main reaction by the US government to what Mr. Straw had so quickly condemned as a human right abuse was for both sides to "work out their differences peacefully." This response, the Telegraph argues, undercuts President Bush's calls for the spread of democracy in other parts of the world.

The [US] president's implacability is partly explained by the attitude of the US State Department. The Americans sponsored opposition movements in Georgia and Ukraine, and Congress recently voted a $40 million grant for pro-democracy activists in Belarus. But when it comes to Uzbekistan, Washington is shamefully equivocal. The Administration is calling for restraint on both sides, even though there is ample evidence that the security forces have been firing into unarmed crowds.
Uzbekistan sits oddly with the rest of George W. Bush's foreign policy. Elsewhere, his Administration has taken the view that the best way to advance American interests is by spreading freedom. Yet Karimov is indulged in an old-fashioned, Cold War sort of way ...

This is much the same way the US treated former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in the 80s.

There are numerous other comparisons to Hussein's pre-Gulf War regime. The Times of London reports that there are at least 6000 religious and political prisoners in Uzbekistan, a country that is 88 percent Muslim. The average wage is $25 a month, "although the country has large oil and gas reserves and is one of the world��s ten leading gold-producers." Karimov's family controls almost all private enterprise in the country.

And Karimov, the Times continues, "maintains Soviet-style controls over religion and politics." All opposition groups have been banned and only state-sponsored Islam is allowed. The main rebel group is Hizb-ut Tahrir, an Islamic rebel group which Karimov has branded "terrorists" and thus given the US government a reason to support his war against them.

The BBC reports on the " Great Game" played by Western nations in the six former Soviet Republics "whose names all seemed to end in 'stan'," and whose gas and oil reserves "rival the Middle East."

The result, the BBC says, is "strange bedfellows and unpredictable events in the struggle for influence, as Uzbekistan is currently showing."

Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002-2004 (until he was suspended because of his criticisms of Karimov's human rights abuses), writes in a Guardian opinion piece the US is already looking for ways to "dismiss" what is happening in Uzbekistan because of its strategic importance. But, he writes, by ignoring the actions of its ally, the US is condemning many people to torture and death.

You may think I exaggerate. Read the 2002 report by Professor Theo van Boven, the UN special rapporteur on torture, in which he denounced torture in Uzbekistan as "widespread and systemic". Human Rights Watch last year produced a book with more than 300 pages of case studies.
One of the uses of Uzbek torture is to provide the CIA and MI6 with 'intelligence' material linking the Uzbek opposition with Islamist terrorism and Al Qaeda. The information is almost entirely bogus, and it was my efforts to stop MI6 using it that led ultimately to my effective dismissal from the Foreign Office.

Mr. Murray also told Reuters that if the US doesn't support the opposition movement in Uzbekistan in the same way it has in Georgia and other former Soviet republics, "We're actually, if you like, creating the monster we pretend we're fighting."

So why does the US continue to support Karimov? Murray writes in the Guardian that while the US base in Uzbekistan is not by itself strategic, "it has a more crucial role as the easternmost of [US Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld's 'lily pads' - air bases surrounding the 'wider Middle East,' by which the Pentagon means the belt of oil and gas fields stretching from the Middle East through the Caucasus and central Asia."

For his part, Karimov denies the charges against him and says the unrest over the weekend was the work of Islamic extremists. The Russian news agency Itar-Tass reports that a source in Karimov's press office told the news service that " everything is functioning as usual."

"There is no reason to worry," the source said.