Detaining the President’s Daughter

I wrote this with my Human Rights Watch colleague Steve Swerdlow for openDemocracy.

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A year ago, the daughter of Uzbekistan’s authoritarian president disappeared from public life. Arrested under corruption allegations in February 2014 and apparently detained at her Tashkent home ever since, Gulnara Karimova – former ambassador, singer, fashion guru, social media star, and business tycoon – remains in a kind of sealed limbo, apparently unable to communicate directly with the outside world.

Karimova’s treatment over the last 12 months is far superior to that of thousands of other people in Uzbekistan suffering severe human rights abuses. Yet her high-profile case provides a telling insight into the dire state of human rights in Uzbekistan today.

Letter to Gulnara Karimova

Dear Gulnara,

Following our Twitter conversation last week, I am sending below the details of some human rights issues in Uzbekistan which can and should be addressed. All these matters fall under your purview as Uzbekistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva.

Given the nature and scale of the problem, it is difficult to know where to begin with this, but what I’ve tried to do below is highlight some general issues, provide lists of some individuals and then go into greater detail for a few of their cases. I hope you will look into these matters and the specific cases mentioned and respond appropriately as you promised to do.

Of course, these are just a few examples of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan that are all too common and that that deserve to be addressed. If we start with these and make some progress, perhaps you would look in to other cases as well.

In preparing this text, I have relied on detailed reporting from United Nations bodies, government reports on human rights practices, and the reports of leading human rights groups. I have quoted from them extensively and linked to the original materials.

I hope this conversation and dialogue leads to some concrete improvements for the individual victims below.

Regards,

Andrew

(emailed to Gulnara Karimova on 12 December 2012. Other readers can find out more about the Twitter conversation between Gulnara Karimova and me in this RFE/RL article and this New Europe interview.)

Real Security in Central Asia Is Not a "Great Game"

Sometimes, I just hate clichés like the plague. I wrote this for my Reuters AlterNet blog on 20 February 2009.

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Even if you don’t follow Central Asia at all, you could hardly fail to notice the increased media attention the region has been receiving in recent weeks. Repeated Taliban attacks on NATO supply routes into Afghanistan from Pakistan have driven General David Petraeus, the top US commander in the area, to make a series of relatively high-profile visits to the former Soviet Stans to shore up a new logistics line from the north. Adding to the pressure and the press buzz that is so uncharacteristic for this largely forgotten corner of the world, Kyrgyzstan is kicking out the Americans from the airbase at Manas, used to support Afghan operations. Moscow’s offer of two billion dollars in loans to Bishkek a couple weeks ago is widely seen to be the decisive factor in the Kyrgyz decision -- or perhaps it is better to call it a Kyrgyz gambit to get Washington to make a counter-bid to keep the base.

In any case, the world’s media have jumped to define the story purely in terms of the US and Russia competing for the favours of the region’s rulers, and one of the oldest, most tired clichés of international relations is dusted off yet again: "The Great Game”. It’s hard to find a commentator who doesn’t use to this facile anachronism, referring to the 19th-century strategic rivalry between the British and Russian empires in Central Asia. And you find it everywhere in Anglophonia: from the right in the US, to the left in the UK.

But blurting out "The Great Game” rather than offering real analysis of the region is not going to help anyone understand what’s really at stake here and how to deal with it.

Central Asians Victims of War on Terror

This is a piece I wrote from Bishkek with BBC stringer Sultan Jumagulov. It ran on IWPR's website on 22 September 2002.

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The September 11 atrocities and subsequent "war on terrorism" are being used to justify a crackdown on human rights and delay democratic reforms in Central Asia, concluded delegates to an IWPR-sponsored conference in Bishkek examining regional developments over the past year.