Uzbekistan, Sweden, and the Terror War

Work of US allies:


Photo of tortured man, killed in KIN-64/29 colony, Navoi, Uzbekistan during detention by ``colony administration'' on January 3, 2005. Source: The Central Asian and Southern Caucasian Freedom of Expression Network (CASCFEN), ``a voluntary association of the public organizations, called to protect freedom of expression and press in the region agreed to Article 19 of the Universal Human Rights Declaration.''


Uzbekistan

Two days ago I posted a very disturbing description of the recent massacre of at least 500 people in the City of Andijan by the Uzbek regime. Dictator Islam Karimov has had a cozy relationship with the Bush administration since shortly after 9/11.

Today, Uzbek officials are claiming that they massacred no one, and that only 169 people died during rioting. Opposition spokespersons say the toll was 700 killed brutally by security forces. I continue to believe the that the narrative found here is accurate, and the official Uzbek version is horseshit.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post has added this account of what did happen:

It was a sunny, warm day, and the crowd was suffused with a sense of optimism as speakers said that they had been in touch with President Karimov and that he would be coming soon to listen to their concerns.

But late in the afternoon, dark clouds began to gather and a helicopter began circling, Mavlanov recalled.

Sensing concern in the crowd, speakers urged the demonstrators to stay in the square, promising that no harm would come to them. But soon afterward, several minivans and trucks packed with security officers arrived, and the men began firing on people from the vehicles' doors and windows.

The reaction of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other US spokespersons has been to pussyfoot around Uzbekistan, citing a few nice speeches the president has given in the past and declaring that, ``We have good relations with some that we believe need to do more on the democratic front.''

British foreign secretary Jack Straw was marginally better, asking for an ``international and independent inquiry'' to ``get to the bottom'' of what happened in Andijan late last week.

Why the kid gloves crock from high US officials on Uzbekistan, and not even a word from the president himself after a horrendous massacre? After all, this same president inspired an incredible response against another dictator in Iraq who ``murdered his own people.'' The reasons for this, I believe, concern the strategic position of Uzbekistan and its secret role in the Terror war.

It is not easy to illustrate how the US uses Uzbekistan, as cooperation with the regime and US military basing in the country developed since 9/11 has been highly secretive. But according to a recent piece on EurasiaNet, ``strategic importance of the Karshi-Khanabad base, the cornerstone of the US-Uzbek alliance, was dramatically declining. Today, many of the functions performed by the base could be easily shifted to Afghanistan.''

However, another US use of the Uzbek regime has been as torturer of choice for certain Terror War prisoners. This passage from Jane Mayer's important February 14, 2005 New Yorker piece on rendition of Terror War suspects contains quotes from Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan,

[Murry] told me that ``the U.S. accepts quite a lot of intelligence from the Uzbeks'' that has been extracted from suspects who have been tortured. This information was, he said, ``largely rubbish.'' He said he knew of ``at least three'' instances where the U.S. had rendered suspected militants from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. Although Murray does not know the fate of the three men, he said, ``They almost certainly would have been tortured.'' In Uzbekistan, he said, ``partial boiling of a hand or an arm is quite common.'' He also knew of two cases in which prisoners had been boiled to death.

In 2002, Murray, concerned that America was complicit with such a regime, asked his deputy to discuss the problem with the C.I.A.’s station chief in Tashkent. He said that the station chief did not dispute that intelligence was being obtained under torture. But the C.I.A. did not consider this a problem. ``There was no reason to think they were perturbed,'' Murray told me.

Sweden and the Terror War
A perhaps surprising stop on the Terror War circuit is Sweden. Here I want to lead into today's exclusive guest post by a British citizen, resident of Sweden, and friend of Deep Blade Journal, Mike Walls. You'll see in a disturbing personal story Mike tells what all this has to do with Uzbekistan.

First, I want to quote another related story from the Jane Mayer article, illustrating how Sweden has cooperated with US rendition methods:

On December 18, 2001, at Stockholm’s Bromma Airport, a half-dozen hooded security officials ushered two Egyptian asylum seekers, Muhammad Zery and Ahmed Agiza, into an empty office. They cut off the Egyptians’ clothes with scissors, forcibly administered sedatives by suppository, swaddled them in diapers, and dressed them in orange jumpsuits. As was reported by ``Kalla Fakta,'' a Swedish television news program, the suspects were blindfolded, placed in handcuffs and leg irons; according to a declassified Swedish government report, the men were then flown to Cairo on a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet.

So it is in the context of the recent Uzbek slaughter, and stories of the crimes against humanity in the form of renditions carried out by the Bush regime and its Terror War collaborators, that Deep Blade Journal today offers this exclusive guest post....

--------------------------------------------------

GUEST POST

Questions about Uzbek, Egyptian, and Swedish complicity in the US Terror War
Recently I saw a news item on the BBC World satellite channel describing the warm relationship between Karimov and the Bush Administration. Regrettably the item did not go into any more detail than that.

For example, they could have outlined the grievances of the protesters in the recent upheavals there instead of echoing Karimov's construction of Islamist terrorism being on the rise which, according to him, was the reason behind the protests. To put the record straight it needs to be aired that Islam Karimov's record on human rights abuses extend not only to Muslims in Uzbekistan but to a plethora of other minorities.

I have a personal story to tell on this account. A former Uzbek colleague of mine told me how he was persecuted for being homosexual. The first time we met he mentioned the US's cosy relationship with Karimov -- that was back in 2003. My colleague was utterly disgusted and distressed. He would laugh out loud at the claim that the US wanted democracy in the region (central Asia) and sometimes in the face of other colleagues who believed such fantasies.

A couple of months ago he was sent back to Uzbekistan to an uncertain fate; nobody, not even his Swedish partner, has heard anything from him since. The fact that the Swedish authorities would do such a thing is disturbing and only lends suspicion to their general foreign policy agenda. Case in point, in late 2004 it was reported in a Swedish independent (The Local) that the now deceased Anna Lindh, back in 2001, in collaboration with the CIA extradited two Egyptian nationals back to Egypt who were summarily tortured shortly thereafter.

The Local quotes its source thus: ``She [Anna Lindh] stepped aside to consult her nearest bosses and discuss the issue. It took maybe half a minute until she confirmed that they would accept the [CIA] offer.''

Could it be that the Bush Administration has a list of countries that, irrespective of their human rights record, have been approved by them because of their agreement to join in the ``War on Terror''? I think we know the answer to that question but my suspicions have been aroused even more in light of the Uzbekistan and Egyptian matter here in Sweden. Could it be furthermore, then, that Göran Persson's government agreed to extradite people back to Uzbekistan on the proviso of the US? Could it be that Sweden and a host of other countries are collaborating in this way in order to expedite the so-called ``War on Terror''? The pot thickens and the boundaries between dictatorships and democracies blur ever more.

Mike Walls
May 18, 2005