{"id":79407,"date":"2016-09-12T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T11:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=79407"},"modified":"2016-09-12T09:27:55","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T08:27:55","slug":"the-death-of-one-of-washingtons-favorite-tyrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/09\/the-death-of-one-of-washingtons-favorite-tyrants\/","title":{"rendered":"The Death of One of Washington\u2019s Favorite Tyrants"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"U.S.<\/a>

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry Shakes Hands with President Karimov of Uzbekistan in Samarkand, November 2015. Image courtesy U.S. Dept. of State<\/p><\/div>\n

7 Sep 2016 – <\/em>The death of long-time Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov has brought rare U.S. media attention to the Central Asian country of 30 million. Uzbekistan is ranked among the half dozen worst countries <\/a>in the world for human-rights abuses. What U.S. government officials and our media mostly ignore, however, is that American taxpayers subsidized that regime and its brutal security apparatus for most of Karimov\u2019s thirty-five years in power.<\/p>\n

Torture has been endemic<\/a> in Uzbekistan, where Karimov banned all opposition groups, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human-rights workers and NGOs out of the country, suppressed religious freedom, and annually took as many as two million children out of school to engage in forced labor for the cotton harvest. Thousands of dissidents have been jailed and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literally<\/a> boiled alive.<\/p>\n

Karimov became leader of the Uzbek Communist Party in 1989 while the country was still part of the Soviet Union. He backed the unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hardliners against reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 and personally opposed Uzbek independence. But finding himself president of a sovereign state when the Soviet Union suddenly dissolved, he quickly modified his position, changing his first name to \u201cIslam\u201d and morphing into an Uzbek nationalist.<\/p>\n

As president of the newly independent Uzbekistan, Karimov banned leading opposition parties and amassed his power through the suppression of opponents and a series of rigged<\/a> elections and plebiscites, labeling<\/a> virtually all opponents as Islamist radicals.<\/p>\n

Uzbekistan is the most populous country in Central Asia, and its capital Tashkent sports a modern subway system and an international airport built during the Soviet era. As an independent state under Karimov\u2019s rule, however, Uzbekistan remains one of the poorest of the former Soviet republics. This is despite generous natural resources, including one of the world\u2019s largest sources of natural gas, and sizable, but largely untapped, oil reserves. Karimov pocketed virtually all of the revenue generated by the country\u2019s natural endowments. Corruption is rampant, and his brutal militias routinely engaged in robbery and extortion. Businessmen who refuse to pay bribes were frequently labeled Islamic extremists and then jailed, tortured, and murdered.<\/p>\n

U<\/strong>.S. military cooperation with Karimov\u2019s regime began under President Bill Clinton in 1995, but expanded<\/a> greatly under President George W. Bush, who provided Uzbekistan with close to $1 billion in aid and an agreement to station up to 1,500 U.S. troops in the country. Karimov was invited to the White House in March 2002, where he and President Bush signed a strategic partnership agreement, which included an additional $120 million in U.S. military aid. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has praised Karimov for his “wonderful cooperation” with the U.S. military. President Bush’s former treasury secretary \u00a0Paul O’Neill spoke admiringly of the dictator’s “very keen intellect and deep passion” for improving the lives of his people.<\/p>\n

Uzbekistan became a destination in the \u201cextraordinary rendition\u201d program, where the United States would send suspected Islamist extremists for torture.<\/p>\n

Craig Murray, who served as the British ambassador to Uzbekistan between 2002 and 2004,\u00a0observed how<\/a>\u00a0Karimov was \u201cvery much George Bush\u2019s man in Central Asia\u201d and that no Bush administration official ever said a negative word about him.<\/p>\n

Murray\u2019s expos\u00e9 of American and British collaboration with Karimov\u2019s despotic regime cost him his career with the foreign service. And it is still a sensitive issue: just this week, the U.S. State Department denied Murray entry into the United States, where he was scheduled to speak before peace, human rights and civil liberties groups.<\/p>\n

There is more than a little irony in the way that the U.S. government, which was once willing to back extremist Islamist groups in Central Asia to fight Communist dictators, became so willing to back a Communist dictator to fight Islamists.<\/p>\n

In May 2005, following an eruption of pro-democracy demonstrations in Andijan and other cities, Uzbek government forces massacred close to 1,000 protesters over a two-day period. The Bush administration successfully blocked a call by NATO for an international investigation, though\u00a0a report<\/a>\u00a0from Human Rights Watch, based on interviews with scores of eyewitnesses, determined that government troops had used \u201dindiscriminate use of lethal force against unarmed people.\u201d The British newspaper\u00a0The Independent\u00a0<\/em>reported<\/a>\u00a0that Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov \u201calmost certainly personally authorized the use of . . . deadly force.\u201d<\/p>\n

The international outcry was so intense, however, that the United States was forced to suspend military aid based on human-rights provisions in foreign aid. To the dismay of human rights advocates, however, the Obama administration in 2011 convinced Congress to waive the restrictions and resume military aid.<\/p>\n

I<\/strong>n reaction to the Obama administration\u2019s efforts, twenty human rights, labor, consumer, and other groups signed\u00a0a letter<\/a>\u00a0to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying \u201cWe strongly urge you to oppose passage of the law and not to invoke this waiver.\u201d The signers encouraged the administration \u201cto stand behind your strong past statements regarding human rights abuses in Uzbekistan\u201d and not move toward \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d with that regime.<\/p>\n

Signatories included the AFL-CIO, Amnesty International USA, and Human Rights Watch, as well as organizations with close ties to the foreign policy establishment like Freedom House and the International Crisis Group. Despite this effort, Congress overwhelmingly approved the waiver and President Obama signed it into law<\/p>\n

Despite evidence to the contrary, Clinton, who visited Uzbekistan that October,\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0that the regime was \u201cshowing signs of improving its human rights record and expanding political freedoms.\u201d When asked about the 2005 massacres during Clinton\u2019s visit,\u00a0a senior State Department official responded<\/a>, \u201cWe\u2019ve definitely moved on from that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The repression, and U.S. assistance\u2014climbing to as much as $30 million annually\u2014has continued every year since.<\/p>\n

Karimov\u2019s death will not likely end systemic, government-sponsored \u00a0human-rights abuses any time soon. And, despite a new U.S. President and Congress coming into office early next year, it\u2019s unlikely there will be a lessening of U.S. support for the regime.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it has been extremely rare for the United States to suspend its support for autocracies like Uzbekistan unless there is pressure from the American public to do so. Living under a repressive dictatorship, the Uzbeks are extremely limited in what they can do to change their government\u2019s policies. We here in the United States, however, don\u2019t have that excuse.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics<\/em> and international studies at the University of San Francisco, where he coordinates the Middle Eastern Studies program, and co-chairs the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. He is the author, along with Jacob Mundy, of <\/em>Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution <\/em>(Syracuse University Press, 2010).<\/em> Zunes is currently serving as a visiting professor at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 progressive.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

7 Sep 2016 – The death of long-time Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov has brought rare U.S. media attention to the Central Asian country of 30 million. Uzbekistan is ranked among the half dozen worst countries in the world for human-rights abuses. American taxpayers subsidized that regime and its brutal security apparatus for most of Karimov\u2019s thirty-five years in power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-central-asia-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}