US looks away as new ally tortures Islamists

JUNE ANTI-TORTURE MONTH

I have long argued that I do not believe the US line, regarding their position on the use of torture, and feel that a decision was made post 9-11 to "take the gloves off."

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the new friends the US has in this period suddenly acquired.

Pre 9-11, the US condemned the political arrests routinely made in country's like Uzbekistan, where some 600 political arrests are made a year and where some 6,500 people are held and tortured, sometimes to death. Now, all this is forgotten in the post 9-11 "realism".

The US is funding those it once condemned. Last year Washington gave Uzbekistan $500m (£300m) in aid. The police and intelligence services - which the state department's web site says use "torture as a routine investigation technique" received $79m of this sum.

Mr Karimov was President Bush's guest in Washington in March last year. They signed a "declaration" which gave Uzbekistan security guarantees and promised to strengthen "the material and technical base of [their] law enforcement agencies".

The cooperation grows. On May 2 Nato said Uzbekistan may be used as a base for the alliance's peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan.

Since the fall of the Taliban, US support for the Karimov government has changed from one guided by short-term necessity into a long-term commitment based on America's strategic requirements.

Critics argue that the US has overlooked human rights abuses to foster a police state whose borders give the Pentagon vantage points into Afghanistan and the other neighbouring republics which are as rich in natural resources as they are in Islamist movements.

There is no consistency to Bush's stances, where on one hand he claims to be exporting democracy, and on the other hand he is backing and funding police states that engage in torture.

Torture in Uzbekistan comes in many forms according to Human Rights Watch. It can as simple as a beating.

Chikunov was arrested and brought to the Tashkent provincial police headquarters on April 17, 1999, and later charged with murder: "Immediately after arrest, even before we arrived at the UVD [police station], one of the operativniks (later I learned that his last name is Grigorian) caught my head in thecar door and kicked me several times in the abdomen. I didn't do anything, even though, as you know, I am able to defend myself.. . . throughout the whole way he beat me with all his might with his fists and elbows..." Chikunov, in letters he wrote to his mother from prison, described being tortured for several days until he was coerced into confessing to a murder charge; his abuse, however, continued even after he confessed. He was convicted of the murder and executed in July 2000.

It sometimes takes the form of asphyxiation.

Police and security officials place gas masks on suspects and close off the breathing tube valve in order to suffocate detainees. Victims may be brought to the verge of unconsciousness; some have reported losing consciousness.

The mother of one victim, seventeen-year-old Alijon Hasanov, learned during a meeting with her son that police used a gas mask to torture him, forcing him to confess to narcotics possession.

Sometimes it takes the form of electric shocks being applied.

Because I hadn't done anything they humiliated me, made threats to get me to talk, and beat me up. They punched me and threatened me. Then one of them, Colonel [name omitted], said if I didn't say what they needed he would use an electric-shock baton on me. I got scared, of course, and started trembling. He pulled it out. It looked like a flashlight, though a bit bigger, in the form of a baton. On one side there were two points and a button.

He put it against my leg and said "will you or won't you talk?" I said "I haven't got anything to say." Then he took it, pressed the button once and gave me an electric shock. It felt like the current was 220 volts or even more... [even] my eyes were jolted. Then they applied it to me a few more times. I said I couldn't say anything specific. They let me go [from the interrogation] until they summoned me the next time. After that my leg hurt a bit in the place where they used the baton. My hands shook for a long time.

Sometimes they use rape and other forms of violence.

Police use sexual violence to degrade and humiliate the detainee in addition to inflicting physical harm. Several interviewees said torturers threatened to use photography to record their abuse and to use degrading photographs tocause further injury to them. Orlova described in detail how police threatened to photograph her while being sexually assaulted:

Then they said they would take a picture of me in a certain way, with one bottle inserted in the front, the other in the back. They said they would send me to prison with this picture as my passport.

Of course there are many variations as to how they can get you to tell them what they want to hear.

Several victims attested to being confined to tiny punishment cells, the size of which allowed them neither to sit, stand, or lie down, forcing them to crouch in strained positions for hours or even days at a time as they awaited interrogation. Mukhammadjon Ibodullaev, one of fifteen young men tried in Tashkent Provincial Court in August 2000, wrote "...then they locked me into the cell called the `little glass' [stakanchik], which was seventy centimeters by one meter. It was impossible even to sit down there."

Several witnesses recounted instances in which police used knives to cut and slash the skin of detainees during the course of interrogation. This technique not only inflicts pain and the fear of death, but is implicitly life threatening. One witness recounted seeing slash marks on her brother's throat during a meeting with him in Tashkent prison, one month after his arrest in December 1998. Other victims reported that police officials shoved the blades of scissors under their fingernails; bodies of victims who died in detention have been seen by witnesses with missing fingernails, suggesting that they were torn out during torture. Victims report having cigarettes stubbed out on various parts of their bodies, or being burned, often on the genitals, by cigarette lighters.

Nor can the US and Britain credibly claim that we don't know what is being done in Uzbekistan in our name as Britain has already removed the British envoy to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, after he questioned the means we were using there to obtain information.

Former British envoy to Uzbekistan Murray said the US and Britain "share 100 per cent of their intelligence... and they have taken a policy decision that they will use intelligence which was obtained under torture in other countries."

He said he had seen classified documents from the British government confirming this political decision.

"If they had not taken that decision to use torture, then the programme of rendition wouldn't have made any sense as this is its foundation," he said.

Murray said he had been working as a British diplomat for 21 years before being removed from office after he started to question London about its alleged methods for obtaining secret information in Uzbekistan.

"All the intelligence obtained there is false as people were forced to sign confessions under torture," the former ambassador said.

"Uzbekistan is a real police state of the Stalinist kind, a structured dictatorship with up to 12,000 political detainees, almost all of them political opponents," he added.

British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, however, in March 2004 decided to continue receiving intelligence obtained under torture as this was seen as a means to fight terrorism, Murray said.

"Nobody ever denied that our intelligence was obtained under torture, ... they told me that this was not violating the United Nations Convention against torture as we didn't do it and we didn't instigate it," he told the Parliament.

Such practices being used in the war against terrorism are ignoring and abusing the rights of Muslims, Murray warned, adding: "We're just doing a coach horse for the US... It will not help us win the war, it's just stoking up more fury."

"I fear that we [Britain] have now turned away from international law and from upholding human rights," he underlined.

So there we have it. Bush is financing a regime that tortures and Blair and Bush are both happy to accept information that they know has been obtained by these methods.

This is the new world of "promoting democracy" that Bush doesn't talk about.

That either man can lecture us about the barbarity of Saddam and others is simply hypocrisy taken to dizzying levels.

It's beyond disgusting.

Tags: Uzbekistan, US, UK, torture, June, anti-torture, month.