OxBlog

# Posted 4:51 AM by Patrick Belton

NEWS FROM UZ: Lately in Central Asia, Uzbekistan has foolishly and short-sightedly decided to kick the Open Society Institute out of the country. Things have been approaching this point for a while- in February, Karimov amended the criminal code to make giving international organisations any information the government chose to deem potentially harmful to it punishable as treason, and the government has been waging a media campaign against international NGOs depicting them as traitors. I've enjoyed having a great deal of contact with the OSI's staff, both stateside and in Central Asia, and the work they did in monitoring governments' treatment and persecution of democratisers and human rights activists was simply not being done by anyone else. When opposition leaders or advocates of democracy and human rights were trumped up on spurious charges, it was OSI's people who would be there in the courtroom each day of trials and visiting them in prison, to send a message that the rest of the world was not blind to those misdeeds. They were the largest dispenser of private aid in Uzbekistan, and Karimov's decision to kick them out only underscores what a wretched despot he indeed is.

And he's not even unqualifiably our bastard: desirous to expand his options now that he has an insurgency on his hands, Karimov visited Russia on 15-16 April to work out details of a new Uzbek-Russian security arrangement. Also, Karimov's government has begun a suppression of all religious minorities, including non-radical Muslims who simply remain independent of the nation's officially sanctioned clerical establishment. Perhaps he has been taking lessons in despotism from his Russian friends.

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