A prominent international rights group has demanded Uzbekistan free a journalist sentenced to 12 years in prison on what his supporters say were politically motivated charges. Dilmurod Saidov’s trial on extortion and forgery charges was severely undermined by procedural violations, making a fair verdict impossible, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement released late on Monday.
Western governments and international rights groups have criticized Uzbekistan over its chronic record of human rights abuses. But Uzbekistan’s ties with the West have warmed in recent months as the ex-Soviet Central Asian nation has helped support US-led military operations in neighboring Afghanistan.
Saidov was arrested in February and sentenced last week to more than 12 years in prison at the end of a closed-door trial, Human Rights Watch said. The group said he was targeted because of his efforts to expose corruption by local officials in the Samarkand region.
“Saidov is well known for his courageous work to expose rampant corruption in Uzbekistan, and this conviction is clearly an attempt to stop him,” Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in the statement. “The trial was a travesty of justice and Saidov should be freed immediately.”
The group said Saidov suffered from acute tuberculosis. It called on prison authorities to provide him with immediate medical attention.
Uzbek President Islam Karimov has ruled resource-rich Uzbekistan with an iron hand since before the 1991 Soviet collapse. He fell out of favor with the US and other Western countries after the government’s violent suppression of an uprising in the city of Andijan in 2005.
Karimov has recently sought to mend ties with the West, in part by allowing the US to send nonmilitary supplies to Afghanistan overland through Uzbekistan. Worsening security on the Afghan border with Pakistan has forced NATO allies to seek safer transit routes.
Uzbekistan has also made some tentative commitments to address human rights issues.
But Human Rights Watch says the Uzbek government is currently holding at least thirteen rights activists in jail for reasons related exclusively to their work.
Several other opposition activists and independent reporters have also been jailed over the past few years, including prominent political dissident Yusuf Yumayev.
Human Rights Watch said in a report last month that Yumayev has recently been subjected to severe physical ill-treatment and denied food and water.
The Uzbek Foreign Ministry’s press office could not be reached for comment.
Meanwhile, Uzbekistan has slammed Russian plans to station additional troops in its neighbor Kyrgyzstan, in the latest sign of a rift between Moscow and ex-Soviet Central Asia’s most populous state.
The Uzbek interior ministry’s house news agency Jahon said in a statement late on Monday that the deployment of the force in Kyrgyzstan could force a destabilizing military build-up in the region.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a deal last week with his Kyrgyz counterpart Kurmanbek Bakiyev to station more Russian troops in the Central Asian state within marching distance from Uzbekistan’s borders.
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