Two weeks after Bakhor came home with her newborn son, the joy of the new baby was overshadowed by a growing suspicion that something had gone badly wrong.
“I kept bleeding heavy black lumps, and the pain was unbearable, I thought I had a tumor,” the 32-year-old Uzbek said.
It took Bakhor four months to save up money for an ultrasound. She cried as she remembered the result. During the caesarean section, the doctor explained, she had a hysterectomy.
“The doctor said: ‘You don’t have a uterus any more.’ He said: ‘What do you need it for? Two children is enough for you,’” she said.
A two-month long investigation for the BBC uncovered what appeared to be a systematic state-run program in Uzbekistan to sterilize women, often against their will and without their knowledge.
Uzbek President Islam Karimov tolerates no dissent in his country and women and doctors who told their stories did so on condition of anonymity. Over secure telephone lines, doctors and health ministry officials said that while first recorded cases of forced sterilizations go back to 2004, in 2009 sterilizations became a state policy.
“All of us have a sterilization quota,” said a gynecologist in the capital, Tashkent. “My quota is four women a month. We are under a lot of pressure.”
In rural areas, doctors said, the number can be as high as eight women a week.
“We go from house to house convincing women to have the operation,” a chief surgeon in a rural hospital said. “It’s easy to talk a poor woman into it. It’s also easy to trick them.”
Several doctors said that in the last two years there had been a dramatic increase in caesarean sections, disputing official statements that only 6.8 percent of women give birth that way.
“I believe 80 percent of women give birth through c-sections. This makes it very easy to tie the fallopian tubes,” one gynecologist said.
Doctors believe the program is meant to keep Uzbekistan’s growing population under control, although some suggest it is also a bizarre short-cut to lowering maternal and infant mortality rates.
In a statement, the Uzbek government said allegations of a forced sterilization program “have nothing to do with reality” and that the “surgical contraception is carried out only on a voluntary basis after consultation with a specialist and with the written consent of both spouses.”
However, on Friday the Avaaz pressure group called on US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to take the scandal up with Karimov. the group said Karimov was “propped up by millions of dollars from the US government who pay him for military transport across the country. This latest round of brutality, this time against his country’s women, has turned on the global spotlight.”
MONEY GRAB: People were rushing to collect bills scattered on the ground after the plane transporting money crashed, which an official said hindered rescue efforts A cargo plane carrying money on Friday crashed near Bolivia’s capital, damaging about a dozen vehicles on highway, scattering bills on the ground and leaving at least 15 people dead and others injured, an official said. Bolivian Minister of Defense Marcelo Salinas said the Hercules C-130 plane was transporting newly printed Bolivian currency when it “landed and veered off the runway” at an airport in El Alto, a city adjacent to La Paz, before ending up in a nearby field. Firefighters managed to put out the flames that engulfed the aircraft. Fire chief Pavel Tovar said at least 15 people died, but
LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER: By showing Ju-ae’s ability to handle a weapon, the photos ‘suggest she is indeed receiving training as a successor,’ an academic said North Korea on Saturday released a rare image of leader Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter firing a rifle at a shooting range, adding to speculation that she is being groomed as his successor. Kim’s daughter, Ju-ae, has long been seen as the next in line to rule the secretive, nuclear-armed state, and took part in a string of recent high-profile outings, including last week’s military parade marking the closing stages of North Korea’s key party congress. Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released a photo of Ju-ae shooting a rifle at an outdoor shooting range, peering through a rifle scope
South Korea would soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps does not work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers. The approval was made “on the condition that strict security requirements are met,” the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it said. The decision is expected to hurt Naver and Kakao
Gaza is rapidly running out of its limited fuel supply and stocks of food staples might become tight, officials said, after Israel blocked the entry of fuel and goods into the war-shattered territory, citing fighting with Iran. The Israeli military closed all Gaza border crossings on Saturday after announcing airstrikes on Iran carried out jointly with the US. Israeli authorities late on Monday night said that they would reopen the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel to Gaza yesterday, for “gradual entry of humanitarian aid” into the strip, without saying how much. Israeli authorities previously said the crossings could not be operated safely during
RSS