To this end, Russian officials concocted a disinformation plan designed to sow the seeds of discontent between the Americans and their hosts. The United States, Central Asia’s leaders were informed, was not telling the truth about its motives. It wasn’t out to fight terrorism, and it certainly wasn’t out to help anyone ‘democratize’. What it wanted was oil. And the simplest way to get it was to replace Central Asia’s established rulers with US-friendly puppets. The CIA, as usual, was up to no good.
When Central Asian nations fell to a series of‘coloured revolutions’ shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Russia’s predictions appeared to be coming true. In 2003, it was Georgia; the following year, Ukraine; the next, Kyrgyzstan. It was no coincidence – the Russians told anyone willing to listen – that these revolutions had taken place shortly after the United States had arrived. This was the way the US machine worked: just a little push from the CIA, and these revolutions would spread across borders like a plague. If America was willing to invade even Iraq for its oil, no one was safe.
The technique could have been tailor-made for the already suspicious Islam Karimov. Shortly after his overthrow, US intelligence got wind of a conversation between Georgia’s ex-leader Eduard Shevardnadze and the Uzbek president. The pair discussed what had happened, and Shevardnadze warned his friend to be cautious of American promises – especially when the White House started harping on about ‘human rights’ and ‘democratization’.
As if on cue, while the Russian poison was doing its work, George W. Bush was re-elected. He immediately talked up human rights and democratization.
‘When you stand for your liberty,’ Bush told the citizens of oppressed nations in the course of his second inaugural address, ‘we will stand with you . . . In the long run, there is no justice without freedom and there can be no human rights without human liberty’
For Karimov, the President’s speech was a wake-up call. The Uzbek president fancied himself canny enough to know that, when George W. Bush said ‘democratization’, he meant ‘regime change’.
* * *
Ironically, Bush’s second inaugural address torpedoed the special relationship inside the United States, too. Seasoned State Department officers were appalled at the emphasis on spreading democracy (was this a policy or a metaphor?). Others were listening closely. Democracy and freedom were on the march: the President had said so. This cast the agreement between the United States and Uzbekistan in a different light. All of a sudden, certain branches of the Executive became immensely interested in human rights issues. Of course, if human rights was the topic, they need look no further than Uzbekistan.
According to the terms of the US–Uzbek Framework Agreement, the United States would offer financial assistance to Uzbekistan, which, in turn, would undertake meaningful political reforms. The United States was offering financial assistance, but the Uzbek regime was stalling on the reforms.
‘[Karimov] had signed a declaration,’ says Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch’s DC advocate, ‘and it had very, very strong human rights commitments. I saw that, and I thought, “Aha! This is my hook.”’
To Malinowski, Karimov was not honouring his part of the bargain. Someone should be told. That someone was Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate sub-committee responsible for approving foreign spending. Malinowski took the text of the agreement to Leahy, filled him in on the background and suggested that Uzbekistan be held to its part of the bargain.
‘It’s hard to argue against holding a country to the promises it has made to the US government,’ Malinowski says today.
Leahy agreed. In February 2003, Congress passed a motion stating that, for Uzbekistan to receive US aid, Secretary of State Colin Powell had to certify the country was making substantial progress on human rights. That summer – to much scoffing – he did just that. Human Rights Watch ramped up its lobbying, contacting leading congressmen and suggesting that dealing with the administration was likely to prove politically embarrassing and that what was going on in Central Asia was flat wrong.
‘We’re not the kind of country that should be in any way associated with people that boil people alive,’ says Malinowksi.
It was hard to disagree with this statement, so the following year, when the time came to decide whether to pay Uzbekistan its money or not, it was much harder to get away with simply saying the country was doing a great job: partly thanks to Human Rights Watch, everyone knew that it wasn’t.
In Senate hearings on the subject, experts disagreed over the best course of action. If the United States stood up for democracy and human rights, it would doubtless lose its new-found friendship with Central Asia – and its airbase. On the other hand, if it stood by Karimov and K2, where did that leave the President’s promises about human rights? What was the point of fighting a War on Terror if your own allies were busy boiling people alive?
The White House now found itself in a fix. Having bound itself to a dual strategy – democratization in Uzbekistan and access to K2 – it had to decide which was the most important. The Pentagon and the regional bureaux of the State Department argued that keeping the base was crucial and that advances on human rights in Uzbekistan, slower than hoped for but apparently significant, justified continued payments to Karimov. The State Department’s functional bureaux, meanwhile, especially the Bureau of Human Rights and Labor, held that Karimov’s ‘reforms’ were a sham to keep the United States off its back, and that nothing was being achieved at all. No more money should be passed to the republic.
The result was an irreconcilable split. ‘Forus, at the DoD [Department of Defense], the most important thing was to maintain a relationship with a country that was geo-strategically important,’ recalls Colonel Jon Chicky ‘Our commanders in CENTCOM kept telling us how important the base was. So for our purposes we needed to keep the base open and maintain a relationship with Uzbekistan.’
On the other side, various factions of the State Department became adamant about not doing deals with dictators.
‘You had the State Department screaming, “There’s no democracy! We can’t deal with these people! We have to attach conditions to aid!”’ recalls Dr Stephen Blank of the US War College. ‘And you have the Pentagon saying, “We have a war to win!” The people that I talked to were completely frustrated. I talked to people from the Pentagon and the NSC and they just couldn’t get anything done.’
As the situation failed to resolve itself, further rifts emerged. Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s right-hand man, witnessed the bureaucratic in-fighting.
‘You’ve got the bureaucratic technique going on,’ he says, ‘the DoD seeking out allies in the State Department to buttress its position (and finding them in the regional bureaux) and you’ve got people in the functional bureaux like DRL, seeking out what allies it can find, usually in the NGO community and in Congress, because you’ve got lots of people in Congress who will fall on any human rights issue and make it their placard for the day’
For the Uzbek president, the issue of the US relationship was rapidly becoming confusing. On the one hand, Congress and various parts of the State Department were lambasting him for not achieving his human rights goals; on the other hand, he was receiving lavish praise from the Pentagon for his stalwart help in the War on Terror. To make matters worse, in the spring of 2003, Karimov discovered that the President of Kyrgyzstan, next door, was receiving more money for his air base than he was. He wrote a personal letter to President Bush asking for this to be remedied. It wasn’t.
The next year, Congress was finally convinced the Uzbek human rights situation was not improving and severed all aid payments: $18 million went unpaid. Suspecting that his airbase was now threatened, a fortnight later US Chief of Staff General Richard Myers flew to Tashkent and announced that the Pentagon would pay the shortfall.
‘That will screw the State Department!’ he commented as he left the podium. ‘That will screw them!’
US legislators were livid. This
was not going to happen again. Efforts were redoubled to deny United States funding to Uzbekistan as well as to stop the Pentagon from paying them through the back door.
With US funds to Uzbekistan curtailed, the money tap was finally turned off. It was now harder to argue that the United States was supporting a murderous dictator. But it was also harder to use the promise of further funding to encourage Karimov to engage in political reform. The money was gone: there were no longer any levers with which to exert pressure. The relationship was coming apart. According to one senior Pentagon official involved, it was ‘like watching a train wreck in slow motion’.
For Karimov, maintaining a deal with America now looked increasingly pointless. The Uzbek president decided it was time to renegotiate his contract. He was willing to offer long-term access to K2, but wanted clarification regarding what, exactly, the United States planned to offer him in return. Shortly after Congress refused to certify Uzbekistan for foreign funding, Karimov wrote to the United States offering a draft agreement for basing rights to K2 and asking for a decision.
By now, however, the State Department and the Pentagon were grid-locked. The State Department was unable to work out whether human rights or strategic issues were more important in the US–Uzbek relationship. The Pentagon, meanwhile, was in the middle of a Global Posture Review that involved analysing where bases would be needed in the future. Perhaps a US air base in Uzbekistan wasn’t necessary after all. With the US decision-making process effectively paralysed, no one knew what to do. Karimov’s letter went unanswered. He wrote another; again, no response. From 2004 to 2005, Uzbekistan wrote six separate times, asking what, exactly, the United States wanted. The United States never replied.
‘These letters from the Uzbek side to us pointed out the fact, painfully, that we were unable to come to terms with the totality of what our interests were in Uzbekistan,’ says a senior Pentagon official of the process. ‘We just weren’t able to agree how to move forward.’
Unable to decide whether to strengthen the knot or cut it altogether, and distracted by the now daily bombs going off in Iraq, the White House left Karimov hanging.
Then, on 13 May 2005, he made the decision for them.
The situation in Andijan came to a head rapidly. At around 5.20 p.m., a series of military trucks and APCs approached Babur Square from different directions. Simultaneously, soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Panicking, people started to run, only to discover the exits were blocked: there was no way out. Protest leaders acted fast, using the PA system to order the crowd into two groups and surrounding them with government hostages for protection.
Then an opportunity presented itself. It seemed that Ministry of the Interior troops had forgotten to block one of the exits from the square: the main road to the north, Cholpon Street. Two groups of protestors, the first at least 400 people, the second much larger, started marching up the street. Women and children were shoved to the centre of the groups, men to the outside, holding their hostages in front of them. Most made it away from the square safely until they reached the junction with Parkovaya Street 500 metres up the road. Beside the toy shop, Detsky Mir, government troops had moved two civilian buses into the street and positioned them end-to-end, blocking it completely. Protestors hauled the buses apart, creating a gap a few metres wide, and squeezed through. But it was a trap. The buses created a funnel through which protestors had to pass slowly, making them easy targets.
‘The moment we went through,’ recalls Nodir Mahmudov, ‘they started shooting.’
The first to pass were shot clean through the forehead. As Mahmudov himself went through, at the last minute he ducked; a bullet went directly through his hat.
‘There was a hole through both sides,’ he says. ‘They were shooting to kill.’
Protestors who made it alive between the two buses dropped to the ground and lay still, waiting for the shooting to stop and wondering what to do next.
At this point it started to rain, further confusing matters. The first group of protestors shoved the buses completely out of the road, crashed past them and ran further north towards the Cholpon Cinema. With the buses behind them, the gunfire stopped and everything went silent. Once they reached the cinema, however, and the junction with Baynalminal Street, there was another surprise.
As the first group approached the cinema, they saw that the military had blocked the road with trucks, jeeps and Russian 8-wheel APCs fitted with 14.5 mm machine guns. In front of School Number 15, sandbag barricades had been erected. On the ground, soldiers were prone with guns at the ready. For a moment there was a pause. Then, when the crowd reached a range of about 300 metres the troops opened fire.
‘From the APCs there was a sound like boom-boom-boom-boom!’ recalls one survivor, ‘then the automatics: takh-takh-takh!’
At exactly this moment the rain turned into a torrential downpour. Unable to see through the rain, unable to flee, facing a hail of automatic gunfire, members of the first group were cut down where they stood.
When the first volley of fire stopped, ostensibly for the troops to reload, survivors who had dropped to the ground stood up and found themselves surrounded by a sea of corpses. The moment they tried to run, the firing started again.
‘It was like a bowling game,’ recalls one. ‘When the ball strikes the pins and everything falls down. There were flashes from the APCs, there were bodies everywhere. I don’t think anyone in front of us survived.’
By the time Sardor Azimov and Nodir Mahmudov arrived in the second, larger, group, virtually all of the first group was dead. As the businessmen struggled to take in the scale of the slaughter, a third wave of gunfire started. Mahmudov, with his wife, daughter and son, flung them all to the ground and hugged them tight. Azimov was slower. Beside him, one of his factory workers was shot, first in the leg, then the stomach.
‘I saw him go down, and I called someone next to me. We carried him over to the edge of the road and we bound up his leg, but we didn’t know what to do about his stomach.’ Facing a volley of gunfire, Azimov abandoned his friend and lay down. When the shooting paused, he jumped up and started trying to help again. ‘We tried to take them to the sides of the road, but there were so many that we just couldn’t help them all. I think about five hundred people died. Some were killed when they were helping the wounded.’
Panicking, survivors now turned right, into Baynalminal Street, and dispersed into the side roads, where they hammered on the doors of locals, begging to be let in. A few opened their doors and agreed to take women and children, warning that snipers were positioned on the rooftops; others simply refused to answer. One witness, looking back at the carnage, saw APCs driving over the bodies of the dead, and government troops apparently executing the wounded.
Anna Neistat, Head of the Emergencies Unit of Human Rights Watch, was at home in Maryland when Sasha Petrov called to inform her that their predictions of the day before had been correct. Something big was happening in Uzbekistan. In fact, it had already happened.
She immediately packed her bags, travelled to the New York office and, together with the Emergencies team, formulated a plan of action. The next day, Neistat and Petrov were on a flight to Russia. From there they flew to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan and on to Osh, near the Uzbek border. In Osh they conferred with local human rights groups, then picked up a car and drove to the border town of Jalalabad where they found the first batch of Andijani refugees recovering in Suzak Hospital.
‘There were about a dozen people wounded,’ says Petrov. ‘It was bullet wounds; some of them had contusions, but many people had been just in psychological shock.’
Not far from Jalalabad, in a field just across the Uzbek border, the Emergencies Unit found two rows of tents and, inside them, nearly 500 more survivors. The camp was basic to the extreme, with no cooking facilities and no proper sewerage or running water; Kyrgyzstan had never dealt with refugees on this scale and was struggling to cope. The team set about interviewing the refugees one by one, i
n an attempt to discover what had actually happened to them. Tragically, many had no idea.
‘There were women and children who had just showed up at the square near the Hokimiyat, because they heard that there was a big demonstration,’ says Neistat. ‘These people just left their home at – whatever time it was, ten, twelve in the morning – sat the day on the square and then the shooting started and they were fleeing.’
As the HRW team set about establishing an account of what had actually happened in Andijan, a problem presented itself. The Uzbeks had all left the city together, on the night of 13 May. They had no clue what had happened afterwards, or what was happening now. From discussions with journalists on the border, the team learned that access to Andijan had become near impossible: journalists were being turned away, arrested and held at gunpoint. Cameras, computers and notebooks were being confiscated. Telephone lines had been cut, mobile phone networks shut down and Internet access blocked. The entire city had been cordoned off. The question was, how to get in to find out what was going on?
On 21 May, just a week after the shootings, and four days after arriving in Kyrgyzstan, a member of the HRW team succeeded in crossing the border into Uzbekistan, then travelling on to Andijan. The moment she entered town, the researcher realized the situation was worse than she had expected.
‘As you enter the town the road goes right past the prison. The moment I saw it, I knew there was absolutely no way I would be able to take pictures,’ she recalls. ‘I’ve never seen an institution guarded so heavily’ The prison itself was surrounded by APCs, inside which was a further defensive ring of sandbagged troops scanning the streets with binoculars. ‘It was heavily, heavily fortified.’
A brief drive around town was enough to convince her that the prison was not the only area receiving special treatment. Thousands of armed troops and security officers were visible on the streets. Entire districts were cordoned off. Taxi drivers had been instructed not to transport journalists or foreigners across town. No one wanted to talk. Through friends and relatives, however, a picture emerged of the true extent of the damage, and its aftermath.
A History of the World Since 9/11 Page 29