A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Recognizing that the Andijan incident was likely to have international repercussions – especially in the United States – President Karimov instructed all proof of the mass killings to be erased. The morning after the shootings, army trucks showed up in the town centre and began disposing of the corpses. The first to be removed were women, children and those killed by heavy-calibre weapons. Fire engines hosed blood from the streets. Many wounded protestors who had survived the night on the streets were killed; hospitals were visited and gunshot victims were murdered; families thought to have taken part in the demonstration received visits from masked SNB officers, who took them into custody for interrogation or, in some cases, shot male members of the family on sight. Numerous Andijanis reported seeing mass graves being dug outside town.

  District community groups, known as mahallas, were instructed to inform on neighbours who had participated in the protest. Anyone asking too many questions, who might be either a journalist or a representative of a human rights organization, was to be reported to the police. Those who did talk found themselves in trouble. A female doctor who told journalists she had seen 500 corpses piled into the auditorium at School Number 15 the day after the shootings was arrested; another informant who took a Radio Free Europe correspondent to the site of a mass grave in Bogi Shamol was mysteriously stabbed to death four days later. The Uzbek Ministry of the Interior was attempting a cover-up on a vast scale.

  Simultaneously, Karimov went out of his way to minimize the damage. Immediately after the shootings, he addressed the nation, announcing that there had been a coup attempt in Andijan, and that he had been forced to step in. Blame for the incident was placed squarely at the feet of the protestors – Islamic fanatics (‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’) trained in Chechnya – who had sought to bring the country to its knees.

  Evidence of the insurgents’ extremist tendencies was presented: hadn’t the jailbreakers shouted ‘Allahu akhar!’ moments before they rammed the prison gates? The numbers of the dead were downplayed, killings blamed not on government troops but on the terrorists. The President said 187 people had perished, of whom the majority were either the terrorists themselves or the hostages they had executed. Tragically, sixty civilians had been killed, all by the ‘bandits’.

  In Kyrgyzstan, HRW staff began the process of putting the information they had gathered into a report, to be distributed around the world.

  ‘I think we all recognized that it was extremely important to get this information out,’ says Neistat, ‘not just for the sake of creating a record, but also for the sake of the refugees.’

  If the Andijanis thought they were safe in Kyrgyzstan, they were wrong. The refugee camp was situated right next to the border. Every day, Uzbeks would cross over to visit them. Some were family members seeking their relatives. Others had shadier motives. The area around the camp was swarming with SNB officers keeping track of who was inside and who was visiting, and trying to persuade refugees to come home. Many of the visitors had already been primed by the SNB to persuade their relatives to return: family members were instructed to tell them that, if they didn’t, their relatives would be arrested and tortured in their place. When that failed, SNB officers, aware of the CIA’s clandestine programme to snatch and transport al-Qaeda suspects globally, commenced their own extraordinary rendition operations, kidnapping refugees and dragging them back across the border into Uzbekistan.

  At the same time, the Uzbek regime deployed more conventional methods, filing extradition requests for the refugees with the Kyrgyz government: these people were terrorists. Uzbekistan wanted them back. Intimidated by its stronger, wealthier neighbour, Kyrgyzstan had some tricky decisions to make.

  The United States had some tricky decisions to make, too. In his second inaugural address, the President had sworn that democracy trumped all else (‘We will encourage reform in other governments,’ Bush promised, ‘by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people’) but here was the United States in bed with a dictator who had just killed somewhere between 500 and 2,000 of his own citizens. What was America supposed to do now? It couldn’t cut funding to Uzbekistan: it already had. The White House had no carrots or sticks left.

  At NATO headquarters in Brussels, US military staff refused to authorize a joint communiqué condemning the Uzbek government’s actions for fear of jeopardizing access to K2, but as more and more evidence accumulated it became clear a line had to be drawn. Yes, there had been a jailbreak and, yes, there were armed protestors, but Karimov’s response was way beyond proportional.

  The State Department and the White House tried to be diplomatic, but, while both refrained from characterizing the Andijan incident as a ‘massacre’, it was impossible to condone Karimov’s actions: as the Economist helpfully pointed out, Andijan was probably the worst atrocity by a government against civilian demonstrators since Tiananmen Square in 1989. The day of the shootings, the State Department’s Richard Boucher warned the Press that ‘the facts are not pretty’; the same day White House spokesman Scott McClellan urged restraint on both sides, but, as evidence amassed of the scale of the killings, this line became harsher. The White House, he said five days later, was ‘deeply disturbed’.

  This was not what Karimov wanted to hear. The day after the shootings, he made the magnitude of the stakes perfectly clear to his allies, imposing a ban on night flights into K2.15 Access to the base was now in jeopardy

  ‘The Uzbeks started restricting our air operations,’ says a senior State Department officer working on Uzbekistan at the time. ‘That was their way of expressing displeasure about our response to Andijan.’ Very quickly it became clear that the Uzbeks were planning to hold the base hostage to try to temper the United States response. The Uzbek regime wanted its refugees back, and was willing to play hardball to get them. ‘It put us in a very difficult position.’

  The result was a series of frantic conferences. ‘There was a tense dialogue at very senior levels,’ recalls Colonel Chicky. ‘Intense debate within the administration, State Department, National Security Council, Department of Defense, about what to do next.’ Chicky, for one, was convinced this story was not going to end happily. ‘It was not a good situation. For my mind I knew that we were going to be the bill payer for this.’

  Two weeks after the shootings, on 29 May, Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Sununu visited Uzbekistan. Uzbek authorities refused to meet them. At a press conference in Tashkent, the senators commented that the events in Andijan were ‘shocking, but not unexpected in a country that does not allow the exercise of human rights and democracy’, and offered a veiled threat: maintaining a US–Uzbek relationship would be ‘very difficult, if not impossible’ if the Government failed to reform.

  Meanwhile, four Andijanis were handed over to Uzbekistan by Kyrgyz authorities; all immediately vanished into SNB cells, where it appeared they were tortured extensively. A further 121 refugees were charged in absentia with crimes against the state, and extradition requests were filed for another 110. Clearly, if the refugees were handed back to Uzbekistan, their lives would be in danger. The situation was coming to a head.

  If one is willing to criticize US policy towards Uzbekistan, one must also be willing to give credit where it’s due. Acknowledging the perilous situation of the Andijani refugees, the State Department and the Pentagon now stepped up and showed their true colours.

  ‘The moment of truth took place when it became clear that the only way to keep this base would be if we stood aside and let the refugees be returned to Uzbekistan,’ recalls Dan Fried, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the time. Fried conferred with his opposite number at the Pentagon. ‘Is there any way to avoid this dilemma?’ he was asked. ‘No, not at this point,’ he replied. ‘The only way to save the base is to send these people back . . . and a lot of them, I suspect, will be tortured.

  ‘Very rarely in policymaking do you have these kinds of star
k moral choices,’ says Fried today. ‘But this was one of the rare cases where you actually had a clear binary choice. We had to do the right thing . . . I remember my colleague at the Defense Department just groaning and saying, “My God, we’ve got to get them out and when we do we’re going to lose the base.”’

  The White House put pressure on Kyrgyzstan not to repatriate or extradite the refugees, while at the same time seeking to find them new homes abroad. It then informed the Uzbeks of its decision.

  ‘In the end we told them, “Look, we have serious strategic interests, but we’re not going to walk away. We have responsibilities towards refugees,”’ says Fried. ‘Not a bad moment, if you’re interested in human rights.’

  The result was a series of tit-for-tat exchanges with the Uzbek regime. On 27 July 2005, Fried announced that the Uzbek refugees would be flown out of Kyrgyzstan to Romania. The next day Karimov responded, delivering a document to the US embassy in Tashkent demanding the termination of the US–Uzbek basing agreement. That the note was not made public suggested it was a threat, to be carried out the moment the United States actually acted. By now, however, the United States’ course of action was set. On 29 July, after a two-month stand-off, 439 Uzbek refugees were air-lifted out of Kyrgyzstan to safety.

  ‘That day,’ says Fried, ‘within an hour, the Uzbek government terminated the base agreement.’ The United States had 180 days to pack its bags.

  Immediately after the shootings the Uzbek regime launched a wave of arrests of those it deemed responsible for the uprising. Fifteen of the most prominent suspects were paraded in front of the media and a show trial was staged. Government negotiators then contacted the Andijan refugees in Romania and offered them a deal.

  ‘They said, if you keep talking about the events at Andijan,’ says Sardor Azimov, ‘and keep saying bad things about the Government and keep giving interviews, we will shoot these fifteen people. We will execute them.’

  The Andijan refugees went quiet. They were then dispersed around the world to new homes. The story disappeared.

  Witnesses effectively silenced, Karimov now shored up his defences. NGOs that had opened as part of the US–Uzbek agreement were hastily ejected from the country – as were the BBC, Radio Free Europe, the American Bar Association and the UNHCR.

  The Uzbek president then flew to Moscow, where the nation that had provided the truck that had breached the gates of Andijan Prison on 13 May 2005 was diplomatic enough not to say, ‘We told you so.’ In a number of press statements, the Uzbek president blamed ‘external forces’ for the events at Andijan: specifically, the United States.

  In September 2005, Uzbekistan announced the cessation of counter-terrorism operations with the United States and, for the first time since 1991, commenced joint military exercises with Russia. Two months later, as US servicemen lowered the flag at K2 for the last time, the republic joined the Eurasian Economic Community, effectively severing US economic influence, and signed a mutual defence pact with the Kremlin. Russian petrochemical giants Gazprom and Lukoil announced that they planned to invest $2.5 billion in the country; shortly afterwards, South Korea’s National Oil Corporation and Korea Gas Corporation signed memoranda of understanding that allowed them to develop and exploit oil and gas fields there, too. India then signed seven economic agreements, gaining permission for its companies to explore for oil, gas and other hydrocarbons. China offered $600 million in a parallel oil deal. Uzbekistan, the jewel of the Great Game, had turned away from the West.

  At almost this exact moment, the situation in Afghanistan – underfunded, understaffed and under-monitored since the glorious victory in November 2001 – deteriorated: the Taliban was back. The United States moved frantically to shore up relationships with other Central Asian states, offering the kinds of cash, assurances and attention that it should have offered Uzbekistan before it was too late.

  Suddenly, it seemed, the United States needed friends in the region after all.

  8

  The Muslim Disease

  How do you deal with an enemy? Muslims, we hate America. Everything is aggravated now. How can we trust this nation?

  Sheikh Muhammed, Waje Central Mosque, Nigeria, 2005

  The day before his assassination, Abdul Ghani attended a funeral in Nowshera. On 2 February 2007, a friend, Ikram Ullah Khattak, had been abducted from Lahore. A week later, after an extensive search, police dredged his body from the Upper Chenab Canal in Gujranwala. It was an unfortunate business.

  It was also an ominous one. The cinema owner, entrepreneur and billionaire had been a senior member of the Khattak dynasty – about as close to royalty as it was possible to get in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The dead man’s uncle had been one of the founders of the largest political party in Pakistan, the PPP, and was a former Chief Minister; two of his brothers were prominent MPs. Not long before Dr Ghani’s arrival in Nowshera, Pakistan’s Minister for Industry had shown up to pay his respects. This was an important occasion.

  Ghani wasn’t cowed. On the contrary, those who met the fifty-four-year-old doctor that day found him curiously distracted. Bemused by his friend’s distant manner, at four o’clock, a colleague, Namair Muhammad, took him aside and asked what was wrong. Ghani waved off the question, explaining simply that he was keen to return to work. Pressed on the matter, however, he opened up a little, admitting that he’d been given an important assignment to undertake the following morning. The Health Ministry had instructed him to drive to the district of Salarzai, fifty kilometres north-east of the main town in Bajaur Agency. Apparently, there was a situation that needed his urgent personal attention.

  Ghani’s friend immediately commented that the trip sounded dangerous. Salarzai was awash with Taliban. Almost certainly, al-Qaeda was there, too. When Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri had fled Afghanistan for Pakistan in the winter of 2001, they had shown up nearby. There was every possibility that they, and their friends, were still in the area. Travel in and around Salarzai was a lottery. Muhammad suggested that Ghani delay the trip, or at least take a little time to think about it.

  ‘I asked him to stay the night and leave the next morning,’ he recalls, ‘but he was in a hurry. He wanted to get back to Bajaur before it got dark.’ Concerned that his colleague was standing into danger, Muhammad asked whether Ghani was up to date on news of the threats around Salarzai. ‘He told me that the security situation was bad. Officers who used official government cars or jeeps were easy targets for the militants.’ Noting his friend’s pained expression, Ghani leant towards him. ‘I know the risks,’ he assured him. ‘I try not to travel in official cars.’ But the doctor was clearly worried.

  After the funeral, Ghani paid his respects to the family, bade goodbye, climbed into his car and headed north, back into Bajaur, to prepare for the next day’s trip. It was the last time Muhammad ever saw him.

  That night, Ghani’s second-in-command at Bajaur Agency Hospital had a dream. Hazrat Jamal’s son Mohammed Viqar was spending the night with his grandmother; for some reason, this bothered him. At around 2 a.m. on the morning of Friday, 16 February, the EPI Technician awoke with a start.

  ‘I saw my son,’ he says. ‘He was lying on the road.’ The boy appeared to be hanging over the edge of a rocky mountain pass. If he slipped, he would fall into a deep river below. In the dream, Jamal was trying to work out how to retrieve him when he glanced down and realized that something else was horribly wrong. Mohammed Viqar’s legs had been ripped apart from the waist down.

  Later that morning, when Jamal reported for work, he bumped into Dr Ghani in the hospital foyer. Just the man I wanted to see, the doctor told him. At the request of the Health Ministry, he, Jamal and three others were heading out for a meeting in Salarzai; the driver had already been summoned. For no reason he could decipher, the nightmare suddenly came back to Jamal and a wave of nausea swept over him.

  ‘I got the same feeling. I felt weird.’

  Too proud to say any
thing to his supervisor, the technician suggested that he man the fort while the team was away. Ghani was having none of it. It was highly important that he attend, he told him.

  Apparently, the decision revolved around facial hair. Ghani himself was clean-shaven, but Jamal had an impressive beard. This might prove useful, the doctor explained. The village they were heading to, Shehano Bandar, was a Taliban stronghold: the more beards in the car, the better. Jamal found himself unable to disagree, and so at 10 a.m. the five-man team – Ghani, Jamal, another technician, a driver and a political officer – climbed into a white four-wheel-drive pickup and headed north out of Khar.

  Jamal was apprehensive. He had been born in the next-door village to Shehano Bandar. What he had heard of the place was not good. ‘I knew there were armed militants there. Al-Qaeda, too,’ he says. ‘There was definitely reason to believe that this was quite dangerous.’

  If Dr Ghani was afraid, he did a good job of concealing it. Throughout the hour-long journey he chatted amiably, laughing, joking and asking the names of villages as they passed. Five kilometres out of Khar, the metalled road disappeared and the pickup traced its way up into the rocky mountain passes that led to Afghanistan.

  The moment the team arrived in Shehano Bandar, it became apparent that things were going to be harder than anyone had anticipated. In front of the village’s only mosque they met the cleric – a large, dark man with a full beard and a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. Taliban.

  In his best formal language, Ghani explained that he was a doctor from Khar and that he would like to discuss a few matters relating to the village’s health record. Nodding sagely, the cleric led the team into the mosque, where the men of the town were gathering for Friday-morning prayers. He then addressed the crowd. A doctor had come to see them, he said. From Khar. He wanted to speak to them. Abruptly the cleric’s tone changed, and he informed his congregation that this ‘doctor’ was probably a government agent. Everything he said was to be disregarded.