Registan.net

Ferghana.ru reported yesterday in a nice, bold, straightforward headline that Uzbekistan’s opposition welcomes closer between the Uzbek government and the West. Of course, news like this is never so straightforward. Birlik in Kokand is the only organization mentioned in the report as supporting rapprochement.

Meanwhile, IWPR reports, in an equally straightforward headline, that Uzbek human rights activists fear NATO’s return to Uzbekistan. Unnamed activists say that they fear closer relations will cause human rights to recede into the background as Western governments become too excited about closer security ties. (Though this is not the aim of this post, this sounds not only implausible to me, but it appears to be demonstrably false. Human rights issues seem to be of increasing importance as ties between the West and Uzbekistan wax. Not that I give the West credit necessarily — Uzbekistan’s government knows what the West wants.) Others say that they anticipate closer ties will eventually result in the end of EU sanctions. In my estimation, that’s almost guaranteed, but I don’t really think the sanctions accomplish much anymore. The statement’s been made.

IWPR rolls out one lone voice in favor of closer ties between the West and the Uzbek government.

Unlike some local activists, Nadezhda Ataeva, head of the Human Rights in Central Asia Association based in France, is not opposed to NATO returning to Uzbekistan. She views this as a matter of global security that affects the interests of Uzbekistan and the West alike, not least because of the resurgence of Taleban activity in Afghanistan.

But Ataeva insists any western engagement in Uzbekistan must be used as leverage to talk about human rights, so that what happened in Andijan is not forgotten.

All of the above is just an overly long lead-up to an important point about these kinds of stories that may be obvious to those who read them over and over again. It’s all but impossible to find any one report that provides a representative sample of the opinions of human rights activists. The community does not speak with one voice, and more importantly, the community is pretty fractured — different factions don’t speak with one another. It’s hard to say with certainty anything more than that some activists support closer ties with the West and some oppose them.

This is important to keep in mind as relations between the Uzbek government and Western governments warm. I fully expect that various organizations and interests will find voices in Uzbekistan only to eager to speak for the entire community of activists for or against closer ties.

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