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The harvest is (mostly) in, but at what price?
This is the question posed earlier this month by the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia. That group’s press release of November 4 broke the stories of deaths and injuries suffered earlier in the harvest. More than just breaking news, the group points out the total complicity of institutions that, in a non-totalitarian society [...]
More retribution
This just in from the Rapid Response Group, a coalition of Uzbek human rights activists. Ganihon Mamakhanov, whose trial starts today, is a Fergana-based activist, arrested at the height of the cotton harvest (October 10) on trumped up charges after local police planted evidence on him. The implications are clear for those brave individuals trying [...]
Nearly all provinces reporting children in the fields so far
Here is the list of Uzbekistan’s provinces from which we have reliable reports of the mass mobilization of children for cotton-picking, three weeks into the harvest:
Fergana province is no exception
One of our sources reports that university students, high school students and schoolchildren in and around Marghilon city (Fergana province) have in fact been sent out to pick cotton.
Kids in the field, September 2009
First reports from the 2009 Harvest
Despite government claims to have “banned” forced child labor, Uzbekistan’s children are not been spared their annual mandatory work in the cotton fields this year. And once again, the government, through the local education departments, is the one forcing them to go.
highlights from the video…
Some of the remarkable facts documented by Nadezhda Ataeva and colleagues deserve to be highlighted. Human rights activists from the group monitored the harvest in six provinces, in the western part of the country and in the Fergana Valley. The video does not indicate where the footage comes from. It does state [...]
More 2008 harvest video from Nadezhda Ataeva and colleagues
U.S. anti-trafficking report: child labor on cotton is forced labor…
…and the Uzbek government is not doing anything serious about it.
The essence of coercion: “We live subject to their orders…”
More documentation from the Fall 2008 harvest continues to emerge, this time in a remarkable report issued by the International Labor Rights Forum, compiled by Uzbek human rights activists. Based on 72 original interviews with parents, schoolchildren, teachers and farmers taken just after the harvest was completed, the report lays bare just how vicious state [...]
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