Satirical Poster by Association for Human Rights in Central Asia

Demonstrators in France turned out on January 30th, President Islam Karimov’s 74th birthday, to call attention to the dictator’s many human rights violations.

The activists picked the Uzbek Embassy in Paris, but embassy staff refused to accept their petition or meet with the protesters, says fergananews.com.

Among the protesters were members of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, the Association of Christians Against the Death Penalty and Torture, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Amnesty International, the Fiery Hearts Club. They called for the release of all political prisoners in Uzbekistan.

Protest signs including a satirical poster (see above) showing Karimov’s face beaming like the sun over a toiling child forced to pick cotton and the slogan, “Work, Sonny, the Sun is Still High!”

Response to Sept 27 HR Ltr on Uzbekistan

While chatting with President Hamid Karzai in Kabul yesterday, Clinton took time to joke about a recent humorous incident in the United States, when Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain told reporters that he didn’t know who the president of “Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan” was — and didn’t think it mattered because it had nothing to do with creating jobs.

Karzai listened to Clinton’s anecdote about Cain and commented, “That isn’t right, but that’s how politics are” (see the video at the Washington Post here.)

Pundits are now endeavoring to explain to Cain just why Uzbekistan’s president Islam Karimov is important — because of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), the supply line to US and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

The US is now intensively engaging with Karimov, a dictator who has held his country in thrall for 22 years, sending thousands of devout Muslims to prison for their religious activity outside of state confines, and jailing dozens of independent journalists and human rights activists for trying to report on the massive human rights violations.

Recently the Obama Administration persuaded the Senate Appropriations Committee to lift restrictions on military aid to Uzbekistan, in place for 7 years over severe human rights problems in Uzbekistan, in order to help bolster the NDN, proffered to Uzbekistan as an opportunity to build stability and prosperity in a new US-backed “Silk Road”.

Alarmed at what they saw as an abandonment of principles, US human rights activists appealed to Clinton in September to raise Uzbekistan’s many human rights problems of political imprisonment, torture, suppression of the media, and forced child labor in the cotton industry. Labor unions and rights groups also picketed a high-profile conference at the American Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce of State Department officials, visiting Uzbek Foreign Minister Elyor Ganiev, and American corporations doing business in Uzbekistan such as Honeywell and General Motors.

Clinton is scheduled to visit the General Motors plant in Tashkent during her visit.

On the eve of her visit, again a coalition of human rights advocates, labor unions, retailers and investors addressed an appeal to Clinton, urging her to raise with the Uzbek government its failure to admit a delegation of the ILO into Uzbekistan to inspect the cotton fields. Andrew Strohlein of the International Crisis Group has called the Uzbekistan’s mobilization of students to pick cotton, documented extensively this year by Uzbek human rights monitors, “The world’s largest state-run program of forced child labour.”

Just as the activists’ new appeal went out, the State Department responded with an answer to their past letter of September 27. In a letter obtained by EurasiaNet dated October 18, Robert O. Blake, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs replied that the Department of State “actively seeks to improve Uzbekistan’s democratic and civil society development and its record on human rights” yet implies that “national security interests” must take priority:

Congress has prohibited the use of foreign assistance funds for assistance to the central Government of Uzbekistan unless the Secretary of State determines and reports to Congress that Uzbekistan is making substantial and continuing progress on specific issues related to promotion of democracy and respect for internationally recognized human rights. We have not thought it appropriate up to this point to provide such a certification, and have continued to provide limited assistance that involves working with Uzbek government institutions — in such areas as counternarcotics, health, and nonproliferation — by using certain available notwithstanding authorities and in consultation with Congress.

The Department of State remains concerned over continued reports of the Uzbek government’s widespread use of forced child and adult labor in the centrally managed cotton harvest, including the harvest that is being conducted now. I and other Department principals raise this issue frequently with the government, including our urging the government to allow credible, outside parties (such as the International Labor Organization) to monitor the cotton harvest.

“Currently, the statutory restriction cannot be waived on national security grounds,” nevertheless Blake explains. The new legislation would give the Secretary of State authority to waive the restriction as “in the national security interest of the United States” — although currently the draft legislation mandates six-month reporting to review possible corruption in contracts, and an annual human rights examination. The purpose, says Blake, is to “provide defensive non-lethal equipment to enhance Uzbekistan’s ability to protect its border with Afghanistan, through which cargo destined for U.S. forces flows.”

In a press conference following her meeting with Uzbek Foreign Minister Elyor Ganiev, Clinton claimed that Uzbekistan seemed to be making progress.. Human rights groups were puzzled, as they couldn’t see the improvements or even what State could have meant by them. Blake now actually contradicts this in his letter:

This limited waiver and the provision of defensive border protection equipment to Uzbekistan would not in any way diminish our efforts to encourage respect for human rights in Uzbekistan. It also does not state that we think Uzbekistan has made substantial or adequate progress to date.

According to the Uzbek government, trade turnover between Uzbekistan and the United States grew from $100.3 million in January-June 2010 to $131.5 million in the same period of 2011. So the amounts of trade are not large, and the military component more symbolic than anything. Nevertheless, it’s a victory in the Uzbek government’s quest for legitimacy, and it remains to be seen whether the US can leverage Tashkent’s desire for international respectibility into some actual human rights progress — or even some of those jobs Herman Cain was concerned about.

This article first appeared on the Choihona blog at EurasiaNet.

Human rights monitor Elena Urlayeva has been reporting from the cotton fields in Uzbekistan, where students have been put to work doing weeding. She notes in particular this year that children have been forced to wear face masks, to try to avoid breathing salt peter (sodium nitrate) used as fertilizer.  You can see the photos she has taken of the students in masks here.

Last week at the ILO annual conference, employers and unions condemned child labor in Uzbekistan.

“This Sunday is World Day Against Child Labor, and the international union movement calls on Uzbekistan to respect fundamental labour rights and to allow an independent committee under the auspices of the ILO to observe the next harvest,” the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Ms. Sharan Burrow said in a statement.

Kyrgyz authorities report that on on the evening of May 24 at the Alga border crossing near the Aydarken border post, borders guards along with local security officials from the Kadamjai district and the customs service halted some smugglers attempting to bring 1,900 tons of cotton from Uzbekistan into Kyrgyzstan.

The contrabandists were driving two Hyundai Porter pick-up trucks. One of the smugglers who was without identification was arrested, and was turned over along with the truck-loads of cotton to security officials.

The incident is indicative of just how valued — and expensive — cotton is this season, with the sharp increase in world prices.

Since the pogroms in Kyrgyzstan a year ago in June, the border has been closed. In the past, trade was brisk from Uzbekistan in fruits and vegetables, that sold for a lower price in Kyrgyzstan. Meanwhile, Kyrgyz would sell Chinese manufactured goods, in demand in Uzbekistan.

Since that time, as Kyrgyz officials have pointed out, the closed border has not only harmed the economy but only fostered the growth of criminals, 24.kg reports.

Unfortunately this seems like too much to ask.  The World Bank has decided to devote this year’s small grants program, intended to develop Uzbek NGOs, to the topic of  ”creating conditions for upbringing healthy and harmoniously developed generation, and realization of the young people’s creative and intellectual potential”–yes, the government’s own propaganda theme for 2010, expressly intended to obscure its annual mass child mobilization.  The deadline for the competition is next week, so it will be interesting to see what projects are actually funded.

Institutionally, the Bank seems to have very little to say on the matter of child labor.  On a web-page headed “child labor” it describes its partnership with UNICEF and the ILO on a research project  called the Understanding Children’s Work initiative, that seems to have more to do with promoting youth employment than with stopping child exploitation:

The primary areas of focus for the partnership are Africa and the Middle East, as well as Latin America.  The partnership works together on several projects designed to better understand the determinants of youth labor market outcomes, to learn what works to promote youth employability, and to promote evidence-based policy debate and coordination.

The Bank’s materials on Uzbekistan make little or no mention of the problem, including a 2005 research report that explicitly deals with the subsidy and taxation policy (including labor and income taxes) that structure the current system of cotton-growing, which completely ignored the massive subsidy inherent in the forced mobilization of low- or no-cost child labor.  And, like the ADB, World Bank officials just can’t get enough of Uzbekistan, it seems: its new country manager there, Loup Brefort, has been quoted extolling results in the country, and announcing 150 million euros worth of new projects.

The head of the Asian Development Bank, Haruhiko Kuroda, was in Uzbekistan on February 16 meeting with President Karimov in February, promising new loans and intensified cooperation.  Wonder if this means continued carte blanche to abuse children? Uzbekistan has already received loans from the bank totaling more than 1.2 billion USD.  The great irony is that while agriculture (especially irrigation) is the target of much of the ADB’s lending, improving the quality of primary education  is the other.  You might think that encouraging the government to actually allow children to attend primary school would be an obvious step in that direction–that is, unless you were the ADB.  So much for the ADB’s mission of “fighting poverty.”

The decree stipulates:

cardinal improvement of the quality of education in schools, professional colleges, lyceums and universities through wide introduction of the new information and communication technologies, providing educational establishments with the modern educational and laboratory equipment and computers, as well as stimulation of the teachers and tutors;

and

expansion of measures to raise healthy generation, including the “Healthy mother – healthy child” program, improvement of the system of protection of reproductive health of mothers, children and teenagers, development of preventive healthcare;

As  Uzbek analyst Sanjar Saidov has noted, these programs are largely if not wholly propaganda exercises.  Last year, after all, was the year of Rural Development and Well-being (!).  But since the realities of life for most of Uzbekistan’s young people are so wildly removed from the puffery of such decrees, does no one in the regime worry that they might make people more cynical, more angry?

…forced child labor is itself a symptom of deep structural problems in agriculture.  Amongthe primary ones is the strict centralization of the cotton sector in Uzbekistan, nearly to the same degree as it was under Soviet rule.  Farmers cannot decide what they will sow in their fields; they sell their produce [to the state] at a price the state determines, which are artificially low, and so therefore farmers cannot pay adults [to harvest cotton] or invest in processing of cotton or other agricultural products.

This is a key observation, though it is not news to those who are familiar with conditions in the country.  The World Bank cites “state interference” in the sector as a key developmental challenge, and reminds us that “Although the gap between the state order and export parity price for the cotton has narrowed by about 10 percentage points between 2004 and 2006, the state order price remains well below the export parity prices and similar prices in the neighboring countries.”  Why then are development organizations active in the country not more critical of these problems, and of the forced child labor that stems from them.  The World Bank’s country information, incidentally, doesn’t mention FCL at all…