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French Protesters Mark Karimov’s Birthday
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 [...]
How Many Children Are Working in the Cotton Fields in Uzbekistan?
Organizations working in the campaign against forced child labour have estimated the number of children working in the cotton fields to be from 1.5 million to 2 million. These estimates were made on the basis of extrapolation of numbers based on surveys of limited areas. Recently, two new sources became available which help confirm [...]
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 [...]
“Little Slaves” by Yodgar Obid
Little Slaves
Bitter frost and biting wind at their backs
How it howls and wails;
Weakened and bent, they trudge with their sacks
Little hands, little slaves
Torn galoshes and worn out clothes
They dream of warm sunny days;
Shaking from cough they tremble as they go
Little hands, little slaves
Childish thoughts, sweet dreams
All of them perish, dead and gone;
In their native land [...]
Poetry and the people’s tragedy
Literature being the common spiritual refuge for those living under totalitarian regimes, it is not surprising that the literary intelligentsia was among the first to speak out against Uzbekistan’s cotton monoculture in the waning years of the Soviet era. Sadly, they are still decrying it twenty years later. Yodgar Obid, exiled now for seventeen years, [...]
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
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REPORTS
Download 2010 SOAS Report What Has Changed
The production and export of cotton continues to be a major feature of the economy, politics and everyday lives of the people of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This report analyses the nature and causes of their use of child labour in the cotton sector.