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On one of our last nights back in Tashkent, before heading for an overnight stay in the Ferghana Valley, we slipped out and visited an old man who lives in a standard drab, Soviet-style apartment block on the outskirts of town. Ikram is 72, and his daughter, Hamida, was one of 55 women arrested in 2002 for allegedly being part of a banned radical Islamic group called Hizb ut-Tahrir. Hamida's husband had been imprisoned since 2000 for the same crime. His daughter, Ikram says wearily, was guilty of nothing "but wearing the hijab," the Islamic headscarf. In 2004, the government appeared to reconsider, and released Hamida as part of a wider amnesty. But less than a year later and without explanation, she was re-arrested and imprisoned on the same charge. She is now serving a seven-year sentence. The jailed couple has a 6-year-old daughter, Mahbuba, who now lives with one of her aunts. Every three months, Ikram takes Mahbuba to visit her mother in jail. What, I asked, does she say to her? "She usually says, 'Mama, can I stay with you this time?'"
Ikram at least knows where his daughter is. In the year since Andijan, says the New York-based Human Rights Watch, the number of people who have simply disappeared into Uzbekistan prisons has increased sharply. Another father we met in Tashkent, Akhmat, hasn't seen his son since he too was arrested for the second time—in his case shortly after Andijan. Like Hamida, he had been released under an amnesty. This time, Akhmat says, the government has not told him where his son is being held. He was arrested again—"we don't know why"—and "he has disappeared," Akhmat says. The father's own fear has now given way to anger—so much anger that he insisted his real name as well as his photograph appear in this story. (For the sake of his safety, we decided to maintain his anonymity.)
A Farewell to Arms
In our last days in the country, Yuri and I traveled separately to the Ferghana Valley. We passed through three separate checkpoints, each manned by soldiers wielding Kalashnikovs. Neither of us went to Andijan, a city of 300,000. We probably wouldn't have been allowed in, and if we had tried, we might well have been arrested. Even skipping Andijan, Yuri managed to get detained anyway. He was shooting photos in the city of Namangan, 60 km northwest of Andijan, when National Security Service agents brought him in and questioned him for three hours. They asked why, if he was just a tourist, he had recently been in Iraq and Afghanistan, as his passport showed. They finally let him go, saying the area was "dangerous" and that they couldn't be "responsible for protecting him." Yuri got the message, and headed back to Tashkent.
At the airport the next evening, it was my turn. Checking in for an overnight flight to Seoul, I was taken out of line and questioned for nearly an hour. Where had I been in Uzbekistan? Why? They'd probably been onto us from the start, as Andrei had observed early in our journey, but never caught us doing anything wrong. This was their parting shot. Near the end, one of the State Security officers sneered: "Do you have plans to come back to Uzbekistan?"
On the flight home I kept thinking about 6-year-old Mahbuba with both parents in jail, apparently for being devout Muslims. What will she be thinking 10 years from now? Since our journey to Uzbekistan, I've spoken to refugees now living in Europe and the U.S. who say Karimov's oppressive hand is driving more people to join banned Islamic groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir. There are thousands of political prisoners in Uzbekistan—no one outside the government knows the precise figure—and the number keeps growing. They've all got families, and friends. I don't know how you keep the lid on that. Uzbekistan's sad burden, though, is that Islam Karimov will nonetheless try.
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