Remembering the Days Before Andijan

On Thursday, May 12, 2005 the BBC ran a story titled “Uzbekistan’s most orderly protest” in which Jenny Norton, a reporter who was on the ground in Andijan, praised the thousands gathered there as being “well-spoken, dignified, and orderly.” She recounted how every day for the previous four months, protesters had gathered in Andijan, a city in eastern Uzbekistan, outside the court where 23 local businessmen were on trial, accused of being extremists.

The hearings had ended Wednesday and the crowd outside was, to Norton’s eyes, waiting patiently for a verdict. Thursday evening, however, everything changed.

When the violence finally ceased, hundreds of men, women, and children were dead, killed by state security forces in central Andijan, and a dark cloud had descended on Uzbekistan’s relations with the West. By the end of 2005, U.S. and European military assistance to the country would be cut, the U.S. would be kicked off the Karshi-Khanabad Airbase, and rhetorical broadsides would emanate from both sides. Uzbekistan refused an independent probe into Andijan, and to date no full investigation has been conducted.

In the decade since the massacre, very little has changed in Uzbekistan – Islam Karimov still rules the country with a bloody fist, torture remains a hallmark of the justice system, and mentioning Andijan is a dangerous prospect. The only thing that has changed is that the country’s relationship with the United States has returned to its pre-Andijan balance. In January 2015, the U.S. donated 300 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to Uzbekistan's military.

Though Andijan is often mentioned as the embodiment of Uzbekistan’s poor human rights record, little is said of what led up to the massacre. As regional paranoia about Islamic extremism rises – the result of ISIS’s success in the Middle East and the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan – it pays to keep in mind that in Uzbekistan, those labeled extremists by the government seldom are.

According to the testimony of Galima Bukharbaeva, an Uzbek journalist working as a country director of IWPR at the time, delivered to the U.S. Helsinki Commission in a June 2005 hearing, the crowd gathering in May 2005,

...was so large because it was not ordinary people who were on trial, but successful businessmen, heads of various manufacturing companies. These 23 businessmen provided jobs to 2,000 people. Their employees, friends, and relatives filled the entire park by the court building on Tuesday and Wednesday...

The 23 businessmen were being tried on charges that they had organized a criminal group, attempted to overthrow the constitutional order of Uzbekistan, were members of an illegal religious organization, and were in possession of literature containing a threat to public safety. The government accused the men of being members of Akramia, a group named after its apparent founder Akram Yuldashev. Trouble is, there is virtually no information about Akramia and Yuldashev – who at one point in time was associated with Hizb ut-Tahrir, although he subsequently left it, reportedly because he did not share their ideology – has been jailed in Uzbekistan since 1999.

In 2010, on the fifth anniversary of the massacre at Andijan Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty wrote of the group:

The Uzbek authorities claim Akramiya was an Islamist organization bent on replacing the government in Tashkent with an Islamic state, but things aren't nearly so cut and dry. The group has also been described as a close-knit business community that collected membership fees, provided discounted goods to members, and was actively involved in local charitable activities.

In testimony for the Helsinki Commission, German journalist Marcus Bensmann, who was also covering the trial in Andijan, said that the 23 defendants differed from other, similar trials of those accused of extremism.

But in this case, these people were not broken, but they were defending themselves with the Constitution in their hand. They were defending themselves, quoting the president, and saying, ‘‘We are businessmen. We did what the president wanted to build up our economy. We are not guilty. We are not members of any group.’’

And one even said, ‘‘It’s absurd to turn men running a bakery, giving work to the people into a terrorist.’’

Later in his testimony, Bensmann recounts an interview he had with the prosecutor of the 23 businessmen. Bensmann says that the prosecutor, when asked what crimes the men had committed, replied ‘‘Nothing. They committed nothing. But we will put them in jail because they may in future do something.”

On Thursday evening the peaceful protest began to devolve. The verdict was announced in secret, the 23 men convicted and sentenced to terms ranging from 12 to 22 years. Outside the court, traffic police had begun to impound cars parked outside, which Bukharbaeva said belonged to the families of the defendants. The crowd, after failing to get the cars released, moved on to the National Security Service building, where six men who had been arrested on the outskirts of the protest that day were being held. “Of course, they couldn’t release them,” Bukharbaeva commented.

A group of armed men then stormed the prison where the 23 men were being held, freeing them and other inmates. A few government buildings were seized and about a dozen police were taken hostage. By the next day, the protests swelled to 10,000. Human Rights Watch wrote that “although it is clear that a small number of protesters were armed, there is no indication that they were ‘fanatics and militants’ with an Islamist agenda.” According to HRW, witnesses recalled shouts of “Ozodliq! ("Freedom"), not Allahu Akbar! ("God is Great").”

That evening, according to Bukharbaeva, the “assault began at 5:20 pm local time.”

A convoy of armored vehicles moved on protesters gathered in Bobur Square. The gunmen who had broken the businessmen out of prison, according to a BBC timeline, moved with their hostages and a large crowd away from the city center and toward School 15, where the worst of the impending massacre occurred.

As Holly Cartner, executive director of the Europe & Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch, noted in her testimony to the Helsinki Commission:

The armed men who broke into the prison, took over government buildings, took hostages, and used people as human shields, committed serious crimes, and those are punishable under Uzbek criminal law. But nothing that was done by the armed men, nor certainly nothing that was done by the peaceful protestors in the square, could justify the government’s response.

One of the businessman freed during the prison break spoke to Human Rights Watch a week after the massacre in an interview at a refugee camp in Kyrgyzstan. He said that the most people, including women and children, died near the school:

There were armored cars there, and troops on the road. They were also shooting from the buildings. It was getting dark ... The road was completely blocked ahead. We couldn't even raise our heads, the bullets were falling like rain. Whoever raised their head died instantly. I also thought I was going to die right there

The Uzbek government says 173 people died during the unrest. Witnesses put the number closer to 500. A BBC stringer in Andijan, Sharifjon Akhmedov, recalled seeing traces of blood still on the streets two days after the massacre: “[T]hey’ve tried to wash it all away but you can still see the blood and bits of hair on the tarmac. There are bullet holes in the telegraph poles and trees.”

Ten years after the massacre at Andijan, Islamic extremism remains the charge du jour for those who dissent in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Islam Karimov’s regime is as brutal as ever, with recent reports from both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International highlighting unjust imprisonment and torture as features of the Uzbek justice system. The Uzbek government, with its zero-tolerance approach to dissent, may very well end up engendering the very revolutionary violence that it fears.