TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (AP) – A U.S. government human rights report claiming prisoners in Uzbekistan are routinely tortured is “biased and counterproductive,” the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
The annual U.S. State Department report on human rights practices released last week also said President Islam Karimov’s government arbitrarily arrests government critics, stifles independent media and convicts peaceful Muslims on trumped-up extremism charges.
“Pitiful are the ongoing attempts of the State Department to replicate trite facts and statements that have already been refuted many times,” the ministry said in a statement.
“The Foreign Ministry … would like to stress once again that such efforts by the U.S. State Department are biased and counterproductive,” it said.
Other ex-Soviet republics have reacted in a similar tone. Russia called it skewed and confrontational and suggested the United States was preaching to the world while violating the rights of its own citizens and others.
U.S.-Uzbek relations soured after the Uzbek government suppressed a May 2005 uprising in the city of Andijan. According to rights groups and witnesses, government troops killed hundreds of civilians; authorities insist fewer than 200 were killed and blame Islamic militants.
The Uzbek government responded to Western criticism of the Andijan incident by evicting the U.S. from an air base it had been using for operations in neighboring Afghanistan, as well as dozens of Western-funded aid groups and media organization.
A former Communist boss, Karimov has ruled the resource-rich Central Asian nation since before the 1991 Soviet collapse.
