Today, it seems that the people of Kyrgyzstan have managed to drive away bloody dictator Kurmanbek Bakiyev; who kept a United States Afghan war base at Manas, against the will of the Kyrgyz people.
Unfortunately, there are more dictators in Central Asia.
This video is called Part (1-3) Torture Farm (Life and Death under Karimov)
Below are videos 2 and 3 of the series.
In Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov is infamous for boiling oppositionists alive and other bloodshed.
Now, I am gonna quote dictator Karimov‘s news agency, which I intend to do as rarely as possible. Just to show what kind of rulers CIA and Pentagon count as their allies.
From Uzbekistan National News Agency:
President of Uzbekistan receives head of US Centcom
UzA, 7 April 2010, 08:47
President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov received Commander of the US Central Command General David Petraeus at Oqsaroy residence in Tashent on 6 April.
Welcoming the guest, the head of the state said the level of the current Uzbek-American relations was strong and stable, and are developing on a constructive and equal basis.
Uzbekistan and the USA are interacting in stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan and this country’s socioeconomic rehabilitation. …
At the meeting in Oqsaroy, General David Petraeus expressed sincere gratitude to the President of Uzbekistan for the warm welcome and noted that the US administration was interested in strengthening bilateral relations.
He also highlighted the importance of the initiatives of the leadership of Uzbekistan in stabilizing the situation in the neighboring Afghanistan.
During the talks, the sides exchanged opinions on the issues of further development of Uzbek-US cooperation and other areas of mutual interest.
An Uzbek Survivor of Torture Seeks to Fight It Tacitly: here.
British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Rupert Joy is vocal and effusive in his praises of the Uzbek regime. But he has gone all coy and refused to answer any questions from leading Uzbek journalist Galima Burkabaeva about his starring appearance at dictator’s daughter Gulnara Karimova’s Tashkent Fashion TV extravaganza: here.
Thailand’s embattled government has shut down media outlets after declaring a state of emergency, while red shirt activists vowed to escalate their pro-democracy protests: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Uzbek women accuse state of mass sterilizations
By MANSUR MIROVALEV (AP) – 1 day ago
GULISTAN, Uzbekistan — Saodat Rakhimbayeva says she wishes she had died with her newborn baby.
The 24-year-old housewife had a cesarean section in March and gave birth to Ibrohim, a premature boy who died three days later.
Then came a further devastating blow: She learned that the surgeon had removed part of her uterus during the operation, making her sterile. The doctor told her the hysterectomy was necessary to remove a potentially cancerous cyst, while she believes he sterilized her as part of a state campaign to reduce birthrates.
“He never asked for my approval, never ran any checks, just mutilated me as if I were a mute animal,” the pale and fragile Rakhimbayeva said through tears while sitting at a fly-infested cafe in this central Uzbek city. “I should have just died with Ibrohim.”
According to rights groups, victims and health officials, Rakhimbayeva is one of hundreds of Uzbek women who have been surgically sterilized without their knowledge or consent in a program designed to prevent overpopulation from fueling unrest.
Human rights advocates and doctors say autocratic President Islam Karimov this year ramped up a sterilization campaign he initiated in the late 1990s. In a decree issued in February, the Health Ministry ordered all medical facilities to “strengthen control over the medical examination of women of childbearing age.”
The decree also said that “surgical contraception should be provided free of charge” to women who volunteer for the procedure.
It did not specifically mandate sterilizations, but critics allege that doctors have come under direct pressure from the government to perform them: “The order comes from the very top,” said Khaitboy Yakubov, head of the Najot human rights group in Uzbekistan.
Uzbek authorities ignored numerous requests by The Associated Press to comment on the issue. Most Western media organizations have been driven from the country, and government officials face serious reprisals for contacts with foreign journalists. However, the AP was able to interview several doctors, sterilized women and a former health official, some on condition of anonymity.
This Central Asian nation of 27 million is the size of California or Iraq, and population density in areas such as the fertile Ferghana Valley is among the world’s highest.
Rights groups say the government is dealing with poverty, unemployment and severe economic and environmental problems that have triggered an exodus of Uzbek labor migrants to Russia and other countries.
Heightening the government’s fears is the specter of legions of jobless men in predominantly Muslim Uzbekistan succumbing to the lure of Islamic radical groups with ties to Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida.
Uzbekistan is not alone in coming under allegations of using sterilizations to fight population growth: Authorities in China’s Guangdong Province were accused by Amnesty International in April of carrying out coerced sterilizations to meet family planning goals. But no other country is known to use that method as a government policy.
Uzbekistan once had one of the Soviet Union’s highest birthrates, four to five children per woman, and Communist authorities even handed out medals to “heroine” mothers of six or more. Young army conscripts from Uzbekistan and the four other Central Asian republics made up for a declining ethnic Russian population.
Now, as authorities try to unravel that legacy, the birthrate has dropped to about 2.3 children per woman — still higher than the rate of 2.1 that demographers consider sufficient to replenish a falling population.
The sterilization campaign involves thousands of government-employed medical doctors and nurses who urge women of childbearing age, especially those with two or more children, to have hysterectomies or fallopian tube ligations, said Sukhrobjon Ismoilov of the Expert Working Group, an independent think tank based in the capital, Tashkent.
The surgeon in Rakhimbayeva’s case, a burly man in his 40s named Kakhramon Fuzailov, refused to comment on her claims and threatened to turn an AP reporter over to the police for “asking inappropriate questions.”
In 2007, the U.N. Committee Against Torture reported a “large number” of cases of forced sterilization and removal of reproductive organs in Uzbek women, often after cesarean sections. Some women were abandoned by their husbands as a result, it said.
After the 1991 Soviet collapse, Karimov, a former Communist functionary, remained at the helm and retained many Soviet features, such as strict government control of public health. Government-paid doctors and nurses are assigned to each district or village.
Family planning is far different from Western norms.
Instead of focusing on raising awareness of widely available condoms or birth-control pills, the Health Ministry has chosen to promote uteral resections nationwide as the most reliable method of contraception.
Some women do volunteer. Khalida Alimova, 31, a plump, vivacious sales manager from Tashkent, agreed to a resection in March, almost a year after her third child was born.
She said her husband, Alisher Alimov, 32, an occasional cab driver who spends days playing backgammon with his friends, refused to use condoms or allow her to take birth-control pills.
“Now I feel relieved,” Alimova said over a cup of green tea in the kitchen of their shabbily furnished Tashkent apartment. She added, though, that she never told her husband about the operation.
Many other women, especially from poor rural areas, say they face coercion from health workers or even potential employers to agree to sterilization.
A 31-year-old mother of two from the eastern Uzbek city of Ferghana said the director of a kindergarten where she sought a job told her to show a certificate confirming she had been sterilized.
After consulting her disabled husband, who receives a government pension of $40 a month, she said she agreed to the procedure, produced the certificate and got the job.
“We just had no choice,” the woman, who gave only her first name Matluba, said by telephone from the eastern city of Ferghana. She refused to provide her last name or identify the kindergarten for fear of being fired.
Several health workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity also because they feared dismissal or persecution, said the authorities are especially eager to sterilize women with HIV, tuberculosis or a drug addiction. Instruments often are not sterilized properly and can infect other women, they said.
Inexperienced medical workers can also cause serious health complications. “Any negligence can do a lot of damage,” said Shakhlo Tursunova, a gynecologist from Tashkent.
Health workers involved in the campaign are threatened with salary cuts, demotion or dismissal if they do not persuade at least two women a month to be sterilized, a former high-ranking Health Ministry official told the AP on condition of anonymity.
Veronika Tretyakova, a 32-year-old doctor from Tashkent, said she came under pressure from health workers to be sterilized.
“The nurse said, ‘They would hang me if I let you have another child,'” Tretyakova said. “I told her to think about her soul.”
Tradition plays a strong role in this male-dominated society, where a large family is seen as a blessing from God, and women are often blamed for childless marriages.
After checking out of the maternity hospital in Gulistan where she lost her son, Rakhimbayeva said she shared her anguish with her husband, Ulmas, a 29-year-old bus driver who refused to be interviewed for this story. Their marriage was arranged by their parents in 2008.
Instead of consoling her, she said, he told her to move back to her parents’ house and wait for divorce papers as he did not want to live with a barren wife.
“He never even questioned why the doctors maimed me, just blamed everything on me,” Rakhimbayeva said wringing her hands. “Now I have no hope of having children, no job, no future.”
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press.
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Target often offers prices that seem too good to be true – so how do they keep their prices so low?
It turns out some of Target’s products might be so cheap because they are made with slave-picked cotton from Uzbekistan and/or purchased from Daewoo International, a company that accounts for approximately 20% of all cotton processed in Uzbekistan.
Tell Target to sign the Daewoo Protocol to fight modern slavery in Uzbekistan.
Thanks for all you do!
Bob Fertik
———–
Walk Free: The Movement to End Modern Slavery
Dear Activist,
We know – a great deal can be hard to resist. And Target often offers prices that seem too good to be true. It makes you think – how do they keep their prices so low? We’ve recently learned that some of Target’s products might be so cheap because they are made with slave-picked cotton from Uzbekistan and/or purchased from Daewoo International, a company that accounts for approximately 20% of all cotton processed in Uzbekistan.
Every year, during the harvest season, over a million children and adults – including teachers, nurses and doctors – are ripped out of their homes, schools and jobs, and forced to work in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan to meet daily picking quotas.
While Target has signed the pledge to not buy slave-picked Uzbek cotton, they are still doing business with Daewoo, a company that clearly profits from the exploitation of children and adults in Uzbekistan.
If Target is truly serious about keeping slavery out of its stores, Target needs to stop doing business with Daewoo and agree to implement the Daewoo Protocol – a series of steps companies need to take to eliminate slave-picked cotton from their supply chains.
Call on Target to eliminate the threat of slave-picked cotton in their stores by joining the Daewoo Protocol.
We expect more from Target, a company that takes pride in holding the highest ethical standards for itself and for its business partners.
So we called and asked Target to join the Daewoo Protocol which is supported by retailers declining to do business with Daewoo until it takes serious steps to stop sourcing slave-picked Uzbek cotton.
Target said they didn’t need to sign the Daewoo Protocol because they have a “No Uzbek Cotton” policy. But such a policy only works if you’re willing to enforce it.
Tell Target to sign the Daewoo Protocol and stop supporting modern slavery in Uzbekistan.
After you take action, please take a moment to spread the word by forwarding this email to 3 of your friends.
Thank you,
Debra, Nick, Jacqui, Jessica, Hayley, Jess, Mich, Amy and the Walk Free Team
Walk Free is a movement of people everywhere, fighting to end one of the world’s greatest evils: Modern slavery.
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