HRW says neighbourhood committees violate rights

Uzbekistan's neighbourhood committees or mahallas - local government authorities with the power to administer a range of activities - are being used to violate fundamental human rights, bringing the repressive policies of President Islam Karimov to a local level, a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued on Tuesday said. "Taken over by the authorities, the mahalla system is now being used to increase the government's control over the population, thereby resulting in greater rights abuses," Matilda Bogner, the office director for the watchdog group, told IRIN from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. The 38-page report, "From House to House: Abuses by Mahalla Committees" documents the role neighbourhood, or mahalla, committees have played in three critical areas of government abuse: the government's six-year campaign against so-called Islamic fundamentalists, those people practicing outside the state approved framework for Islam; its response to domestic violence; and the 2000-2001 forced resettlement in southern Uzbekistan. In a statement by the group, for centuries, the mahalla had been an autonomous institution organised around Islamic traditions and social events, noting, however, that the current government had transformed it into a national system for surveillance and control. Central Asia's most populous nation is divided up into some 12,000 mahallas, each with between 150 and 1,500 households. "Mahalla committees may appear to be a benign form of local self-government, but in reality the government uses these committees to keep tight control over its population," Rachel Denber, HRW deputy director for Europe and Central Asia said in a statement. "Mahallas are the eyes and ears of the government, passing on all they observe to the police." According to HRW, Karimov had earlier declared 2003 the "Year of the Mahalla," reflecting what activists saw as the government's intent to expand the powers of mahalla committees. By keeping files on those considered "overly pious" in their religious expression, carrying out surveillance,and reporting "suspicious" religious activity to police, mahalla committees assist the authorities in its crackdown against peaceful, independent Muslims who practice Islam outside state-controlled religious institutions, adding they also organise and participate in public denunciations at which pious Muslims are abused, threatened and demonised. Additionally, such committees work to enforce government policy to prevent divorce at the expense of women's rights to protection from domestic violence. Serving as a gatekeeper to law enforcement and the courts, mahalla committees frequently deny battered wives access to both, deny them permission to divorce, and hold women responsible for violence they face in the home. "The women are often sent back to potentially dangerous domestic environments," Bogner claimed. Moreover, between August 2000 and March 2001, HRW maintained that mahalla committees had also participated in the government's forced resettlement programmes in southern Uzbekistan, following incursions by Islamic militants against the government. "People were forced from their homes and relocated to resettlement villages where they were cut off from interaction with the general community and deprived of any means of livelihood," the rights group said, adding that the committees had joined the military and other authorities in the intimidating and violent tactics that characterised the forced displacement. The HRW report comes just days after a US diplomat insisted that Washington was not blind to the allegedly systematic abuses committed by Tashkent. "It is people, it is individuals who are suffering out there, the United States heartily conveys our concern," Stephan Minikes, US ambassador to the 55-nation Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said in an AFP report on Friday. Speaking at the opening of an office for the US democracy group Freedom House, Minikes was quoted as saying that he had discussed "education, torture, conditions of trial, conditions of arrest" at a meeting with Uzbek Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov. Tashkent has been a key US ally in the Central Asia region since the start of a US-led military operation against Afghanistan in late 2001 and continues to host US forces at its southern Khanabad airbase. [For a full copy of the HRW report: www.hrw.org]