Southern demonstration barred after week of protests

Women who participated in demonstrations that shook the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, this week, were prevented by authorities from marching on a regional centre in southern Uzbekistan, protestors said on Friday. "We were planning to march to the administrative centre of the [Kashkardarya] region demanding the release of our men who were arrested in Tashkent after police broke up our protest outside the US embassy," Zulayho Charieva, 29, told IRIN. "But all women were taken away to the police office on Thursday morning and kept for a whole day," she added. More than 50 protestors, including women and children, began occupying land outside the US embassy on Tuesday, demanding the government return their farms and property in the southern Kashkadarya region. Other demonstrators called for the right to asylum in the US to escape what they describe as a campaign of harassment against them by the authorities. They also demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev, along with other officials. More than a hundred special police broke up the protest camp at midnight on Tuesday, assaulting some of those involved and then busing them back to their hometowns. "We begged them not to beat us saying to the police that we were ready to stop the demonstration, but there was no mercy. All men and women were repeatedly beaten by police and plain clothes security people armed with truncheons. Our children were thrown into the buses like animals," said Charieva. "We were insulted and humiliated all the way down to Kashkadarya. Since then we haven't seen our men and don't know what happened to them," she added. Most of the protestors were relatives of entrepreneur Bahadir Chariev, whose lucrative farm had been repossessed by the state. Chariev himself was granted asylum in the US in January after being harassed and arrested several times as a result of efforts to get his farm back, which he acquired in 1999. The US embassy in Tashkent criticised the way authorities had handled the situation. "The demonstrators who had set up a camp across the street from the US Embassy on 3 May were exercising their right to freedom of expression and assembly that are recognised by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights," the US statement said. "They posed no threat to embassy security, nor did they interfere with the embassy's operations in any way. We regret that government authorities overnight removed them and resorted to force to do so. " Tashkent's interior ministry and general prosecutor's office insisted that no one had been injured during the forced removal and that it was the fault of protestors themselves that police had to resort to force. Officials said that the protestors were neither held nor charged in connection with the incident. But Charieva claimed that police threatened to arrest her and other women if they didn't sign confessions. "I refused to sign any confession and will continue to seek justice. We have no food and no hope and we want our property back - the only source of our livelihoods," Charieva said. Human rights campaigners have repeatedly accused the Uzbek government of suppressing any dissent in the country, and continuously intimating and harassing rights defenders and independent journalists. Discontent is fuelled by the widespread poverty, corruption and unfair land disturbution in this mostly agrarian country, observers say. Analysts suggest the recent revolution in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan could boost protest movements across the region, including Uzbekistan, which has the largest population of the Central Asian former Soviet republics, with some 26 million people.