The authorities are intensively persuading publicly significant participants in the July protests, forcing them to repent and fully admit their guilt before the state. According to an ACCA source in Karakalpakstan, there has been moral pressure on their relatives for two months.
“Until this succeeds, the propaganda campaign to release some of the protesters from custody is sluggish,” the ACCA expert notes. According to official reports, more than 500 people were detained in July, of which only 24 were changed to house arrest with public control.
The last attempt to intensify the process of remorse was the meeting of the parliamentary commission with the leader of the protests, Dauletmurat Tazhimuratov. “As a result, a text was distributed with statements that everything was in order with him and that he wasn’t being tortured,” the expert sums up. “He communicates with his lawyer. There was one meeting with his family. He receives parcels.” At the same time, the denial of physical violence is doubtful, since in the publication about the meeting on the Ombudsman’s website you can see a photo of Dauletmurat’s back. It is known that he was repeatedly beaten during the detention.
The fate of the journalist Lolagul Kallykhanova, who was arrested in Tashkent during the events, remains unknown. It was initially uncompromisingly inclined after the amendments to the Constitution of the country, which deprive Karakalpakstan of sovereignty and became the cause of people’s discontent. The editor-in-chief of the Karakalpak publication Makan.uz believed that if the new Constitution came into force, the citizens of Karakalpakstan wouldn’t be able to organize a referendum on secession from the Republic of Uzbekistan. “Such changes should have been made by the citizens of Karakalpakstan themselves, who were surprised to read the draft amendments to the Constitution, which provide for the deprivation of their own right,” the journalist notes.
An ACCA source said that an audio of the journalist is now circulating on the network, in which she talks about her release from the pre-trial detention center. There is no confirmation of this. The authorities only assure the OSCE and the international community that everything is all right with her.
Even at an early stage of the commission’s work, Farida Sharifullina (the administrator of the Tashkent-SNOS [demolition] group) stated that the commission is trying to mislead with a beautiful picture. Its members have not yet met with Kallykhanova, who is in custody in Tashkent.
The authorities didn’t name the authors of the amendments to the Basic Law, protests against which caused the death of dozens of people.
“Has the commission found out who was the author of the anti-Karakalpak amendments?” asks Sharifullina. “We understood that these amendments were copied from the Russian Constitution. Will the authors of these amendments be regarded as accomplices of foreign enemy forces?”
