The most representative of the 16 defendants is the journalist and lawyer Dauletmurat Tazhimuratov, on whom the most serious charge weighs, “attempt to overthrow the constitutional order”. Last year thousands of people took to the streets against the Tashkent government’s constitutional amendments, which sought to annul the region’s autonomy.
Tashkent () – The Supreme Court of Uzbekistan has begun the appeal trial of activists from the Karakalpakstan region, convicted at first instance for the Nukus riots last year. The most representative of the 16 defendants is the journalist and lawyer Dauletmurat Tazhimuratov, who is also facing the most serious charges of “attempting to overthrow the constitutional order”, “organizing mass riots” and “conspiracy to usurp power”, while which he himself accuses of having been subjected to torture in solitary confinement.
The lawyer for the Karakalpakstan activists, Sergej Majorov, spoke of Tazhimuratov’s conditions during the trial, which is also attended by some Western diplomats as observers – among them the EU representative in Uzbekistan, the Lithuanian Mindaugas Kacherauskis. The Tashkent government has instead denied access to the Kazakh humanitarian activist Galym Ageleuov, but Gazeta.uz nonetheless broadcasts the trial on YouTube and shows the interventions of all the participants.
Majorov confesses that he is “not optimistic”, although he hopes that the judges will allow everyone to intervene. In his opinion, the prejudices and pressures against Tazhimuratov, former editor-in-chief in Nukus of the Karakalpakstanan-language daily El kyzmetinde, where he had long written against amendments to the Uzbekistan Constitution with the aim of excluding the status of autonomy of the region, and urged citizens to take to the streets to “demonstrate peacefully”. Thousands of people joined this call at the end of June 2022, but the protest was put down very violently with a toll of 21 dead (including 4 police officers) and more than 270 injured. In the end, the presidency renounced to modify the statute of autonomy of Karakalpakstan.
The activists were arrested on 1 July and held in solitary confinement, first in Nukus and then in Bukhara. Tazhimuratov remained locked up under the harshest regime, especially in the run-up to the trial at first instance, when he was held in a punishment cell at Zangiat, near Tashkent. When the trial began on May 15, following the allegations of torture, the court ordered an investigation, the conclusions of which officially state that “no evidence of acts of pressure or humiliation of the accused was found.”
According to the lawyer, Dauletmurat did not show signs of violence at the beginning of the trial, but reported severe pain in his kidneys and explained that in solitary confinement they forced him to shower first under a stream of boiling water that immediately afterwards turned icy, in his opinion to weaken it. In any case, the lawyer managed to see him twice during the isolation period, the second time together with his brother Renat, who was then allowed to visit him regularly.
Tazhimuratov was charged not only with subversive activities but also with “misappropriation” and “money laundering”. To a large extent, according to Majorov, these charges are based on linguistic misunderstandings in relation to the accounting documents of the activities of all those convicted, more than 300 pages in the Karakalpakstan language, very different from both Uzbek and Russian. For the lawyer “it is clear that Dauletmurat has always been a problem for the Tashkent authorities, because he called things by their name, reported on all the unresolved problems of the republic and criticized the bureaucracy and the country’s political leaders” . And he also did it on his own blog on the Internet. Many accusations collect episodes and expressions of the last two or three years.
The most serious accusations, those contrary to the Constitution and the attempted coup, quite contradictory to each other, were formulated by “K. Suleymanov” and later confirmed and expanded by the national security services. These investigations seem decidedly partial and not they allow the defense to access all the elements of the conclusions.The “plot” to seize power, which presupposes a vast network of conspirators, for example, is attributed only to Tazhimuratov, with the sole complicity of another person, Logalul Kallykhanova, actually convicted of other crimes.
President Mirziyoyev and the Tashkent government are trying to distance themselves from the Court and from the controversies, when in reality, according to the defendants, they are the ones truly responsible for the problems in the region, the largest in all of Uzbek territory, whose fate still hanging by a thread.
