Offender fined 190 dollars for violent assault on human rights campaigner.

	Gulshan Karaeva, head of the Kashkadarya divison of the Uzbekistan Human Rights Society (OPChU{

A court in the Chirakchinsk district of Uzbekistan’s Kashkadarya region has fined a man 460,000 sums for his violent attack on human rights campaigner, Gulshan Karaeva.

Arif Pardaev, a 34-year-old man who lives in Kashkadarya region, was found guilty of disorderly conduct for the attack and fined the equivalent of just US$190.

The attack on Gulshan Karaeva, head of the Kashkadarya section of the Uzbekistan Human Rights Society (OPChU), happened on 8 July. Karaeva describes how she was travelling back from Tashkent to Karshi that day in a private taxi with three other

He started to beat me round the head with a bottle full of water, then with his hands, he pulled my hair and swore at me when I asked him to stop”

Gulshan Karaeva

passengers.

As they left Tashkent, Arif Pardaev, one of the other passengers, began verbally attacking Karaeva. By the end of the 400km journey he had begun to insult and swear at her, then attacked her with his fists.

“He started to beat me round the head with a bottle full of water, then with his hands, he pulled my hair and swore at me when I asked him to stop,” Karaeva says.

The human rights campaigner doubts that the attack was coincidental. The day before, she had received several telephone calls, but was unable to understand what the callers were saying, and that night her dog was poisoned.

Gulshan Karaeva remains one of the only active human rights campaigners in Kashkadarya region. The authorities have successfully silenced many of her colleagues, who are now either in prison or in exile.

The mass exodus of human rights activists and journalists from Kashkadarya and other regions in Uzbekistan began following the Andijan killings of 13 May 2005. After a wave of arrests across the country, dozens of human rights activists in Uzbekistan found themselves behind bars.

Six years after the bloody events in Andijan Uzbek civil society has never been the same as it was before the killings and not every region has still living within it a human rights activist like Gulshan Karaeva.

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