For years, Hillary Clinton said at the National Democratic Institute in November last year, dictators told their people they had to accept the autocrats that they knew in order to avoid the extremists they feared. And, all too often, America accepted that narrative as well. This commendable mea culpa was addressed to the movers and shakers of the Arab spring. But from where, they would have done well to ask, had the US secretary of state just then returned? From Uzbekistan was the answer, the nastiest dictatorship in central Asia, whose name is synonymous with torture.

But Uzbekistan has one asset that Washington needs: a railhead into northern Afghanistan, which has become the key node of a US military supply line known as the northern distribution network. For this alone, America and the EU are prepared to look the other way, when confronted with what the US embassy cables described as a nightmarish world of rampant corruption, organised crime, forced labour and torture. Last month, Mrs Clinton formally waived a previous human rights based ban on military assistance to Uzbekistan.

Yet Uzbekistan’s human rights nightmare is not receding. On the contrary, there is evidence that it is growing, as a recent report by Human Rights Watch makes clear. HRW dismantles the claim that Uzbekistan’s adoption of habeas corpus and other procedural rights for pre-trial detainees has improved human rights. Nearly a decade after a special rapporteur found that torture in Uzbekistan was widespread and systemic, and nearly seven years after the massacre in Andijan, the plight of civil society activists continues to worsen. The habeas corpus hearings are described by one lawyer as judicial theatre. Torture is so prevalent that in seven cases since 2008, the European court of human rights ruled against sending detainees back on the grounds that they would be brutalised. Tashkent has refused to allow the UN rapporteur on torture to visit the country.

Despite having the muscles, the EU is as loath to flex them as Washington is. President Islam Karimov gloried in the reception he was afforded by the commission president José Manuel Barroso. Germany leases an airbase on the Afghan border at Termez and granted one of the architects of Andijan, the former interior minister Zohir Almatov, a visa for medical treatment in Hanover, just days before Almatov topped the list of names subjected to a visa ban.

Uzbekistan will not quietly go away. All the ingredients of conflict are there, including Uzbeks who have fought alongside the Taliban. There is every chance that, as US troops start withdrawing from Afghanistan, trouble could spread northwards, placing Uzbekistan firmly in the sights of Islamic militants.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/12/uzbekistan-looking-in-the-other-direction-editorial?newsfeed=true