the forced treatment and confinement of Jamshid Karimov

Uznews.net – Samarkand’s psychiatric hospital is continuing the forced treatment and confinement of Jamshid Karimov, an independent journalist and President Islam Karimov’s nephew, a hospital source said.

Information about his release spread by sources in Jizak Region few days ago has turned out to be fake.

The source told Uznews.net today that Jamshid Karimov, 41, was still in hospital and there were no signs of his release.

“Jamshid is in hospital. We do not know when he will be discharged,” the source said.

Information on his release from the psychiatric hospital was first circulated last Saturday when it was reported that two activists of the Ezgulik society Dilmurod Muhitdinov from Andijan Region and Mamarajab Nazarov from Jizak Region were released from prison. They both were sentenced to five years in 2006.

The news about the release of Muhitdinov and Nazarov was soon confirmed by their lawyers and relatives, whereas no-one could manage to learn about the future of Jamshid Karimov.

The Samarkand hospital refused to give any information about their particularly important patient-inmate. The authorities have isolated his relatives living in Jizak from him, the outside world and local human rights activists. The only person who had the greatest eagerness to fight for Jamshid’s freedom and waited for his return home was his mother, Margarita Karimova who died this March without seeing her son.

“We should perhaps wait for a good piece of news about Jamshid that he would be allowed to go home and they stop forced treatment in the psychiatric hospital, claiming that he is ill,” human rights activist from the Jizak branch of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, Bahtiyer Hamrayev, said.

The case of Jamshid Karimov, a talented journalist and interesting person with a spiritual personality, is one of the most vivid examples indicating the essence of the regime of President Islam Karimov who has been ruling Uzbekistan since 1989.

Despite being the Uzbek power-monger president’s nephew and son of his elder brother Arslan who died in a car crash in 1989, Jamshid Karimov has been undergoing forced treatment at the Samarkand psychiatric hospital since September 2006.

He is being treated and forced to receive psychotropic preparations absolutely legally: no relative of Jamshid has seen a court ruling on his forced treatment. Moreover, neither Jamshid nor his relatives had a chance of appealing against this decision.

Margarita Karimov said before she died that only his omnipotent uncle Islam Karimov could throw Jamshid into the mental hospital because no-one else could dare to do this to the presidential nephew even if after Arslan’s death Karimov forgot about the family of his brother – a wife and three children.

He did not help them while his closest relatives hardly managed to meet ends living in poverty in a small flat in Jizak.

Astonishingly, Karimov finally recalled his poor nephew only to clap him into the mental hospital for his cooperation with foreign media and desire to emigrate from Uzbekistan.

No-one now knows when Jamshid will be discharged from hospital. Even hospital personnel do not know about this. However, they say with sympathy for Jamshid that they will set him free as soon as they receive the corresponding order from on high.