The representative of the prosecution has announced the opening of an investigation for “attack on the constitutional order of the country”.
Le Monde with AFP
The Ouzbek prosecutor’s office reported, Monday, July 4, of several deaths during the disorders who opposed at the end of last week anti-government demonstrators and security forces in northwestern Uzbekistan, where no opposition is tolerated .
“Eighteen people died of their injuries during mass troubles in Noukous,” said Ria Novosti news agency, Abror Mamatov, representative of the prosecution, during a briefing devoted to these events . The Ouzbèke National Guard for its part reports 243 injured.
This new episode of violence is added to the long list of clashes, riots, repression and confrontations that regularly shake Central Asia, a region made up of five ex-Soviet republics on which Russia exercises a Big influence.
The president of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, had recognized on Sunday “victims”, among civilians and the police, following demonstrations on Friday and Saturday to denounce a constitutional reform project reducing the autonomy of Karakalpakistan, Poor region of the northwest Uzbek, of which Noukous is the capital.
The representative of the prosecution announced the opening of an investigation for “attack on the constitutional order of the country”. The course of events remains very vague, the authorities having cut most of the means of communication during the clashes. Some videos have filtered on the internet, showing wounded and unconscious people.
Emergency state
Saturday, a one -month state of emergency was decreed in the region. At the same time, the Uzbek president promised to withdraw the constitutional amendments decried. Mr. Mirziyoyev also accused the organizers of the demonstrations of “hiding behind” politicians to try to “take control of the official buildings of the local government” and to seize weapons.
Since its independence from the fall of the USSR, Uzbekistan has never let the opposition emerge. Arrived in power in 2016 at the death of its predecessor, the merciless Islam Karimov, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, hitherto Prime Minister, has led important economic and social reforms, also promising timid political liberalization measures.
Re -elected last year, he more recently gave a screw. The Head of State thus wants to reform the Constitution to allow him to stay in power longer. Noukous disorders are the most serious internal crisis that President Mirziyoyev has been confronted so far. In 2005, Islam Karimov had made demonstrations in the blood in the blood in Andijan. Hundreds of people are dead there.
vast dispute movement
Uzbekistan, which has a common border with Afghanistan, is by far the most populated in the countries of Central Asia ex-Soviet with some 35 million inhabitants. In January, it was another authoritarian state in the region, Kazakhstan, which crushed a vast protest movement, killing more than 230 people. These events had constituted a shock, this country having been until then considered to be the most stable and prosperous in the region.
The other neighboring countries have also experienced hectic periods in the recent past, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan competing, for example, regularly at their common border, in particular because of conflicts on access to land and ‘water. The Tadjikes authorities have also just carried out an operation presented as “anti-terrorist” to neutralize influential local figures in the autonomous region of Gorno-Badakhchan (BGAO), a large mountainous area of the Pamir massif.
Kyrgyzstan has known three revolutions (2005, 2010, 2020) since 2005), as well as serious ethnic violence aimed at the Uzbeke minority in 2010 in the south of the country. Russia supports the powers in place in these countries which it considers as belonging to its pre -square. Central Asia, at the crossroads between South Asia, China, Europe and Russia, has vast natural resources (hydrocarbons, minerals) arousing Russian, Chinese and Western lusts.