Bobomurod Abdullaev, a journalist, was taken to a detention center in Tashkent, the capital, and, according to his lawyer, tortured after agents of Uzbekistan’s National Security Service grabbed him in September. But Mr. Abdullaev, who has been charged with «conspiracy to overthrow the constitutional regime,» was last month allowed to meet with a human rights lawyer and tell him of his mistreatment. Two officers have now been removed from the case and are under investigation for misconduct.
Mr. Abdullaev’s case points to what, 18 months after the death of Uzbekistan’s longtime dictator, Islam Karimov, is the central question: Can a brutal and once all-powerful security apparatus be transformed into a law enforcement agency?
Mr. Abdullaev is still under arrest. He told his lawyer, Sergei Mayorov, that he was beaten and kept naked in a freezing cell without sleep. Officials warned him that unless he confessed his wife and daughter would be raped, his lawyer said. The internet is still censored, albeit less than before, and fear of the security service, known by its Russian-language acronym, S.N.B., remains widespread.
But senior officials and even some of Uzbekistan’s critics insist that the country’s new leader, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, is going against the authoritarian trend around the world — evident in Cambodia, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey and even once-democratic nations such as Hungary and Poland.
In Uzbekistan over the past year, at least 27 jailed high-profile dissidents, some of them held in prison for nearly two decades, have been released and about 18,000 people have been removed from a blacklist that kept them from traveling or working. The government has also started to address the dragooning of doctors, teachers, students and others to work as effective slave laborers during the cotton harvest. «There has been a massive change for the better,» said Jonas Astrup of the International Labor Organization, a United Nations body.
Sodiq Safoev, a close confidant of Mr. Mirziyoyev and vice chairman of Uzbekistan’s Senate, said the thaw would continue because there is a consensus in favor of change. «The ice is melting in this country,» he said. This process, he acknowledged, has faced resistance in a country bound for so long by arbitrary red lines beyond which nobody was allowed to stray. «The biggest red line,» he added, «is one running through people’s minds.»
Getting people to shake off their fear and suspicion depends on reining in the S.N.B., which under Mr. Karimov infested the country with informers, filled jails with political prisoners who were often tortured, and crushed the faintest flickering of dissent.
Surat Ikramov, a veteran human rights activist, praised Mr. Mirziyoyev, who took power immediately after Mr. Karimov’s death, for trying to rein in Uzbekistan’s formidable apparatus of repression but said the system has strong roots. He believes the case against Mr. Abdullaev, who the S.N.B. has accused of being the author of a series of sometimes well-informed but incendiary political tracts written under a pen name, was aimed at showing the new president that «he has enemies everywhere» and cannot risk easing up.
Mr. Karimov, who ruled from 1991 until his death in 2016, was unforgiving of dissent, particularly after unrest in the eastern town of Andijon in 2005, which ended with S.N.B. officers killing hundreds of protesters. Shukhrat Ganiev, the director of the Humanitarian Legal Center in Bukhara, thought Mr. Mirziyoyev would be just another Karimov. «I advised people that we should not expect anything from him,» he said. Today, surprised by the new leadership’s tone, he conceded: «I was wrong.»
In February, President Mirziyoyev described wayward members of the security service as «mad dogs» who needed to be put down. The hope of activists is that a concentration of power will allow the president to bend the security services to his will. In recent weeks, more than a dozen S.N.B. officers have been arrested. This followed the January dismissal of Rustam Inoyatov, who had led the service for more than 20 years. His deputy, Shukhrat Gulyamov, was fired, put on trial and sentenced to life in prison for arms trafficking and other offenses.
Yelena Ulaeava, a human rights activist who under Mr. Karimov was repeatedly detained, said the S.N.B. had now stopped harassing her and even let her stage small protests. She disputes that the use of forced labor has actually stopped, but is so happy with Uzbekistan’s new direction that she started a petition to get Mr. Mirziyoyev nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. «Our country has shifted 180 degrees,» she said. A dictator’s successor reins in the secret police.