WUNRN
Uzbeks Face Forced Sterilization
10 March 2010
The Associated Press
Alexander
Zemlianichenko / AP
Uzbek women cleaning silk worm
cocoons in a village outside
Uzbek health officials did not
answer repeated telephone calls from The Associated Press to seek their comment
about the claim.
However, previous reports from
human rights groups, the United Nations and the U.S. State Department have also
claimed that women in the Central Asian country have been forced or duped into
sterilization.
The Expert Working Group, an
independent think tank based in the Uzbek capital,
Uzbek law does not prohibit
forced sterilization or removal of reproduction organs.
The decree orders each district
physician to persuade “at least two women” a month to have the procedure, the
group’s coordinator, Sukhrobdzon Ismoilov, said in a telephone interview.
Physicians who do not follow the decree face reprisals and fines from their superiors,
he added.
“We’re talking about at least
tens of thousands of women,” Ismoilov said.
Ismoilov said his group reached
its conclusion after interviewing dozens of health workers throughout
A human rights group in western
Khaitboy Yakubov of the Najot
group in the Khoresm region said in an interview that his group learned about
“numerous” cases of forced sterilization even before the decree was issued.
The group said in a report in
2009 that doctors in hospitals often sterilize women after their second child
without their consent. Many women, alarmed by rumors about the procedure, opt
to give birth at home, the group said.
Sometimes, the group said,
doctors force women to have the surgery, claiming that they have serious
gynecological pathologies.
The Expert Working Group and
Najot have both faced official pressure amid a perennial crackdown on
government critics and opposition in
Their claims reflect similar
allegations made in 2005 by Gulbakhor Turayeva, an Uzbek human rights activist
and medical doctor. He said surgeons were instructed to secretly perform
hysterectomies on women treated for minor gynecological disorders in the
densely populated
Turayeva was later convicted of
anti-government actions and possession of banned literature, and he spent six
months in jail.
In 2006, a U.S. State Department
report on
In 2007, the UN Committee Against
Torture reported a “large number” of cases of forced sterilization and removal
of reproductive organs in Uzbek women, often after cesarean sections. Some
women were abandoned by their husbands as a result, it said.
Most of the Uzbek population is
concentrated in impoverished rural areas, where inefficient economic reforms,
official pressure on farmers and deterioration of Soviet-built irrigation
systems have contributed to widespread unemployment and a mass exodus of Uzbek
labor migrants to neighboring countries.
The practice of forced
sterilization dates back to 1999, said Ismoilov of the Expert Working Group,
when Uzbek President Islam Karimov expressed his dissatisfaction with the high
birth rate of about 4 to 5 children per woman and ordered measures to curb it.
Ismoilov claimed that the
ministry suspended the practice in 2003 amid independent media reports and
spreading rumors, but the February decree apparently renews it.
In 2008,
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