Press Release, 14.05.2015

A regular meeting of the Committee Against Xenophobia took place in the office of the YABLOKO party on May 13.

It was attended Dr. Galina Mikhaleva , Coordinator of the Committee Against Xenophobia and Secretary of the Political Committee of the YABLOKO party, Alexander Engels, Director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage and Holocaust, Usman Baratov, President of the Inter-Regional Uzbek Ethnic Group Vatandosh, Grigory Semyonov, Deputy Chairman of the Moscow YABLOKO and other members of the Committee.

The Committee meeting was timed to the 10th anniversary of the Andijan tragedy. At the beginning of the meeting Usman Baratov made a report on the tragic events and demonstrated photographs.

Mass-scale riots began in Andijan on 12 May 2005 after the court sentence to 23 businessmen. The trial was accompanied by rallies in support of the arrested (the protesters believed the case had been fabricated). On the night of May 12 – 13, demonstrators seized a number of administrative buildings. President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov ordered violent suppression of the rebellion. According to Usman Baratov, the security forces conducted mass shooting of unarmed demonstrators in the central square of Andijan on May 13, 2005.

“Islam Karimov laid the blame for the tragedy entirely on the demonstrators, refusing to carry out an independent investigation. And we still do not know the truth. Equally appalling was Russia’s decision to vote against the UN resolution condemning Uzbekistan for its stance to consider the events in Andijan only as an internal affair of the country. In fact, Russia’s President Putin backed Karimov’s actions “, Usman Baratov noted.

The Committee decided to organize a conference with the involvement of witnesses of the events, lawyers, experts in international law, and historians in order to give a balanced assessment to those events in Uzbekistan.

“Do people have the right to an armed rebellion if they had no legal ways to achieve justice? That is where the events in Andijan differ from the peaceful uprisings in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, from the Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. It is important that the international community has to find an answer to this question “, Galina Mikhaleva said.

After the lecture, the Committee held a discussion of an action in memory of deported peoples scheduled for May 18. The Committee members noted the mass-scale nature of the deportations of peoples under Stalin. The Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, Chechens, Ingushs, Karachai-Cherkessia people, Poles, Germans and many others were the victims of the dictaror.

The participants also noted the importance of the action against the rising re-Stalinization of the society, manifested, in particular, in the abundance of printed materials praising Stalin, installation of monuments and commemorative plaques, buses with portraits of Stalin in the streets, and television programs with a positive assessment of Stalin.

“Now we are witnessing a rapid process of re-Stalinization. Moreover, policy documents not only of the Communist Party, but the party of Communists of Russia, not to mention the anti-Maidan organizations contain a direct promise to restore Stalin’s personality cult, and this must be fought against, ” Galina Mikhaleva said.

Alexander Engels offered to publish an open letter on the dangers of re-Stalinization of the society developing with the tacit protection of the state and bring to this matter to experts.

The next meeting of the Committee will be held on June 17 in the Tatar center.