Kyrgyz Torture Ban

President Askar Akaev's recent decision to outlaw torture came amid a growing chorus of complaints at home and abroad that police routinely abuse detainees.

The reform, announced abruptly on state media on November 17, three days after it was signed by the president, followed the release of a critical report by the OSCE in Vienna earlier in the month, naming Kyrgyzstan as one of the CIS states that had not fulfilled an international obligation to prohibit torture

Police and other officials will now face the prospect of criminal charges and prison terms of up to ten years if convicted of the offence.

In one particularly notorious case, Azimjan Askarov, a rights activist from the Jalal-Abad region, said police beat unconscious a 20-year-old pregnant women accused of theft.

Officers had detained her and three of her friends in Bazarkurgan after another woman accused them of stealing a carpet and two towels.

Askarov said that although the police interrogator was a woman, the investigation turned into a severe physical assault that horrified the plaintiff. She withdrew her complaint and reported what she had seen to rights activists.

Askarov's Justice organisation decided to defend the pregnant woman, and on August 11 he visited her cell with the deputy district prosecutor Suyun Satybaldiev, finding her in a serious condition.

There was no let-up for the woman when she was taken to the district hospital on September 19 to give birth prematurely to a baby girl. "Police were waiting in the maternity ward and after I gave birth they handcuffed me to the bed," she later told IWPR.

Her daughter died while she was restrained - a death that doctors attributed to malnutrition and vitamin deficiency. Immediately afterwards, the women was taken back to the holding cell in handcuffs.

She and her friends went on trial in October in the Bazarkurgan district court and were given one year suspended prison sentences. After the trial, it was claimed that they had been sexually assaulted in detention as a result of police "selling" them for 100 soms (2.20 US dollars) a night to other men in the cells.

Besides beatings, rights activists say police routinely pull the nails out of detainees'

fingers, give them electric shocks, hang them upside down, inject them with needles, tear out their teeth and suffocate them.

Kachkyn Bulatov told IWPR of his first-hand experience of life behind bars in the Kochkor district of Naryn region, "I was kept in a cell for 12 days, not given food and water and tortured in various ways until I lost consciousness."

Bulatov said many detainees tried to kill themselves to escape the persecution and humiliation.

Rights activist Abdunazar Mamatislamov said the climate of intimidation prevented numerous cases from coming to court. He recounted one involving a man detained in August, "After two weeks he managed to send his T-shirt home with an appeal for help written on it in his own blood."

After lobbying the authorities, Mamatislamov got the man released but couldn't persuade him to bring charges against the authorities, as they had frightened him off by threatening to re-arresting him, "We got him out but he is scared to go anywhere for help and doesn't trust anyone."

Police officials flatly deny the reports of wrong-doing. Deputy interior minister Bolot

Nogoibaev said he had received no complaints of torture at all from suspects or relatives. "Our society is democratic and does not ignore any illegal activity by police, let alone torture," he said.

Joldoshbek Busurmankulov, chief of the interior ministry's press service, has in the past accused activists of inventing stories to attract foreign money. "There is no [proof] of torture," he said recently. "I consider the actions of so-called human rights activists who are saying such things in order to receive grants from abroad to be treachery."

After the president issued a decree outlawing torture, presidential adviser, Bolot

Januzakov, admitted there had been individual cases of police exceeding their powers, describing these episodes as part of "the price of the 'transitional period' from a totalitarian system to a democracy".

Januzakov said President Akaev now understood "these difficulties", which is why he had announced a thorough reform of the country's law-enforcement bodies.

Sultan Jumagulov and Ulugbek Babakulov are independent journalists in Kyrgyzstan.