Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, once this was part of the Soviet Union, now its government is helping us in the war against terrorism
There's a degree of paranoia about working here that's really hard to capture on tape. When it became independent Uzbekistan inherited all the Soviet technology for spying on its own citizens -- the secret police, the networks of informers --.
And yet the West is buying its friendship: the regime gets millions of dollars in aid. We get to use its bases for the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.
But just who is our new best friend?
Saturday night, in downtown Tashkent. I was on my way to a pop concert. The government are former communists. The people are moslem. The pop stars are home grown..
This is Setora: Uzbekistan's top girl group.
What's funny about Setora is that they're so enormous they've even be coopted by the government into the war on terrorism
Their hit video is a song about a soldier who dies fighting terrorists..
The regime here says its battling its own extremists.
Thats one of the reasons theyve become our friends.
In 1999 terrorist bombs killed 16 people in Tashkent it triggered a crackdown.
We're on our way to the trial of two members of a banned Islamic organization -- well, alleged members --
The government often puts on trial those people who it says are trying to overthrow the state but it's also drawn a lot of criticism for the way those trials are conducted so it's going to be interesting to see just what goes on in this one
The men were accused of belonging to Hizb-ut-Tahrir. It does want an Islamic government but it doesnt support terrorism.
Their defence lawyer was late but the trial began anyway.
President Karimov had never been very keen on opposition. The bombs in Tashkent were his cue for suppressing it entirely.
The cross examination began.
"The older one said . Especially if it was handing out leaflets."
The two men are still waiting for the verdict.
We're on our way to an Uzbek prison and in the front of the car is a minder who I sincerely hope doesn't speak English. Uzbek prisons are notorious for poor treatment of prisoners and even deaths in custody and even human rights groups have a really hard time getting in here so I'm astonished that were being allowed in, frankly.
The ministry of internal affairs had chosen to let me visit Zangiote High Security Prison.
There are at least seven thousand people in prison in Uzbekistan for what the government calls religious crimes.
Human rights groups say many of them have been tortured and sexually abused into giving confessions.
Three prisoners were lined up for me to meet: Avaz, Fakredin and Kazim.
A man from the Ministry of Internal Affairs took down their names.
I think theyre reminding them that they have power over them
Theyd been sentenced for going to religious meetings and handing out leaflets.
Does he think 12 years is too long?
He told me it wasnt.
But then the prison governor was listening.
Kazim was serving sixteen years.
What did he think?
Kazim says he hopes the president will be merciful.
They made the prison sound like a boarding school.
Kazim just told me the food was delicious.
The Uzbek government had wanted me to see that not only is it locking up our common enemies, but its doing it humanely.
I wasnt convinced.
"Any time they strayed on to anything remotely dangerous the only time any of them got animated was when they were talking façade."
I had a rendezvous to arrange.
I was trying to meet someone who wouldnt be afraid to tell me the truth.
"that was someone I was told to call, but they said the situation here being what it is I was given a codeword I was told to say go across town to meet him."
The man I was going to see is Uzbekistans leading human rights activist. Since he was attacked in his flat, hes careful who he opens the door to.
Mikhail Ardzinov has escaped prison so far because he's well-known abroad.
I asked if Uzbekistan would use the alliance with america to increase repression.
He said Id come to the right man. Hed just published the definitive work on the subject.
There are no human rights in Uzbekistan
He says the danger is the government is using the excuse of a war against terrorism to oppress any of its opponents, human rights figures, oppositions politicians, anyone who criticizes the regime, theyll be branded territorists and possibly be put in prison and thats the great danger that the country is in now.
It all seemed so simple at first US is fighting a war on terrorism, UZ is fighting a war on terrorism and then you meet someone like M Ardzinov and he says that there is no war on terrorism the gov. is just a bunch of unreconstructed communists using the threat of Islamic extremism to justify their repressive measures.
Mr Ardzinov told me there was someone else I should track down.
He gave me an address.
An old Soviet lift took me to the ninth floor of an apartment block.
I knew Makhbouba Kassimova had recently got out of prison. Shed been sentenced to five years for harbouring an extremist.
Shes been a human rights activist for twelve years both under communism and under an independent uzbekistan
Makhbouba was in prison here for a year and a half. She credits her release to the fact that she got so many letters through amnesty, and these were the letters she got, something like six thousand of them altogether,
dear makhbouba, my name is amy rayner, and I live in pettswood, I got to bullers wood school and Im in year nine . Love from amy rayner..
she says if she hadnt got these letters, shed probably still be in prison.
As we read the letters, she told me her real crime was publicizing cases where prisoners didnt get a fair trial. That was why the government locked her up.
Her own trial, she said, had lasted half an hour and thered been no lawyer there..
Makhbouba gave me the address of a family whose son died in prison just a few days ago.. if theyll talk to us.
I went in without the camera.
Id been in Uzbekistan long enough to know
they would be scared.
We oppose terrorism to protect our liberty, but here the fight seems to end up with people terrified or dead.
They wouldn't talk to us afraid to be open with me
These photos were taken by Human Rights Watch.
Furkhat Usmonov was the son of a well known muslim preacher. He went into prison healthy and came out like this. Officially he died of heart failure but his injuries tell another story.
It's almost impossible to know what to believe in this country. I went to the department of religious affairs to talk to the minister
Law-abiding people had nothing to fear, Mr Minavarov insisted.. They could worship however they wanted.
But what President Karimov wouldnt tolerate was mixing religion and politics.
There have been many allegations of torture particularly on religious prisoners ..is there a role for torture in the war on terrorism?
He said there wasnt and he and his ministry had never received details of such allegations.
We are heading east into the Fergana Valley - this is the part of the Uzbekistan that juts into Kirghizistan and Tadzhikistan, this is considered the tinder box of central asia, and this is the part of the country that the government is most suspicious of and is trying hardest of all to control
Radical islam began to flourish here as communism fell apart.
I felt as we were entering an occupied country.
My destination was the town of Namangan..
"ten years ago to the day .we've got hold of the video"
The secret video shows thousands of people gathering in the main square.
One of them was Nosir Zokir, then a local opposition politician.
People streamed in to the square from all sides, he said to shout questions at President Karimov, who was campaigning to keep his job in the first elections since communism.
When the president tried to speak, he was heckled. Eventually a popular local radical took the microphone from him and asked for the crowd to be silent.
They weren't. Karimov was humilated and had to sit fuming while the local man spoke scornfully about his government.
"He's says we had opposition.. independent newspapers appearing,. It was democracy."
It didnt last. The government started shutting mosques.
I guess the point is there are rooms like this all over the Fergana Valley that used to be mosques
In the Namangan area there were 1000 mosques and now there are only a couple of hundred
The Islamic opposition leaders fled to neigbouring countries like Afghanistan. The young man who had humiliated Karimov ended up with Osama bin Laden.
Just over a year ago, Uzbek terrorists crossed from Tajikistan into this area. After a month of heavy fighting they were routed.
We headed for the town of Chartak..
This is Chartac a typical Fergana valle town
What we've heard about this town is that in February 1999 17 of its young boys crossed the border into Tadhzikistan to join the terrorists.
I went to the market where theyd been recruited.
Were the boys the first wave of a revolution, or angry misfits?
I got the feeling that whatever terrorists there were or for the time being out of the country or locked up.
" we've been trying to talk to people about the boys who disappeared and they're very reluctant to speak to us because after all this is a country where you can get fifteen years in prison for handing out Hizb ut Tahrir leaflets
I was told me to speak to these women,
They said there was no longer any terrorism just repression.
Their husbands and sons were in jail simply because one had worked in a mosque
"last year, this is astonishing really, her son came out of the army, so he would have been twenty, and he was arrested when he was ten."
"she said she's absolutely fed up, give me a kalashnikov and I'll go against the government myself"
You could say that our new friend President Karimov is winning the war against islamic extremism.
But his tactics are like a primitive cancer treatment that kills as much as it cures.
Back in Tashkent that feeling would grow stronger.
I've come here to meet a woman who has travelled a thousand kilometers to try and get justice for her husband and sons. Two of her sons have been sentenced to death for being terrorists but she says they're innocent and they didn't get a fair trial. And she's staying in Tashkent with friends but her friends are too afraid for us to film in their apartment so we have had to come somewhere else to meet her.
Darmon Sultanova has come to Tashkent to find out if her sons are still alive. They were arrested three years ago and sentenced to be shot..
She says everything that happened, it was all illegal, she says it was an illegal trial and that everything that went on was illegal
and there are no laws in Uzbekistan
She also says when she saw her sons at the trial they had been tortured and she had difficulty recognizing them and even their voices had changed.
She told us that even under torture her sons had refused to confess. So the police tried one last ploy.
She says that she was taken down to the police station and they made her take her clothes off and she was begging them not to make her undress but she was forced into a room naked and her sons and other men were brought in and she was humiliated and abused by the police officers..
One son then confessed after the police threatened to put his young wife through the same ordeal and then rape her.
This is the death sentence against her sons for one of her sons .
Darmon was adamant that we shouldnt film her out on the streets. She had business down at the registry of births, deaths and marriages.
Its absolutely chilling but every two or three months, Darmon has to come here to find out if the death sentences on her sons has been carried out, this is the only way she can find out if her sons are dead or alive.
In Uzbek, this place is called the house of happiness.
She told me her sons were still alive - this time
She said she'd give anything to change places with them.
She showed me photographs of her grandchildren. She wonders whether they'll ever see their father again.
Collateral damage in the war against terrorism.
There's a degree of paranoia about working here that's really hard to capture on tape. When it became independent Uzbekistan inherited all the Soviet technology for spying on its own citizens -- the secret police, the networks of informers --.
And yet the West is buying its friendship: the regime gets millions of dollars in aid. We get to use its bases for the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.
But just who is our new best friend?
Saturday night, in downtown Tashkent. I was on my way to a pop concert. The government are former communists. The people are moslem. The pop stars are home grown..
This is Setora: Uzbekistan's top girl group.
What's funny about Setora is that they're so enormous they've even be coopted by the government into the war on terrorism
Their hit video is a song about a soldier who dies fighting terrorists..
The regime here says its battling its own extremists.
Thats one of the reasons theyve become our friends.
In 1999 terrorist bombs killed 16 people in Tashkent it triggered a crackdown.
We're on our way to the trial of two members of a banned Islamic organization -- well, alleged members --
The government often puts on trial those people who it says are trying to overthrow the state but it's also drawn a lot of criticism for the way those trials are conducted so it's going to be interesting to see just what goes on in this one
The men were accused of belonging to Hizb-ut-Tahrir. It does want an Islamic government but it doesnt support terrorism.
Their defence lawyer was late but the trial began anyway.
President Karimov had never been very keen on opposition. The bombs in Tashkent were his cue for suppressing it entirely.
The cross examination began.
"The older one said . Especially if it was handing out leaflets."
The two men are still waiting for the verdict.
We're on our way to an Uzbek prison and in the front of the car is a minder who I sincerely hope doesn't speak English. Uzbek prisons are notorious for poor treatment of prisoners and even deaths in custody and even human rights groups have a really hard time getting in here so I'm astonished that were being allowed in, frankly.
The ministry of internal affairs had chosen to let me visit Zangiote High Security Prison.
There are at least seven thousand people in prison in Uzbekistan for what the government calls religious crimes.
Human rights groups say many of them have been tortured and sexually abused into giving confessions.
Three prisoners were lined up for me to meet: Avaz, Fakredin and Kazim.
A man from the Ministry of Internal Affairs took down their names.
I think theyre reminding them that they have power over them
Theyd been sentenced for going to religious meetings and handing out leaflets.
Does he think 12 years is too long?
He told me it wasnt.
But then the prison governor was listening.
Kazim was serving sixteen years.
What did he think?
Kazim says he hopes the president will be merciful.
They made the prison sound like a boarding school.
Kazim just told me the food was delicious.
The Uzbek government had wanted me to see that not only is it locking up our common enemies, but its doing it humanely.
I wasnt convinced.
"Any time they strayed on to anything remotely dangerous the only time any of them got animated was when they were talking façade."
I had a rendezvous to arrange.
I was trying to meet someone who wouldnt be afraid to tell me the truth.
"that was someone I was told to call, but they said the situation here being what it is I was given a codeword I was told to say go across town to meet him."
The man I was going to see is Uzbekistans leading human rights activist. Since he was attacked in his flat, hes careful who he opens the door to.
Mikhail Ardzinov has escaped prison so far because he's well-known abroad.
I asked if Uzbekistan would use the alliance with america to increase repression.
He said Id come to the right man. Hed just published the definitive work on the subject.
There are no human rights in Uzbekistan
He says the danger is the government is using the excuse of a war against terrorism to oppress any of its opponents, human rights figures, oppositions politicians, anyone who criticizes the regime, theyll be branded territorists and possibly be put in prison and thats the great danger that the country is in now.
It all seemed so simple at first US is fighting a war on terrorism, UZ is fighting a war on terrorism and then you meet someone like M Ardzinov and he says that there is no war on terrorism the gov. is just a bunch of unreconstructed communists using the threat of Islamic extremism to justify their repressive measures.
Mr Ardzinov told me there was someone else I should track down.
He gave me an address.
An old Soviet lift took me to the ninth floor of an apartment block.
I knew Makhbouba Kassimova had recently got out of prison. Shed been sentenced to five years for harbouring an extremist.
Shes been a human rights activist for twelve years both under communism and under an independent uzbekistan
Makhbouba was in prison here for a year and a half. She credits her release to the fact that she got so many letters through amnesty, and these were the letters she got, something like six thousand of them altogether,
dear makhbouba, my name is amy rayner, and I live in pettswood, I got to bullers wood school and Im in year nine . Love from amy rayner..
she says if she hadnt got these letters, shed probably still be in prison.
As we read the letters, she told me her real crime was publicizing cases where prisoners didnt get a fair trial. That was why the government locked her up.
Her own trial, she said, had lasted half an hour and thered been no lawyer there..
Makhbouba gave me the address of a family whose son died in prison just a few days ago.. if theyll talk to us.
I went in without the camera.
Id been in Uzbekistan long enough to know
they would be scared.
We oppose terrorism to protect our liberty, but here the fight seems to end up with people terrified or dead.
They wouldn't talk to us afraid to be open with me
These photos were taken by Human Rights Watch.
Furkhat Usmonov was the son of a well known muslim preacher. He went into prison healthy and came out like this. Officially he died of heart failure but his injuries tell another story.
It's almost impossible to know what to believe in this country. I went to the department of religious affairs to talk to the minister
Law-abiding people had nothing to fear, Mr Minavarov insisted.. They could worship however they wanted.
But what President Karimov wouldnt tolerate was mixing religion and politics.
There have been many allegations of torture particularly on religious prisoners ..is there a role for torture in the war on terrorism?
He said there wasnt and he and his ministry had never received details of such allegations.
We are heading east into the Fergana Valley - this is the part of the Uzbekistan that juts into Kirghizistan and Tadzhikistan, this is considered the tinder box of central asia, and this is the part of the country that the government is most suspicious of and is trying hardest of all to control
Radical islam began to flourish here as communism fell apart.
I felt as we were entering an occupied country.
My destination was the town of Namangan..
"ten years ago to the day .we've got hold of the video"
The secret video shows thousands of people gathering in the main square.
One of them was Nosir Zokir, then a local opposition politician.
People streamed in to the square from all sides, he said to shout questions at President Karimov, who was campaigning to keep his job in the first elections since communism.
When the president tried to speak, he was heckled. Eventually a popular local radical took the microphone from him and asked for the crowd to be silent.
They weren't. Karimov was humilated and had to sit fuming while the local man spoke scornfully about his government.
"He's says we had opposition.. independent newspapers appearing,. It was democracy."
It didnt last. The government started shutting mosques.
I guess the point is there are rooms like this all over the Fergana Valley that used to be mosques
In the Namangan area there were 1000 mosques and now there are only a couple of hundred
The Islamic opposition leaders fled to neigbouring countries like Afghanistan. The young man who had humiliated Karimov ended up with Osama bin Laden.
Just over a year ago, Uzbek terrorists crossed from Tajikistan into this area. After a month of heavy fighting they were routed.
We headed for the town of Chartak..
This is Chartac a typical Fergana valle town
What we've heard about this town is that in February 1999 17 of its young boys crossed the border into Tadhzikistan to join the terrorists.
I went to the market where theyd been recruited.
Were the boys the first wave of a revolution, or angry misfits?
I got the feeling that whatever terrorists there were or for the time being out of the country or locked up.
" we've been trying to talk to people about the boys who disappeared and they're very reluctant to speak to us because after all this is a country where you can get fifteen years in prison for handing out Hizb ut Tahrir leaflets
I was told me to speak to these women,
They said there was no longer any terrorism just repression.
Their husbands and sons were in jail simply because one had worked in a mosque
"last year, this is astonishing really, her son came out of the army, so he would have been twenty, and he was arrested when he was ten."
"she said she's absolutely fed up, give me a kalashnikov and I'll go against the government myself"
You could say that our new friend President Karimov is winning the war against islamic extremism.
But his tactics are like a primitive cancer treatment that kills as much as it cures.
Back in Tashkent that feeling would grow stronger.
I've come here to meet a woman who has travelled a thousand kilometers to try and get justice for her husband and sons. Two of her sons have been sentenced to death for being terrorists but she says they're innocent and they didn't get a fair trial. And she's staying in Tashkent with friends but her friends are too afraid for us to film in their apartment so we have had to come somewhere else to meet her.
Darmon Sultanova has come to Tashkent to find out if her sons are still alive. They were arrested three years ago and sentenced to be shot..
She says everything that happened, it was all illegal, she says it was an illegal trial and that everything that went on was illegal
and there are no laws in Uzbekistan
She also says when she saw her sons at the trial they had been tortured and she had difficulty recognizing them and even their voices had changed.
She told us that even under torture her sons had refused to confess. So the police tried one last ploy.
She says that she was taken down to the police station and they made her take her clothes off and she was begging them not to make her undress but she was forced into a room naked and her sons and other men were brought in and she was humiliated and abused by the police officers..
One son then confessed after the police threatened to put his young wife through the same ordeal and then rape her.
This is the death sentence against her sons for one of her sons .
Darmon was adamant that we shouldnt film her out on the streets. She had business down at the registry of births, deaths and marriages.
Its absolutely chilling but every two or three months, Darmon has to come here to find out if the death sentences on her sons has been carried out, this is the only way she can find out if her sons are dead or alive.
In Uzbek, this place is called the house of happiness.
She told me her sons were still alive - this time
She said she'd give anything to change places with them.
She showed me photographs of her grandchildren. She wonders whether they'll ever see their father again.
Collateral damage in the war against terrorism.