Official lists of dead and wounded as well as discussion on numbers of victims

Incidents in Karakalpakstan:
OFFICIAL LISTS OF DEAD AND WOUNDED AS WELL AS DISCUSSION ON NUMBERS OF VICTIMS
February 25, 2023
Vitaly Ponomarev,
Memorial Human Rights Defence Centre
This material has been produced as part of an investigation into events in Karakalpakstan, conducted by Freedom for Eurasia (Austria) with the participation of human rights defenders from other countries. This review is a preview of a section of the report, which is scheduled to be completed in April 2023. Freedom for Eurasia has sent an enquiry to the Uzbekistani authorities regarding some of the facts mentioned in the text.
The unjustified and disproportionate use of force during the suppression of unrest in Karakalpakstan on 1-2 July 2022 led to a debate (quite emotional at times) on the number of victims. These discussions, reflected on social media and in the media, that were promptly inaccessible due to difficulties in obtaining additional information. Human rights activists have recently been able to access the official lists of the dead and wounded attached to the criminal case file of the first group of 22 protesters convicted in January this year. This review examines the number of victims on the basis of these and other new material that has recently become available.
Previous data on the number of victims
The first figures were announced by representatives of the Prosecutor General's Office and the National Guard of Uzbekistan in July 2022. On July 4th, at a briefing at the Agency for Information and Mass Communications, officials said 18 people were dead and 243 injured in the rallies, including 38 law officers. Among them, 149 received first aid and were released home. 94 people remain in hospitals, among whom there are seriously injured[i]. The head of the National Guard press service, Davron Zhumanazarov, reported four National Guardsmen seriously wounded[ii].
However, on the same day, Major General Rustam Jurayev, commander of the National Guard of Uzbekistan, appointed commandant of the state of emergency zone in Karakalpakstan, mentioned the deaths of four law enforcement officers in his public speech [iii]. Two days later, Zafar Alimov of the commandant's office repeated the report of four dead military personnel, speaking towards a group of journalists and bloggers who had arrived in Nukus[iv]. This information, which was widely disseminated in the media, can now confidently be assessed as unreliable on the basis of the available material, despite the fact that it has not been officially disproved. It can be suggested that this fiction was made up by the security forces in order to justify the large-scale use of firearms in suppressing the rallies.
On July 18, a press aide to the Prosecutor General's Office told a regular briefing that "another three people" who were in grave condition had died. Sixteen out of 274 people who sought medical help remain in hospitals. A total of 141 law enforcers who were injured and 16 citizens whose health and property were damaged have been identified as victims ^[v]. During the trial of the first group of protesters in Karakalpakstan, held in Bukhara from November 28, 2022, to January 31, 2023, the figure of "19 dead" was mentioned in the available video footage, i.e. less than the figure announced in July.
However, the official statistics were immediately received with disbelief both by the people of Karakalpakstan and by journalists and experts on the region. Unofficial estimates, circulating since July at the level of rumours and internet posts, still range widely, from many dozens, 200 or more hundreds to the fantastic 2000! Most of these figures have no clear source and so such estimates remain nothing more than speculation.
Meanwhile, there are more serious sources whose findings require additional verification.
In particular, according to Azamat Atadzhanov, editor-in-chief of the online newspaper Gazeta.uz, "On July 2 at approximately 23:00, Gazeta.uz was told about 77 dead and 114 injured during the day by the Karakalpak branch of the Republican Scientific Centre for Emergency Medical Care (RSCEMC).
The centre noted that the victims included women and children who were presumably injured in the market where smoke or stun grenades had been used". The official structures did not subsequently confirm these figures, but the newspaper's source in the Ministry of Health of Karakalpakstan "confirmed that the figures reported at the time were close to the truth"[vi].
On July 06, the correspondent of Radio Azattyk (RFE/RL's Kazakh service) published a story describing an eyewitness who arrived in Nukus from Kazakhstan on July 02. The interviewee participated in one of the incidents on the day of arrival (probably near the Shorsha Baba cemetery), where he saw the bodies of six dead (there were 20 according to unconfirmed reports), and on the morning of July 03 he reached the district centre of Chimbay, where a local hospital doctor told him about 12 bodies in the local morgue and six people in coma who had been brought from Nukus[vii].
Eyewitnesses located out of Uzbekistan and interviewed by the author of this article reported at least two deaths on the evening on July 01 near the building of the Jokargy Kenes (Parliament) of Karakalpakstan, five deaths near the building of the City Police Department on July 02, at least 10 on the same day - near the Shorsha Baba cemetery (not including victims of a truck crash on a group of rioters), several deaths near the bridge connecting Nukus with the Khojeli district, at least one in the Koskol area of Nukus and others. Eyewitnesses interviewed by colleagues reported casualties in other districts of the capital of Karakalpakstan as well[viii].
About a month after the protests on July 01-02, 2022, the first unofficial lists of the dead appeared in Karakalpakstan, mostly based on short messages from acquaintances and relatives of the victims to foreign activists via messengers and internet channels. author of the material)[x]. One of the names was later found to have been included by mistake[xi].
In a number of cases, there were variations in the spelling of names and other details. At the same time, additional information, copies of documents, photos of tombstones, etc. were later obtained for some of the cases. Information has also been received about previously unknown cases.
On August 03, 2022, the website of the Polish-registered Open Dialog Foundation (headed by Lyudmila Kozlovskaya) published a report by a coalition of Human Rights organisations (linked mainly to civil society in Kazakhstan) [xii] with the list of dead Karakalpakstan civilians as one of its attachments[xiii]. The "Kozlovskaya's list" included 20 names[xiv], 9 of which were missing from the "list 34" above-mentioned[xv].
Subsequently, during the work organised under the auspices of Freedom for Eurasia, the two lists were merged. The merged list, which has been refined and updated, now includes 49 names. It has not been published, but has been used as a document of work by Human Rights Defenders working on the topic. The list is not comprehensive.
Certainly, many informal reports of deaths need to be further verified and cross-checked with other sources. Information on possible cases of extrajudicial executions also needs to be investigated. Unfortunately, due to arrests and other forms of pressure, it is often impossible to contact the persons who have sent the reports thereof. The relatives of many of the dead have until recently been paralysed by fear, and well-known civil society activists in Karakalpakstan who could have been involved in verifying information have been arrested or are under strict control of the authorities.
It is worth noting that the names of the dead were actually never publicly announced by official sources. It was made only during the trial in Bukhara in November-December 2022 that some names were voiced and a new total number of dead was announced - 19 (video of some sessions in the Karakalpak language are available online). There were no comments related to the reduction of the number of victims officially announced in July (from 21 to 19).
In some cases, the discrepancy between the official and unofficial figures can be explained by differences in the methodology of recording victims. In particular, unofficial death lists include the names of two people who died of torture after being detained for investigating the incidents of July 1-2, 2022. However, differences in methodology may only explain small discrepancies in the number of deaths, but not more than a twofold difference.
Concerning the issue of those who disappeared during the protests, the official position remains unclear. In July 2022, a representative of Uzbekistan's Prosecutor General's Office criticised the Open Dialog Foundation's report of 58 disappeared protesters (by early August this figure had risen to 90). According to the prosecutor's office, some of the citizens mentioned in the distributed list are at home, others have gone abroad, and some did not exist at all^[xvi]. Since many of those arrested or administratively detained pursuant to the investigation into the July 1-2 incidents were for the first few months held incommunicado (in isolation from the outside world) and relatives were not always aware even of the fact of their detention, it is likely to be assumed that many complaints of disappearances during that period were caused by this policy of the authorities.
However, amid further rumours of extrajudicial executions (in particular widespread information circulating about the discovery of bodies with tied hands at the bottom Kyzketken (water channel) near the bridge in early August and on a group burial in the Khorezm oblast), the authorities have unfortunately not made a clear statement on the presence or absence of missing persons in Karakalpakstan in early July 2022.
As rumours on the high number of victims, among other factors, have a destabilising effect on the situation, the authorities in Uzbekistan and Karakalpakstan would do well to draw on Kyrgyzstan's experience. In 2010, amidst speculation, rumours and heated debates about the number of victims of the inter-ethnic riots in southern Kyrgyzstan, the Human Rights Organisation Kylym Shamy published a list of the dead based on information from official (non-public) and unofficial sources. Later, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Kyrgyz Republic took the same step. This led to the disappearance of much of the rumour and speculation, as anyone with information on the dead could check whether his name was on the official list.
So far, however, Tashkent has avoided transparency on the issue.
In December 2022, a so-called "Independent Committee" set up by the Uzbek authorities sent a request to the Prosecutor General's Office, requesting that "information of public concern be made public"[xvii] including on the deaths and causes of death in each case.
The response of the General Prosecutor's Office stated that "the list of 19 persons who died during the mass rallies and the causes of death will be discussed one by one during open court sessions"^[xviii] (this has not yet happened). According to the prosecutor's office, the criminal case "on the use of weapons and special means during the rallies in Nukus on July 01-02 and the detention of the accused" has been isolated. Investigations are underway into the deaths of two citizens[xix].
On February 9 - after another reminder from the US on the need for public transparency and accountability for law enforcement officials who violated Uzbekistani law[xx] - the Prosecutor General's Office reported that a criminal case was initiated on illegal actions of 3 law enforcement officials related to the incidents in Nukus and they were taken into custody[xxi]. No details were provided.
Apparently, even at first glance, there is a clear disproportion between the number of civilians dead and wounded and the number of law enforcement officers whom the authorities, under international pressure, have agreed to bring to justice.
Authorities eventually failed to release the official list of the dead. Moreover, according to information we received in February 2023, the Uzbekistani security services exerted pressure on the relatives of the accused to prevent the text of the verdict in the "22 x case" containing data on the victims from being handed over to foreign human rights activists.