Craig Murray on Uzbekistan Today

. . . 1.4 million Uzbek children are today working in regime forced labour in the Uzbek cotton fields. They work at physically very tough labour for twelve hours a day in conditions identical to those in which black slave workers suffered in the Southern United States 200 years ago – indeed several US slave owners would have scrupled at the wholesale use of children as young as eight in the fields, as is done by the Uzbek government. They sleep in barracks on concrete floors, live on weak vegetable soup and drink dirty water from the irrigation ditches.

Of course it is not only children who are forced into the fields, and the system requires extreme compulsion. On October 6 in Kashkadarya, 18 year old Navruz Islamov was beaten to death by police for attempting to leave a cotton field when suffering from sunstroke. There are scores more such instances we do not hear about.

I have never felt so outraged as I did two years ago, when a European Commission official told me that the EU would not act on child labour in Uzbekistan as there was “no official evidence” of the practice, only “rumour”. This year – with the active connivance of EU nation state diplomats in Tashkent, particularly the German Ambassador – the Uzbek Government for the third successive year refused a request from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to visit Uzbekistan to monitor child labour in the cotton harvest. At the same time, the EU says it will not act without this report from the ILO.

This is also the position of the British Government, which has never made a single comment or statement on child labour in Uzbekistan (except by me while Ambassdaor). Indeed the coalition government has never made any statement on human rights in Uzbekistan at all, having no interest in the fate of its 8,000 political prisoners and ever-lengthening list of tortured and killed by the British “ally”, President Karimov.

Cuba has just announced the abolition of exit visas. Uzbekistan is now one of a tiny number of extreme regimes which still locks its people in, retaining the old Soviet exit visa system. The Cameron/Clegg government refuses to raise this with the Uzbek regime.

Britain and the EU are again selling weapons and providing military and secret service training to the Karimov regime, and the UK, US and other NATO countries are negotiating to “gift” huge amounts of arms and military materiel to Karimov as they withdraw from Afghanistan. Nobody in the West, and particularly in the Western media, appears to have any interest at all in our collusion with the most repressive and corrupt regime in the world.

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Friday Evening Musical Movement: Dancing on Water in Petersburg

It truly is a magical time of year in Petersburg, Russia’s Northern Capital and the Venice of the North. These limber school leavers decided to celebrate by dancing “on” water (as the caption has it) near the beach outside the Peter and Paul Fortress (and pimping for Bank Rossiya in the bargain).

Meanwhile, in other parts of town, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum was underway. The city’s non-elected governor delighted guests at a reception held in conjunction with the forum with “nine-year-old girls in the role of living statues” (as the fellow who posted this photo on Twitter put it).

But what Petersburg celebration would be complete without senseless arrests? Yesterday evening, police nabbed our comrade Filipp Kostenko on Saint Isaac’s Square and wrestled him into a paddy wagon. His crime? According to local news web site Zaks.ru, Filipp was arrested and charged with violating city regulations on the use of parks and disobeying a police officer, adding that “next to him on a bench were blank sheets of paper, since activists were planning to draw posters for pickets.”