The news reached Dmitry Tihonov in Uzbekistan's rural heartland as the labor activist quietly recorded the arrival of thousands of teachers, nurses, laborers, students and other conscripts sent to the fields to pick cotton. A fire had destroyed Tihonov’s home office. When he returned to search the debris on Oct. 29, his reports for international monitors documenting the annual mobilization had vanished. Human rights groups say Tihonov is a victim of Uzbekistan’s efforts to conceal a massive, state-orchestrated forced labor system that underpins its position as the world’s fifth-largest cotton exporter. They cite regular arrests, intimidation and harassment of activists. The activist from Angren, a town about 62 miles (100 km) east of the capital Tashkent, says he’s under constant surveillance by local authorities to remind people “it’s better to keep away from me” – an allegation that Reuters could not independently confirm.
Persecution of activists is among many abuses cited by witnesses and human rights groups that fueled discord in the Obama administration this year over how much criticism Central Asia's most populous nation deserved in the U.S. State Department’s annual report on modern slavery. In a previously undisclosed memo, analysts in the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons called forced labor “endemic” during the cotton harvest and said Uzbekistan had "failed to make significant and sustained efforts" to improve its record. The early 2015 memo, reviewed by Reuters, recommended keeping Uzbekistan in the lowest tier of the report’s rankings, raising the specter of economic sanctions on a country whose cotton is used in yarn and fabric that play a significant role in the global supply chain.
But senior U.S. diplomats rejected the recommendation, downplaying concerns about human rights in a strategically important country. The landlocked nation of deserts, mountains and steppes was a transit point for U.S. troops and supplies during the war in neighboring Afghanistan. Washington now wants its help preventing the spread of Islamic militants, stabilizing Afghanistan and offsetting Russian influence in the region. When the State Department issued its 2015 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report in July, Uzbekistan was elevated from the bottom tier of violators. Uzbekistan doesn’t meet “minimum standards” to end trafficking, the report said, but it is “making significant efforts” – a caveat absent from the analysts’ assessment.
Uzbekistan’s government makes an estimated $1 billion a year from cotton sales, and the harvest mobilizations of roughly a million people that date to Soviet times are characterized as a patriotic duty. Uzbek officials did not answer repeated requests for comment but generally argue that citizens pick cotton voluntarily. A Reuters examination – based on interviews with local officials, activists and workers in the fields – found that while the country has made progress ending child labor in the harvest, it has intensified recruitment of adults and older teenagers using the same coercive approach.
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