03 Mar 2003 12:09 OSCE report blasts rights abuses in Turkmenistan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
MOSCOW, March 3 (Reuters) - Torture, mass arrests and reprisals against suspects' families are widespread in Turkmenistan since an alleged attack on its president, according to a report to Europe's largest rights organisation.
The draft report for the 55-nation Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said Turkmen authorities responded to an attack on their president-for-life last November 25 by detaining and torturing relatives of suspects, televising forced confessions and staging show trials.
"Large-scale violations of all the principles of due process of law like arbitrary detentions and show trials took place," said the report, a copy of which was made available to Reuters on Monday.
"Not only has torture been used to obtain confessions, but the forced use of drugs as a means to criminalise the detainees."
Human rights groups and OSCE monitors have criticised Turkmenistan before, but the 58-page OSCE report by Paris law professor Emmanuel Decaux is the highest-level condemnation of abuses in the Central Asian state yet.
The report, requested by Western countries in the OSCE, was based on information from human rights groups, sources the author kept secret to protect their safety, and from Turkmen public statements, since Turkmen authorities refused to allow the expert into the country.
The Vienna-based OSCE was keeping the report under wraps until mid-March to give Turkmenistan a chance to respond before it was made public, although diplomats said the Turkmens had so far refused to discuss rights concerns.
PERSONALITY CULT
Isolationist and gas-rich, Turkmenistan has been ruled since Soviet days by President Saparmurat Niyazov, who brooks no opposition and is lionised in a personality cult.
The chairman of the OSCE, Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, met Niyazov on Monday in the Turkmen capital Ashgabat to talk about mounting human rights concerns.
Niyazov, known as Turkmenbashi or Father of the Turkmen, was not hurt in what officials called an assassination attempt by dissidents last November. The president said his motorcade was sprayed by gunfire and several suspects later confessed on television to conspiring to kill him.
But the OSCE report cast doubt on the official account of the attack. Decaux said there were many contradictions, including that the president said he did not notice the shooting as he drove by, but still gave a detailed public account and accused some conspirators that same day.
"The suddenness of the announcement made by President Niyazov...challenges the principles of presumption of innocence but also casts doubts on the credibility of the official version," the report said.
In the first few days after the reported attack, Decaux said several hundred people were arrested and more than 100 charged with various offences, including relatives of suspects.
Since then, at least 46 people have been convicted in closed trials on charges linked to the assassination attempt, including former foreign minister and opposition leader Boris Shikhmuradov, who was jailed for life.
Shikhmuradov gave one of several televised confessions criticised in the West for harking back to Stalinism.