By Matt Siegel (AFP) – Jun 24, 2009

ASTANA (AFP) — The United States has put stabilizing Afghanistan before human rights in Central Asia by forging transit deals with authoritarian regimes accused of rights abuses, analysts said Wednesday.

A series of deals between Washington and the governments of Central Asia in recent months has secured supply lines to the war-wracked state but signals an unwillingness to confront authoritarianism in the region, analysts said.

Washington on Tuesday cemented its vital Central Asian military supply network by signing a deal to keep open a US airbase in Kyrgyzstan which had been ordered closed by Bishkek in February.

"For now, stabilizing Afghanistan is the number one foreign policy priority," said Alexander Cooley, a political scientist at Columbia University in New York.

"Maintaining reliable transit arrangements, even with these authoritarian regimes, is a critical part of executing the new Afghanistan strategy," he added.

"But there is no doubt that these deals will further limit US capacity to criticize Eurasian regimes on democracy and human rights-related issues."

Kyrgzstan had long complained that it was not receiving a fair rent for the Manas airbase, which has been used to ferry troops into Afghanistan and also hosts planes used for the mid-air refuelling of combat aircraft.

Under the newly announced deal Washington more than tripled the annual rent on the base from 17.4 million dollars to 60 million dollars, and will provide almost 120 million additional dollars in aid to Bishkek.

But Kyrgyzstan, which is preparing for presidential elections in July, has recently seen a string of arrests of opposition politicians and brutal attacks on independent journalists that many blame on the government.

Washington's willingness to look the other way on human rights is already a major cause for concern in Kyrgyzstan, said Alisher Khamidov, a leading expert on Islamic extremism in Central Asia.

Many working on issues of human rights and religious freedom feel abandoned said Khamidov, who is currently conducting research in the volatile Fergana Valley region shared by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

"You can see it everywhere. There is the general sense among people that US criticism of the human rights records of these Central Asian regimes has been muzzled because of the presence of the base," he said.

"There's a lot of disappointment among the NGO community and human rights community (in Kyrgyzstan) because the US is not doing much on human rights."

And Kyrgyzstan is far from the worst human rights violator of Washington's regional partners.

Washington also has a new deal with Tajikistan, the most impoverished of the ex-Soviet states, for the transit of non-military cargo.

Just last week a former interior minister who broke with Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon died under suspicious circumstances in the capital Dushanbe.

Neighbours and relatives of Makhmadnazar Salikhov told AFP that a group of men in ski masks burst into his home and attacked him. The government maintains he committed suicide rather than face arrest on corruption charges.

The Obama administration also inked a transit deal with Uzbekistan, an isolated state accused by human rights groups of maintaining a vast network of secret prisons and routinely employing torture against its enemies.

There are already signs that the United States is backing away from promoting democracy inside Uzbekistan in exchange for transit deals, said Paul Quinn-Judge, a Bishkek-based analyst with the International Crisis Group.

By backing Uzbek President Islam Karimov, Washington risks being associated with an aging and unpopular dictator, a potential problem if ethnic-Uzbek fighters return to the region from their bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"Any indication that the US is willing to backpedal from an explicit, open, and well-supported policy of calling for improved governance and democratic change in this part of the world would be a very dangerous signal," he said.

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