Uzbekistan

As youngsters in the United States return to school, children in Uzbekistan will be returning to the fields. For them, it is the autumn cotton harvest. From now through the end of November, instead of attending classes, 2 million Uzbek children ages 6 to 15 will be forced to spend their days picking cotton. Unlike most instances of forced child labor in agriculture, this mass mobilization is not driven by exploitative plantation owners or desperate families but by the government.

A prominent rights advocate who has accused Uzbekistan of abuse and torture said she was beaten by a group of women she alleged were sent by the police. Elena Urlayeva, a member of the outlawed Free Peasants party, said four "burly" women attacked her Thursday on a street in the capital, Tashkent. Police refused to comment.

A prominent human rights activist in Uzbekistan who worked part time as a translator for New York-based Human Rights Watch has been detained after fleeing her homeland and then attempting to return, her lawyer said Monday. Umida Niyazova, 32, an activist with Veritas, an unregistered Uzbek human rights group, was detained near Uzbekistan's border with Kyrgyzstan on Jan. 22, according to Human Rights Watch.

An Uzbek court freed a rights activist and suspended her seven-year jail sentence after she confessed to all the charges against her and criticized international rights groups from a cage in the courtroom. The United States had criticized the jail term handed down last week to Umida Niyazova, a translator for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Uzbekistan's authoritarian President Islam Karimov, who has ruled the Central Asian nation for nearly two decades, won another seven-year term with 88.1% of the vote, according to early returns in an election that critics called a sham. Karimov faced three other contenders in the vote Sunday, but all publicly supported him. The election-monitoring arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the vote failed to meet democratic standards.

Police in Uzbekistan arrested a group of people on suspicion of trying to sell a U.S. $1-million bill for half price. There is no such denomination. The suspects told the potential buyer that they were prepared to sell the bill for $500,000 because they needed quick cash, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. It cited prosecutors in the Uzbek city of Samarkand. The fake bill was made on a color printer, the report said.

Spent nuclear fuel containing enough weapons-grade uranium to produce at least two bombs was safely returned to Russia from Uzbekistan this week in a high-security and classified operation, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency disclosed Thursday.

Uzbekistan shut down the local office of Counterpart, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization that runs humanitarian projects, the group said. The nation has cracked down on foreign aid groups and the media since Western countries criticized the bloody suppression of an uprising in the town of Andijon a year ago. David Holiday, Counterpart's head in Uzbekistan, declined to say why the office was closed.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin told Uzbekistan's leader Islam Karimov on Friday that he looked forward to blossoming ties, a year after Uzbek troops earned international censure by firing on civilians. The European Union, meanwhile, issued a fresh call for a "credible investigation" into the bloodshed. Witnesses said hundreds were killed on May 13, 2005, including women and children, when Uzbek troops opened fire on a protest in Andijon.

The killing of a well-known religious leader by security forces this month in Kyrgyzstan has increased tensions in Central Asia's densely populated Fergana Valley, which is caught in a spiral of worsening conflict between radical Islamists and authorities. Mohammed Rafik Kamalov, the popular imam of a mosque in the town of Korasuv, died Aug. 6, reportedly in a shootout between police and the two passengers of his car, who were also killed.