Uznews, Tashkent, 12 Feb 2009 – Relatives of jailed dissident writer Yusuf Juma have managed to visit him in the Jaslyk prison after they have been denied this for months. They reassured themselves that he is alive but the state of his health is very serious.
The writer’s daughter Feruza came back from Karakalpakstan yesterday after managing to see her father, who was sentenced to five years, at Jaslyk.
This meeting was vital for his family because the prison administration had not allowed family members to see the writer since last November.
This refusal raised concern that the dissident might have died because he regularly faced violence, moral pressure and mistreatment and he was deprived of food and was forced to share his cell with seriously-ill tuberculosis patients.
Moreover, the Jumas have already lost a family member: the writer’s 22-year-old son Mashrab who was sentenced to four years in January 2008 on charges of stabbing a man has disappeared in prison where he was serving his sentence.
Last June Bukhara Region police put Mashrab on a wanted list and said that he had broke out of the prison. The Jumas believe that Mashrab was tortured to death and the authorities are trying to present his death as an escape.
After seeing her father, Feruza came back home with a good piece of information that Yusuf Juma was alive. However, she said he was in bad health because he had often been placed in a concrete punishment cell for 14-15 days, instead of a maximum of 10 days, on all kinds of pretexts.
Prison guards say that they do this because the writer is “President Islam Karimov’s personal enemy”, which is hard to argue about in modern Uzbekistan.
“What can we do to stop this abuse and how long will it last?” his wife Gulnora Oltiyeva has repeatedly asked.
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