Watchdog

TASHKENT -- Uzbekistan's Interior Ministry has taken the unusual step of promising to investigate the temporary detainment of two independent journalists while they were covering the aftermath of a dam burst that forced tens of thousands of people from their homes in the Sirdaryo region and neighboring Kazakhstan.

The ministry said on Telegram that it will "assess the legality" of the actions taken by officers in holding the reporters on May 3.

"The Interior Ministry is always open to media outlets and does not meddle in their operations," the ministry statement said.

The statement came less than two hours after the independent online news organization Human.uz wrote on Telegram that police detained its reporter, Mavjuda Mirzaeva, and her cameraman while they were interviewing residents who were being temporarily housed at a college in the regional capital, Guliston, because of the accident.

In the video, posted by Human.uz, law enforcement officers, some of whom are in plainclothes, force the cameraman, whose name was not disclosed, into a minibus, while Mirzaeva films the situation and demands an explanation from an officer for the arrest.

The officer finally says, "You refused to follow lawful demands," but does not respond to Mirzaeva's request to clarify which "lawful demands" she and her cameraman refused to follow.

The officer then instructs one of his colleagues inside the vehicle to "delete all their video records after looking through them."

Until recently, the Interior Ministry investigating such an incident would have been seen as unthinkable.

Until 2016, Uzbekistan was under the iron fist of President Islam Karimov, who ruled the Central Asian state from before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 until his death in 2016.

Since President Shavkat Mirziyoev took over, many imprisoned political opposition figures and journalists, some of whom were held for almost 20 years, have been released, while websites that were censored for years have become accessible.

Still, the watchdog Reporters Without Borders said in its assessment of press freedom in Uzbekistan that "the road is still long" for the country "to fully restore press freedom without political pluralism and without justice for the dictatorship's crimes."

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called for a "thorough investigation" into "shocking" allegations that Iranian border guards beat and then forced a group of Afghan migrants into a river.

Afghan officials said up to 70 migrants last week illegally crossed into Iran, where they were beaten, tortured, and then forced into a river by Iranian border guards.

Authorities in the western province of Herat, located along the border with Iran, said they had retrieved 12 bodies from the Harirud River that crosses both countries.

Dozens of Afghan migrants are still missing and Afghan authorities have launched an operation to locate and retrieve the bodies.

"The allegations are indeed shocking," Patricia Gossman, an associate director for the Asia division at HRW, told RFE/RL on May 4. "It really requires a very thorough investigation into what exactly happened."

Gossman said that if proven, the actions of the Iranian border guards would amount to "a very serious human rights violation."

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Musavi said the "incident" took place on Afghan soil.

"Border guards of the Islamic Republic of Iran denied the occurrence of any events related to this on the soil of our country," he said in a statement on May 3, adding that Tehran would launch an investigation into the incident.

Abdul Ghani Noori, governor of Herat's Gulran district, where the migrants crossed, accused Iranian security forces of throwing the group of Afghan migrants into the Harirud River.

Afghan officials said it was not the first time that Afghans had been tortured and killed by Iranian security forces guarding the 920-kilometer-long border.

"I haven't heard of a case like this in recent memory, although we have previously documented abuses by Iranian border officials against Afghans for some time," Gossman said, adding that there had been past incidents of Iranian border guards beating and firing on Afghan migrants.

Decades of conflict, extreme poverty, and high rates of unemployment force thousands of Afghans to illegally cross the border into Iran every year.

There are currently up to 1 million registered Afghan refugees in Iran, while the country hosts another 2 million undocumented Afghans, according to the United Nations.

With reporting by Reuters and AFP