Lemkin Institute Statement at the United Nations Forum on Minority Issues Session II (3pm-6pm) November 30, 2023 Presented by Samuel Adams, MA candidate in Global Politics, Rutgers University My colleague from the Lemkin Institute has previously documented and covered the extensive challenges facing the Karakalpak population in Uzbekistan in the first session of this Forum. She highlighted the ways Karakalpak people face a genocidal pattern of violations to their human rights, culture, identity, and existence. These are not individual, isolated cases. This is a targeted pattern of assault against the Karakalpak group by the state of Uzbekistan. Individuals, governments, and international organizations who work with Uzbekistan must be made aware of the nature of the persecution of the Karakalpak people, so that they can fashion their policies accordingly. In line with the topic of our second session, Social and Economic Empowerment, I will highlight what we believe is the coordinated assault on the social and economic lives of the Karakalpak people by Uzbekistan authorities. Karakalpakstan is Uzbekistan’s poorest region, despite its wealth in hydrocarbons, which has so far benefitted only the central government in Tashkent. Bleak economic conditions in Karakalpakstan have forced hundreds of thousands of Karakalpak people to leave their homeland in search of economic opportunity. The poverty rate in Karakalpakstan is the highest in the nation at 27%, while bordering Uzbek towns commonly post yearly incomes 50% higher than their Karakalpakstan counterparts. 30% of the people emigrating from Uzbekistan to countries abroad are from Karakalpakstan. Nearly 20% of the region’s households have family members working abroad. The neglect of Karakalpakstan’s economic development, compounded by the ecological disaster of the disappearance of the Aral Sea, has amounted to the fracturing of the Karakalpak people throughout Central Asia and across the globe and has resulted in alarmingly negative health outcomes for people remaining in Karakalpakstan. While economic stagnation, population dispersal, and negative health outcomes have been the consequence of economic neglect, the Uzbekistan state has also directly and actively targeted the social and economic wellbeing and cohesion of the Karakalpak people, using various methods, including political persecution, to undermine social bonds and disrupt economic development. Uzbekistan authorities prefer to place ethnic Uzbek officials within the government of Karakalpakstan, leading to economic policies that benefit the central state over the local economy. There are reports of ethnic Uzbeks being encouraged with offers of housing and high salaries to move to Karakalpakstan in order to shift the demographic balance in favor of the Uzbek ethnic group. Karakalpak women have been targeted in a discriminatory fashion with official policies of forced sterilization and forced abortion, undermining Karakalpak population