BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has pressed Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan on human rights issues during his first tour of Central Asia.
Just days before Ban's visit, Kyrgyz police seized equipment in a raid on a local television channel, effectively taking it off the air in what the opposition said was an attack on press freedom.
On the sidelines of Ban's closed-door meeting with Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev, a senior UN official said the UN chief had particularly stressed that he was "troubled" by steps taken by the authorities to limit independent reporting.
The UN official quoted Ban as telling Sarbayev: "How do I answer such questions from the media, and how do you answer the world?" The official said Ban delivered a similar message in a separate meeting with President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
As talks were under way, dozens of activists rallied outside the UN office in the capital, Bishkek, waving banners saying "Reporters under threat" and shouting "Freedom to journalists."
Two prominent journalists were killed in the region late last year. Several independent media web sites and radio stations have not been accessible in Kyrgyzstan since early March.
"We are deeply disturbed by the actions of Kyrgyz authorities to systematically unplug their citizens from independent and opposition news sources," the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement late Friday.
Although Ban is likely to stick to diplomatic language during his tour, his visit has emboldened local human rights defenders to speak up about problems in the region where governments usually tolerate little political dissent.
"We want Ban Ki-moon to start paying attention to what is happening here, to the fact that human rights are being violated here and that Kyrgyzstan uses repression against its own people," said Asiya Sasykbayeva, an activist at the rally. "There is no media freedom in this country. There is no alternative information. Dissent is being suppressed."
Speaking in Turkmenistan on Friday, Ban said he had won concessions from Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov to invite a United Nations human rights special rapporteur focusing on education — an issue of concern after the country's educational system severely deteriorated under Berdymukhamedov's egomaniacal predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, who made his book of spiritual wisdom required reading.
Turkmenistan also aims to begin bringing its penitentiary system into conformity with international standards, Ban said. A senior UN official traveling with the delegation said access to prisoners, food and health were notable concerns.
On Sunday, Ban called on Central Asian states to work together to tackle the disastrous effects of the shrinking Aral Sea during a visit to Uzbekistan. Much of the former bed of what was once the world's fourth-largest lake is now a desert covered with scrub and salt flats. It shrank by 70 percent after Soviet planners in the 1960s siphoned off water for cotton irrigation projects in Uzbekistan.
"I was so shocked," Ban said after viewing the damage by helicopter, describing it as "clearly one of the worst environmental disasters in the world."
Ban is to continue to Tajikistan, a country still struggling to overcome the devastation of a five-year civil war against Islamists in the 1990s and to fight the surge of Afghan opium that penetrates its porous border en route to European addicts.
The trip concludes in Kazakhstan.