The farmers were locked in a cold room from 6pm and not allowed to leave until they signed their statements.148 Having held out until midnight, Ibragimova, hungry and freezing from the cold and worried about her children, devised a plan: she agreed to write the statement as instructed, but omitted the word ‘land’, thus reading: ‘The reason for writing this statement is to return to the district reserve.’149 Ibragimova believed the statement would, therefore, not provide the basis for the seizure of her land, because it did not make sense, as it did not specify what exactly Ibragimova wanted to return. Tired police officers and hokimiyat officials did not read the text of her statement and she was released. ‘The hokim had no justifiable reasons for taking the land from the farmers, otherwise the Hokimiyat would have gone to court and obtained the cancellation of the long-term land leases on a legal basis,’ explains Ibragimova.150 However, she discovered that her “application” to return the land was registered by the Chancellery Department of the district hokimiyat on 16 January 2019, two days before she attests that she was pressured to write it. According to Ibragimova, this proves that the hokimiyat first took the illegal decision to seize the land and then decided to frame it as a mass, simultaneous voluntary decision of farmers to give up their land.151 The district hokim then issued an order stating that Ibragimov’s “request” to cancel the long-term lease agreement for the land plot had been accepted.152 The statement confirmed that the farm would be returned to the district land reserve and reallocated through an open and competitive process. It appears that no-one questioned why, nine days after the adoption of the Cabinet of Ministers resolution on land reforms, farmers of the Pop district would en masse surrender their land. The decision of the Council of People’s Deputies of 18 January 2019 states that out 149. of the existing 1,121 farms in Pop district, the heads of all 538 cotton and grain farms, all 67 horticultural farms, 296 vineyards/gardens, 86% of livestock farms (100) and the remaining 104 farms submitted written statements to terminate their land lease agreements.153 For no apparent reason, all except 16 farmers in Pop district terminated their land leases. Ibragimova has attempted to get her land back by filing lawsuits in the administrative courts to overturn the decision of the Pop district hokim dated 18 January 2019. Specifically, Ibragimova filed a complaint with the Namangan region Administrative Court, which heard the case on 7 September 2021. The court upheld the order of hokim Azamjon Sultanov on the grounds that the plaintiff had missed the three-month deadline for appealing to the Administrative Court.154 In its decision, the court also stated that the inaccuracy of the text in Ibragimova’s “voluntary” application to cancel her land lease was not a matter of substantive importance, on the grounds that Ibragimova had written the application as the head of the farm and understood the essence of her application. The court also noted that the date of the application, 16 January 2019, was the result of a procedural error within the district administration and not grounds to cancel the decision. On 26 October 2021, the Court of Appeal upheld the verdict of the first court. Umida Ibragimova then filed a complaint to the supreme court of Uzbekistan, which rejected her appeal. The Supreme Court did not consider the merits of the case, but ruled on the basis that she had missed the six month deadline to appeal to the Administrative Court. According to Ibragimova, more and more farmers and farm workers from Pop district have left for Russia in search of work since losing their land and becoming unemployed. Most of the farmers have reluctantly accepted the loss of their land and only a handful are trying to get it back by appealing to the courts and government officials. Letter from Umida Ibragimova to Nigmatilla Yuldashev, Prosecutor General, Republic of Uzbekistan, 17 January 2022. A False Sense of Legality 51