Uzbek govt’s ruthlessness boosting radicals’ support
By Yana Dlugy
TASHKENT: Uzbekistan’s autocratic President Islam Karimov is widely reviled by the people of this Central Asian land and critics say the story behind the recent deadly clashes in the east of the country helps explain why.
His regime’s ruthless campaign against real and imagined Islamists, they say, has filled the nation’s jails with innocent people and is in fact boosting support for extremist groups.
“The repression against presumed extremists and Islamists has radicalized many Muslims here,” said Vassila Inoiyatova, a member of the Berlik opposition party.
The events leading up to the military crackdown in the eastern city of Andijan on May 13, which killed hundreds of civilians as troops dispersed an anti-government rally, are a mirror image of the wider tensions.
Government critics — a group that includes everyone from cab drivers to Western businessmen and sometimes even members of the powerful police — say the “religious extremism” label has become a convenient tool for those in power to remove their competitors in business and politics.
“What happened in Andijan could have happened in 10 other cities,” said a Western official.
The tensions in Andijan began simmering months ago, when 23 local businessmen were charged with membership in an extremist group. Such charges have been a common feature of Uzbek courts since 1999.
That year saw a series of car bombs and attacks linked to a radical group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) that killed dozens of people. The government said the movement was aimed at assassinating Karimov.
Uzbekistan sits on the northern border of Afghanistan, so Karimov, a secular leader of a Muslim land, has kept a watchful eye on religious revival in this ex-Soviet republic since independence in 1990.
After the 1999 attacks, Karimov’s government launched an all-out campaign against Islamic radicals and today between 6,000 and 10,000 people are in Uzbek jails, convicted of extremism charges, according to the estimates of human rights groups.
Surat Ikramov heads a rights group that has monitored 120 trials of suspected religious extremists like those in Andijan.
“In none of the trials was the guilt of those accused of terrorism and extremism proven,” he said. The trials, he added, “are organized to turn people’s attention away from the economic situation and the lack of reforms.”
The 23 people accused of religious extremism in Andijan several months ago were businessmen whose companies employed several thousand people. Many in Andijan believe the men were targeted because a powerful local politician wanted their businesses.
Many expected a guilty verdict — people are often convicted in Uzbekistan on evidence that would seem less than fully proved. For example, one person has been convicted because known militants used a pay phone in his store; another went to jail because a friend who had given him his SIM telephone card had made calls to Saudi Arabia on it.
Many people caught in the anti-Islamist net are simply practicing Muslims and many of the convictions are based on confessions that are routinely acquired by torture of prisoners in the precincts of Uzbekistan’s all-powerful police, rights groups have said.
“My eldest son’s fingernails were pulled out,” a woman whose two sons and husband are serving prison terms told AFP.
Critics say that Karimov’s anti-Islamic drive and suppression of political opposition is filling the ranks of groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, which advocates the setting up of an Islamic caliphate in Central Asia by peaceful means.
Many people who find themselves in jail falsely convicted of membership in a religious group actually become members of one in prison, activists have said.
“I know a lot of instances when prisoners and even prison guards became Hizb ut-Tahrir members,” Ikramov said.
Since publicly opposing the regime can lead to a jail sentence, the tension will eventually explode in public unrest, critics warn — like the events in Andijan on May 13, when the 23 defendants’ supporters stormed a police station, a military post and finally the prison where the accused were held.
They were freed along with hundreds of other prisoners, and their supporters then broke in and took over the regional government headquarters.
The next day soldiers moved on thousands of people who had gathered in the city’s central square in a massive anti-government rally, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians.
Few here seem to believe the official version of events — that the deaths occurred during a battle between troops and well-armed Islamist radicals.—AFP
