Iran's powerful conservatives, still reeling from their overwhelming defeat in last February's Parliament elections, took aim on Sunday at their most powerful and persistent foe: the independent, reformist press.
For well over a year, the Uzbek government has been engaged in a campaign against Islamic "extremism," which it also calls "Wahhabism." The net has been cast broadly: the campaign has targeted all expressions of Islamic piety beyond the direct control of the government's own religious administration. And it is not just the so-called extremists who have suffered.
CEP: Last month, Human Rights Watch issued a report documenting the government crackdown on human rights defenders in Uzbekistan. Please describe the campaign.
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright concluded a three-country tour of Central Asia on April 19. During stops in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Albright focused talks with regional leaders on a variety of security-related issues, including drug trafficking, counter terrorism and border control.
"What you are witnessing is the explosion of a free medium in a closed society," said Ufuk Guldemir, whose site, Haberturk (www.haberturk.com), has become the standard bearer of the news portals.
Conservative clerics are not inclined to stand in the way of Iran's transition to democracy, Olivier Roy, an author and expert on the region, told those attending a Central Eurasia Projects-sponsored meeting.
Over 700,000 people have left Armenia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The same number might leave over the next five to 10 years, some observers suggest.
Torture is the western world's dirty little secret. In a new report, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) identified torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment as one of the OSCE region's most wide-spread problems.
The occasion of Georgia's presidential elections on April 9 [See Eurasia Insight], as well as the first anniversary of its accession to the Council of Europe on April 27, provides an opportunity to evaluate the country's compliance with its obligations.
Crimean Tatars have been the traditional Muslims of the lands of today's Ukraine for six hundred years. Their "Khanat" state lasted for centuries. It is well-known that they had been decimated and deported by Stalin in 1944 and were allowed to return only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
