Uzbekistan’s guardians of moral values have imposed a curfew on Internet cafes in Tashkent, which they believe are perverting the nation’s teens, encouraging them to view material “contradicting our national mentality.”
According to new rules issued by the Tashkent mayor’s office, Internet cafes and computer clubs must close by 9 p.m., with immediate effect. City hall says the curfew is needed because of the existence of “clips, pictures, sites, and films advocating aggression, brutality, and immorality, which exert a negative influence on minors and are one of the main causes of the increase in the number of crimes among young people.” As a further reason, the decree cites “the increase in the number of Internet cafes and computer clubs” in the capital.
The decree (which was passed on February 18 and came into force as it was published on February 25—just ahead of a presidential election next month) also banned minors from being in Internet cafes in school time or “at a late hour” without the presence of a parent or adult guardian. It did not specify what was meant by a “late hour,” but that is evidently before 9 p.m.
The decree also imposes a sweeping – and hard to define and enforce – ban on the existence “in the establishment’s computer memory” of any material “advocating immorality, religious extremism, [and] nationalism in the form of computer games, or their use through the Internet.”
The administration of Islam Karimov has long been obsessed with promoting “Uzbek values” to counter the risk of foreign influences perverting the nation’s youth. Tashkent rails against Western imports like rap music, officially discourages celebrations of Valentine’s Day (deemed to breed terrorists) frowns on Santa Claus, and has condemned foreign toys as liable to undermine these so-called “Uzbek values.”
To diminish young people’s exposure to such menaces, Uzbekistan has set up its own social networking sites, cloning global successes like Facebook and Twitter to keep users inside the tightly controlled Uzbekistan Internet domain. But these sites have failed to rival the popularity of their Western and Russian originals. Last month, the authorities announced plans for another state-sponsored social network (as yet unnamed) to be created this year.
To counter all the negative material that is flooding the brains of web-savvy kids, the mayor’s office ordered Internet cafes to post material with “patriotic content” in Internet cafe booths. It also ordered the local authorities in each district of Tashkent to draw up lists of Internet cafes in order to keep better track of them.
The decree also orders Internet cafes to snoop on users and inform on any found accessing extremist or terrorist sites online, or engaged in “other suspicious actions.” Cafes must report such cases to the law-enforcement bodies and preserve the evidence.
Joanna Lillis is a journalist based in Almaty and author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan.
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