TeliaSonera, a telecom giant owned in part by the Swedish and Finnish governments, is again under fire for abetting an authoritarian regime.
The company owns a majority stake in Tcell, one of Tajikistan’s top mobile providers. Since fighting between local armed groups and government soldiers left dozens dead in Gorno-Badakhshan province on July 24, Tcell, along with Tajikistan’s other mobile, Internet and 3G providers, has blocked access to scores of websites under an order from the state communications agency that rests on shaky legal ground. Throughout the country, YouTube, Russian news agency RIA Novosti, and the independent Asia-Plus news agency, among others, remain blocked three weeks after the violence. And the government has kept most communications links with Gorno-Badakhshan severed.
The head of information for TeliaSonera, Thomas Jönsson, tells Swedish Radio News that the closures followed orders from the Tajik government.
He says he naturally believes that information should be freely available. But when a country raises internal security issues, under the regulations they have to follow such requests.
However Johann Bihr of Reporters Without Borders says Tcell should have waited for court orders, under the international conventions that Tajikistan has signed.
The head of the Swedish branch of Amnesty International, Lise Berg, says their information confirms that Tcell is acting without court orders[.]
Tajikistan’s most-wanted warlord has surrendered, according to state media reports. Last month, a hunt for Tolib Ayombekov in the eastern mountains left dozens dead, including at least 17 government soldiers.
Speaking on television in Gorno-Badakhshan province, Ayombekov said he was giving himself up for the good of the nation, and urged other militants to lay down their weapons as well, the Khovar state news agency reported on August 13.
Radio Free Europe said that Ayombekov is being treated in a Khorog hospital, and that he hopes for a free and fair trial. At least three other senior rebel leaders are believed still on the run.
Government soldiers are reportedly beginning to withdraw from Khorog, and the situation is said to be calm. But protestors on August 11 demonstrated against an incident at a checkpoint the day before that saw two passengers killed when their minibus failed to obey soldiers’ orders. The isolated region remains cut off from the rest of the country, with spotty phone and Internet connections.
With the dust now settling on the London Olympics, Kazakhstan has emerged as the undisputed Central Asia champion, finishing a laudable 12th in the overall medal table, up from 29th four years ago in Beijing. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan also made it to the winner’s podium.
But besides the considerable costs of training and putting athletes forward for Olympic glory, what have the wins cost Central Asia’s thin pocketbooks? Leaders across the region promised more than fame to athletes who could score a medal in London, including cash prizes, apartments and luxury cars.
In Kazakhstan’s case, the cash prizes to be doled out total over $2 million – $250,000 for each of seven golds, $150,000 for one silver, and $75,000 for each of five bronzes. Uzbekistan will fork out $100,000 to its gold winner, 120-kilogram freestyle wrestler Artur Taymazov, and $50,000 to each of three bronze winners. It’s not clear what Tajikistan was offering its bronze winner, however. President Emomali Rakhmon set the prize for gold at $63,000. But the Dushanbe mayor and the opposition Islamic Renaissance Party each promised female boxer Mavzuna Chorieva – who won a bronze – an apartment.
The US State Department’s annual terrorism report, released this week, provides a brief overview of how Foggy Bottom views terrorist threats abroad. On Central Asia, unfortunately, the cautious survey adds little to our understanding of the problem.
In its introduction to the region, the report notes that Central Asian governments “faced the challenge” of balancing human rights with security concerns. Further down, the report lists myriad examples where authorities heavily favored security, often at the expense of basic human rights.
State hedges on Central Asian governments’ tendency to hype threats. For the most part, the report simply lists what authorities describe as terrorist attacks and as anti-terrorist operations, but uses qualifying terms – “reportedly”; “potentially” – that make it clear State is as in the dark on the nature of the events as the rest of us.
The report does cautiously point out that Central Asian governments’ widespread human rights abuses may end up creating terrorists.
For example, Kazakhstan’s 2010 amendments to the law on “religious activities” had “severely restricted the peaceful practice of religion,” the report says, adding that some commentators linked subsequent violent incidents to the new law.
In the Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan sections, the report states the widely held belief that the three countries misuse counterterrorism statutes to persecute legitimate political and religious actors. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, despite their well-documented use of the same playbook, are not censured directly on this point.
As Tajik authorities celebrate their success disarming rebels in the restive mountainous east, their tight control over information from the region is fostering skepticism that all is rosy in Gorno-Badakhshan.
Nationwide, authorities are blocking more websites every few days, while telephone and Internet connections with the province remain erratic.
As of August 2, Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti, Vesti.ru, BBC Russia and YouTube were not accessible, along with a handful of other Russian-language news sites. Authorities have also continued their blockade of Asia-Plus, perhaps the country’s largest and most influential independent media outlet.
Fighting in Khorog, the capital of Gorno-Badakhshan, left at least 48 dead between July 24 and 26, including, officially, one civilian. But reports continue to trickle out of anywhere between 15 and 100 civilian casualties. Stories of Tajik soldiers committing atrocities against civilians are also beginning to surface.
The blackout makes those reports harder to confirm or deny. (Cell phone connections with Khorog are still down, some landlines have been restored and some Internet users in the town are able to use landlines to connect, but their access is intermittent.) The information vacuum is spreading confusion and forcing concerned Tajiks to rely on rumors, which include some outrageous claims not worth reprinting.
“Khorog is safe now. You will have no problems going through there. Please send me a message after you get to Dushanbe so we know you are safe.” Twenty-two-year-old Matrop didn’t blink an eye as he offered this subtle contradiction and poured me another bowl of green tea.
Midway through a four-week journey across Tajikistan, I had stopped on July 27 to spend the night at Matrop’s family’s home in the Wakhan Corridor village of Darshai, across the river from Afghanistan. After learning that I spoke Russian, one of Matrop’s friends anxiously informed me that Khorog, four-hours drive northwest, had a “war raging in the streets.” Huh? The fighting had already been going on for three days, but out in remoter parts of Gorno-Badakhshan province I hadn’t heard a thing.
He cursed the situation with an anger I’d find common among 20-somethings in the region over the next few days. The fighting had rekindled divisions and resentment lingering from Tajikistan’s 1990s civil war, when the Pamiri minority in mountainous Badakhshan found themselves fighting Tajiks.
“How many of our people have died already over the years? For what? Our country has been peaceful a long time, and now a new war is happening. The president’s special guard has been sent in,” he said, repeating a blend of concerns and rumors I would hear again and again. “Maybe a civil war will start again.”
Matrop’s uncle, Mubaraksho, a Russian-language teacher and avid ibex hunter, took the lightest attitude. “It’s fine,” he assured me. “You will be fine. Of course, I don’t know for sure, but I think it is already peaceful. That’s what people are saying.”
Comrade Lenin was happy where he stood for 35 years. Then city authorities built a stadium directly in his line of site. Within a year, so disappointed by the local football team’s losses, Vladimir Ilyich couldn’t take it anymore, and got up and moved downriver.
So go the jokes in Khujand, formerly Leninabad, to explain why officials moved Central Asia’s tallest statue of the Bolshevik revolutionary in May 2011 from a central square to a patch of weeds where cows graze by the Syr Darya River. He was replaced by a statue of Ismail Somoni, a proto-Tajik 10th-century king.
He’s still the tallest Lenin in Central Asia, however, at 12.5 meters with a new 12.5-meter pedestal, just like the old one. (Except without the marble facing and nameplate.)
To placate some locals upset by the move, a new story is making the rounds: The cow fields and industrial wasteland surrounding Lenin’s new spot will be turned into a large park.
Authorities in Tajikistan are ramping up efforts to keep information about recent fighting in the mountainous east from getting out.
Telephone and Internet connections to Gorno-Badakhshan, scene of heavy fighting July 24 between government forces and local rebels, remain cut for a third day. Asia-Plus, the country’s largest independent news agency, is blocked. Now several Internet service providers have blocked YouTube, users in Dushanbe confirm, as unauthenticated photos of dead soldiers and burning houses are circulating by email.
Officials still insist there were no civilian casualties in the clashes, which took place in the regional capital, Khorog, a town of some 30,000 on the Afghanistan border. Officially, 42 died: 12 government soldiers and 30 militants. But Asia-Plus and Radio Ozodi report dozens of civilian casualties.
Few will believe the official explanation given today by the head of the state communication service, Beg Zukhurov, that a stray bullet took out all communication links with Gorno-Badakhshan. Instead, his comments are likely to fuel increasing concerns by people unable to reach their loved ones. With rumors spreading quickly, many are asking what the government has to hide.
At least nine Tajik soldiers have been killed and 20 wounded in an operation against a local warlord in Tajikistan's eastern Badakhshan province, local media are reporting. An unspecified number of militants have also been killed and BBC’s Russian service says there are civilian casualties.
Sources in Khorog, capital of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) in the Pamir Mountains, reported a heavy military buildup on July 23 in response to the weekend murder of a top security official. General Abdullo Nazarov, head of the regional branch of the GKNB (successor to the KGB), was reportedly stabbed on July 21 by a group of men who dragged him from his car as he returned from a business trip to Ishkashim, about a two hours’ drive south of Khorog. Both towns lie on the porous Afghanistan border and along major drug-trafficking routes.
Thousands of men filled every nook and cranny of the Haji Yacoub Mosque in Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital, for the first day of Ramadan on July 20. This year, the holy month began on a Friday, Muslims' main day of prayer.
David Trilling is EurasiaNet's Central Asia editor.
