Respublika has been suspended by the courts, but published last week under the name Azat (Freedom). Photo: EurasiaNet.org
A prominent Kazakh opposition party, Alga!, and outspoken media outlets are fighting a legal battle against a bid to shut them down. They say authorities are attempting to muzzle dissident voices in Kazakhstan.
The move to close Alga! -- whose leader Vladimir Kozlov is serving a jail term for allegedly inciting fatal unrest in Zhanaozen last December, which he denies -- has become bogged down in a legal paradox: Alga! has been arguing in court that it cannot be closed because it does not exist, since the authorities have for years refused to register it and make it legal. Alga!’s case has been adjourned to December 11.
One media outlet, the Stan TV Internet television station, has already been ordered to close by a court, which on December 4 declared its output “illegal,” Kazakhstan’s Adil Soz media watchdog reported.
Three brothers of a journalist murdered in 2007 have been attacked outside their Bishkek home, Fergananews reports. One of the suspected assailants is the nephew of a prominent member of Kyrgyzstan's parliament.
Journalist Shokhrukh Saipov and students Ozodbek and Yusuf Saipov are younger brothers of Alisher Saipov, a well-known ethnic Uzbek journalist and editor who was gunned down outside the offices of his paper, "Siyosat" (Politics), in Osh on October 24, 2007.
Saipov’s murder has never been solved, and many regional experts believe Uzbekistan's secret services played a role. Saipov, who was 26 at the time of his death, was often critical of the regime of Islam Karimov in Tashkent.
Journalists and rights activists across the region are outraged at the attack on his brothers. Shokhrukh was inspired to become a journalist when Kyrgyz authorities failed to investigate his brother’s murder. He was also attacked in Osh in August 2011.
Aziza Abdurasulova, head of Kylym Shamy, a human rights watchdog in Bishkek, said Shokhrukh and Yusuf required medical care. Shokhrukh was beaten so badly he was unable to speak. They intend to press charges, she said.
Bishkek police have arrested Azamat Tekebayev, nephew of the head of the Ata-Meken party, MP Omurbek Tekebayev, as a suspect. It’s unclear what the motive was. Azamat and an accomplice, who has also been detained, say both sides started the fight.
The chief of Tajikistan’s communications agency says he has blocked Facebook access in the country because Internet users were begging him to shut that “hotbed of libel.” And he wants a few words with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Earlier Beg Zukhurov denied any blockade, saying he could log onto Facebook just fine and that perhaps some Internet providers were having technical problems. But on November 27 he admitted he gave the order: "Public figures have talked to me about this several times. I've had a lot of calls from outraged Tajik residents who ask me to shut down Facebook," RIA Novosti quotes Zukhurov as saying.
He added that a group of volunteer Internet monitors had described numerous violations (of what, it’s unclear). "Government heads are being insulted on the site and these statements are being made by fake users. Some people are clearly getting paid good money for this," RIA Novosti quoted him as saying.
In August, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) wrote to Zukhurov of its “profound concern” that he was creating a group of Internet monitors accountable to him and not the courts. “Such a system of control could lead to the wholesale blocking of online publications and websites. While we agree defamation should be penalized, it should be dealt with by the courts, where defendants can put their case and have the right of appeal,” RSF wrote.
The defendant in this case appears to be the social network’s founder and chairman, Mark Zuckerberg.
Prosecutors have moved to silence some of the few dissenting voices left in Kazakhstan’s tightly controlled political arena, seeking to muffle media and opposition groups for allegedly calling for the overthrow of the state in the run-up to fatal violence in Zhanaozen last December.
A statement by the prosecutor’s office on November 21 accused two vocal opposition forces -- the unregistered Alga! party and the People’s Front organization, consisting of Alga! and the Communist Party of Kazakhstan -- of extremist actions and said it had filed a court case to ban them, along with a host of media outlets.
Alga! is led by Vladimir Kozlov, who on November 19 lost his appeal against a seven-and-a-half year prison sentence over the Zhanaozen unrest. Critics -- including international human rights organizations and the US government -- fear Kozlov’s imprisonment was designed to silence Kazakhstan’s battered opposition.
“The authorities are themselves radicalizing dissent, pushing it out of the legal field,” Amirzhan Kosanov, deputy leader of another -- still tolerated -- opposition party, OSDP Azat, commented on his Facebook page.
When a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) went to visit a journalist jailed in Uzbekistan’s southern Karshi region recently, ICRC staff thought they had finally scored a meeting with a political prisoner. Prison officials had been hiding journalist Salijon Abdurahmanov for months, according to a report by the independent Uznews.net.
On one previous ICRC visit to prison camp No 64/61, Abdurahmanov, who worked for Uznews.net before his 2008 arrest, was reportedly taken away and hidden from the inspectors. This time, according to the Uznews.net report, which cites the journalist’s son, prison authorities presented the delegation with an imposter. ICRC has not commented.
This autumn, the journalist’s son, Davron, said, ICRC inspectors came to the prison again, but this time the prison administration arranged a meeting with “a fake Abdurahmanov.”
“Father said that he was driven away in an unknown direction and a different prisoner was brought to the meeting instead, as if he were Salijon Abdurahmanov,” Davron said.
ICRC representatives immediately established that it was someone else before them, the journalist himself told his son at a meeting.
The “fake” journalist said he was Salijon Abdurahmanov, but ICRC members refused to believe him, saying that they had seen a photo of the journalist and have their own view of him.
The Russian-language news service Ferghana News is pressing ahead with two lawsuits seeking to overturn a ban imposed earlier this year by authorities in Kyrgyzstan.
Kyrgyz Internet service providers have blocked Moscow-based, Ferghana News (formerly Ferghana.ru), a leading independent news source in Central Asia, since late February, according to managing editor Daniil Kislov. A 2011 parliamentary resolution, adopted after an investigation into the new website’s coverage of the 2010 inter-ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, reportedly served as the basis for the ban. Media watchdogs, including the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, have assailed the action against Ferghana news, contending that it amounted to retaliation for what Kyrgyz officials deemed “negative” coverage of the Osh events.
One lawsuit filed by Ferghana News and currently pending in a Kyrgyz court seeks to overturn the ban, arguing that only a court order, not a parliamentary resolution, can legitimize pulling the plug on a mass media outlet. A second suit, filed on behalf of a Kyrgyz citizen, pursues a broader aim, arguing that such a ban violated the plaintiff’s constitutional rights, according to Kislov.
Kyrgyzstan is far from alone in Central Asia in blocking Ferghana.ru, but it is the only state in the region “where it is possible to file such a suit,” said Kislov. He made the comments during an Open Forum, held November 19 at the Open Society Foundations in New York. [Editor’s Note: EurasiaNet.org operates under the auspices of the Open Society Foundations].
Late last year, when Ankara was coming under severe attack for the growing number of journalists that were being jailed in Turkey, the government was able to call an unlikely witness in its defense: the press freedom watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists.
While press freedom advocates and government critics in Turkey put the number of jailed journalists in Turkey at the time at well over 70, CPJ, in its annual census of jailed journalists around the world, implausibly put the number at eight. The backlash to the group's report on Turkey was immediate and strong, strong enough that CPJ realized it needed to take a closer look at what's going in Turkey and issue a followup study.
That study was issued today, making it clear that CPJ got things quite wrong in last year's census. According to the group's new report (full disclosure: I was interviewed for the study), there are currently 76 journalists in jail in Turkey, making the country the world's leading jailer of journalists. From the report's summary:
Kazakhstan’s government is moving to prevent state media outlets diverging from the official line when covering emergencies -- from terrorist attacks and accidents to earthquakes and, it seems, labor unrest.
New agreements with editors of state media would prevent “the dissemination of alternative information through all distribution channels – TV, newspapers, the Internet,” Minister of Culture and Information Darkhan Mynbay said in comments carried by Tengri News this week.
That would include flagship TV channels Khabar and Kazakstan, which play a major role in forming public opinion, as well as radio stations like Kazakhskoye Radio and newspapers such as Kazakhstanskaya Pravda.
The minister said Astana was in the process of reaching agreements with editors of state media outlets “on not permitting the distribution of unofficial information and a negative interpretation of official information which casts doubt on the veracity of information, or the competence of the speaker, or calls on citizens to commit some actions.” He did not specify what actions he had in mind.
Mynbay added that the government was forming a pool of approved journalists to which it would pass information during emergencies.
The term “emergencies” could cover a wide range of contingencies, including terrorist attacks, security operations against suspected extremists, earthquakes and accidents.
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[.]
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.
