Delivering the usual grim assessment on press freedom in Central Asia, the Committee to Protect Journalists says the region’s media continue to be shaken by “tactics to intimidate, harass and imprison journalists.” CPJ released its annual Attacks on the Press report on February 21.
Even in Kyrgyzstan, celebrated for its shift from authoritarian leadership to parliamentary rule, attacks on journalists continue to rise. In 2011, eight media workers were assaulted, CPJ counted, while ethnic Uzbeks working in the field were forced to flee or, in the case of Azimjan Askarov, remain languishing in prison.
“Rising violence, censorship, and politically motivated prosecutions against the media marred the year in Kyrgyzstan. Parliament decriminalized libel, but moved to censor foreign press coverage. Ethnic Uzbek journalists were targeted for legal reprisals” in the wake of ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan in 2010. The report adds:
After the June 2010 conflict, ethnic Uzbek media owners Khalil Khudaiberdiyev and Dzhavlon Mirzakhodzhayev faced attacks, harassment, and retaliatory prosecution. Authorities forced Khudaiberdiyev to sell his company, Osh TV. Mirzakhodzhayev suspended operation of Mezon TV and the newspapers Portfeland Itogi Nedeli. The outlets had produced news in Uzbek, as well as in Russian and Kyrgyz. As both owners fled the country, the country's largest ethnic minority was left without access to news in its native language.
An exiled Tajik journalist is in intensive care after receiving multiple knife wounds in a Moscow restaurant. Dodojon Atovulloyev, leader of the Vatandor (Patriot) movement, and editor of Charogi Ruz (Light of the Day), was reportedly stabbed in the liver and lung late on January 12. He is in serious, but stable, condition.
Russian police say they have detained a 23-year-old suspect from Tajikistan.
Atovulloyev, 56, fled Tajikistan in 1992, after his newspaper was banned and he was charged with inciting ethnic and religious hatred. In subsequent years, Dushanbe has repeatedly asked Moscow to extradite him for insulating President Emomali Rakhmon and attempting to overthrow the government, charges often leveled against critics in Central Asia. He was granted asylum in Germany in 2002 and continued to work from Moscow and Hamburg.
Veteran Central Asia watcher Arkady Dubnov said on January 13 he was certain the attack was an “order” from Dushanbe, the Asia-Plus news agency quoted him as saying.
In 2001, Russian authorities detained Atovulloyev at Dushanbe’s request, but released him after international pressure. Rights watchdogs have long said Atovulloyev is being persecuted for his political views.
Why is the Obama administration sanctioning one post-Soviet dictator with an atrocious human rights record and not another?
Barack Obama has signed a new bill banning some top Belarusian officials from visiting the United States -- and requiring Washington to monitor restrictions on press freedom and human rights abuses in Belarus -- because President Alexandr Lukashenko wantonly jails political opponents and journalists.
Sound familiar?
Those are hallmarks of Uzbekistan strongman Islam Karimov’s regime, where journalists are regularly imprisoned and critics tortured. Says the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ): “He personally oversaw the May 2005 massacre in the city of Andijan, and his regime virtually annihilated the independent press after it spread the word about those brutalities.” But instead of censure, Karimov “has received stunningly cordial treatment from the Obama administration,” including, in the past few months, a friendly phone call from the president and a visit from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. From CPJ:
There are scores of examples to position the Uzbek leader as far more brutal and dictatorial than Lukashenko's regime. The human rights abuses include forced child labor; arbitrary detentions and torture of detainees; harassment of lawyers and imprisonment of rights defenders; absolute state control over the media and Internet; and eviction of the last international monitor--Human Rights Watch--from its offices in Tashkent. All of these and other issues are listed in the U.S. State Department's own 2010 Human Rights report for Uzbekistan, which brands the country as "an authoritarian state."
Despite facing mounting domestic and international criticism, an Istanbul court today decided to keep in jail two leading journalists who are on trial for allegedly being part of a plot to topple the Turkish government. The journalists, Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik, have been in jail for almost a year on charges that many believe to be fabricated in order to silence the two muckrakers. Some background from a good piece in today's New York Times about the trial and the growing threats to press freedom in Turkey:
A year ago, the journalist Nedim Sener was investigating a murky terrorist network that prosecutors maintain was plotting to overthrow Turkey’s Muslim-inspired government. Today, Mr. Sener stands accused of being part of that plot, jailed in what human rights groups call a political purge of the governing party’s critics.
Mr. Sener, who has spent nearly 20 years exposing government corruption, is among 13 defendants who appeared in state court this week at the imposing Palace of Justice in Istanbul on a variety of charges related to abetting a terrorist organization.
The other defendants include the editors of a staunchly secular Web site critical of the government and Ahmet Sik, a journalist who has written that an Islamic movement associated with Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive cleric living in Pennsylvania, has infiltrated Turkey’s security forces....
The France-based media freedom watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, has just issued an interesting brief expressing concern over what the group believes to be increasing pressure against journalists who are covering the Kurdish issue and the escalating conflict between Turkey and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). From the report:
Pressure is mounting on journalists in eastern Turkey as the government intensifies its military offensive against the armed separatists of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an offensive that is spilling over into neighbouring countries.
As well as a spate of trials and cases of prolonged detention, journalists are now the target of government directives. Journalists who cover Kurdish issues critically continue to be accused of supporting the separatists by officials who cite the war on terror as their overriding imperative. And concern is growing that the government is trying to control coverage of its offensive.
Jailed for an interview?
The Turkish judicial system continues to treat the publication of interviews with PKK members as terrorist propaganda, even if they are accompanied by commentary that stops far short of praising the PKK.
Nese Düzel, a journalist with the liberal daily Taraf, and his editor, Adnan Demir, for example, are being prosecuted for two April 2010 reports containing interviews with former PKK leaders Zübeyir Aydar and Remzi Kartal. A prosecutor asked an Istanbul court on 14 October to sentence them to seven and a half years in prison. The next hearing in their trial is to be held on 9 December.
Prosecutors at the same court are preparing to try the journalist Ertugrul Mavioglu over a report in Radikal in October 2010 that contained an interview with Murat Karayilan, one of the leaders of the Union of Kurdistan Communities (KCK), regarded as PKK’s urban wing.
On October 14, courts in northern Tajikistan found two journalists guilty of crimes related to doing their jobs, local news agencies reported.
BBC reporter Urinboy Usmonov was sentenced to three years for not tattling on his sources. He was then released under amnesty. Makhmadyusuf Ismoilov, who has spent the last 11 months in prison on charges of “insult,” slander and inciting hatred after publishing a series of articles exposing local government corruption in his home district, was fined over $7,000 and forbidden from reporting for three years.
Their ordeals and guilty verdicts are a warning to other journalists. Both plan to appeal.
Ismoilov had faced 16 years for his reporting in Nuri Zindagi, a weekly with a circulation of about 2,000. His fine is several times the average annual salary in Tajikistan.
In June, Usmonov, a reporter with the BBC’s Uzbek service, was arrested and held for a month on suspicion of belonging to Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamist extremist group. After intense diplomatic pressure, authorities lessened his charges to contacting radicals without ratting them out (i.e. interviewing them).
Both cases have received extensive international attention, which appears to have paid off. It is rare for charges to be reduced in Tajikistan, where acquittals are almost unheard of.
The mudslinging against the favorite in Kyrgyzstan’s upcoming presidential elections on October 30, Almazbek Atambayev, shows little sign of abating.
Kyrgyz-language newspaper Uchur reheated allegations on October 13 that Atambayev is profiting from the illegal drug trade, but not without adding some piquant and typically (for Kyrgyz-language newspapers) outrageous and unsourced allegations.
According to the Uchur report, the Russia media has turned on Atambayev and exposed his alleged involvement in the drug trade. It is not clear to which Russian publications Uchur is referring and there is little evidence of any truth in their claim. So far, it seems the slurs have only gained traction on a handful on dubious local news websites and Internet forums. (In fact, on October 10 Atambayev was received in Moscow by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, which looks suspiciously like an endorsement.)
The campaign appears to be the brainchild of a group that calls itself the Association of Free Bloggers and Journalists of Kyrgyzstan, which no prominent blogger in the country has confessed to ever having heard of. The only figure identified as having any association with the group is one Bakit Djailibaev, who spends most of his time on Facebook taunting actual bloggers and posting links in favor of rival presidential candidate Tursunbai Bakir uulu, a conservative from the Ar-Namys party.
As long prison terms were handed down in Almaty on October 11 to those convicted of the murder of Kyrgyzstani journalist Gennadiy Pavlyuk in 2009, vital questions about the case linger. Was justice done for the reporter who was brutally defenestrated?
Aldayar Ismankulov (a Kyrgyz citizen and former member of Kyrgyzstan’s security services) was sentenced to 17 years in prison. His accomplices Shalkar Orazalin and Almas Igelikov (both Kazakh citizens) received 11 and 10 years respectively.
It’s not often that those guilty of perpetrating violence against journalists in Central Asia are taken to court at all, so the first reaction to the sentencing might be applause.
But wait a minute. Despite loudly voiced misgivings that the death of Pavlyuk – an investigative reporter who wrote under the pseudonym Ibragim Rustambek – was linked to Kyrgyz politics, the court appears to have swallowed the version propounded by Kazakh investigators earlier this year that this was a robbery gone wrong.
According to that theory, the thieves lured Pavlyuk 200 kilometers from Bishkek to Almaty purely to rob him. When they failed to extract satisfactory valuables from the reporter, they became so enraged that they bound his hands and feet and hurled him to his death from the sixth floor of an apartment building.
Pavlyuk’s associates have long pointed to the flaws in that theory – namely that the reporter was not a rich man and that defenestration seems something of an overreaction to the circumstances.
Television viewers in Kyrgyzstan will say goodbye to foreign news this weekend for the duration of the country’s presidential election season. Between September 25 and the October 30 ballot, Kyrgyzstan’s televisions stations and cable operators are forbidden from rebroadcasting foreign news bulletins that could affect the election’s outcome. Most operators have no choice but to suspend foreign news programming altogether.
Ata-Meken leader Omurbek Tekebayev, himself a presidential candidate, first proposed the ban this spring after he experienced a thorough bashing by Russian media during last year’s parliamentary polls. His party’s fifth-place finish, by most accounts due to the Russian pressure, was the season’s biggest political upset. The author of Kyrgyzstan’s 2010 constitution and one of the “revolutionaries” who came to power after street riots ousted President Kurmanbek Bakiyev that spring, Tekebayev is often called “pro-Western” and is said to have angered Moscow by endorsing a parliamentary form of government.
Tajik authorities are usually reluctant to trust Islamic extremists -- except when they’re ratting out others.
Just two months ago, Dushanbe dropped troublesome charges that a BBC reporter was a member of a banned Islamic radical group.
But this week a court in Khujand read a letter by an imprisoned “Hizb-ut-Tahrir leader” claiming that Urinboy Usmonov is indeed a supporter of the group, the Asia-Plus news agency reported on September 20.
Usmonov, who works for the BBC’s Uzbek service, was disappeared in June and later charged with being a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. He spent a month in jail, where he was denied legal counsel and claims he was tortured until a chorus of international opprobrium embarrassed Dushanbe into releasing him. He still faces charges of not informing Tajikistan’s security services about his meetings with Islamists, however – meetings he says he held as a reporter. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists say the sham charge “criminalizes journalism.”
So what to make of the new testimony? Is someone in the government trying to resurrect the case against Usmonov? He is supposedly only being tried for not tattling on his sources. Could members of Tajikistan’s intelligence services be trying to save face, embarrassed at being reprimanded for the investigation and arrest?
