Here’s some rare – if tentative – positive news for a detained journalist in Tajikistan. Authorities appear ready to drop the most serious charges against BBC reporter Urinboy Usmonov – membership in a banned Islamic extremist group. But he still faces accusations that could test Tajik law and further erode media freedoms.
Usmonov was nabbed on June 13 and later charged with belonging to Hizb-ut-Tahrir. The arrest, concerns he may have been beaten in custody, and authorities’ apparent unwillingness to allow Usmonov access to counsel prompted an international outcry and demands for his immediate release. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based watchdog, said the “trumped-up charges” were designed to silence a government critic.
The BBC’s Russian Service reports that Usmonov, 59, still faces charges of contacting members of the radical group – which has never been linked to violence and is legal in some western countries, such as the UK – and reporting their statements without alerting authorities. Yet his lawyer says Tajik law guarantees the right for journalists to protect their sources, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Concerns are growing about the fate of a BBC journalist detained in northern Tajikistan. Urinboy Usmonov, who has worked with the BBC Central Asian Service for ten years, was arrested on June 13, accused of being a member of a banned Islamic movement. Media rights activists say he has not had access to a lawyer and believe he has been beaten in custody. Usmonov, 59, is diabetic and suffers from high blood pressure.
Authorities told the AP that Usmonov is suspected of membership in Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamic movement banned throughout Central Asia, but which operates legally in some western countries and has never been tied to violence.
Journalists who know Usmonov say he has reported on Hizb-ut-Tahrir, but that he is a secular man. If he had copies of banned material, they said, it was simply so he could do his job.
Kyrgyzstan’s parliament has voted unanimously to ban the independent news website fergananews.com (formerly Ferghana.ru).
After weeks of heated debate over the causes of last summer’s ethnic violence, lawmakers cast votes on a resolution including the ban, and blaming Uzbek “separatist” leaders for organizing the clashes. Ninety-five approved; none opposed.
The resolution instructed the Ministry of Culture and Information, the Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor General's Office “to take steps to block the site Ferghana.ru in the information space of the republic.”
Moscow-based Ferghana.ru – singled out for offering alternatives to the nationalist narrative that Uzbek separatists are to blame for the tragedy – has been blocked in Kyrgyzstan in the past, just before periods of intense political upheaval, such as immediately preceding the ousters of both Askar Akayev in 2005 and Kurmanbek Bakiyev in 2010.
Editor Daniil Kislov called on authorities to act based on the law, not “emotional hostility.”
“It would be very sad to see post-revolutionary Kyrgyzstan on a par with other states that are Internet enemies,” Kislov said in a story on the website.
In the same article, the head of the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society, Dinara Oshurahunova, said the resolution was a violation of the law, as the legislature has no authority to determine guilt, which is the province of the courts. She also pointed out that the blocking of websites helped precipitate the events that led to Bakiyev’s bloody ouster last year.
Internet giant Google has lashed out at Kazakhstan, accusing it of “creating borders on the web” in ways that threaten to hamper Internet freedom and “create a fractured Internet.”
Astana is among governments “attempting to create borders on the web without full consideration of the consequences their actions may have on their own citizens and the economy,” Google Senior Vice President Bill Coughran said in a blog posting.
The crux of Google’s complaint is that, under new rules announced last month, Kazakhstan requires all .kz domain names to operate using servers that are physically located inside the country – and that includes www.google.kz.
This would require Google to alter its current policy of handling requests “the fastest way possible, regardless of national boundaries,” and instead routing searches to servers within Kazakhstan by default.
To get around a policy that Google says raises questions “not only about network efficiency but also about user privacy and free expression,” the company has decided to redirect users from www.google.kz to www.google.com in the Kazakh language. It is warning, however, that search quality will deteriorate, as results won’t be country-customized.
Kazakh journalist Guljan Yergaliyeva has chosen an attention-grabbing way to promote the new media outlet she launched today, called Guljan – by stripping on YouTube.
“It’s necessary to act,” Yergaliyeva tells the camera as she removes her jacket to reveal a spotted bra. She then turns her back and walks away from the camera while taking off all her clothes – with the exception of a teetering pair of shiny stilettos.
“We’ll overcome all barriers and look truth in the eye,” Yergaliyeva says, before walking away from the camera naked with a cheery wave.
This is a controversial way to launch a website, but then Yergaliyeva – who resigned as editor of the Svoboda Slova newspaper earlier this year – is no stranger to controversy: She’s known for her hard-hitting reporting, frequently critical of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s administration. In 2006 she was briefly imprisoned for taking part in an unsanctioned rally protesting the murder of opposition leader Altynbek Sarsenbayev.
Daniyar Moldashev, director of the ADP Ltd company (Respublika’s registered publisher) went missing last week after being beaten up and robbed of documents belonging to the paper. Now, his brother Askar says, he’s been in contact -- but his phone call has only increased his relatives’ misgivings. Askar Moldashev has now filed a statement with police urging them to get to the bottom of the mystery.
According to the statement, lodged on April 2, Daniyar Moldashev called his brother at noon on April 2 and said “that he was in Minsk on his own business, that everything was fine with him, that I shouldn’t make a statement, and that he’d explain everything to me later.”
This was the first time Daniyar Moldashev had been in contact since March 30, his brother said, and in the intervening period his telephone was switched off and he didn’t reply to SMS messages.
“His behavior looks very strange, there’s never been anything like this before,” Askar Moldashev commented, adding that he only waited so long to file a statement because the police themselves -- who visited Moldashev’s relatives on March 30 to investigate -- advised him that he had to wait three days.
Earlier this week EurasiaNet.org reported on the trials and tribulations faced by Respublika newspaper, which is often highly critical of President Nursultan Nazarbayev's administration, and the samizdat publishing methods the newspaper uses to reach newsstands.
Now it seems a fresh misfortune has befallen Respublika: The director of the paper’s parent company has gone missing just days after being beaten up and robbed of documents belonging to the newspaper.
Daniyar Moldashev, head of Respublika’s registered publisher, ADP Ltd, was brutally attacked near his home on March 26 after returning from a trip to Moscow to visit Respublika’s editorial office there, deputy editor Oksana Makushina told a news conference in Almaty on March 31.
Moldashev was left with a broken arm and a concussion, and the attackers stole a camera and documents he’d brought from Moscow: items related to the newspaper’s investigative reporting.
Moldashev was supposed to be at home recovering, but since March 29 he’s been unreachable by telephone and isn’t to be found at home, Makushina said.
The only communication from him since then has been an enigmatic call from an unidentified number to the cellphone of a colleague, Guzyal Baydalinova, the evening of March 30. Moldashev said he was, all of a sudden, in Minsk – and then hung up.
In another mysterious twist to the tale, staff in Respublika’s Moscow office suspected that Moldashev was under some sort of surveillance in the Russian capital, Makushina said. The spooks were so amateurish that the Moscow journalists spotted them and even managed to take some photos.
Kazakh police say they’ve solved the brutal Almaty murder of a Kyrgyz journalist after well over a year. Anyone expecting that the killing was linked to the work of renowned investigative reporter Gennadiy Pavlyuk will be surprised: Kazakhstan’s cops have reached the conclusion that the journalist was hurled to his death, hands and legs bound, from the sixth floor in a robbery gone wrong.
“It has been established by the preliminary investigation that the suspects lured G. Pavlyuk to Almaty through an Internet exchange, booking a room in the Kazakhstan Hotel, after which by deception they took the journalist to an apartment on Furmanov Street,” Interior Ministry spokesman Kuanyshbek Zhumanov told a briefing March 24 in remarks quoted by Kazakhstan Today news agency.
They then tied him up and tried to extort valuables, Zhumanov continued, “but, not achieving what they desired, they threw the journalist out of the apartment window.”
This story appears to raise more questions than it answers. Why did the three suspects (two citizens of Kazakhstan and one of Kyrgyzstan) consider it worthwhile to lure a journalist not known for his lavish lifestyle 200 kilometers from Bishkek to obtain his worldly goods, and then defenestrate him when they failed? The casual observer might suppose that the extortionists would have been better off picking on a wealthy Kazakh businessman or even a random client leaving one of the city’s swish nightclubs, rather than duping an investigative reporter.
The ongoing investigation into Ergenekon -- the name given to an alleged plot by ultranationalists to topple the Turkish government -- has led to the arrest of several journalists since it started a few years ago. Many of these were controversial figures from less savory corners of the Turkish media, so there was muted outcry about their arrest.
But the arrest yesterday of a group of some 10 journalists has led to protests and strong denunciations by international observers. Among those arrested were Nedim Sener, an award-winning investigative journalist at Milliyet, one of Turkey's leading newspapers, and Ahmet Sik, another investigative journalist who is well respected in human rights circle for work that exposed several years back military plans to overthrow the government. Sener, who has done important work investigating police involvement in the 2007 murder of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, was declared a World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute (IPI) this past summer for his investigation of the Dink case.
Turkish government officials have denied that the arrests of the journalists have any political motive.
The authorities had denied blocking LJ, but observers were skeptical. As a motive for the government to deny access, they pointed to the LJ blog of Rakhat Aliyev, the disgraced former son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev who fell out with the president in 2007, was divorced by his daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva, and was later sentenced to 40 years in prison in absentia on charges he denied.
Now, all of a sudden LiveJournal is accessible again in Kazakhstan – but Aliyev’s journal can’t be seen here, or anywhere else for that matter. In a twist that’s most convenient for Astana, Aliyev’s blog was suspended by LiveJournal itself on November 9.
Visitors to his page now see a sign saying “Suspended Journal” and an incongruous picture of a goat wearing an eye patch and a skull and crossbones hat. “This journal has been suspended,” a message says. “Its contents are no longer publicly visible. LiveJournal cannot discuss the reasons for a journal suspension with anyone except the journal owner.”
