Samarkand: Main bazaar near the Bibi Khanum Mosque.
Radio Europe/Radio Liberty has posted a fascinating series of video interviews with women in Central Eurasia explaining why they wear -- or don't wear -- the hijab.
Among the RFE/RL videos are interviews with Asylkan Sadykova and Dinara Osmonova from Kyrgyzstan, who explain why they don't wear the hijab, and with Eliza Kaldybaeva who explains why she does. The population of Kyrgyzstan is 75 percent Muslim.
The report doesn't include any interviews from women in Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, likely because it was too difficult to get reporters into and videos out of those countries on this sensitive subject.
Secular authorities in Uzbekistan have periodically cracked down on women wearing the hijab and the government brutally discourages any practice of Islam outside of state control. The Uzbek government banned the wearing of headscarves in schools and universities in the south last year. Last summer, after violent attacks in Andijan, police conducted raids in Tashkent and other cities, arresting people suspected of Islamic insurgency. Police swept through marketplaces telling women to remove their religious headgear and forced some of them to go home.
Fifty-three-year-old Abdul Ahad Helmandwal is
accustomed to being the go-to guy in one of southern Afghanistan's most
violent areas.
From his mud compound in Helmand Province's Nad-e
Ali district, the turbaned ethnic Pashtun has for years looked after an
extended family whose 110 members -- particularly the young -- were
KARA-SUU, southern Kyrgyzstan -- Six weeks after ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and minority Uzbeks engulfed southern Kyrgyzstan, people are gathering for Friday prayers at the Imam Sharahshi Mosque. The white, three-story building sits near a canal that marks the border with Uzbekistan.
The government of Tajikistan says it has captured a member of al Qaeda, a citizen of Uzbekistan, which RFE/RL says is Central Asia's first "homegrown al Qaeda member":
Islam Niyozmatov, an Uzbek citizen and a suspected member of Al-Qaeda, has been arrested in neighboring Tajikistan, according to a spokesman for the Tajik Interior Ministry.
"Niyozmatov was trained in Al-Qaeda terrorist camps in Pakistan in 2005-06, and he has taken part in several terrorist operations plotted by this organization," ministry spokesman Mahmadullo Asadulloev told RFE/RL.
He added that officials have convincing evidence to believe Niyozmatov is indeed an Al-Qaeda member.
Is this really Central Asia's first al Qaeda member? That would be pretty remarkable, given that there are already documented America, British, Canadian and German members.
RFE/RL's analysis of what this means seems pretty solid:
Expert opinion is divided over the arrest. Some security analysts suggest officials could be exaggerating the suspect's affiliation to Al-Qaeda to attract Western attention and aid.
Others, however, say that Al-Qaeda's recruitment of Central Asian youth has always been a question of "when." They say the most vulnerable to recruitment are people who struggle to find their place in society as a result of the lack of opportunity, poverty, and rampant corruption in the region.
Still, expect Niyozmatov to pop up as a data point in every future scaremongering journalistic/government/think tank report about the looming al Qaeda threat in Central Asia...
It’s cotton harvest time again in Tajikistan, and the erstwhile moneymaking sector faces more bad news.
Though government officials repeatedly promise that children are not used to harvest cotton in the late summer and fall, those dubious assurances have fallen on deaf ears in Washington. The US Department of Labor announced on July 19 that it would blacklist Tajik cotton from import into the United States, RFE/RL reports.
Damian Wampler, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, said that "there were credible reports that some officials in the Sughd and Khatlon oblasts used threats and coercion to force children to work in the cotton fields during the 2009 harvest."
In Soviet times, Tajikistan produced up to a million tons of cotton annually. The country produces roughly one-third of those amounts these days. Harvests consistently fall below targets.
Now, further threatening the industry, poor planning has left cotton processing plants facing a raw material shortage, centralasiaonline reports.
The world financial crisis slashed ginned cotton prices at the international commodity exchanges, making cotton exports unprofitable. Farmers were unable to cover costs and repay loans.
Remember when we thought that the prospect of Turkish troops going to Armenia, through a temporarily opened border, for a NATO exercise was a further step toward rapprochement between the two countries? Well, never mind. For all the enthusiasm Turkey apparently held for the idea, it was less popular among Armenian officials, who quickly rejected the notion:
The Armenian Foreign Ministry refrained from officially commenting on the possibility of a temporary border opening. But a diplomatic source in Yerevan shrugged off the Turkish statement as "a public-relations stunt aimed at burnishing Turkey's image."
"Armenia has no desire to contribute to that effort," the source, who asked not to be identified, told RFE/RL. The Armenian government might refuse to let any personnel or vehicles enter the country from Turkey during the exercise, he added.
Other Armenian officials went on the record rejecting the Turkish reports:
The talks on a temporary opening of the Armenian-Turkish border during the NATO military drills to be held on September 11-17 in Armenia are groundless, assure correspondents of the RA Ministry of Emergency Situations with which NATO is organizing this year's military drills.
During the initial and final planning conferences organized within the framework of the NATO military drills, there was no mention of the opening of the Armenian-Turkish border. The Armenian, North-Atlantic and Turkish delegations didn't even make a proposal," Deputy Director of Armenia's Rescue Service of the RA Ministry of Emergency Situations Sergey Azaryan told "A1+".
The OSCE's plan to deploy a small international police force to southern Kyrgyzstan has not been universally well received in Kyrgyzstan. The country's defense minister, who stepped down today in preparation for running for parliament, took the occasion to criticize the plan: “We have different mentality, laws and military training. Besides, we have definite agreements within SCTO and SCO,” he said.
And there may or may not have been a protest in Osh against the OSCE deployment. RFE/RL reports that "several dozen" protesters took to the streets "demanding that the government revise its approval for an international police force for Kyrgyzstan." But Interfax (not online), which also said it had a correspondent at the scene, said the crowd was "up to 1,000" and that they protested both against the OSCE plan and Bishkek's response to the violence there:
Participants in the rally are demanding that the Kyrgyz ombudsman, Tursunbek Akun, apologize because the protesters were not pleased with Tursunbek Akun's assessment of the inter-ethnic clashes that took place in the Kyrgyz south in June. They are demanding that rights activists, who are investigating these events on their own, stop doing so. They are also demanding that certain leaders of the Uzbek diaspora and the heads of the two local Uzbek language TV companies, Osh TV and Mezon TV, be brought to account.
But the local government in Osh said that the protest was small, and not about the OSCE at all:
Turkey is coming under increasing criticism for its internet laws, which critics say make it too easy for websites to be blocked or banned. (See this RFE/RL article for more details.) YouTube is only the most famous of numerous websites currently blocked in Turkey for a variety of reasons. In a recent case, the deputy governor of Turkey's southeastern Sanliurfa region was able to get a court to block a local news site after he complained about some critical online comments made about him.
Have Turkish internet users had enough? Well, at least some of them have. On Saturday, some 2,000 protesters marched in Istanbul in the name of internet freedom. From the Hurriyet Daily News's report:
The march on İstiklal Avenue in Istanbul on Saturday attracted several hundreds of people from various Internet groups, nongovernmental organizations and Internet platforms such as many popular Turkish websites, including sourtimes.org, zaytung.com and bobiler.org, the Young Civilians, Penguen magazine, “Sansüre Sansür” (Censor Censorship) and “Sansüre Karşı Ortak Platform” (Joint Platform against Censorship). The group gathered at Taksim Square at 5 p.m. and marched to Galatasaray Square holding large banners reading “Censorship-free Internet,” “Do not click on our freedom,” and “Censorship protects you from the truth.” Demonstrators also had whistles, portable music systems and tambourines.
The administration of US President Barack Obama is reportedly considering blacklisting major Taliban factions, a move aimed at undermining groups linked closely to Al-Qaeda, but which could also jeopardize Afghan President Hamid Karzai's efforts to reconcile with Afghan insurgent leaders based in neighboring Pakistan.
This 12-year-old girl isn't doing her schoolwork. In fact, she says she has missed months of classes. That's because nearly every hour of her day is spent working in the tobacco fields of Kazakhstan alongside her parents, who are migrant laborers from neighboring Kyrgyzstan.
