President Islam Karimov was quick to blame the uprisings in the Ferghana valley region of eastern Uzbekistan on Islamists. That seemed to be an attempt to deflect criticism by the United States, which gave his regime $21-million in military aid last year.
Karimov’s tactics have worked up to a point. While expressing concern, the Bush administration has initially been inclined to set the violence in Andijan, Pakhtabad and elsewhere in the broader context of its ”war on terror”.
But pinning the blame on Islamists, while convenient, appears, at best, misleading and, at worst, an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.
The 23 men in Andijan whose trial and subsequent jail break sparked the killing spree were accused of membership of a banned Islamic organisation, Akramiya, allegedly dedicated to overthrowing the state.
Akramiya was described by Karimov as a ”faction of Hizb ut-Tahrir”, a fundamentalist group. But according to Muhammad Sadyk Muhammad Yusuf, the former mufti of Uzbekistan, quoted by Igor Rotar in the Eurasia Daily Monitor, ”Akramiya has nothing in common with Hizb ut-Tahrir and other radical Islamic organisations.”
Akramiya was reputedly founded by a maths teacher, Akram Yuldashev. He wrote a tract in 1992 called The Path to Faith, focusing on personal morality and the superiority of the Islamic worldview. He did not call for the forcible creation of an Islamic state.
All the same, official persecution ensued. Yuldashev was accused of involvement in bombings in Tashkent in 1999. Like about 7 000 religious activists, he is now languishing in jail.
Andijan residents quoted by Radio Free Europe say the 23 accused had not heard of Akramiya before being arrested and confessed to membership under torture.
If so, this would hardly be surprising. The British Foreign Office says disappearances, show trials and fabrication of evidence are common. ”Torture is a particular concern,” it says.
”For years the government has imprisoned on ‘fundamentalism’ charges individuals whose peaceful Islamic practices fell outside strict government controls,” Human Rights Watch says. ”The government justifies this campaign by referring to the ‘war on terror’.”
The extent of the threat posed in Uzbekistan by Hizb ut-Tahrir is also open to question. Even the US does not consider it a terrorist organisation. The group describes itself as an inspirational political party espousing non-violent methods.
More menacing is the Islamist Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is dedicated to Karimov’s violent overthrow and an Islamic caliphate in central Asia run on the Taliban’s Afghan model. Both the US and Britain link the IMU to al-Qaeda, and the Afghan heroin trade. But it has been relatively inactive of late and there is no evidence connecting it to current events.
Economic factors translating into political unrest, more than fundamentalist agitation, appear to lie at the root of the turbulence. Many Uzbeks feel shackled by the government’s tight controls on private business, which mirror the lack of political and individual rights. A crackdown on retail trade in cheap imported goods was launched this year. Uzbekistan’s best-known private bank was shut down last month. The government routinely pays below market rates for farm produce, while state seizures of farms led to protests last winter.
Farmers and traders in Korasuv rushed to rebuild a bridge to Kyrgyzstan last weekend, an assertion of economic independence as well as political freedom. Seen in this light, Karimov’s reaction to the Ferghana uprisings is not so much a response to Islamist insurgency as to increasing concern about a local emulation of the so-called tulip, orange, and rose revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Georgia respectively. Uzbekistan has yet to pick its colour, although after Andijan, blood-red may suit. — Â