Annual Press Freedom Report, Uzbekistan
Reporters Without Borders,
October 27, 2004
Censorship was officially abolished in 2002, but the
media was still being censored in 2003 and no criticism of President Islam
Karimov and his policies was allowed. Five journalists were in prison at the
beginning of 2004.
The privately-owned independent media hardly exists in
Uzbekistan. Journalists criticise government policies, local officials or
President Islam Karimov’s associates at their peril. Taboo subjects include
the regime’s systematic use of torture in prisons and the drafting of
schoolchildren to work on the cotton harvest, as well as public health
problems and Russia’s opposition to the Iraq war (which ran counter to
Uzbekistan’s strong support for US foreign policy since the 11 September
2001 attacks).
Steps in mid-2002 to ease censorship and enactment of a
freedom of information law in February 2003 did not improve press freedom
however and censorship in fact increased. In early May 2003, a senior editor
at the state TV was sacked for filming live Karimov’s reaction during a
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development meeting in Tashkent when the
bank’s president criticised him for not condemning torture in prisons.
Several anti-censorship demonstrations were later staged outside the state TV
building.
Journalist and press freedom campaigner Ruslan Sharipov
was arrested in May and sentenced to four years in prison for homosexuality
after a sham trial. He was tortured in jail beforehand and threatened with an
injection of HIV/AIDS virus to force him to plead guilty. Four other
journalists were in prison on 1 January 2004.
Eight journalists imprisoned
Jusuf Ruzimuradov, editor of the opposition newspaper Erk,
was jailed for eight years and one of his journalists, Mohammed Bekzhanov, for
15 years on 18 August 1999 for allegedly intending to overthrow the government
by force, belonging to an illegal organisation and insulting the president in
the media (punishable under article 158.3 of the criminal code). Members of
Ruzimuradov’s family were threatened with rape, and torture and
psychological pressure were used to extract confessions from him. The
journalists are being held in the central region of Navoi.
Majid Abduraimov, of the weekly Yangi Asr, who criticised
government and legal officials, was arrested on 10 March 2001 and jailed for
13 years for corruption on 1 August that year.
Journalist Ergash Bobozhonov was arrested at his home in
the Ferghana Valley on 17 February 2003 and accused of libel in three articles
he wrote in the independent weekly Res Publica in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan in
1999, 2000 and 2001. These criticised the incompetence and abuse of power of
an official in the Ferghana region, Satyvaldy Mirzaev, and his harassment of
the journalist and his family and also criticised badly-run local secondary
schools. Bobozhonov, 61, was also accused of disclosing state secrets and
making death threats. He was roughed up by police when he was arrested. He was
freed on 26 February and the charges against him dropped under a amnesty.
Gayrat Mekhliboyev, a journalism student at Tashkent
University, was sentenced to seven years in prison on 18 February 2003 for
belonging to the banned Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir and for
anti-constitutional activity and religious agitation. He had been arrested on
24 July the previous year in a Tashkent market during an anti-government
demonstration (which he denied taking part in) and accused of possessing
“illegal written material” and using his journalistic activities to
promote religion, a month after finishing his journalism studies at Tashkent
University. At his trial, which opened in Tashkent on 5 February, he was
accused of writing an article on 11 April 2001 in the newspaper Khurriyat
headed “The Scales of Justice,” in which he discussed the ideas of Hizb
ut-Tahrir. He admitted studying the party’s doctrines but denied possessing
banned writings and said the article was based on his own ideas. He told the
court he had been beaten in detention awaiting trial and forced to sign a
letter begging forgiveness for his alleged crimes. But the judge did not order
any enquiry into this. His sentence was reduced by six months on 14 March by
an appeals court and his convictions for incitement to religious hatred and
belonging to an illegal organisation were struck down.
Bakhrom Khamroyev, Moscow representative of the
opposition quarterly Kharakat (printed in the United States and distributed in
Uzbekistan) and a regime opponent and human rights campaigner, was arrested on
20 July in Moscow for possessing drugs. He was also accused by the FSB secret
police of having ties to Islamists. The Russian human rights organisation
Memorial and the Helsinki Committee said it was put-up job by Russian
officials as a favour to Uzbekistan a few days before an official visit to
Tashkent by Russian President Vladimir Putin. At a Memorial press conference
on 24 June, he had fiercely criticised the 7 June arrest of 55 suspected
Islamists, mostly from central Asia.
Boimamat Dzhumayev, correspondent in Karshi (Kashdarya
region) of the newspaper Mulkdor (organ of the state property committee), was
sentenced on 15 August to three years in prison for corruption and abuse of
power. He was accused of extorting $500 from the head of a local branch of the
central bank and was arrested on 12 May. He said the bank official had lent
him the money after he told him the paper had trouble getting subscribers. The
handover of the money had been filmed. The paper’s editor, Miradyl
Abdurakhamanov, said the charge was bogus and that Dzhumayev had been set up
because he had accused local officials in several articles of abuses and
preventing the growth of small businesses.
A Tashkent appeals court sentenced journalist and human
rights activist Ruslan Sharipov to four years in prison on 25 September for
homosexuality (article 120 of the criminal code) and sexual relations with a
minor (article 128). A former head of the Union of Independent Journalists of
Uzbekistan (UIJU) and local correspondent for the Russian news agency Prima,
Sharipov, 25, was arrested on 26 May. On 8 August, he was forced to
“confess,” dismiss his lawyer and ask President Islam Karimov to forgive
him for everything he had written criticising the authorities. On 5 September,
he wrote to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan saying he had “confessed”
after being physically and psychologically tortured, threatened with death and
forced to sign a bogus farewell letter to make it look as if he had killed
himself in case he died in prison. He said interior ministry agents had also
threatened to beat up his lawyers if he did not dismiss them. One of them,
human rights activist Surat Ikramov, was attacked by four thugs in Tashkent on
28 August just after he had been to see the judge in charge of the case on the
eve of a planned demonstration in support of Sharipov. Sharipov, who has never
denied he is bisexual, said on 27 May he did not know the alleged victims, who
were arrested on 26 May and held for several days. His lawyer said the youths
were beaten and threatened by police to get them to give evidence in court.
The case was postponed several times because of their absence from the
courtroom. Sharipov has been frequently harassed by the authorities in recent
years to get him to drop his human rights work and criticism of the
government. On 25 November, he won the 2004 Golden Pen of Freedom award of the
World Association of Newspapers (WAN) for his “outstanding defence and
promotion of press freedom in the face of constant physical danger, prison and
censorship.”
Seven journalists arrested
Oleg Sarapulov, of the Union of Independent Journalists
of Uzbekistan (UIJU), was arrested in Tashkent on 22 February 2003, not
allowed to contact his family or a lawyer and interrogated about two articles
he had written criticising the government and which he was accused of
intending to distribute since they were in his possession at the time. He said
police has planted propaganda among his belongings about the banned Islamist
group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which wants to set up a caliphate in central Asia. He
was freed two days later.
Rohila Ochilova, correspondent of the US radio station
Voice of America, was arrested on 24 March in Samarkand while reporting on a
demonstration by students demanding the reinstatement of the head of the
Foreign Languages Institute. State security agents seized her passport,
damaged her dictaphone and claimed she was breaking the law. Police also
arrested Solikh Yajhyayev (journalist) and Rinat Kodirov (cameraman) for the
Internews media development and assistance organisation, at the same protest
and seized the film they had taken.
Yadgar Turlibekov, of the international media aid and
development organisation IWPR, Tulkin Karaev, of Voice of America, and Dmitri
Aliaev, of the British BBC radio, were arrested on 27 May when police broke up
a demonstration outside the interior ministry in Tashkent. They were freed two
hours later.
Four journalists attacked
Khusnudtin Kutbetdinov, correspondent for Radio Free
Europe / Radio Liberty, and Yussuf Rassulov, correspondent for Voice of
America, were beaten up by 15 thugs on 7 March 2003 while covering the arrest
at Tashkent’s Chorsu Bazaar of women demonstrating against the arrest of
relatives who had been accused of being Islamist activists. The thugs then
urged bystanders to attack the journalists as police did nothing. One of the
thugs said he was under the orders of the interior ministry, which a ministry
spokesman denied later that day.
BBC correspondent Matluba Azamatova was attacked by a
crowd Alty-Aryk (near Marghilan, in the Ferghana Valley) on 14 August while
reporting on a demonstration organised by human rights activist Mutabar
Tajibaeva in front of the public prosecutor’s office.
Galima Bukharbayeva, representative in Uzbekistan of the
international media aid and development organisation IWPR, was set upon by
police at a demonstration in front of the state-run TV building in Tashkent on
6 November as she tried to protect human rights campaigner Elena Urlaeva from
them. The police accused her of being a “Western agent” and a
“provocateur” and threatened to arrest her.
A journalist threatened
Deputy education minister Rustam Qosimov announced at a
press conference on 3 March 2003 that the ministry’s weekly paper Milliy
Talim was being shut down because of its “grammatical errors” and lack of
funding less than a month after starting up. Editor Ismat Kushev publicly
criticised the decision the same day, called on several top officials to
resign and said he was ready to go on hunger-strike. He said the government
was afraid of honest and independent editors raising the country’s true
cultural and media problems. He said he had received death threats for
protesting against the paper’s closure and had had menacing phone calls,
including from deputy minister Qosimov, who warned him he would be hanged if
he kept on protesting.
Harassment and obstruction
Russian freelance journalist and human rights activist
Nikolai Mitrokhin was refused entry into the country on 18 and 22 January
2003. Both times he was held for several hours at Tashkent airport and sent
back to Moscow without being told why. He said it was probably because of what
he had written criticising rights violations in Uzbekistan.
During the US-British invasion of Iraq in the spring,
most programmes about the war from Russian TV stations and the European
station Euronews were censored. Only the pro-war Uzbek point of view was
heard.
Amirkul Karimov, editor of the weekly Khurriyat, was
summoned by presidential officials on 14 March and told to resign. He said he
was criticised for articles exposing rigging of cotton harvest figures and
reporting how children were forced to pick through garbage to find something
to eat.
Police tried to stop Associated Press reporter Burt
Herman and a Voice of America colleague (who wanted to remain anonymous)
talking to a group of women demonstrating outside Tashkent prison on 17 March
against the conviction of two Muslims for belonging to an extremist group.
Police accused the journalists of organising the protest and said reporting on
it would give the country a bad name.
The authorities closed the daily Russian-language Vremya
i mi, the country’s fourth biggest paper, on 26 March, officially for
economic reasons. Its journalists said it was a political decision because the
paper was one of the few to mention sensitive topics such as economic reforms
and social problems.
Several foreign journalists—including Bagila
Bukharbayeva (Associated Press) and Marina Kozlova (United Press)—were
barred from a press conference given by President Karamov during a
parliamentary session at the end of April.
Ahmajon Ibrahimov, a senior editor at the state-run TV,
said on 6 May he had been sacked because President Karimov had been shown in a
bad light during a European Bank for Reconstruction and Development meeting in
Tashkent two days earlier. Karimov was shown throwing off his earphones in
annoyance when the bank’s president, Jean Lemierre, denounced the use of
torture in Uzbek prisons as well as numerous other human rights violations in
the country.
Ibrahimov was accused of not cutting off the picture in
time. The channel’s boss, Farkhaf Ruziyev, was criticised for putting him in
charge of covering the event. But Ibrahimov was reinstated on 20 May after a
demonstration calling for an end to censorship on state-run TV.
Freelance journalist and human rights campaigner Olim
Toshev was fined 250 euros on 23 May and ordered to pay a fifth of his salary
to the government for two years for allegedly attacking a woman. He had been
sacked as editor of the Kashdarya regional weekly Posbon in May 2002 for
printing criticism of police abuses soon after censorship was officially
abolished. Toshev, who has been harassed by police since he was fired, said
the charges against him were bogus.
Elmira Khassanova, of the fourth state TV channel, was
dismissed on 24 May for publicly protesting against censorship of state TV
programmes. She had taken part in a demonstration in front of the state TV
building on 20 May organised by Elena Urlaeva, head of the Human Rights
Society of Uzbekistan, in protest at the sacking of senior editor Ahmajon
Ibrahimov. Several other journalists backed the protest but Khassanova was the
only one who showed up.
Her programme was taken off the air on 21 May and two
days later management decided to sack her for “actions damaging the
president,” though an attempt was first made to get her to resign on grounds
of supposedly poor work. After international protests, she was reinstated on
26 May but was still under pressure to resign and her pay was reduced. Her
programme is regularly censored, especially when she mentions human rights
violations in the country.
Alisher Saipov, correspondent of Voice of America, was
“asked” to come to the state security offices in Tashkent on 30 May, where
a Capt. Isabek Nazarov questioned him about his work and asked if he had
contacts with the banned Uzbekistan Islamic Movement. Nazarov asked him to spy
on the Islamists and on other journalists. Saipov refused and was allowed to
leave.
The staff of the weekly Mokhiyat resigned on 15 July in
protest against censorship by the paper’s new management. Editor Abderkayum
Yuldashev had resigned in May after government pressure.
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