6 Jul 2012 | Europe and Central Asia
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]“I will be arrested the minute I land in Uzbekistan and then thrown in prison,” an Uzbek human rights activist tells me, “and what happens with me afterwards is a good question.”
For his family’s safety, I cannot tell you the name of the young man. Let’s call him Rustam, a common name in Uzbekistan.
“I only have five minutes, then they cut off the phone,” the 26-year old explains.
Since 12 June he has been held at the immigration services detention centre in Oslo, Norway, after having received the third and final rejection of his appeal for political asylum. He will be deported on 12 July.
Looking at his case it is obvious that the Norwegian authorities are ignoring evidence showing that returning Rustam to Uzbekistan is as good as sentencing him to torture, even death. They have also disregarded UN evidence that says returned Uzbek dissidents who sought refugee status abroad have been disappeared and subjected to torture.
It is easy to detect the fear in Rustam’s voice. In 2004, he and some friends started an NGO called Movement for Freedom and initiated a campaign against child slave labour. Every year, two million Uzbek school children — the youngest just 7 years old — are forced to spend six to eight weeks picking cotton, eight to 10 hours a day.
Uzbekistan has been heavily criticised for this abuse of children. But the income from cotton exports runs into hundreds of millions of dollars, and much of it falls into the pockets of the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, who has been in power for 23 years since Soviet times.
When Rustam and his friends started their campaign against child slavery, he was detained and tortured. Upon his release, Rustam fled to Russia. While he was in hiding, he heard that one of the Movement’s co-founders had been killed in an Uzbek prison. He decided to move on to Norway.
I understood how dangerous it would be for me if I returned or was extradited…I too could very easily be killed.
Russia, a close ally of the Karimov regime, routinely extradites Uzbeks. Afterwards many of them ‘disappear’.
The authorities in Norway have two problems with Rustam’s plea for asylum:
1/ Rustam does not have a passport. Rustam says he threw it away when he smuggled himself out of Uzbekistan to ensure he could not be identified by the police if he was apprehended. But it means outside Uzbekistan Rustam now cannot prove that he is who he claims to be.
2/ While Rustam was in Norway hoping to be granted asylum, he started working as a volunteer for the Uzbek human rights defender Mutabar Tadjibaeva. This is now the heart of Rustam’s appeal: the Norwegian authorities do not believe that he worked as her webmaster.
Because of her international standing, Tadjibaeva is hated by the Karimov regime; working with her would land Rustam in very serious trouble in Uzbekistan.
Tadjibaeva has been living in exile in France since in 2008 escaping after three years of prison, rape and torture in Uzbekistan. The country has more than 10,000 political and religious prisoners and experts put it amongst the harshest dictatorships in the world, on par with North Korea.
Tadjibaeva runs the website Jayaron, one of very few independent sources of information about Uzbekistan, a country in which media are strictly controlled by the regime. She has established a widespread network of informants inside the country who send her details about corrupt court cases, unfair imprisonments and cases of torture. Her site is a thorn in the side of a regime that has almost managed to completely isolate its population from the outside world.
The Karimov regime call Tadjibaeva an “extremist” and accuse her of planning to overthrow the government, which is rather difficult to imagine when you meet her in person — a small, soft-spoken 49-year-old woman, her health scarred by years of torture and prison.
In 2008 the US State Department gave Tadjibaeva the prestigious Woman of Courage award. After Tadjibaeva received it, a Wikileaks telegram revealed that the American ambassador in Tashkent received a “tongue lashing” from the Uzbek dictator, who threatened to block US transit to Afghanistan in retaliation.
The ambassador advised his government to tone down the criticism of the Uzbek regime, advice they took. And relations are nearer to the close relationship the countries enjoyed before Karimov’s army killed 800 demonstrators, many of them women and children, in May 2005.
Mutabar Tadjibaeva stresses to me that Rustam has worked with her since August 2010. She cannot understand why the Norwegian immigration authorities rejected Rustam’s asylum plea, stressing that they do not believe that he and Mutabar work together.
We have worked closely together, you can even find his name on our website. Because of this, his life would be in great danger if he were returned to Uzbekistan.
“The Uzbek regime does not like people telling the truth,” she adds. “I have no less than 343 emails here in which we discuss Rustam’s work with our website and my blog,” she tells me, “that obviously prove that we worked closely together.”
“If the Norwegians really wanted to know the truth, all they have to do is check his computer, mobile phone and emails.” She showed me the email and text communication between the two.
“I have even transferred money to him in Norway, so he could buy a computer and work on our website,” Mutabar explains. She shows me receipts.
If he is sent back to Uzbekistan, a long time in prison and severe torture awaits him. There is a real risk that the regime will kill him, as a warning to others to stay away from human rights work.
At the moment it looks like that Rustam will be deported to Uzbekistan within the next week.
But in June something happened which Mutabar hopes will help Rustam. The UN Committee against Torture censured Kazakhstan — Uzbekistan’s neighbour — for deporting 29 Uzbek asylum seekers in 2010. Several of the 29 were later given lengthy prison sentences, kept in isolation and therefore, say analysts, most likely tortured.
UN conventions forbid states deporting people to their home countries if there is a risk that they will be tortured.
Exact numbers are impossible to come by — this is Uzbekistan — but according to local human rights organisations dozens of people are tortured to death each year in Uzbek prisons, and the favourite victims of the security police are those who have been in the West asking for asylum or even speaking poorly about the regime. This description clearly applies to Rustam.
Mutabar Tadjibaeva hopes that the UN decision will make Norway re-consider his case. “But,” she adds, “so-called democratic countries in Europe have often shown themselves full-willing to close their eyes to the atrocities of the Uzbek regime. I have lost all faith in them.”
Michael Andersen is a Danish journalist who has covered Central Asia for more than 10 years. His newest feature-length documentary on Uzbekistan is called Massacre in Uzbekistan.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
6 Jul 2012 | Asia and Pacific
This year, Massoud Hossaini became the first individual Afghan journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize. Hossaini’s photograph — a little girl crying in a bright green dress covered in the blood of the bodies surrounding her — also made him the first journalist to win a Pulitzer for the Agence France-Press news agency in its 177-year existence.
For Afghan journalists, the success of Hossaini’s photographs from a December 2011 attack on Kabul’s most important Shia shrine is indicative of the state of post-Taliban media in Afghanistan.
After 30 years of war and six years of a Taliban-imposed media blackout, to the Afghans working for foreign and domestic outlets the awards Hossaini’s photographs have received show the gains Afghan journalists have made in the last 10 years. But Hossani’s images from one of the bloodiest attacks in the capital in the decade since the US invasion also highlight the fragility of those gains.
Akmal Dawi, a journalist who splits his time between Afghanistan and Virginia, says Afghan journalists fill an important role in media coverage of the embattled nation. He believes the stories of the actual people have “been lost” among what he sees as politicised coverage of the ongoing conflict.
Hossaini aims to show the world events on the ground as an Afghan would view them. “People forget that most of the victims of these attacks are women and children. There is nothing political about them, but they are dying,” Hossaini says of the 56 people whose deaths in the 7 December attack were part of the record 3,021 civilian casualties in 2011.
Despite their efforts, the majority of Afghan journalists reporting internationally still face challenges in promoting local angles to stories reported by foreign outlets. Dawi, who reported for the BBC World Service after the fall of the Taliban, says the media coverage is “almost entirely shaped by the foreign journalists” who cover the country’s situation with the interests of foreign audiences in mind.
Mustafa Kazemi, a Kabul-based freelance journalist who has worked with several foreign media outlets — including the Deutsche Presse-Agentur and Sky News — puts it more simply:
Afghan journalists are not in a decision-making position in foreign outlets. A small percentage enjoy this freedom.
As with every war zone, coverage of a nation of 30 million focuses on the war, says Lotfullah Najafizada, Head of Current Affairs, for TOLO News, the nation’s first 24-hour news channel.
The reportage by a few prominent, highly-connected outlets has led to a situation where anything that does not go with the “flow of news” is cast off by foreign reporters, who rely on the majority of locals only for translation and fact-finding, says Dawi.
Dawi says this “superficial reporting” has had a particular impact in the US, where coverage of the central-Asian nation has never exceeded five per cent since the Pew Research Center began weekly monitoring in 2007.
Though Dawi says that he is “not interested in Afghanistan being top news”, the content of what does get covered by foreign outlets has ripple effects at home and abroad.
In Afghanistan, Najafizada, who works for the nation’s most popular television station, says local media is inspired and impacted by the big names in foreign media.
In an effort to counter the tendency to look towards established foreign outlets for inspiration, Najafizada has placed a strong emphasis on investigative reporting in the country.
By forming a team of journalists who were given a week to expose corruption within the Afghan parliament, Tolo TV’s popular 6:30 report was recently able to expose bank statements of several leading MPs who were receiving money from unknown sources.
Such reports have not been without their dangers. According to Nai Supporting Open Media in Afghanistan, there was a 38 per cent increase in violence against media workers in 2011, including three deaths, six injuries, two detentions, and 33 instances of assault. The majority of the threats, say the journalists, come from political officials within the Western-backed Karzai government.
Kazemi says on many occasions he too has had to question the effects of publishing information that may impact the reputation of a public figure. He says:
I was confident that if I write this story and publish it, I will have black-filmed Land Cruisers with no number plates follow me.
In 2009, New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch called on the Afghan president to pardon Parwez Kambakhsh, a student and part-time journalist for the daily Jahan-e-Naw, New World, at Balkh University.
Kambakhsh’s original death sentence on charges of blasphemy was commuted to 20 years in prison, but it took international pressure for President Hamid Karzai to grant Kambakhsh “amnesty” nearly a year after a high court found him guilty of “blasphemy and distribution of texts defamatory of Islam” for allegedly distributing writings critical of the treatment of women under Islamic law.
According to the journalists, the real test for Afghan media, much like other aspects of Afghan society, will come after December 2014, when international forces are expected to pull out of the country. With that year fast approaching, Najafizada says the international community must make serious investments in the Afghan media, which he cites as “one of the greatest successes of post-9/11 Afghanistan”.
Without a stable economy, Najifazada sees a bleak future for independent media in the country:
I’m pretty much pessimistic of media growth dependent on foreign aid and media outlets (…) Media organisations [in Afghanistan] are fragile, and are likely to die as soon as the foreign money dries up.
Sardar Ahmad, whose Kabul Pressistan employs 15 Afghan journalists, shares a similar fear for the state of post-Taliban media after the withdrawal of foreign forces.
“We are already required to work harder just to survive [as it is],” says Ahmad, who fears the impact of further financial and political constraints on local reporting will have the work of an Afghan-founded and Afghan-run media house like Kabul Pressistan.
Without foreign funding and oversight, Hossaini and other Afghan journalists fear the human side to the country’s story will not be conveyed to the world.
Ali M Latifi is a Kabul-born, California-raised journalist based in Doha, Qatar. He has written for Al Jazeera English, Campus Progress, New America Media, and TBD.com. Follow him on Twitter: @alibomaye
5 Jul 2012 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features
Tens of people gathered near Moscow’s Tagansky Court on Wednesday to protest against the prosecution of members of feminist punk group Pussy Riot.
Three activists locked themselves in a cage near the court building and police struggled hard to unlock it and detain them “for taking part in an unsanctioned rally”. Six other activists were detained for having stood in the traffic area near the court. They later faced administrative charges for “breaking the rules of the rally organisation”.
Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Ekaterina Semutsevich have been accused of hooliganism for allegedly staging an anti-Putin performance in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral. They face up to seven years in prison if convicted.
The court set a deadline for the women to acquaint themselves with the criminal case reading materials. They have until 9 July to read the volumes which, according to one of their lawyers, Mark Feigin, “violates the defence’s rights to get prepared for the proceedings,” as they do not have enough time to read them. The trio announced a hunger-strike in protest.
Outside the court building, people wore t-shirts with the band’s picture and white ribbons, a symbol of protest against Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian policy. Most of them told Index they did not believe their actions could influence Pussy Riot’s destiny, but nor could staying silent
Russian intellectuals and artists have condemned Pussy Riot members’ persecution in an open letter, stating the criminal case “compromises the Russian judicial system” and “undermines the confidence in Russian authorities”. The letter was signed by notable directors, writers and actors, including Viktor Shenderovich, Dmitry Bykov, Chulpan Khamatova, Mikhail Zhvanetskty, Eldar Ryazanov.
Rock group Faith No More invited free Pussy Riot members to participate in their Moscow concert on 2 July, where the women asked to “support their sisters” and chanted out:
Russian rebellion. We do exist. Russian rebellion. Putin has pissed with fear.
However, the number of protesters near the court on 4 July did not exceed 300 people. One of them, notable Russian poet Lev Rubinstein, told Index that in spite of international rights activists’ community concerns over Pussy Riot’s persecution, “most people in Russia are simply not aware of Pussy Riot case, or have heard the name and condemn the women without finding out the details.”
This lies in two things: censorship on Russian television prevents the public from understanding the Pussy Riot story in detail, and the lack of solidarity between activists in Moscow and other Russian cities prevents others from protesting against the group’s prosecution outside the capital.
