Focus on press freedom

A new Uzbek media watchdog has urged international organisations promoting journalist's rights to pay more attention to the situation in this Central Asian republic where there is no independent press and freedom of speech is severely curtailed. "Uzbekistan is becoming a dangerous place for journalists who dare to challenge the government," Yusuf Rasulov, head of the Association for the Protection of Journalist's Rights and Freedoms (APJRF), told IRIN in the capital, Tashkent. Rasulov, a former Voice of America (VOA) correspondent, said the aim of the NGO was to protect the handful of independent journalists working in Uzbekistan who are often victims of harassment, attack and threats from security forces. He was attacked and brutally beaten by a group of women, while police looked on, while covering a protest in Tashkent's huge Chorsu market in 2003. "Since then, as we have been trying to create this new NGO, I have been threatened and often watched by security people," he said. Uzbekistan, Central Asia's most populous state, is known for imprisoning opponents of President Islam Karimov's regime or forcing them into exile and widely criticised for slow economic reforms and growing poverty, particularly in rural areas. Western radio stations broadcasting to Uzbekistan and the region in the Uzbek language are virtually the only critical media in this Central Asian country due to strict state control of national and local broadcast and print media. JOURNALISM UZBEK STYLE Although censorship was officially lifted in 2002, self-censorship within the Uzbek media remains widespread with an absence of critical reporting. Many people complain in private that the only view to be found in the national press is that of the government, forcing those seeking a more comprehensive picture of regional developments to tune to Western radio stations such as the BBC or VOA. State control is all pervasive, critics of the regime say. A centralised body, controlled by the presidential press service, draws up quarterly and annual work plans which determine priority subjects to be covered in the national media. The press, radio and TV are not permitted to cover topics such as the widespread poverty, acute problems of public health and education, or child labour in the cotton sector, let alone write about the opposition, corruption or civil liberties. Critics say that after Georgia's "rose revolution" and a similar process in Ukraine late last year, the authorities in Uzbekistan are poised to muzzle the media further to prevent them playing a role in any emerging popular opposition to Karimov. In April 2004, the authorities closed down billionaire philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Institute in Tashkent and warned two other US-funded media-related NGOs against supporting outlawed political organisations and "certain groups" among Uzbek society. The Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) was refused registration and the activities of Internews Uzbekistan was suspended for six months. The secular government of Uzbekistan - an important ally in Washington's anti-terror campaign - while stepping up its fight against terrorism and radical religious groups has also begun targeting human rights defenders and independent journalists, seeing them as the main enemies, members of the newly established group said. The practice has become more common after bomb attacks in February 1999 and suicide bombings in 2004 in the capital Tashkent and Bukhara region, which the authorities blame on radical Islamic groups from abroad. STATE CONTROL According to observers, the police anti-terror department instructed staff to monitor opposition members, religious groups and representatives of foreign media and independent journalists in 2003. "Special written instructions to renew the police records of opposition members and independent and foreign journalists became public knowledge when a police official mistakenly faxed the letter to a human rights group asking them to provide details and photos of people working for foreign media," Rasulov said. A former editor on a district newspaper told IRIN anonymously that several years ago he was sacked from his job because a correspondent working for his paper, who was later jailed, was a member of an outlawed religious group. "Editors must not only know the background of employees but also should monitor their ideological, spiritual and patriotic principles," he said, cynically. Last November a man was jailed for distributing "inflammatory recordings" from Western radio stations, including the BBC, VOA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Another defendant, on trial over a string of suicide blasts and shoot-outs in 2004, said that his discontent with the government had been fuelled in part by information he had obtained from these outlets. OFFICIAL ATTITUDE A Uzbek media official acknowledged, under condition of anonymity, that there was no independent press in Uzbekistan and all media outlets served as propaganda tools for the government. But he defended the government's stance on freedom of speech. "We don't want a Western-style media. Yes, our media should be informative, but educational as well, in line with government policy, based on our national values," he said, echoing recent remarks by Karimov. A stable Uzbekistan "with its particular national mentality" would stick to its own idea of democracy, the president was reported as having said on 26 December. The official dismissed non-state media workers as troublemakers. "Most of these independent journalists are rights defenders and journalists at the same time. How can they be genuinely independent? As rights defenders they get grants from Western governments," he said. But according to media watchdogs, the few journalists left in the country are facing problems greater than just bureaucratic barriers. THE RISK OF WORKING AS AN INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST Matluba Azamatova, the BBC and IWPR stringer covering the Ferghana valley, said local authorities were quick to accuse the few independent journalists in the region of provoking unrest and associating with the "enemies of the state". "I have been attacked twice, in 2003 and 2004, while covering protests. Each time, police and prosecutor officials watched calmly while I was attacked by a group of women," she told IRIN. "On 26 December I covered the demonstration of 50 people who boycotted the parliamentary election. The next day a regional official described me as 'a Western spy who bribes people to condemn the government'," she added. According to Rasulov, cases of harassment, threats and attacks on journalists in Uzbekistan have increased in recent years, with seven being attacked in 2004. In a recent case, on 21 December a journalist reporting for the London-based IWPR, Jamshid Karimov, was brutally beaten up by unidentified assailants in front of his home in the city of Jizzakh, 200km southwest of Tashkent. The authorities refuse to accept that the attack was politically motivated, saying it was just a mugging. But Karimov told reporters that two days before the assault he had been refused an official job and on the morning of the incident he had been heading to a peaceful human rights protest. According to the annual report by international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), published in October 2004, eight journalists have been imprisoned in Uzbekistan since 1999. Two of the jailed journalists were released last year under an amnesty. One of them, Ruslan Sharipov, whose case was covered internationally, has since been given political asylum in the United States.