Associated Press
December 13
uman rights groups hail him as a poet and a champion of the downtrodden. Authorities in his native Uzbekistan say he's a terrorist masquerading as an exiled dissident.
On Friday, a court will decide whether Uzbek opposition leader Mukhammat Salikh - arrested last month as he arrived in Prague to discuss human rights abuses in his homeland - will be extradited to the former Soviet republic or allowed to return to Norway, which gave him asylum.
Salikh, released earlier this week from the prison where he was held since his Nov. 28 arrest on an Interpol warrant, expressed bewilderment over his ordeal.
An 18-year-old Soviet soldier when he first arrived here in a tank in 1968 to defend Czechoslovakia's communist regime against a democratic uprising, Salikh said he never expected his trip to give an interview to Czech-based Radio Free Europe would land him behind bars.
"When I came to Prague, invited by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, I did not expect for a minute that it would be here in the free country of (Czech President) Vaclav Havel that I would be arrested," he said.
Czech authorities grabbed Salikh at Prague's international airport after computers flashed red during a routine check of his passport.
Salikh was subsequently ordered to remain in custody while Czech prosecutors investigated whether there are grounds to extradite him to Uzbekistan, where he is wanted on terrorism charges. He was sentenced in absentia last year to 15 1/2 years in prison for alleged involvement in bombings that killed 16 people in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, in 1999.
Salikh, who repeatedly has denied involvement in the bombings, fears that Uzbek authorities would kill him if he is forced to return. He accuses Uzbek President Islam Karimov - whom he challenged in 1991 elections - of using the war on terrorism as a cover to go after his adversaries.
"I was happy when President Bush said he wants to eradicate terrorism, to tear it up by its roots," Salikh said. "We democrats in Central Asia can show President Bush where the roots are: in the totalitarian regimes of Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries."
The United States has not publicly intervened in Salikh's situation - perhaps not surprisingly, considering Uzbekistan has offered key help to U.S. forces trying to smoke Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan.
But shortly after Salikh's arrest, New York-based Human Rights Watch - which has accused Uzbek authorities of an overly harsh crackdown on Islamic activists - urged Czech authorities not to extradite him, calling his plight a "matter of life and death."
Havel, himself a writer and former dissident who had his own bitter experience with persecution under a totalitarian regime, believes Salikh will not be extradited to Uzbekistan but instead will be allowed to return to Norway, which granted him political asylum in 1999.
"Surely a terrorist, which is what he is accused of being, would not receive asylum in Norway," Havel said in a recent interview with Radio Free Europe.
Salikh, meanwhile, said his detention had brought back embarrassing memories of his participation in the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed democratic reforms in what was then Czechoslovakia.
"I'm still ashamed that I arrived here as a soldier of the Soviet army," Salikh said. "But I was not yet 19, and I had to go where they sent me."