Insight Magazine
January 12

While the attention of U.S. policymakers was absorbed by Afghanistan in 2002 and by Iraq in 2003, the political fate of a new strategic partner in the region, the Republic of Uzbekistan, has been unfolding slowly in the background. A large former Soviet air base there became a staging area for the U.S. attack on the Taliban regime early in 2002, and U.S. troops remain stationed there as their colleagues scour the mountains of eastern Afghanistan for a spider hole containing Osama bin Laden.

Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, the former Communist Party boss during the Soviet period, has had his hands full for the last 12 years steering his country toward a market-based economy and a more democratic republic, while simultaneously fighting a small group of armed rebels closely allied to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. After car bombings killed 14 people in the capital city of Tashkent in 1999, the government stepped up its crackdown on a group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which operated freely at that time from Afghanistan with the support of the Taliban. Uzbek security forces also arrested and jailed more than 4,000 persons (watchdog groups say 7,000), chiefly young men belonging to Islamist organizations, including a shadowy underground Islamic group, Hizb ut-Tahrir al Islami (the Islamic Liberation Party, pronounced HIS Boot Tuck-Rear, or HT). The group until now has eschewed violence, but government officials say HT members are ready and eager to set up a strict Islamist state in Tashkent.

Karimov's critics are legion in the Western press, at the U.S. State Department and within the human-rights community. "The government is the terrorist," Margarita Assenova, a human-rights activist for the Washington-based Freedom House, tells Insight. Assenova, who spent several months in Tashkent showing local citizens how to make official complaints about human-rights abuses, says the government uses the terrorist threat as an excuse to suppress any opposition group. Meanwhile, the International Crisis Group (ICG), a multinational conflict-resolution organization based in Brussels and Osh, Kyrgyzstan, reported in July 2003 that "In Uzbekistan mass arrests of Muslims - many but not all members of radical political groups - have led to serious mistrust between authorities and the population and radicalization of those who have suffered from a brutal police force."

Such criticisms are exaggerated and naive, says Stephen Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam and a recognized expert on Islamic extremism. "It is hard to understand how people who are working underground to overthrow the elected government and re-establish the Islamic caliphate can be any further radicalized," he tells Insight.

"The whole weight of the ICG report is to downplay the threat of Wahhabism, the threat of radicals as represented by Hizb ut-Tahrir." Schwartz has argued that in a post-9/11 world the doctrine of pre-emption trumps the presumption of innocence until proven guilty of terrorism.

As Schwartz has written in The Weekly Standard, "Groups like HT that do not presently carry out acts of violence nonetheless prepare an environment conducive to violence. Identifying the advocates of extreme ideology with the practitioners of terror does not undermine the campaign against terrorism. The campaign against terrorism is undermined by weakness, irresolution and apologetics, not by identifying the enemy."

At present Hizb ut-Tahrir operates freely out of its London headquarters but is legally banned in all Central Asian nations and all nations in the Middle East. Its ideology envisions a strict Islamic state and the re-establishment of the ancient Arab caliphate. The movement, which began in Jerusalem in 1953, sent preachers and missionaries by the droves to Uzbekistan following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since it operates clandestinely its membership is unknown, but it claims to have 10,000 adherents in Uzbekistan and, according to the ICG report, HT has become the most prominent challenge to the government's secular leadership.

HT literature is virulently anti-Jewish and some of it indeed is threatening. According to Uzbek officials, the following exhortation in the magazine Al Vaiy was distributed by HT three months prior to the September 11 attacks:

"A faithful Muslim should exercise all the methods to fight against infidels. There is no difference whether he will stand at a distance and fight ... or, without jumping by parachute, will direct the plane to where the infidels are gathered."

The article goes on to say: "If the enemy uses the weapons of mass destruction, as is happening in Palestine, then we will immediately put into action similar weapons. In this case, there will be no difference whether the enemy or peaceful citizens are killed as a result of using explosives. ... If an old man might help the enemy, for instance, by giving his opinion or showing the methods of killing Muslims, he should also be killed." Imran Waheed, a spokesman for HT in London, denied that the article was published by his organization.

"In Uzbekistan we have no documented links [of HT] to terrorism," says Zafar Abdullaev, a national-security officer who has spent eight years studying HT activism. "But we believe there are links between HT leaders and terrorist organizations. And in neighboring Kyrgyzstan some terrorist bombers were former members of HT before joining the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. At the present time, the group conceals this information for fear of losing support among the Uzbek citizenry."

In an exclusive interview with Insight, Uzbek Foreign Minister Sodyk Safaev says "Traditional Islam has always had a stronghold in Uzbekistan, but Islamic radicalism is a problem not simply in Uzbekistan. It is a global problem."

"There is a propensity to explain radicalism from a simplistic point of view, as if it comes as a direct consequence of poverty or an absence of democracy, yet several of the 9/11 bombers came from prosperous families," he says. "Islamic radicalism is a big problem in Turkey and Russia, which are considered to be democratic countries; no, the problem of religious extremism is within Islam itself."

Responding to criticism from human-rights organizations in Tashkent, Safaev tells Insight that the international nongovernmental organizations are doing a lot of good for his country: "They are providing experience and knowledge to improve the lives of our people, and we need such watchdogs," he admits. "Due to their criticism, we have more openness in our prison system," he says, noting that in 2003 alone the International Committee of the Red Cross visited Uzbek prisons 19 times, and some of the visits were unannounced.

On the other hand, Safaev differs on the issue of accommodating HT. "The human-rights community believes the government should have a dialogue with Muslim extremists, but it is difficult to do that with a secretive organization that does not have dialogue and compromise on its agenda," he says.

"While Western analysts are divided about the nature of the Islamist movement there will be little progress in fighting the growing terrorist threat," Col. Ilya Vasiliyevich Pyagay, an official of the Uzbek Interior Ministry, tells Insight from behind his simple pine desk in an austere Tashkent office. "Hizb ut-Tahrir is nothing more than communism from within Islam - the idea of restoring the caliphate is quite similar to [the slogan] "Workers of the world unite!'" he insists sternly.

According to Pyagay, "You must understand that we have had a long experience with communist ideology and practice. We learned history from the communist viewpoint, and we are familiar with [Vladimir] Lenin's methods. Lenin began by starting various groups that demonstrated peacefully under the banner of popular slogans. But his mass movement sheltered a core group prepared for armed struggle. Peaceful demonstrations led to civil war in Russia. With his armed followers, Lenin took power in 1917, and his followers presided over a dictatorship that lasted more than 70 years." He adds: "The religious extremists eventually will demand political power."

Pyagay says the Uzbek government deserves credit for moving proactively to incarcerate the radicalized activists. "If Uzbekistan hadn't taken action in time the consequences would have been calamitous," he asserts.

By all accounts Central Asia is undergoing an Islamic revival, and Uzbekistan is no exception. Its mosques are full of worshippers, and its Islamic schools (madrassas) have more applicants than they can admit. According to the ICG, the Hadicha Kuboro women's madrassa in Tashkent has 10 applicants for each of its 50 seats, and applicants for the most prestigious madrassas reportedly are willing to pay bribes of $400 to $2,000 to obtain admission.

Uzbekistan's top religious cleric, the Grand Mufti Abdurashid Haji Bakhramov, tells Insight he is pleased with the government's support of religious schools. "Whereas in 1991 we had only 89 mosques and one madrassa in Bukhara and one religious seminary, today we have more than 2,000 mosques and 10 madrassas, and we now have an Islamic university in Tashkent," he says, adding that the government is paying for the development of the religious sector similar to other branches of education.

But that isn't enough for the watchdogs at the ICG, who complain that the Uzbek government's religious-registration law of 1998 is a heavy-handed attempt to control religion as it did in Soviet times. Before the law, says the ICG, there reportedly were more than 5,000 mosques in Uzbekistan. Following the law, thousands of mosques were closed by authorities when they could not meet the registration requirements. Such efforts are seen by critics as a clash between an authoritarian, secular government and independent, devout citizenry.

But looking at the problem this way is a "wholesale error," Schwartz says. "The view of the ICG is that the conflict in Uzbekistan is between secular people and devout people, but the idea that there is a split between the secular Muslims and the devout Muslims is a Western idea," he says. "People in the Muslim world are not divided between the secular and the devout; they are divided between traditional, pluralistic Islam and the radical Islam, and Westerners are not getting this."

Religious tolerance, in fact, has been a hallmark of the cosmopolitan, multiethnic Islam for which Central Asia is legendary. A Jewish community has resided there, chiefly in the ancient city of Bukhara, for 2,500 years, and Uzbekistan was a refuge for Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. The idea of an Islamic state that would expel all Jews is new to Uzbek citizens, and ominous if it should become a popular movement, says security officer Abdullaev. "HT now is targeting Jews and Westerners, but who is to say that it could not target other religions? It could produce a state parallel to fascism and communism," he says.

There are signs that the Karimov regime is moderating its approach. On Dec. 2, 2003, Karimov announced an amnesty that would pardon some 700 prisoners during the next three months. This amnesty follows two previous pardons in 2001 and 2002.

Grand Mufti Bakhramov tells Insight he is doing his part by visiting the jailed extremists in prison and using moral suasion. "I have been to every prison in the country where religious extremists are," he says. "Most of them admitted their mistake and have repented." Other prisoners become hardened in their resolve to overthrow the government and will tell visitors this, says Zeyno Baran, director of international-security and energy programs at Washington's Nixon Center, who interviewed several extremists in Uzbek prisons recently.

For now Karimov's government is not taking any chances. Karimov urges those who would understand Uzbek character to study the life of Uzbekistan's fierce national hero, Tamerlane, who ruled an empire that stretched from the gates of Moscow to northern India in the 14th century. And, according to Tamerlane, "The mission that cannot be achieved by 100,000 cavalry can be obtained by a single correct plan." By all appearances, Karimov is listening to critics but taking his management cues more from ancient Samarkand than from modern Brussels.

---