Uzbekistan bans journalist who recorded evidence of massacre

Press Gazette October 20 BBC World Service journalist Jenny Norton, who recorded the only audio evidence of the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan on 13 May, has been banned from returning to the country. The Uzbek government has accused her of being one of the foreign journalists they allege assisted Islamic extremists to stage a coup resulting in the killings in Andijan. But Norton, who was named personally by Uzbekistan's prosecutor general in a government trial of those charged following the protest, claims the Uzbek authorities are falsely portraying the massacre of hundreds of demonstrators as an uprising against the government. Norton, now World Service planning editor for Eurasia, described her sadness that the journalists she knew in Uzbekistan had suffered such severe intimidation from the authorities that they too were forced to flee the country and were seeking political asylum. She said press freedom was non-existent inUzbekistan and the government news service portrayed a "parallel reality". Recounting the events in Andijan, Norton told Press Gazette: "I was in Andijan up until the afternoon before the unrest happened, reporting on a long-running protest outside the local court where a group of businessmen were on trial accused of being Islamic extremists. Many of the people I spoke to were caught up in the violence the following day. Some of them died. Some of them are still on the run." On the day of the shootings in Andijan, Norton was in Tashkent. She received a call at midnight telling her there had been an attack on the local prison. She and her colleagues sat in the BBC office for the next 18 hours talking to people on the phone and trying to work out what was happening. "We were able to record and relay back to London the voices of people involved in the mass demos on the town's central square, some of those occupying the town hall, the rising ten-sion as helicopters circled overhead, and then, as the storming of the building began, the sounds of heavy gunfire, people shouting and screaming, and, worst of all, the sound of terrified people saying their last prayers. This was the only audio available on the day, and remains, I think, the only recording ofwhat actually happened." Norton went back to Andijan with a BBC team a week later. "We found a city in fear and were eventually thrown out after we tried to get to a cemetery where a local gravedigger told us that victims of the shootings on the central square were being buried in mass graves," she said. Norton conducted interviews in both English and Russian for radio and TV before, during and after the events of 13 May. "The Russian stuff especially put me on the Uzbek authorities' radar screen," she said. "In the months since, I've been dealing with the consequences for our office and staff in Tashkent. We've been under constant attack in the media in Uzbekistan. Our office is barely able to function. Seven BBC employees, including the World Service correspondent, have had to leave the country because of threats and intimidation by the authorities. Two have been granted political refugee status by the UNHCR. Five of us have been named personally by the prosecutor general during the course of the trial. People's lives have been completely turned upside down."