Different Stans

Uzbekistan Begins Repairs at Rail Bridge Blast Site: Tajikistan

Uzbekistan has begun repairs on a rail bridge that authorities said was destroyed by a terrorist bomb, fergananews.com reports, citing a statement from Tajikistan's Foreign Ministry.

"Tashkent has informed us about the start of restoration work on the rail bridge at the Galaba-Amuzang crossing, linking Hatlon region with the outside world," Nizomiddin Zihidov, deputy foreign minister of Tajikistan reported January 27 at a press conference in Dushanbe.

The rail bridge was said to have been damaged in an explosion November 17.  No terrorist group is known to have taken credit for the attack. The incident halted traffic on the line to Tajikistan, blocking food deliveries and driving up prices for Tajiks. The Tajik railroad says 298 freight cars bound for southern Tajikistan have been stalled. Tajik authorities believe Uzbekistan deliberately created the blockage to stop rail traffic into Tajikistan as part of a long-standing dispute over Tajikistan's plans to build a hydroelectric power station that could adversely impact Uzbekistan's irrigation-intensive cotton industry.

Despite the simmering conflicts, Zihidov believes Uzbek-Tajik relations are back on track, fergananews.com reports. While Tashkent turned off gas to Tajikistan for non-payment earlier this month, it restored service after just a day of negotiations.

 

At Least They Still Have a Song in Their Hearts

Belarus Freedom by Lyapis Trubetskoi The only thing that makes it bearable to follow Belarus every day, as I think about my friend Andrei Sannikov stuck in prison and even being tortured by Lukashenka's henchmen, is that he has so much support from his fellow countrymen and some dedicated campaigners in the West.

A reminder what makes this all possible, besides insufficient attention and spine from Europe and the world -- Russia. Here's a $2 billion gift to Belarus from Moscow, when it reduced its gas prices for example -- there's plenty more of that sort of aid and trade.

But there's more -- this kind of co-optation coming from Milinkevich -- agreeing to take part in the regime's staged "parliamentary elections" with his movement "For Freedom".  Or this kind of contorted dithering without principle from Kuznetsov (the "For Freedom" coordinator in Gomel...)

So it's all of it -- spinelessness and indifference in the West; cooptation and insufficient standing on principles at home; and of course Russia, endorsing and paying for it all. An unbeatable combo, and why it's just so damn hard to break. Still, one must try. It starts with solidarity and "living not by the lie."

Everyday I read on the different Belarusian news sites and the European Belarus emailing about people holding pickets, demonstrations, making graffiti, doing all kinds of things to remember Sannikov, Zmitser Banderenka and other languishing in prison in poor health -- and that is redeeming, of course.

Because nothing seems to make Belastan better, and only the survival of Belarus underneath is gives us hope. Here's a new blog with a song and the spirit lives on.

Thank God Oleg Volchek, who has helped so many people, got by with just four days arrest.  And the beat goes on...

Shouldn't Berdymukhamedov Be Ashamed of This?

The official government website, the over-the-top Turkmenistan the Golden Age, has a visitor counter at the bottom of the page.

Internet access is so terrible in Turkmenistan that way more people from Russia can access this page than people from inside Turkmenistan.

A whopping 13,419 are shown today as logging in from Russia, and only 5,250 from Turkmenistan (and it's like that most days, I've been watching for weeks). Imagine that! (I'm wondering if some people have access to Russian providers even within Turkmenistan? But I don't know how that would work, especially now that MTS has been shut down.)

Then you can see the dwindling list of the rest of the countries that care about reading Turkmenistan's official government news:

5,026 Turkey
3,480 US 
3,595 Ukraine
2,153 Germany

Then it drops off further:

1,783  Belarus
1,657  China
1,557  Kazakhstan
1,437  UK
1,184  Netherlands
    900 France

 

Turkmen Tongue-Twister

 

Well, this is weird, a Turkmen boy in a contest of tongue-twisters in Russian and English.

You get a glimpse of life in the Turkmen school, where both Turkmens and Russians are studying together and not all in the complete regulation uniforms.

This is from br3itain, the same person who uploaded the clip of the graduation ceremony in Abadan -- you wonder what he was doing there.

Turkmenistan Steps Out on Eurasia Star

 

Neweurasia's Annasoltan has a gripe about the pan-Turkic Eurasia Star song contest -- she feels it was badly organized and a "a lost opportunity to experiment with electronic direct democracy."

I can't really speak to the organizational issue, I don't know if this has anyything to do with any antipathy of any kind that the Turkmen government has to its chief trading partner (now after China) and regional soul mate, Turkey.

You can see Berdymukhamedov's mug beaming in most of the beginning of this over-produced video, and I imagine the authorities had the whole thing very locked down. Those choreographed kids in the national costumes/uniforms come out smiling like puppets, and then Sohbet Kasymov, a fifth-year student of the Department of Theater Art of the Institute of Culture of Turkmenistan, comes on to sing one of those saccharine tunes that sounds part Bollywood, part Turkish YouTube crooner, with some Turkmenistan national stuff in there somewhere....I think. It's good to remember that Turkmenistan is, well, a Turkic country and has songs like this.

He isn't my favourite -- there are other Youtube artists from Turkmenistan that I think are more lively but he's accomplished and a credit to his nation.

But I do want to say that "direct democracy" is not something to praise unconditionally. Of course, the sectarian left at Neweurasia love that sort of thing -- as we know Christopher is very enamored of all things cyberspace (I sparred with him over Jeff Jarvis).  "Direct democracy" -- especially in authoritarian settings -- has a lot of built-in problems -- manipulation, lack of information, lack of informedness, etc.

I do think people in Turkmenistan have more cell phone and Internet than we imagine and even more satellite dishes than we imagine because people just often find a way. Yes, a terrible blow was struck when 2.4 million people were turned off MTS. But some got turned back on even with crappy Altyn Asyr, and now Hyundai has signed a deal with Turkmenistan for carriers.

I've been surprised, once I began scanning news with Scoop.it, just how many Twitter Four-Square check-ins there are coming out of Ashgabat, and not all by ex-pats. What are they using to reach the Internet? Like any of these countries (starting with Russia), there is a wired elite that makes use of these things. We heard that some service was turned back on for the anniversary or the annual oil and gas conference -- did it stay on?

Surprised there are even...a dozen people. Not to get carried away here. The total views on our Turkmen Eurasia Star winner? 267. 267!!! And that's probably mainly people abroad.

Contrast that with Bilbil Orazowa -- a popular Turkmen singer who has 3,262 views on one tune today. (Watch for Berdy's mug in this one, too, towards the end.) 

Even so, what's important about the Eurasia Star contest or anything that gets people interested in international music is that people at least feel more connected to the rest of the world and they might increase their use of YouTube and then look for other things on Youtube -- that is, if they can even access it (we're told it's blocked in Turkmenistan, yet people do manage to upload things to it, you can see them.)

Whether or not they actually can "vote directly" and help reinforce "the tyranny of who shows up" is less important as a "democracy building" caper than people finding and sharing things they genuinely like.

(P.S. Turkmenistan on YouTube has its unexpected little joys. Here's Willie Nelson set to pictures of a young Turkmen's romantic pictures of his beloved.)

Foust Backpeddles Furiously on US "Sell-Out" Charge; Nathan Hamm Defends the Honour of Uniform for Registan

 After several days silence from the Registanis on their theory that the case against Jamshid Muhtorov is all trumped up by the evil Muslim-hating feds, first,  more stubborn skepticism pretending its not conspiracy theory from Foust, in a post, "The Merits of the Mukhtarov Case, and Why Skepticism Is Not Conspiracy."

It's a response to a tasty intellectual beat-down of Foust from Gunpowder & Lead which does a pretty good job of tackling the "college stuff " like the "epistemological errors" and does a "critical" reading pointing out that the indictment doesn't even mention "chat rooms" -- a good answer to Foust's nonsense.  The Gunpowder & Lead bloggers Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Lauren Morgan then proceed to question the basic Foustian premise that "the IJU doesn't exist." They also call out Foust, as I have done with another author misrepresented in this way by Foust on the Atlantic, for misrepresenting an author on the global jihadi movement,  JZ Adams.

And I'm so glad that these authors also called out the obvious -- that the groups themselves actively portray themselves as global jihadi, and that's important to document even if they don't have the capacity to really go big-time -- which I did with Foust on his claim that the extremist group in Kazakhstan was invoking the Zhanaozen killings.

Oh, you can't win if you try to prove that Foust is or isn't in a conspiracy theory, but I do point out that there are schools of thought that form around power groupings of various sort that have a vested interest in either minimizing or maximizing the terrorist threat in Central Asia, as I outlined them. This prevents open-minded and clear analysis of the real situation because those in the schools become attached to their theories -- the anti-anti crowd has the mindshare much of the time in public discussions and it makes it impossible to judge whether the government is in fact making its case because looking at any piece of it only earns withering scorn from the punditocracy -- and questioning them only causes their knee-jerk reaction to put you in the same basket as Atlas Shrugged.

(On the 2004 bombings, while I don't think we have to take the Uzbek government's word about anything, I do think we have to show the mechanisms and mindsets that bring even a brutal government to deliberately setting off bombs and destroying property or even killing their own people in an "active measure" and nobody really does have the facts of what really happened there as there has never been a credible Uzbek defector or WikiLeaks of the regime.)

Like Kendzior, Foust attaches Muhtorov to the human rights movement. Is that deliberate so as to smear the human rights movement -- the human rights movement they both often scorn (in favour of the establishment in Uzbekistan and a soft touch for Karimov). Muhtorov was not representative of the human rights movement. He joined a group because he appeared to have family reasons to protest injustice -- his sister was accused of murder at the age of 19 that she appeared not to have anything to do with, but that may have been gang-related. He was not in Andijan nor did he flee the persecution related to Andijan. He was kicked out of the group that he was in by its chair because he demanded more money but didn't file financial reports. He joined another more radical farmer's group and then fled to Kyrgyzstan where he was portrayed at least by the official refugee committee as an "opportunist". He may or may not be a double agent and so forth and so on -- in other words, he is not a credible human rights activist by anyone's account, and yet these two keep describing him as one in a two-for that both smears the human rights movement that in fact disbanded the chapter he headed to get rid of him (!) and which also seems to exonerate him in advance from terrorism charges.

Next Foust does one of those reversals and double-backs for which he is infamous:

As Daveed notes, Mukhtarov does seem to have fallen afoul of the “material support” laws in the U.S. My argument, poorly stated in that initial post, was that those laws are themselves inherently flawed, a point JM Berger also picked up on in the comments and as I repeated. Saying the law is flawed is not the same as saying Mukhtarov broke no law, which is what Daveed (incorrectly) reduces my argument to.

This is so much like the way he nimbly evades any moral condemnation associated with drones, by saying "drones don't kill people, bad 9/11 anti-terrorism legislation kills people" -- and puts it all off to a meta layer that he doesn't have to analyze then because it's too big and complex and removed from the specific drone.

Perhaps these laws are inherently flawed -- I'd have to think about that some more. There are many legal critiques of the war on terror that find it overbroad. In Muhtorov's case, however, the "progressives" at Registan have to explain why it isn't material support to make travel plans to go meet up with a group of extremists watched by the Turkish government in a group that appears to have committed terrorist acts already, using a code word that has been used by Al Qaeda, and promising to die and only see his little daughter in heaven. Do they really believe he was only going to a relative's wedding and saying the bride's dress was "to die for"?

Having pitched that lie mispresenting his own original position which -- we can all read the record -- claimed the US was "crazy" for making these charges against this specific man (not that "the law" was bad and misused) he goes further and suddenly disassociates himself from the original claim by Gazistan and The Bug Pit:

All that being said, and this is separate from me and Daveed, there is a growing chorus of skeptics that seem to allege some sort of weird-ass plot between the Uzbek government and the State Department, or whatever, to trade Mukhtarov, a prominent dissident, in exchange for access to the NDN. That is, put simply, silly and completely without data even to suggest it is the case.

Oh, are we going to see that rapprochement established with at least some "good" EurasiaNet writers now start to evaporate?! Oh, and thanks for claiming falsely that Muhtorov was a "prominent dissident". Fake!

I agree that it was without data and was pure speculation and I characterized it as such during the days Registan was silent and treading water and talking to their hook-ups, whatever they are.

THAT Foust has hook-ups (as every good defense pundit would be expected to have) is revealed (bragged about) in his next paragraph:

I can say that more than one U.S. official working on Uzbek policy was genuinely surprised by Mukhtarov’s arrest, and it almost certainly wasn’t a feature of the NDN negotiations (and it isn’t something either State or DOD would do anyway)

I agree it's fake, but I don't agree that it's something DOD "wouldn't do". Of course, it doesn't work in some a literalist, instrumental way. But THAT Karimov literally put the NDN on the block over the State Department's award to a dissident is revealed in a WikiLeaks cable and it stands to reason State might tip-toe. The DOD might well get into talks, which State would then have to be part of, about designating certain groups as terrorists formally on the US list. That process isn't something that necessarily proceeds with all due legal and IHL rigour but can indeed be bargained with.

Foust provides more cover for Muhtorov's actions:

Turkey does have a large Uzbek population, and that population is vocal in its dissidence and opposition to the Karimov regime. There are perfectly legitimate and innocent reasons for Mukhtarov to travel there, whatever his emailed statements have said.

Well, sure. But to a non-existent wedding? To a group that is characterized as a terrorist group?

Then all Foust can do is say "there's no such thing" despite the evidence:

Back to Daveed’s point: about the real threat posed by the IJU, he too engages in some epistemological perfidy. While scolding me for reducing the Mukhtarov indictment to “crimes on a chatroom,” Daveed pulls from the indictment itself a list of crimes that include sending emails favorable of Juma Namangani and saying he supports the goals of a website administrator. I fail to see the distinction, even if he is working on semantics rather than specifics, between “email correspondence with a website administrator” and “crimes on a chatroom.” It comes down to a lot of big talk on the Internet (including the bay’ah, because who ever engages in hyperbole on the Internet, ever?) and the purchase of a plane ticket. I don’t dispute that that can constitute a U.S. crime — I do, however, think that is a dumb basis for a law.

Ultimately, Foust's argumentation hinges on the idea that "the US gets very bad information from the Uzbek government."  He was not available at all to question the case of the Uzbek who wanted to assassinate Obama -- no comment at all. He wasn't available to question the cases of trafficking by Uzbeks which coincided in time with big cases solved in Europe and Uzbekistan to make it possible to declare Uzbekistan as fighting traffickers in the annual State Department reports -- although all these cases may have had Uzbek intelligence, too. (And maybe Uzbek government intelligence, as awful a regime as it is, isn't always wrong? How can we tell?)

He reverts finally to claiming it's all just big talk in a chat room (something Foust knows a lot about himself, personally, with all of Twitter's big-talk chat room and his 5,000 followers) and getting on a plane to a country where a lot of your fellow countrymen happen to live isn't a crime -- and ducks from explaining why connection to a terrorist group isn't a crime, the crime of "material support" -- leaving only the very dubious claim that this group -- which is shown to have had explosives in Germany and charged with making attacks on Coalition Forces -- as "fake".

Nathan Hamm then appears to Ask Some Important Questions and essentially "defend the honour of uniform" (as they say in Russian) so that the powers-that-be don't think Registan is just a tabloid with Jousting Faust at the helm.

I don't know if he read my own notes on the case -- with skepticism about Registan's skepticism -- but he, too, does respond to Joshua Kucera's claim that the US was "selling out dissidents" for the sake of the Northern Distribution Network (the NATO cargo lane through Central Asia). I had a lot of questions about that dubious thesis even though I'm quite prepared to say that the US doesn't do enough for dissidents and may sacrifice human rights principles at times. (It's precisely because I think this that I think you have to make the case as carefully as you can -- after all, they are professionals, we are amateurs.)

As I studied Kucera's links in his blog making this hyped-up claim, I could see that he likely got it from Gazistan -- because Gazistan put out the idea first, and more starkly. To be sure, Kucera constantly links human rights and the NDN, and scours the landscape to find human rights activists inside the country complaining about the US so he is capable of coming up with this concept on his own. Still, I think the musings of Gazistan on Muhtorov helped

Gazistan is written by "Aslan Juhayman Khan" which translates as "Scowling Lion King" from Arabic. I haven't read enough of his posts to figure out where he might be from, or whether he's actually an Arabic-speaker. He sounds like a typical foreign student in the US or the West dumping on Western civilization and with many grievances about US power in the world. His story of a visit to the Met's new Islamic art exhibit is telling -- he drips with cynicism and contempt at the way this exhibit was put together -- which boils down to um, white northern ice people putting vibrant tan Arabic -- and Persian! -- people in constrictive boxes...or something...  I visited the exhibit -- very crowded -- and found it fascinating and educational although I felt there was not enough "story" in the placards at each item. I got much more enjoyment from it by coming with a friend who studied in Central Asia and knows a lot about the cultures and could unpack some of it -- and she was more interesting than the tour guides whose canned explanations I could catch here and there. Of course it needs more visits, but I don't anything deliberately different was done about the Islamic exhibit versus the Indian paintings (I do think it's possible the exhibit was rushed to opening for various reasons -- I did an analysis of the craven misuse of museum art to suck up to Berdymukhamedov in a preview). For Aslan, it's a study in evil Western Orientalism.

Aslan has persisted in his defense of Muhtorov -- "Internetting While Muslim" (i.e. like "driving while black," like the phrase used to describe American policemen's excuse to stop and search black drivers).

His defense basically seems to be: Muslims get in touch with various groups that don't really exist or if they exist aren't so terrible; they sometimes say things like they hope to die for their cause but they don't really mean it; the FBI shouldn't listen in on Muslims' chat like this because it's racist and they are nabbing the wrong people.

He made this conclusion after reading the complaint and the indictment which I provided; Kucera hadn't seen these, and hasn't returned to the topic.

Interestingly, Hamm doesn't get into the group-think supplied by Foust (who claimed the entire prosecution of Muhtorov was "crazy") and Kucera and others, notably Uzbek social media expert Sarah Kendzior, who has made out Muhtorov and his group affiliations to be "philosophically like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International" (wrong, or at least, partly wrong, as AI does defend "defensive jihad" and has dropped its once-noble credo of supporting only non-violence cases).

He steps out of it slightly because he can see that they are all cruisin' for a bruisin' if they continue that unsupportable line, and he inquires about The Facts -- although in doing so, he reveals his own deep "anti-anti" prejudices:

I get the reasoning you’re using in claiming the IJU might not even exist. Since the position is philosophical, where you do draw the line? When is the organization “real?” There was a period when the fair question would have been whether or not the IMU existed anymore. The tables are now turned, and the IJU doesn’t do much beyond an odd job here and there and, apparently, practice horrible communications security. Small and unsuccessful as it now is, it’s not non-existent. They don’t pose much of a threat, but they are still active. Are you arguing instead that they don’t rate high enough to be a designated terrorist organization? Or are you saying that they aren’t actually active they’re just some dudes who talk big on the internet? You’re right that they’re hard to pin down, and we’ve both seen people fill in gaps with a lot of bullshit, but in laying out the realities of the organization and putting its threat into context, I think you have to be careful not to go overboard

Given how Hamm normally defends Foust, and given how Fousts literally lies about and misportrays the writings of people on terrorist groups, making claims about them that aren't supportable which you can debunk merely by reading the people's texts, I would be more inclined than ever to think the IJU exists. And it doesn't have to be part of the global conspiracy, and can be the gang that didn't shoot straight, and still constitute a crime for a US resident to be in touch with.

Then here's some truly Foustian fancy foot-work in response to Hamm:

To be precise, I did not actually say “the U.S. government is doing the Uzbek government’s dirty work for it, about a group that probably doesn’t really exist.” I’ll cop that one can read that into what I was writing, which you’re right is the result of an off-the-cuff history of how the government forms its opinion about these groups. But I most certainly didn’t say that quote, and I don’t think that’s an accurate distillation of what I did write.

As for the threat Mukhtarov poses… I mean yeah. I’m still lost for what he did that would actually constitute criminal activity, at least apart from the “material support” laws (and that’s what really worries me). I’m not sure, however, that you can neatly disaggregate Mukhtarov’s indictment from a broader overreaction to some Uzbek groups — especially when the one we even really talk about as a “threat” anymore, the IMU, is bottled up in the Afghanistan-Pakistan nexus.

And I have to conclude this: how is Foust so sure that the US government, that has far more resources than he, even if he used to work for the DOD, is out of date? Maybe he's out of date? He's on the outside now, right?  And what's so terrible about the material support laws in this narrow construction -- traveling to help a group apparently commit a terrorist act of some kind that was coded as a "wedding"? Whether or not they were capable of putting it on or whether they really are "global," it's still wrong. There are 4,000 Uzbeks fighting in the Afghan war. Do the Registanis really think they do nothing but just wander around getting lost in the AfPak nexus?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elitist Blogger Dumps on Elitist Tweeters over Twitter Censorship Issue

Sarah Kendzior appears to have stopped digging among exclusive Uzbek-language materials that leave her with "more questions than answers" about terrorist-suspect Jamshid Muhtorov -- and has fallen silent on that case (so typical of what happens with controversial stories at Registan).

Twitter's awful new country-by-country censorship policy provides her with a hook to hawk her theory of the "secret Internet" of Uzbeks -- that special-sauce web where Uzbeks only speak in Uzbek to each other, so that the rest of us can't know what they're talking about -- and MORE importantly, require the expert services of Prof. Kendzior to interpret it for us.

I suspect those secret Uzbeks are talking about soccer games and cars and rap videos and love interests and the price of gasoline, just like anybody else anywhere, and aren't so super-arcane-special, but I could be wrong, as I hardly know any Uzbek. I do know Russian, though, and since a lot of Uzbeks will speak Russian on Russian-language news sites, I see they aren't THAT different than everybody else.

In fact, one of the reasons anthropologists may secretly mistrust the Internet and see it as "a problem" is that it both homogenizes people and makes them more similar with a mass global culture (like it or not, there it is) AND it reveals to people that they aren't so different from one another. That puts anthropologists out of a job!

Kendzior's theory of the "secret Internet" hypothesizes about:

regional activists whose situations do not get discussed because we don’t know much about them, and we don’t know much about them because social media skews our understanding toward popular languages, successful causes, familiar geopolitical contexts, and media-savvy dissidents who know how to attract an international following.

So as I suspected, she maintains an ideal picture of the Ur-community of Uzbekistan, untainted by those nasty Westernized human rights activists or exile-influenced political dissidents who just turn into "media-savvy" showboats on social media. If only we can scrape away the acretions of social media's "skewing," and its "popular" languages like English or Russian, or "successful causes," why, we will find the "authentic" people of Uzbekistan.

I was thinking that Sarah might actually oppose the Twitter policy in some useful way, even with this sort of narrow sectarianism, but she doesn't at all -- it's merely yet another occasion for her to toot her horn with her ethnic specialness theories.

And here's what's wrong with it again:

Her prime example is the cases of  Malohat Eshonqulova and Saodat Omonova, two journalists who blew the whistle on corruption and censorship at their TV station and who were dismissed, and then who went on a hunger strike. They had one Twitter account, @Malohat_Saodat which you could follow (which I did) -- if you spoke Uzbek, as most of it was in Uzbek.

I was among the journalists in this field who wrote about their case repeatedly -- you can see that in fact far from not being covered, and being in an Uzbek-language silo, these journalists were able to get their story known because Russian-language correspondents, and Uzbek emigre sites willing to report in the Russian and English languages, were thus able to reach wider audiences. And all those journalists additionally tweeted about their hunger strike. Just not a lot of them.

I will say there's a factor in these kinds of stories that can work against coverage. Human rights activists and journalists don't like hunger strikes as a publicity tool. I sure don't -- and I know others don't even if they don't like to speak of it for fear of being politically incorrect. Hunger strikers trying to force attention to their cause hit hardest against those directly next to them -- the family members and the usually already-overstressed local human rights movement now forced to drop everything and accommodate somebody's decision to use force in this way. Indeed, it is a form of violence, and that's why none other than the Dalai Lama himself has spoken against hunger strikes as a campaigning tool.

Protest fasts like this seldom work to get the attention of the people who are supposed to reverse decisions or make new ones -- and this one didn't. Sometimes they do, if there's a lot of momentum, but this one didn't. In fact, at one point, the journalists had to call off a press conference because foreign embassy people wouldn't come. They may not have wanted to be helping to further incite a health-damaging action -- there was also speculation that the human rights defender who was supposed to help with the news release on email didn't send it around, although he claims he did.

The story becomes about the drama of the hunger strike and less about the conditions that prompted it, which is a shame, because these two women had an important story to tell about the corruption and oppression of state TV.

In any event, aside from these drawbacks this story did get as much attention as anything can expect to get in Uzbekistan, and the fact that they tweeted only in Uzbek was entirely irrelevant, because there is a persistent and hardy corps of human rights defenders and independent reporters, both Uzbeks and Russians in Tashkent, who keep reporting on these things and give it wider coverage through exile press and the foreign RFE/RL and BBC. Indeed, just like the Abadan story, this story wasn't about tweeting because it was more about independent and alternative news sites -- that doesn't fit the "progressive" social media theory and so the theorists tend to discount the role of those sites in amplifying social media (instead of visa versa).

Kendzior takes a narrow look at this only through the Twitter lens:

Most of their tweets were in Uzbek, although some were in Russian. By the time of their final post, they had tweeted 730 times, had amassed around 65 followers, and had attracted no international media attention or global outcry.

But in fact specialized international media did cover them and various nonprofit web sites like Index on Censorship -- which is more than most stories get covered out of this country and is about to be expected for Central Asia.

And groups like Human Rights Watch did take up the case to a certain extent (I recall discussing it with them), but within the harsh attention-economy of their own internal priorities, this case and this country was not going to be flavour of the month -- in part because it didn't illustrate other easy-to-understand global issues and in part because it couldn't be won.

There are a number of reasons why the human rights causes from this region never gets picked up globally:

1. Few English speakers -- Russian is the lingua franca and fewer young Western journalists speak it, and fewer Central Asians as well.

2. The global left always treated the Soviet Union as "progressive" and even took ideological instruction from Moscow -- these old memes and ideologies and networks die very, very hard (look at RTV and its disgraceful following). It is very hard to get the left excited about anything happening in these countries that they felt were workers' paradises for decades. If you can't get the global left excited about a cause, and if they don't see how it fits in with their own anti-corporate anti-imperialist, etc. agenda easily, it's hard to get energy behind a cause -- the global right isn't as causey. The global left could easily pick up the narratives of Iran (an enemy of the US) and Egypt (whose dictator was propped up by the US for decades). The same dynamics apply in some of the stans, but the narrative isn't as clearcut and compelling.

3. As a consequence of no. 2, the global activist networks tend to see dissidents or social movements of resistance in these countries as reactionary, i.e. nationalists, extremists, paid for by the West, etc. They don't take them seriously or even think they shouldn't get near them for fear of "taint" from their own enemies (their own governments, neoliberal politicians, blah blah).

4. While some of the ingredients in this region like the presence of US bases or US military exigencies like the Northern Distribution Network could potential get the blood flowing the way bases or presences in Turkey or the Phillipines or Saudi Arabia can get people indignant and supporting local rebel causes, the war in Afghanistan never engendered a mass anti-war movement like other wars because it was believed to be a "just war" involving legal pursuit of terrorists who had first attacked the US on 9/11.

So it's not just the saga of Malohat and Saodat -- it's any activist that does anything in this part of the world -- they have not only the language barrier and the technological problem and the sheer financial problem of having to use up scarce funds to keep Twitter going from a cell phone -- they encounter the Soviet wall that surrounds any form of activism related to this region to this day.

Sarah concedes that the independent media helped publicize this case, but she doesn't seem to want to concede the role of the Western broadcasters, nonprofit Western media, etc. And unfortunately -- but not surprisingly, given her tendency to go with the establishment -- she comes around to invoking "the law" in the same disingenous way that Tufekci does:

Tufekci is correct that Twitter’s policy is realistic – as she points out, “the Internet is not a ‘virtual’ space, and cyberspace is not a planet which can float above all jurisdictions forever.” But realistic does not mean right. Twitter’s policy privileges the already privileged, hurting nascent dissident movements and the regional activists who struggle to promote them.

As I pointed out on my tech blog Wired State, there isn't just law when it comes to Uzbekistan, so enabling that brutal regime to invoke "the law" is just plain wrong. I don't know what's really driving this for Tufekci. I suspect it's part of the platform-uber-alles that I see with all these gurus lining up now behind Twitter -- and serving as the best proof I've had yet of the existenced of the nascent Wired State -- that its own network and own sustainability on corporate platforms are more important than democratic institutions and universal principles and the rule of law organically. These gurus could all become the lapdogs of the big social media companies because their power derives from these platforms -- if they don't have Twitter or Facebook or Google+, they don't have the substrate for their theories.

Kendzior merely joins them with a local quibble -- and she takes a poke at them as internationalists without enough particularity for her own special snowflake, Uzbekistan.

Jillian York puts up her dukes in the comments, admitting she "bristles" at the word "elites" -- Kendzior implies that the Arab Spring people and their adoring global left (of which Jillian is an avid part) are the sounding board for elites in these countries (and indeed, that is about the size of it) and that's the only reason Twitterati know about them. (Indeed, as we know, Anne-Marie Slaughter could cook up an entire international relations theory around the fact that she has some inside connections at State she could tweet about an Egyptian woman arrested, and Tufecki could write a post triple the length of most of mine explaining how wonderful all that was.)

Jillian tries to sink any claim of elitism by saying that the sheer number of Arabic speakers in the world -- 310 million -- which she says dwarfs the number of Russian speakers "by half" -- means that they are inherently "not elitist". This is silly on several fronts, because for one, there are way more than the 147 million Russians of Russia speaking Russian -- there are all the other former Soviet republics with not only sizeable Russian minorities but Russian as a lingua franca -- plus the diasporas, bringing the number up closer to the Arabic speakers. More practically, there's nothing to suggest that all those Arabic speakers are on Twitter or care about the activist issues that York and her friends care about.

Tufecki comes in to the comments to assure us that the real problem is lack of people's willingness to commit civil disobedience, not companies' repressive policies (of course she'd never say that about the struggles of Occupy Wall Street). Her sudden upholding of "law" everywhere and "practicalities" are strangely at odds with her willingness to drop those concerns when it came to SOPA and piracy.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for Tufecki and others simply to call on Twitter not to do business with Uzbekistan and some of the other most severe censoring regimes. It's not as if Twitter is planning to open an office in Tashkent. The only reason Twitter won't do that is because they want to "leave the door open" for commercial opportunities anywhere. That's silly. They should do the same thing that 60 apparel companies have done and announced that they will not knowingly source their fabric  from Uzbek cotton -- naturally they can't police every source, but they announce their good intentions. Twitter could function the same way on some of the worst censorship countries -- and include China instead of getting greedy about expansion. Like Facebook, Twitter has only the ad-click and marketing data-scrape as business models.

The worst thing about the accommodationist approach to Twitter's bureaucratic solutions by Tufecki and others is that they proffer the "transparency" and the "tools" of seeing chillingeffects.org as somehow a good enough substitute for not doing the right thing. But they aren't, because the system will be overwhelmed with DMCA notices and arcane British libel suits and it will be hard to pick the signals out of the noise. As I've noted, creating "an international conversation about what gets censored" far from being "liberating" is going to tend to reinforce and validate censorship and create new supportive audiences for it.

The coyness with which Twitter and its lapdog social-media gurus are telling people they can just Tor around this policy or toggle their geolocation is nauseating, too, given what's most likely to happen is that states will cut off Twitter completely -- they already do that with Youtube in some countries such as Turkmenistan.

 

The US Tap-Dance on Human Rights in Uzbekistan

A hip-hop dancer sponsored by the US is part of the cultural exchange approach the Administration has employed to engage with Uzbekistan. Photo: US Embassy Tashkent.

The pressure of the Soros-funded EurasiaNet articles, even criticizing the Administration on selling out dissidents for the sake of the NDN , as well as the shadow defense ministry pundity circuit exemplified by Registan.net (the Kerry-for-Secretary-of-State lobby?) is finally making the State Department fight back a little.

In a speech at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where he was welcomed by regime-enabler S. Frederick Starr, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake, Jr. has this to say:

Contrary to suggestions in some recent articles, we do not see our engagement with Central Asia as an either-or choice between developing security relationships at the expense of core values like human rights. Progress on one issue can help reinforce, or create incentives for, progress on other issues.

Those "recent articles" likely include the well-placed op-ed piece in The New York Times by Joshua Kucera saying the US was hypocritical and should remain silent (although begrudgingly conceding the weird claims by both Blake and Secretary of State Clinton of "improvement" -- I've noticed that it often happens with these State and blogger sparring partners that they somehow observe the niceties in their gentlemen's disagreements as they are all sort of in the same club).

And given the readers and audience for Registan, Blake could have even mean this piece by Joshua Foust that implied there was some horrible moral dilemma around either delivering military aid through the middle-man of Uzbekistan, or raising human rights issues.

Blake is at pains to say that there isn't such an either/or. And by combining the articulation of the different policies -- fighting terrorism, delivering aid to NATO, promoting regional prosperity on a "new silk road" and raising human rights in a carefully-structured framework -- he tries to persuade us that the US really is being all things to all men.

I'll be the first to say it's fake, however, even while conceding that the US does more than Foust or Kucera claim and that those bloggers' hyping of fake moral choices isn't really how the US government works (as I outlined in this post in reply to Foust's attack on the human rights movement for contrasting hypocritical US postures for Belarus and Uzbekistan and insisting on ownership of the Uzbekistan problem.)

Why is it fake? Because all human rights concerns are shoe-horned into this rickety and ridiculous structure called "he Annual Bilateral Consultations" (which sort of get held twice a year because they have the actual consultation and then assessment of it). Human rights is mixed in with a lot of other silly -- and expensive -- USAID-type development stuff and even more dodgy American Chamber of Commerce in Uzbekistan fandagos.

And indeed, our strategy for Central Asia explicitly states that our efforts to strengthen and broaden relations with Central Asia should not impinge upon our strong support for democratic development and universally recognized human rights. U.S. engagement in the five Central Asian states consistently focuses on political liberalization, good governance, civil society capacity building, and addressing human rights concerns – as well as a wide range of other important interests such as non-proliferation, energy, economic development, and educational exchanges.

By creating this four-part package of everything from baggy USAID programs funnelling money to corrupt local khokhims, ineffectual if well-meaning notions to encourage  local municipal programs,  to having both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and  Amb. Melanne Verveer patting women entrepreneurs on the head, to mentioning a few forlorn cases of prisoners -- in fact human rights gets very, very diluted. Indeed, as I reported, it's been turned into a hand-maiden of good business.

The ABCs shouldn't be the only place human rights is funnelled -- there should be periodic vocal statements by US officials responsible for human rights about cases and issues of concern -- like the five-year additional sentence just handed to Muhammad Bekjon, brother of Erk party leader Muhammad Solih, or the persistence of forced child labour in the cotton industry despite government claims to the contrary. Germany and the UK do a little more of this; the US can, too, without losing its precious cargo lane.

And indeed, the ABCs aren't the only place where the US "puts" human rights -- it can go in private bilateral talks at OSCE or the UN or other settings of international meetings or bilateral trips by Uzbek officials to the US. But these could be more vocal and even if kept out of the press, could involve more collaboration with human rights groups.

The USAID and related development programs at State and through Congress should be reviewed with an eye to whether they really promote and protect human rights. Do they have staff in them who try to push the envelope and go under the radar and really help dissidents, unjustly disbarred lawyers, human rights reporters, prisoners' relatives? Or do they just collect their per diem and help reinforce the regime?

Yet as Blake's speech indicates, the US is very wedded to its existing rigid structure for "dialogue":

We feel strongly that the best way to advance U.S. interests across the region is by enhanced engagement at all levels with the Central Asian governments, civil society, and people themselves. A cornerstone of this engagement has been the Annual Bilateral Consultation process that I chair with each of the five Central Asian countries. These consultations are a face-to-face structured dialogue based on a jointly developed agenda that promotes candid discussions on the full spectrum of bilateral issues, including human rights, religious freedom, science and technology collaboration, economic development, defense cooperation, and other subjects either side would like to discuss.

Perhaps someone can persuade me that "enhanced enagement" is actually helping human rights, but this statement from Blake looks like what I said: that everything from soup to nuts is packaged into the ABCs. The worst feature of this construction is that the agenda is "jointly developed". That means the Karimov regime gets a veto on topics they don't like -- would torture in the prisons or the unjust trials of religious believers be among such topics? And with such a jumble, does business ("economic development") get more play than some of the others?

I realize the US doesn't have a lot to work with, in dealing with Uzbekistan. But I think it could have more articulation and more rigour in how these topics are discussed. I vigorously opposed the McFaul-Surkov Commission for Russia (and its successor) because I don't think with Russia, especially with a far more free and articulate human rights community and opposition (especially now), that you should create creaky vehicles that only reinforce bad actors (like Surkov and the anti-gay Russian commissar who has followed him.)

But a more-defined specifically human rights-oriented commission/scheduled series of bilateral talks might help keep these topics more focused and less subject to that taffy-pulling that comes when you send the ABC delegation over with a business delegation hard on its heels to promote enterprise with state-owned corruptioneers.

To give you an idea of just how hard it must be for even the official human rights promoters of the US government to get anywhere with all this, look at Blake's next paragraph:

The Annual Bilateral Consultation process has given seats at the table to virtually the entire U.S. Government, including the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Commerce, and the U.S. Trade Representative, to name just a few active participants. Each discussion results in a work plan that outlines practical steps to advance U.S. and partner policy goals. The road to achieving these goals is not always smooth, but our continued engagement with the region is yielding results. We also use the consultative process to engage civil society and business communities in each country.

Given seats at the table? You mean it works like that? (Yes, I realize it works like that, but I want to hear them answer.) They all have to lobby for attention and hope they get a seat? Does the human rights and democracy bureau have to fight for attention?

The problem with making work plans for "a consultative process to engage civil society and business communities in each country" with all those State Department desks/interest groupings is that you get caught up in the mechanics and lose sight of the stark fact that there isn't really an authentic and free civil society in Uzbekistan.

Instead, there are some exotic human rights groups that try to remain free; there are some battered former prisoners or relatives of existing prisoners; there are GONGOs that might do some good but are coopted or worse, are instruments of repression; there are fake businesses in the government's pocket, and so on. But that's why you have to be more outspoken on the individual cases and evidence of injustice, you are speaking to a kind of virtual civil society that might some day come into being, on principle, so that you are not aligned with the regime, the regime that will inevitably fall, one way or another.

Now for the topics that most preoccupy Blake:

The threat of terrorism makes very clear the security interests the United States shares with Central Asia. In support of the International Security Assistance Force’s efforts against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and now as Afghanistan is increasingly taking the lead for its own security, the Central Asian countries are serving as vital partners.

Expanded trust and cooperation with Central Asia has made possible the Northern Distribution Network, or NDN. Over the past year, we have expanded the capacity of the NDN to offer critical alternate routes for our non-lethal cargo transiting into Afghanistan to support our troops. These have become particularly important given current challenges in our relations with Pakistan, and Islamabad's decision in November to close the border crossing points to Afghanistan, effectively leaving NDN as the key land route for supporting Coalition Forces in Afghanistan.

Well, there you have it, but it isn't the horrid moral dilemma that the Registanis imagine. They minimize the threat of terrorism and extremism, saying it's all concocted, and don't have a plan for where it really does exist and in part should be addressed by increased rather than reduced religious freedom and human rights.

What I never see here is the calling of Tashkent's bluff. If they are threatening cooperation with the NDN because of any vocal criticism or even private carefully-manicured discussions about "governance," does anybody ever remind them of their own professed claim to wish to deter terrorism? Shouldn't it be Tashkent that faces the "moral dilemma" of either helping the US extract itself from its Afghan quagmire and tolerating some "governance" and "human rights" lecturing (and even concessions) versus reinforcing its dictatorship? Shouldn't those competing claims get tested more often than they do by US interlocutors? (We never see anything like this in WikiLeaks -- the US is a willing player in Tashkent's game to do "just enough to get the West of its back" and exploit the relationship with Washington to tweak the Kremlin.)

Does the US ever send any delegations of religious leaders, including Muslim clergy, to discuss frankly with both state officials and religious bureaucrats the question of how to address Muslim aspirations?

Of course it's easy to sit all day on your blog and come up with ideas that other people in very constrained circumstances could do. The US has done some expert tap-dancing here confronting the claims of fake moral dilemmas thrown up at them by some bloggers -- they do have a carefully-choreographed script and song sheet with which to continue to address the recalcitrant Uzbek regime.

But within that script, there is loads of room for tightening up the act. Why should the US be "building capacity" with local farmers under the thumb of corrupt and authoritarian governments in Uzbekistan, if they are doing nothing about forced child labour? Why is the US not more vigorously using its membership in the World Bank to vet the aid that goes to this regime and fine-tune it better? Why didn't the US work harder to get the ABA and NDI -- much less Human Rights Watch -- back into Uzbekistan as a price for lifting military sanctions?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Broken Metronome is Right at Least Half the Time?

Interesting that the Matlyubovs are dismissed now -- according to uzmetronom.com, which of course is not a reliable source (it is described as a commercial publication censored by the Uzbek government, and may well be such, but it is notorious for leaking information from Uzbek law-enforcement and intelligence, and giving the Uzbek dictator Karimov a soft touch).

The presence of these two in in official police positions  -- Bahodir Matlyubov was the Interior Minister and his brother Jamshid Matlyubgov was a district police chief -- was part of what made it so impossible to investigate the circumstances of the death of the singer Dilnura Kadyrjanova who was said to be Jamshid's mistress and the mother of his child.

Bahodir was described "from private sources" (!) by uzmetronom.com as having turned in his resignation on January 24. He was said to have long wanted to retire,  and was 60 years of age -- and the news then came out that he had dismissed his brother in November 2011. Bahodir's resignation was supposedly confirmed by the fact that he didn't show up at his deputy's birthday party.

If these two really have fallen from grace  or been pushed out of power by some other rivals, then it will be interesting to see whether the parents of the dead singer will now be able to get their grandchildren back. Strangely, Jamshid had all the children, his son and the singer's two daughters, given over to the custody of their nanny. That nanny and her brother then began the harassment-suing of human rights groups, including Ezgulik, that had taken up the defense of the singer's family. Will that harassment end now? It was enough to get several court decisions fining Ezgulik and making life miserable for them as their office equipment was confiscated.

I see that uzmetronom.com hasn't come up with a single story about the suspected terrorist Jamshid Muhtorov -- yet.

But I missed another nasty from Ezhov, the editor of uzmetronom.com, on the "suicide girl" story.

On December 14, he ran another story, dripping with sarcasm and seething with hatred, claiming that "disinformation about the suicide with the clear purpose of provoking disorders in Andijan was put out on the web by the former imam Mohammadsolih Abutov, who lives in Sweden, and the local-brew acting Mother Theresa  Elena Urlaeva.

Uzmetronom.com cites the BBC story that debunked the hoax with interviews of the woman Hurshida Jurabaeva, who claimed to be her sister. Yet it does so misleadingly  -- so typical of this tabloid site --by implying that the BBC claimed that Abutov was to blame by introducing that comment into the story. That's not the case. Abutov apologized for running the fake story, but said he thought it was true, it wasn't something he deliberately concocted.

Furthermore, we are still left with the odd ending to this story -- that Hurshida claims  Uzbek intelligence put her up to the hoax and that a secret policeman was even still accompanying her abroad.

Uzmetronom.com says "we're not so naive as to believe the authors of this disinformation will admit their deliberate lie and publicly repent." Well, they don't claim that they made any deliberate lie?

And the question remains open why uzmetronom.com hurried to cover this with lightning speed, even claiming preposterously to be in direct touch with German border police who confirmed that there was no such person (!).  And of course, the question remains open about why the EurasiaNet author hurried to reprint uzmetronom and call their expose "reliable".

Uzmetronom.com snarks more and more, saying everybody looks like they are covered with shit, and while they can speak of Uzmetronom.com as being "close to intelligence agencies" (they must be) they can't say that of the BBC, which ultimately exposed the hoax.

Meanwhile, Abutov continues to be harassed even while abroad, uznews.net reports. Now his name has been linked to the case of a student of Islamic University in Tashkent arrested for distributing leaflets.

According to police, the student, Fazliddin Zaynuddinov, corresponded with someone calling himself "Mohammadsolih Abutov" who said he was from the Tayanch website and gave the student an assignment to distribute the leaflets and told him to go to a certain place to receive $100. Police followed him and later arrested him.

Abutov said the entire story is concocted and he has nothing to do with the student.

Surat Ikramov, head of the Initiative Group of Human Rights Defenders of Uzbekistan, told uznews.net that the trap Zaynuddinov fell into became possible because the opposition has grown more active.

"As soon as the leaders united into the Popular Movement of Uzbekistan (PMU), these kinds of provocations began to take place aimed at discrediting its leaders," said Ikramov.

Abutov says the hoax about the suicide girl was similar, he got the information and in good faith published it, believing it to be true.

Uznews.net describes the authorities as deliberately trying to split the opposition by setting groups against each other. "They were successful in persuading the organization of Andijan refugees called Andijan Justice to leave the PMU. Then they dropped even the word 'Andijan' from their name, which had eloquently recalled the Andijan massacre of May 13, 2005" said uznews.net

Mohammad Salikh, a leader of the PMU and leader of the Erk Party, was dealt another blow recently with the sentencing of his brother Muhammad Bekjan to an additional five years of prison.

 

 

 

 

 

What Do We Know About Uzbek Terrorist Suspect Jamshid Muhtorov?

It's a good thing that now with mainstream media coverage, we have more than just a bunch of blogs to read about this mysterious case of an Uzbek "human rights activist-turned-terrorist". Registan, Gazistan, and EurasiaNet's The Bug Pit -- all echoing and reinforcing each other -- are saying that Jamshid Muhtorov is a victim of evil American intentions to cater to the sinister Uzbek government -- and that he has been sold out for military cargo right-of-way (I'll use the US spelling of his name as it appears in court documents).

COURT DOCUMENTS IN MUHTOROV CASE

Oh, court documents!  That's helpful. The complaint and the indictment.  These could have been examined with a little assiduous Googling even 4 days ago as I see from one local crime buff's blog -- but none of the bloggers (including me) found them before now -- and I'm waiting to see what Registan and the Bug Pit will have to say after jumping to their conclusions.

While I realize we're supposed to believe that Jamshid is an innocent victim of the NDN-hungry US military, there may be something more to the case -- as the Christian Science Monitor (not exactly your gungo-ho military mouthpiece) points out after reading the court documents like real journalists: Muhtorov even cursed the FBI he knew was listening in on his phone calls:

Court documents filed in the case read at times more like a slapstick comedy than a deadly serious terror operation. The suspect and an alleged overseas terror contact overuse the word “wedding” as a code word, and at one point jointly curse the FBI agents who they believe – correctly – are monitoring their every utterance.

At one point, Muhtorov’s wife threatens to take their children from Denver and go live with her mother – in Kygyzstan.

When he tells her she must choose between her mother or him, she accuses him of choosing the alleged mission in Turkey over his wife and children.

Ultimately, the seriousness of the case is crystal clear. Last summer, according to an FBI affidavit, Muhtorov “told his young daughter that he would never see her again; but, if she was a good Muslim girl, he will see her in heaven.”

Now, by using the headline, "The Bumbling Jihadi?" -- CSM lets us know that they think there might be something slapdash about this case, possibly more than the terrorist suspect himself.

But while we can concede that the "wedding" de-code could be opportunistic by the FBI (they say it's used typically by Al Qaeda), you have to wonder why a "wedding" trip would be postponed, and then resumed again later with a "gift" after that postponement.

A local TV channel also looked at the court documents and talked to the DA:

Muhtorov is facing charges of attempting to provide material to a foreign terrorist organization, according to John Walsh, the U.S. District Attorney for Colorado.

Muhtorov, who also goes by Abumumin Turkistony and Abu Mumin, was arrested without incident.

Court documents show Muhtorov told suspected terrorists he was "ready for any task, even with the risk of dying."

EXPERTS' COUNTER-NARRATIVE -- MINIMIZING TERROR, MAXIMIZING RIGHTS

Of course, the experts are weighing in with a counter-narrative similar to Registan:

Middle East & Islamic Affairs Prof. Nader Hashemi with the University of Denver said Muhtorov probably wasn’t a real threat on U.S. soil.

And here's our own Sarah Kendzior producing an even more contrived counter-narrative:

"I knew him from having read about him in 2005 and 2006 when he was involved in human rights activities in Uzbekistan," said Uzbekistan researcher Sarah Kendzior.

Kendzior contributes to the website registan.net, a website devoted to covering central Asia.

"The group that he's being accused of having helped is very different from the sorts of human rights organizations that he was involved with in Uzbekistan," said Kendzior. "It's odd that he had this previous involvement with groups that are more similar, or sort of philosophically linked, to groups like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and is now being linked to these fundamentalist organizations."

She said he was known to want to expose corruption and fight for human rights against an oppressive government in Uzbekistan.

This is particularly contrived because Sarah would have known by then  (she was said to be "digging through VOLUMES of Uzbek-language material") -- it was on her own Registan on the morning of January 24, and she gave her interview to Denver TV on the evening of the 24th -- that Muhtorov was in fact dismissed from the Jizzak chapter of Ezgulik, the human rights group he was in, for not filing reports on time (Foust quoted the WikiLeaked cable on this). Furthermore, she knows full well that far from being "sort of philosophically linked, to groups like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International," he was in fact linked to the Uzbek farmers' organization that wanted to overthrow Karimov by force (which is why Ezgulik wanted to disband its Jizzakh chapter and part ways with Muhtorov).

Human Rights Watch doesn't advocate the overthrow of governments, but I take that back about Amnesty, Gita-gate showed us how in fact Amnesty has developed a notion of "defensive jihad" as a legitimate form of people's struggle. I imagine somebody could concoct a "defensive jihad" defense for Muhtorov as well -- oh, the same outfit involved in Gita's case are citing his case already.

Even allowing for the tilt of international groups to violence themselves, it's really a stretch to say that Muhtorov was "like" Western human rights groups. He was only with Ezgulik for a time (two years), and he left it for a more radical group; and even Ezgulik, although it is registered and does not pursue a goal of overthrowing the government, isn't exactly like HRW, either. Sarah knows better. She's just trying to posture.

What she seems most keen to do in this interview is to stress how the feds have nabbed the wrong guy, because all he was doing was fighting against corruption in Uzbekistan (why he had to go to Turkey to do that, she doesn't explain). She is quoted as speaking of  "an oppressive government in Uzbekistan" -- the sort of phrase she never really puts together in one sentence so clearly on Registan, where she usually demurs and speaks more vaguely of the problems of Uzbek shortfalls in human rights (and even here she doesn't finger Karimov personally for the interview with the TV station).

So, it's odd that he previously had these links, she says -- which she misrepresents, and knowingly so, as she knows he wasn't any Amnesty chapter and then "is linked" (i.e. by the FBI) to these other groups (which she and other Registanis don't think exist). Yet the documents available from human rights groups and WikiLeaks online show that Muhtorov broke away from a legal group to pursue a more extreme struggle and then fled the country anyway, where he was seen as "opportunist" by the city refugee agency.

WIKILEAKS CABLE ON MUHTOROV'S SPLIT FROM HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP

We know about his history with Ezgulik (regretably) from WikiLeaks, from a US cable from Tashkent:

In December 2005, the head of the Ezgulik Human Rights Society, Vasila Inoyatova, filed a request with Jizzak Province registration authorities to dissolve Ezgulik's Jizzak regional branch. As she explained to poloff, the decision was the result of more than two years of internal conflict, which culminated in the defection of the Jizzak branch to a rival political party. Ezgulik's problems are symptomatic of the larger issue of destructive rivalry in Uzbekistan's small and dwindling human rights community.

The new coordinator, Jamshid Mukhtarov, also failed to submit regular reports, and reportedly complained to Inoyatova that financing from the Tashkent headquarters was insufficient to provide him a living income. In May 2005, according to Inoyatova, Mukhtarov went to Russia to work and earn money for six months. With Mukhtarov absent, and Baybulatov holding the seal, Inoyatova said, "there was no one to defend human rights." Mukhtarov returned to Uzbekistan in October, and reportedly refused to apply to local registration authorities for a new corporate seal. Finally, in December, Mukhtarov and other Ezgulik activists decided to break relations with Inoyatova and allied with the Free Farmers Party (reftel). (Note: Ezgulik is affiliated with the rival opposition party Birlik.) "

Inoyatova characterized the ideological difference between Birlik and the Free Farmers Party. She said that the Free Farmers calls for a revolution in Uzbek society - for nothing less than regime change - while Birlik calls for a more gradual evolution in public attitudes toward civil society. According to Inoyatova, the Free Farmers Party seeks to call Uzbek citizens onto the streets in protest. Birlik, in contrast, recognizes that opposition political forces cannot mobilize enough activists to force change in the government, and the population as a whole is not sufficiently politically aware to recognize and act for change. Jamshid Mukhtarov believes Inoyatova is too reluctant to mount open demonstrations and protest publicly against the government, and says that his politics are more consistent with those of the Free Farmers.

Inoyatova said that, with Mukhtarov's rebellion, she realized that she had irretrievably lost control over the Jizzak branch, and she filed a request with Jizzak authorities to formally close it. She said that Ezgulik veteran Mamarajab Nazarov has already joined with Bakhtiyor Hamroyev, Jizzak regional coordinator of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, and eight others to form an initiative group, which will soon apply for registration as Ezgulik's new regional affiliate.