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.
We can also learn a little bit about his past from the State Department's Country Report for Uzbekistan in 2005 (which isn't offline as Foust claimed it was the other day, fetching it from google-cache), although perhaps it was "down" temporarily. It's now "up".
There were reports that police arrested persons on false charges as an intimidation tactic to prevent them or their family members from exposing corruption or interfering in local criminal activities. In December Dildora Mukhtarova, the sister of human rights activist Jamshid Mukhtarov of the NGO Ezgulik, was arrested in Jizzakh in connection with a murder. Mukhtarov and the family's attorney maintained that the charges were fabricated as a means of intimidating Mukhtarov, who had attempted to defend local farmers against alleged illegal land seizures.
Human Rights Watch had a bit in its report of that period:
On January 11, [Ulugbek] Khaidarov and Jamshid Mukhtarov, a human rights defender from Jizzakh, were detained in this town on sexual harassment and drunken behavior charges after three women had asked for a match. Mukhtarov handed them a match and within minutes both were detained. Khaidarov and Mukhtarov were detained overnight and released after being compelled to write statements promising not to write articles for the internet or to oppose the government. One month later, Mukhtarov fled Uzbekistan.
MUHTOROV A DOUBLE AGENT? -- TOLIB YAKUBOV
Back on Registan now, Dilshod -- one of the many anonymous posters there who fits right in with the regime status-quo crowd, had this to say:
Btw, just went through a piece by Mr Tolib Yakubov, a leader of Uzbek HR group who lives in France. He says amazing things about Mr. Mukhtarov – that he is likely to be a secret agent for the Uzbek intelligence, plus, that he received a refugee status on fake grounds (that he was not fleeing the gov’t persecution, but was escaping from families whose members were killed by a gang his sister was part of) and that he indeed told Mr Yakubov that “democracy is kufr”.
Tolib, God bless him, can tend to exaggerate, but he may be on to something. We know that Tolib was involved in a terrible split in the Uzbek human rights movement with various mutual recriminations. It could well be that the Uzbek intelligence agency has a disinformation department that sets groups like his against each other (and Registan's anonymous posters have sometimes happily taken part in such disinformation campaigns, unconsciously or not, such as with the "suicide girl" story).
It's an awfully tall tale to say that not only has Jamshid fled in fact because of some mafia settling of scores (!) but that he's a double agent (and perhaps the plan is to have the US return him, and then the Uzbek NSS lets him go?)
But perhaps that theory of the "double agent" explains a lot -- an opportunist trying to work different sides of the aisle. Suddenly, you see Islamic jihad groups illuminated as something that few ever think of them as being: merely opportunistic gangs. They give young men things to do. They have money and guns. They take over, they run ops. Maybe all these IMUs and IJUs feel so fake because they are at heart, just mafia-type gangs that have figured out how to use a thin veneer of religious extremism opportunistically to gain and keep recruits.
A BIT MORE...
There's not a lot on Jamshid on Google. You can try using the different spellings -- Jamshid Mukhtarev, Jamshid Mukhtorov, Jamshid Muxtarev. He shows up in a UK government report as beaten twice in a crackdown on activists in Jizzakh. There's a 2006 item that sheds some light on the story about his sister (he is mistakenly called "she" in the story); it says she was a 19-year-old student arrested and forced to sign a confession of murder. [I found that 2006 news item but regretably lost the link, will search again.] What appears to have happened to Muhtorov's sister is exactly what can and does happen in the Uzbek criminal "justice" system -- policemen are rewarded for solving crimes and they beat confessions out of people. Other items talk about his activism in Ezgulik in Jizzakh, his arrest with a prominent journalist once, etc. So is this really all about family revenge in the end? (It seems his sister was forced to sign a confession -- at the age of 19 -- to having murdered a cab driver.)
From all accounts -- and we do need more information -- Muhtorov is a character who has a long and checkered career in which most of the people who have dealt with him who have spoken publicly didn't find him reliable. Reputable human rights defenders have found him to be an opportunist, and one (Tolib) has claimed he may have cooperated with authorities (and as he is quoted in WikiLeaks, claiming that others who found fault with him were the ones cooperating with the government).
First he leaves a group where he was unhappy because they didn't pay him enough and demanded reports. Then he left to work in Russia for six months. When he returned (the order of events isn't clear), he distributed Human Rights Watch's report about the Andijan massacre. That fact in his story stood out to me as a possible flag of opportunism simply because most people don't distribute Western organization's literature, they distribute their own country's literature, like these four women just arrested recently.
That is, sure, there may have been a Russian-language edition of the HRW report available at that time that he distributed, but he may have simply wished to associate himself with this group for the purpose of claiming some of its protective powers and/or putting into his legend a story that would jump up and shout "human rights". This is quite common when people are trying to get refugee status -- they know they have to set up their story to pass officials in third countries or the US to qualify for the status by showing their activity and that they were persecuted for it.
As anyone who has ever worked on refugee and political asylym cases knows, the systems are overwhelmed with applicants and a large percentage of the claims are exaggerated or falsified, sometimes deliberately with the help of unscrupulous storefront green-card mills or even lawyers. It makes it hard for the real cases to shine through, in fact.
OSH REFUGEE COMMITTEE ACCOUNT OF MUHTOROV
Muhtorov then fled to Kyrgzystan with his family, and the refugee agency official there went out of her way to say he was a dubious case as I discussed in my previous post. I'll quote in more detail here (translated from centrasia.ru and 24.kg):
Jamshid Muhtorov, who calls himself a leader of the Uzbek refugees, says Joldosheva [then head of the Osh Committee for Refugees and Employment], appeared in Osh in the winter of [2006]. He arrived together with his wife and children from Jizzak (Uzbekistan) and had no relationship to the Andijan events whatsoever. Muhtorov took upon hmself the role of defender of all the Uzbek refugees although according to many of them, they had not delegated him that authority.
Muhtorov lives in Osh fairly well, Joldosheva believes.
"He rented a cafe, he got a job in an international project, and openly visits the Interior Ministry and other law-enforcement agencies. Furthermore, she says, he makes himself out to be a great martyr and pursues only h is own goals, gaining refugee status in a third country.
"He is exploiting the situation of the introduction of a stict regimen in Osh," says Joldosheva. "He came to our committee with a statement that our special agents are persecuting him and threatening to deport him. And he brought with him another refugee who was supposedly taken out of town by the Uzbek secret police, beaten and then thrown out of a car. But the "beaten" man said that he was beaten by Kyrgyz secret police. A medical exam did not discover any signs of beating. This story very much surprised the leadership of the Kyrgyzstan Committee for National Security."
In the opinion of the workers at the Committee for Migration and Employment, Muhtorov is distorting the real nature of events, and appealing to all the international organizations with statements that he is supposedly being persecuted."
Now, given that this is the Osh city committee -- an official committee -- and given that they haven't bought the refugees' possibly true story of secret police persecution -- and have somehow implied they compared notes with the secret police themselves -- it's possible that Joldosheva isn't on the right side of this story (remember, this is 2006, however, not 2010, and the Osh authorities did help Andijan refugees back then).
That is, she may be discounting what is in fact a real story on Muhtorov's part. The article in centrasia.ru was prompted by another article on the Internet , "Situation in the South of Kyrgyzstan is Growing More Tense". (It's hard to say what that is, there are so many articles with names like this, like this one.)
On the other hand, Joldosheva herself describes Muhtorov as going to the MVD and law-enforcement agencies, implying that he's cooperating with the authorities, something she appears then to judge, not applaud, and that it doesn't fit with the usual profile of a refugee.
The Osh authorities today are definitely no friend to human rights, and they may not at all have been telling the truth about Uzbek refugees back in 2006.
Even so, given that this is one of the longest and most detailed documents about Muhtorov and contains some red flags about him being an opportunist -- and no other indignant articles from independent sources claiming the opposite, but in fact, Yakubov saying he is a double agent -- it does seem to indicate that he isn't the pure human rights activist some may wish to portray him (and as he was portrayed in the Common Language Project essay).
(Joldosheva goes on to become the Minister of Labour and Employment, and finds NGOs distorting reality in 2011, so she may not be a good judge of Muhtorov.)
Again, her 2006 account says that Muhtorov was seen going in and out of the MVD (police) offices -- something that contributes to the sense that he might be an agent of some kind or someone who cooperated with authorities. (And perhaps he was merely interceding on behalf of refugees if he really was their leader -- but that's not something we've actually established anywhere). He is also noted as going into business by renting a cafe, and working on some unspecified international projects -- that also doesn't square with the notion that he was just busy being a refugee leader and human rights activist waiting to get permission to emigrate.
Then, somehow, he gets to America -- possibly with refugee status, as the US has been accommodating some refugee applicants who fled the Andijan massacre and aftermath, and there is a small community of such Andijan-related refugees in the US.
Nobody has come up with anything about his story in this period, and yet somehow he went from a trim haircut and mustache to a long beard and piety forehead bruises indicating the very devout Muslim. It's not known where or how this happened -- in one of the Denver pieces a friend, Fatima Iskenderova, who knew him back in Uzbekistan and in the US, describes a change coming over him.
A former friend told the 9Wants to Know investigators she severed her relationship with Muhtorov because he became a religious extremist.
Fatima Iskenderova said Muhtorov's personality changed when he moved to the United States.
"When I see him [in Uzbekistan], he shave very nice. He finished at University of Uzbekistan. He was a lawyer. Good intelligent man. When he come to United States, he start big beard. Change clothes, you know, he talking different," she said.
That's not a crime, but telling your daughter you won't see her again until you get to heaven could indicate the planning of one.
