Uznews.net and Fergananews.com have published a story about an assault on an Uzbek imam living in exile in Sweden.
Obid-kori Nazarov was shot by an unknown assailant in the Swedish town of Stromsund as he was returning from noon prayers. The gunman fired several rounds and disappeared, leaving behind a pistol silencer found later by police.
The imam is recovering from an operation in the hospital and is listed in critical but stable condition.
Daniil Kislov, editor of Fergananews.com, on Facebook offered two hypotheses for the culprits: 1) Uzbek intelligence; another imam was assassinated in the Russian city of Ivanovo in September; 2) ill-wishers and rivals in his own religious community.
I'll go with Door No. 1, as I don't see that two imams being shot abroad is going to be explained away by business or religious disputes. Of course, we'll likely never know.
In Russia, lots of people get assassinated -- journalists, human rights defenders, bankers. The murders never get investigated. But in Sweden?
Sweden in fact just deported nine Uzbeks back to certain torture in Uzbekistan two weeks ago -- Uzbeks in Sweden say the Swedish welcome mat seems to have been taken up.
But the imam had been allowed to stay -- so the SBU may have come after him. Strange, the Swedes can't manage to get Julian Assange extradited from the UK to face questioning in a rape case, but they can send 9 Uzbeks back to certain torture and now have an imam shot on their soil. What's up?
Nazarov fled Uzbekistan in 1998 to Kazakhstan, charged with forming an extremist organization and even plotting terrorism. But so many devout Muslims are charged in this way in Uzbekistan, with thousands rounded up, tortured and imprisoned, that it has to be taken with a grain of salt. He then fled from Kazakhstan to Sweden in 2006 after getting refugee status from the UNHCR. Sweden had made the decision to allow Nazarov to remain for the last five years; that would suggest that he wasn't the terrorist Tashkent claimed.
Nazarov is not without his critics, including uznews.net, which criticized him in 2008 on a Radio Ozodlik show for not defending freedom of speech, and being willing to censor expression in the name of Islam. Later uznews.net also complained of being attacked by emigres for frankly covering disputes in the Swedish Uzbek emigre community. The perils of journalism in these fractured communities.
The imam supported the resolutions pushed at the UN by the Organization of Islamic Community (as it is now called) in favour of proclaiming "defamation of religion" a human rights offense. The West pushed back and ultimately in a resolution co-sponsored by the US and Egypt last year another resolution was passed in the Human Rights Council that avoids the notion that you can't criticize theocratic states and makes a more narrowly-defined offense that speaks of hate speech that constitutes incitement to imminent violence, which is the language US Supreme Court ruling.
Friend of free speech or no, I think it's unlikely the imam was shot by "rivals" in Sweden. This story highlights the problem of both pious Muslims as victims and pious Muslims as inciters of human rights violations -- and it's in fact rare for liberals, as in fact these journalists at uznews.net and Radio Ozodlik did, to speak up in criticism of this fact.
All Uzbek emigres abroad have to feel unsafe.
Since the picketing of Gulnara Karimova's fashion show in New York by human rights activists (joined by PMU members in exile), the PMU first suffered the assassination of Fuad Rustamhojaev, a PMU leader in Ivanovo who had been present at the group's founding in Germany. I wrote about the assassination here, for which I was denounced by the PMU as insufficiently sympathetic to the cause.
The headline was chosen by the editor, not me; I had suggested wording more about the shock to the community not suggesting failure of a cause. Not for the first time the EurasiaNet editor changed the meaning of a story. He had a curious insistence to remove some very pertinent facts from the story as well -- I had written that the killers spoke Uzbek and seemed to argue with the victim before shooting him, a fact that suggested a) they may have been known to him b) that made the likelihood of Uzbek intelligence chasing an emigre stronger, i.e. it wasn't the Russian mafia. This information was removed as "destroying the flow" (?!).
I'll have to find that denunciation somewhere online, but it was typical of prickly emigres for whom nothing is ever enough. And the PMU not surprisingly split, not only due to personalities or priorities, but apparently because of harassment of some relatives and threats. I don't think we can draw a straight line between their picket in New York and the assassination in Ivanovo, but no doubt the SBU wasn't happy about that picket. In an odd twist, Rustamhojaev in fact imported textiles from Uzbekistan to Russia, so it doesn't seem likely that anything that happened to him was related to a picket against forced child labour in the cotton industry. Rustamhojaev was also the local imam, serving as the lector in the mosque because there was no permanently-assigned imam in that locale.
The Andijan Justice group then split off from the PMU, and perhaps it's just as well, as before, their focus had been more narrowly devoted to the issue of exposure of the massacre and justice for the victims, not overthrowing the regime. The PMU was started by Mohammed Salih, a long-time exile and head of the Erk party who is criticized as authoritarian and standing in the way of progress -- like all emigre party heads, nothing new here. I have no knowledge of this particular situation exept to say that it is like so many emigre situations, and the regimes fan the flames and keep it that way deliberately with provocations.
After the assassination and the split, then came the story of the "suicide student" proven to be a hoax where Salih's name was invoked, with the student supposedly given instructions to murder him (?!). That was a red flag from the beginning that it was a planted story.
Then there was yet another incident where the same Uzbek emigre said to perpetrate the hoax supposedly wrote to a theology student with instructions to distribute leaflets and got him into trouble in Uzbekistan (he said he had published the story like many others, including Registan, which was first to promote it in English, and denied writing to the student).
I hope Sweden takes this attack seriously and investigates it thoroughly. They should also follow up on those nine people they returned -- did they get any diplomatic assurances? All in all, a bad situation.
