My comment on a post by Sarah Stuteville who is described by Joshua Foust on Registan as "the only person to have made an English-language interview with Muhtorov" back in 2006, is here.
But of course there's another person who made a Russian-language or Uzbek-language interview and then had it translated into English, and that's Fergananews.com here, also in 2006.
The stories differ in significant details as I point out on her column:
Sarah, I appreciate the field experience and professional experience you bring to this story. But I wonder if there is ever a grounds of suspicion and "probable cause" that you'd ever accept in a terrorist case as warranting arrest, if you can't accept an arrest is justified for Muhtorov.
Muhtorov was arrested at the airport with money, cell phones, and GPS equipment on his way to Turkey and charged with "material support of a terrorist group" for his plans -- discovered by FBI bugging of his phone -- to connect with the Islamic Jihad Union which is on the US terrorist list. He indeed made these contacts repeatedly, it's not like he just surfed a jihad site. He also is alleged to have collected money from another person to support this group from another Uzbek emigre who was also arrested. He vowed to support this group unto death. He had jihad videos on his cell phone with the 9/11 towers. He told his daughter when he left that he wouldn't see her again until "heaven". Maybe any one piece of evidence is circumstantial, but taken together, along with testimony the FBI still keeps secret, does appear to warrant an arrest.
I'm struck by a key discrepancy in the story you got when you interviewed him of the forms of persecution he suffered. I don't doubt at all that these forms of persecution exist, having covered Uzbekistan for years; I also think it's quite plausible Muhtorov suffered this form of harassment for activism. But the story does differ.
In the interview you published at clp.org, he said this:
""In January of 2006, I was arrested on rape charges and beaten by the arresting officers who made it clear that my beating was a result of my activism."
On Fergananews.com which interviewed him at the same time, he describes a different, longer and more complicated story about being set up by a woman who was working for the secret police and trying to entrap him, whom he then turns and whose statement he then tapes, then he is attacked later on the street:
"Two days later, on December 21, I was attacked. I was walking home at 10 p.m. or so when several men jumped out of a car and knocked me down. It happened so fast that I did not even see how many assailants there were, much less see enough to identify them afterwards. A blow at the head with something hard put me out. Some kindhearted pedestrians found me in the morning and helped me get to my place. Once I came to, I discovered that the attackers had got away with my Dictaphone and a folder with documents in it. They had not been interested in money."
In the first version of the story from your interview, he is arrested by police, and beaten by arresting officers after arrest. In the second version in another interview, he is first threatened with a trumped-up case through this woman, then attacked by unknown people (implied to be secret police).
These are quite different stories. What's your sense of why there are these discrepancies in the story?
***
Some people might view the differences in these stories as insignificant. I don't. There's a big difference between formal processes and charges by official police in custody, and informal threats and beatings on the street by plainclothes secret police.
In one story, he is arrested by identifiable police whom he even calls "arresting officers", is charged with the crime of rape, and taken to a police station (or so it is implied by speaking of "arresting officers") and then beaten by those identifiable police. That's Sarah Stuteville's version. Even granted that she may have had to compress the story at the time to boil it down as it was complicated and space was limited, the difference between arrest on a criminal charge and beating by police and the other story is significant.
In the story he gives to Fergananews.com, he says that a woman kept bothering him and trying to set him up; that eventually she confessed that she had been sent to set him up (typical secret police story meme, as I poined out here on the "suicide" student hoax). He then turns her (another classic meme) and then the next thing that happens, he is attacked by unknown people (presumably secret police).
It's also possible that he himself gave a compressed version of his complicated story to a Western journalist, thinking it was too hard to convey otherwise. But is that really the case? Being arrested by police and charged with a fake charge (and then being let go for reasons we can't understand) is one thing; uncovering an attempt to set you up and then getting a beating and also escaping from many hours later "the next morning" is a very different story.
There are two other discrepancies that I didn't get into in my comment on the Globalist, but they are important to examine.
In the version of the story for Fergananews.com, Muhtorov is described as saying this:
Mukhtarov himself barely avoided arrest on fabricated charges of being an Islamic fundamentalist in August 2005. He avoided detention only because Birlik leader Vasila Inoyatova phoned the then Interior Minister Zakir Almatov on his behalf. Mukhtarov's activeness in the human rights movement rekindled his conflict with law enforcement agencies.
That doesn't come up in the version of the story told by Stuteville, but where there is a similar story about intervention by a woman and a tip-off from information from the Interior Ministry:
"One morning, soon after that, I was sitting having my breakfast when someone knocked on my door and warned me that the Minister of International Affairs had ordered that I be taken under arrest. At first I thought this was just another form of intimidation, but when I asked a close friend who also worked on human rights, she said that the government was coming for all of us and that we had to flee the country.
These could be two separate incidents, but we have to wonder how it is that this person who is irritating the authorities by circulating Human Rights Watch reports is constantly let go and never charged, at a time when others were -- and even given a tip-off to help him escape the country.
Some more problems with the CLP piece --
o they characterize Muhtorov affiliation incorrectly in their introduction:
Here, in his own words, devoted human rights activist Jamshid Mukhtarov, director of the Ezgulik Human Rights Society in the southern Uzbek city of Djizzak, discusses his decision to flee his country.
But by July 2006 in Kyrgyzstan, when they were interviewing him after he had fled Uzbekistan, he was no longer the director of a chapter in Jizzak or a member of Ezgulik. He was fired from the organization by then. He was already affiliated with the farmer's group which was more radical, which he describes in the Fergananews.com interview.
o they and Muhtorov both gloss over the violence involved by Andijan businessmen that preceded the massacre of civilians. First, Andijan businessmen were arrested on charges of corruption that were said to be trumped-up. Incensed at this arrest, a group of them took up arms and did a jail break of their friends -- killing a policeman in the process. They then took other policemen as human shields and went out into the public square. That part cannot be glossed over, but of course not only Uzbeks but Western liberals often do gloss over that part.
Then later, hundreds of people came out on the square to protest. The Uzbek authorities claim that the jail-breakers with the hostages were the problem, and that in attempting to shoot them down, civilians were shot, too. The story is more complex, and there is deliberate gunning down of women and children merely convening a protest in the square as well. There's no question that the Uzbek government is at fault for the Andijan massacre and killed innocent people. They're at fault for the original injustices that sparked the riot. But in fact people did use violence, did murder a policeman, and did take hostages as human shields.
My diagnosis about the discrepances in Muhtorov's stories? They don't add up. There are too many narrow misses and too many tip-offs from the authorities and too complicated a set-up story to pass muster.
While people can tell their own story differently at different times and it need not show guilt, the presence in these stories of a secret police operative that Muhtorov miraculously turns, or Interior Ministry officials willing to leak information about impending arrest, tend to point to a story of cooptation rather than mere repression.
