WELCOME TO IWPR'S REPORTING CENTRAL ASIA, No. 457, July 21, 2006 KAZAKSTAN: LANGUAGE TENSIONS MOUNT Ban on official use of Russian in southern region rattles non-Kazak speakers. By Gaziza Baituova in Taraz
TAJIK AUTHORITIES GET TOUGH ON FEMALE ISLAMISTS The authorities dismiss women who join Hizb-ut-Tahrir as mere puppets of the men in the banned group, but still insist they must be locked up for years on end. By Madina Saifiddinova in Khujand UNHAPPY JOB SWAPS FOR TURKMEN TEACHERS When street cleaners are redeployed to work on farms, schoolteachers are forced take their place. By IWPR staff in London ****************** VISIT IWPR ON-LINE: www.iwpr.net *************** PLEASE NOTE IWPR'S NEW ADDRESS & PHONE NUMBERS: 48 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1X 8LT, UK Tel: +44 (0)20 7831 1030 Fax: +44 (0)20 7831 1050 RSS: http://www.iwpr.net/en/rca/rss.xml FREE SUBSCRIPTION. Readers are urged to subscribe to IWPR's full range of electronic publications at: http://www.iwpr.net/index.php?apc_state=henh&s=s&m=p ****************** VISIT IWPR ON-LINE: www.iwpr.net *************** KAZAKSTAN: LANGUAGE TENSIONS MOUNT Ban on official use of Russian in southern region rattles non-Kazak speakers. By Gaziza Baituova in Taraz Russian-speakers in the Jambyl region of southern Kazakstan are facing a bureaucratic nightmare. Almost overnight, any dealing with officialdom has to be conducted in Kazak - a language few of them understand. "I wanted to submit a complaint to the authorities, but after looking at my letter the security guard refused to let me into the offices because it wasn't written in the state language," said Yadmin Yaroslavova, a Taraz resident. At the end of May, the deputy governor of the region, Kenesbek Demeshev suddenly announced that Kazak would be the sole language used for local government business, leaving the non-Kazak community, just under a third of Jambyl's population, bewildered and angry. "This is a direct violation of Kazak laws," complained Yaroslavova. She has a point: Russian and Kazak are both official languages, although the latter has higher status as the "state language". The governor's draconian ruling brings into sharp focus a long-running debate over the Kazak language that threatens to alienate the country's Slav nationalities. Although Kazak is officially the principal language of local government business in the Jambyl region, as opposed to many other provinces which are required to make the transition by 2010, the state programme that set out the process in 2001 made it clear that documents submitted in Russian would continue to be acceptable across the country. Ever since independence, efforts have been made to encourage Kazak language usage. But these have been mostly poorly-executed. As a result, the use of Kazak has diminished while the number of people who count themselves as Russian speakers has steadily grown - today they represent 85 per cent of the population. Attempts to encourage the use of Kazak have included special programmes for civil servants, teaching materials for schools and an insistence that television stations give equal time to Kazak- and Russian-language broadcasts. But civil servants have complained of badly organised courses; teachers have been critical of the quality of the materials they have been asked to use; while broadcasters have sneaked the Kazak programmes into overnight schedules when audiences are negligible. Notwithstanding the lack of progress on this front, the Jambyl authorities' decision to take such drastic action has been greeted with incredulity. Some have suggested that they panicked after money allocated by central government for the development of the Kazak language had been used for other purposes, such as sprucing up the city of Taraz. Demeshev may have also calculated that his move would not provoke too much of a storm since Kazaks make up 69 per cent of the local population - one of the highest concentrations of the indigenous ethnic group anywhere in the country. But whatever his thinking, non-government groups and cultural organisations were keen to make their feelings known, railing against the edict in a joint memorandum on June 19. "No one will convince us that restricting the use of Russian will in any way assist the development of Kazak, just as one nationality [ethnic group] cannot flourish by infringing the rights of others," said Svetlana Chautina, the head of the Russian community in Taraz. It's unclear how the government will respond to the Jambyl episode, but there are signs that it wants to devote more energy to encouraging the use of Kazak - it has instructed the committee for languages, which comes under the culture ministry of culture, to come up with new approaches to the problem. "Russian is the most widely used language in Kazakstan, while the state language is in second place. We must maintain the level of use of Russian, and by 2010 bring the development of the Kazak language to the same level," said culture and information minister Ermukhamet Ertysbaev. Government critics are not convinced by such pledges, suggesting that there is little reason to believe officials when their record on promoting Kazak over the years has been so poor. "We have ministers who don't know Kazak - what can we expect from ordinary citizens?" said Dos Kushim, the leader of the nationalist political movement Ult Dabyly (Destiny of the Nation). In particular, Kushim berates the education and culture ministries for failing to deliver on targets set in the late Nineties, and says there must be more of a focus on using television to boost Kazak language use. "Television channels must obey the law and give 50 per cent of airtime to broadcasts in Kazak, as the law requires. There must be an end to the tendency for a number of television channels to run these programmes [after] midnight," said Kushim. Kushim and his supporters insist that if real progress is to be made, the 1997 law on languages which effectively gave Russian and Kazak parity should be replaced by new legislation whose clear objective is the revival of the local language, "We would like all of Kazakstan's citizens to know Kazak just as well as Russian." Such talk alarms organisations which represent other ethnic groups, who point out that maintaining the linguistic balance is vital for ethnic harmony. "A revision of language laws will lead to the departure of the Russian population and provoke conflicts within Kazakstan," warned Ivan Klimoshenko, the head of the Slavic group Lad. Gaziza Baituova is an IWPR correspondent in Taraz. TAJIK AUTHORITIES GET TOUGH ON FEMALE ISLAMISTS The authorities dismiss women who join Hizb-ut-Tahrir as mere puppets of the men in the banned group, but still insist they must be locked up for years on end. By Madina Saifiddinova in Khujand The authorities in Tajikistan have begun meting out hefty prison sentences to female members of the Islamic group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, but appear to be at a loss to explain what drives women to join the banned movement. At series of trials ending in late May, a court in Khujand, the main town in the northern Sogd region where Hizb-ut-Tahrir is particularly active, nine women received sentences of between five and 11 years for associating the group, which has been illegal since 2001. None was accused of acts of violence, and the most serious charge was calling for the state to be overthrown. Other accusations were that they had distributed leaflets and recruited new female members. Hizb-ut-Tahrir - the "Party of Liberation" - is originally of Middle Eastern origin, but took root in Central Asia in the Nineties amid political ferment and economic decline. It first became active in Uzbekistan, calling for the creation of a "Caliphate" based on the early Muslim states, but while it called for a change in government to achieve this, it always professed non-violence. The authorities in Central Asia have accused Hizb-ut-Tahrir of masterminding various acts of violence across the region, although such allegations have proved difficult to substantiate independently. The organisation has survived thousands of arrests of real and supposed members in Uzbekistan through a tight structure of isolated, underground party cells, and has spread to Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan, initially through ethnic Uzbek communities but also embracing other groups. Governments in the region dislike opposition of any kind, and are especially fearful when it comes in the form of political Islam - which appears to offer simple solutions to the region's unsurmountable problems of economic, political and social marginalisation - and is based on a tradition with deeper roots than either Soviet Communism or the neo-nationalism which emerged from it. One of the women was identified as head of a female cell of Hizb-ut-Tahrir and got 11 years in prison because of her active role in disseminating propaganda, according to Sogd deputy prosecutor Asatillo Urunov. The nine convicted in this trial were among 21 women arrested in Sogd region on similar charges since the beginning of the year. Urunov said the authorities only started arresting women on a wide scale this year, in response to a perceived change in their role in the Hizb-ut-Tahrir network. "Until 2006, there were virtually no women among Hizb-ut-Tahrir members who were arrested," he said. "Previously, we did not charge them because our legislation is humane, but they abused this and began to become active." The reasons that prompt women to join the Islamic group are unclear. Officials talk variously about pressure from male relatives, financial gain, or as one investigator put it, "fanaticism". But are these assessments over-simplistic? The thrust of the May court case was that the women only joined Hizb-ut-Tahrir because their husbands, brothers or other relatives forced them to. Marhabo Turdimatova, the judge in one of the May trials, told IWPR, "It was very painful to see the tears of a husband - a Communist - when his wife was sentenced for membership of the extremist [Hizb-ut-Tahrir] party, which she joined under her brother's influence," The sister of a woman sentenced to ten years in jail, speaking on condition of anonymity, said she had been forced to join Hizb-ut-Tahrir by her husband. "When she discovered that her husband was actively engaged in propaganda work, she initially tried to talk him out of it, but he got very angry and even hit her. And then he started forcing her to do propaganda work and hand out leaflets among the women in our street. She resisted, but he threatened to divorce her and take the children with him," said the woman's sister. "Now she will be separated from her four children for many years, and she's only 40." Another route to membership is recruitment by existing members. Even the purported ringleader is said by prosecutors to have joined after meeting other wives while visiting her husband in prison. In a country where poverty and unemployment are endemic, modest sums of money are said to have acted as a powerful incentive. Prosecutors say defendants admitted to receiving up to 30 US dollars for delivering leaflets. "For carrying out an errand like this, they received the average monthly salary of some public-sector employees," said a prosecution official. A more sophisticated argument is that women really are taking a more assertive role in Hizb-ut-Tahrir, if only because so many men have been rounded up. "When they saw that the law-enforcement agencies had stepped up arrests of devoted male supporters, they handed over certain powers to women," lawyer Muhabbat Juraeva told IWPR. But if the official line is that the women of Hizb-ut-Tahrir are passive victims who have been coerced and led astray, the question remains why the authorities feel they need to lock them up for a decade or more. The establishment view seems to be overwhelmingly punitive. Even a legal aid lawyer in Sogd region, Gulchekhra Rahmonova, is unsympathetic towards those who get caught up in Hizb-ut-Tahrir for whatever reason. "Everyone is equal before the law, and it makes no difference if you are a women or a man. Judges only take into account whether women have underage children. Ten years in prison is a minimum prison sentence, given that Hizb-ut-Tahrir men get 15 years for this crime," said Rahmonova, who is head of the regional branch of the INIS Legal Aid Centre. "Only punishment can - in part - stop them from crimes. They are committing crimes against the state. Not punishing them means acknowledging their activity." Such views appear to ignore the possibility that women might be active participants in Hizb-ut-Tahrir in their own right, and join it out of genuine religious conviction, even if that is misplaced. The suggestion that the women are ignorant and easily manipulated is weakened by reports that many of them have had a college or university education. "You can't say the party members are uneducated. There are women who've had a higher education - in fact, about half of them. One, for example, is a paediatrician from the local polyclinic," said judge Turdimatova. According to deputy prosecutor Urunov, "Each witness says that the women wear hijab [Islamic dress], say the namaz [prayer] five times a day, borrow books from their fellow party members, and take part in women's meetings every day." A woman who was jailed in a separate trial from the nine convicted in May apparently became convinced that Hizb-ut-Tahrir was a good thing after her husband underwent a complete reform under the group's influence. Her sister-in-law, who did not want to be named, recalled, "He drank a lot and often, and when he was drinking he'd beat her up - the family was falling apart. He changed radically in 2004: he started praying, and was bringing money home. It turned out he'd joined Hizb-ut-Tahrir." The wife followed her husband into the organisation, but both are now in prison - she for ten years, he for 16. A man whose son is already in jail for membership of the Islamic group recalled how his daughter-in-law, too, was drawn in - apparently through conviction. "She'd shut herself away in her room and read books. She was constantly meeting up with women wearing the hijab," he said. "We warned her not to join the banned party, but she said it was her destiny." Madina Saifiddinova is an IWPR contributor in northern Tajikistan. UNHAPPY JOB SWAPS FOR TURKMEN TEACHERS When street cleaners are redeployed to work on farms, schoolteachers are forced take their place. By IWPR staff in London Like a swarm of ants, scores of people rummage around the pile of demolished buildings, clearing away bricks and other bits and pieces of masonry. With no gloves to protect their hands and glum expressions on their faces, these workers appeared to be labouring under sufferance. This is hardly surprising, as these workers are in fact teachers who have been corralled into the clearance operation by the city authorities in the eastern city of Turkmenabat, formerly Charjou, who have no labourers to do the job. In a move that reflects a wider policy of forcing public sector employees to work in areas other than their own, the cash-strapped city administration has given the teachers no choice in the matter. If they refuse to do general labouring and cleaning tasks for the municipality, they will lose their jobs. President Saparmurat Niazov effectively gave the green light for this form of exploitation last year, when he began using soldiers to cover for hospital staff sacked in a massive cost-cutting exercise. Although Turkmenistan is a major exporter of gas, the revenues do not appear to reach the central government budget, which frequent cuts in jobs and benefits suggest is strapped for cash. In Turkmenabat, while white-collar state employees such as teachers and doctors are being dragooned into clearing streets and collecting rubbish after work and at weekends, the municipal cleaners who should be really doing the job are dispatched, along with many factory workers, to the cotton fields. They spend up to three weeks at a time there weeding and thinning out young crops in preparation for the harvest. The exercise is strongly reminiscent of Soviet "subbotniks", when people had to turn out for voluntary work at the weekend. In post-Soviet Turkmenistan, though, the exercise has something of the absurd about it, as everyone seems to be doing someone else's job. "We are forced to work everywhere that the municipal workers should be working. We teachers sweep and clean the streets, pick up rubbish on lawns, and trim trees and bushes," said history teacher Raisa Maximova. "We are forced to work both weekdays and weekends. But we too have families, children. When can we give them any attention if we work with virtually no days off?" Her colleague, mathematics teacher Batyr Yazyev, spoke of the difficulties of combining two jobs. "Every day for two or three hours after teaching lessons, we work in these ruins. Is this part of our professional duties?" he asked. "The end of the school year is the most intense time at school. There are school reports, exam preparations, and repairs to classrooms." A senior official in the local education department admitted that the authorities were putting teachers under unbearable pressure. "Teachers [already] have an incredible burden: preparing for lessons, marking work, and meeting parents," he said. "We must take teachers' time into account. After all, they are laying the foundation for the most important thing of all - the future generation of the country, as bombastic as that may sound." Teachers are bitter and frustrated at having to pay for the inefficiency of bureaucrats. "The city authorities solve their economic problems at the teachers' expense, thus violating their labour and constitutional rights," said a representative of the teachers' union. While the teachers feel aggrieved, they can at least consider themselves fortunate not to be shipped off to toil in the cotton fields, as many other urban workers are. "We're sent out to the fields by force, dozens of kilometres from the city," said Batyr Arslanov, whose real job is at a textiles fire. "The management ignores our family circumstances. The order comes to the workshops and we are divided into shifts and sent off for ten or 15 days at a time." To add insult to injury, the "volunteers" have to fork out the cost of both getting to the fields and food provisions for the duration of their time there. Some find creative solutions such as the staff at one Turkmenabat plant, who pay villagers to do their work for them. Others end up being forced into resigning, like Lachin Mamedova, who left her job at a silk factory. "I have three children, my husband works, and I cannot leave my family and children for two or three weeks and travel a long way from home," she said. "The management gave me a choice - either go to the fields or write a letter of resignation. I chose the latter. Another four employees at our factory did the same." (The names of people speaking in this article have been changed for safety reasons.) ****************** VISIT IWPR ON-LINE: www.iwpr.net *************** IWPR's Reporting Central Asia provides the international community with a unique insiders' perspective on the region. Using our network of local journalists, the service publishes news and analysis from across Central Asia on a weekly basis. The service forms part of IWPR's Central Asia Project based in Almaty, Bishkek, Tashkent and London, which supports media development and encourages better local and international understanding of the region. IWPR's Reporting Central Asia is supported by the UK Community Fund. The service is published online in English and Russian. All our reporting services are also available via e-mail subscription. For further details on this project and other information services and media programmes, visit IWPR's website: www.iwpr.net Editor-in-Chief: Anthony Borden; Managing Editor: Yigal Chazan; Senior Editor: John MacLeod; Central Asia Programme Manager Saule Mukhametrakhimova; Editor in Bishkek Kumar Bekbolotov. The Institute for War & Peace Reporting is a London-based independent non-profit organisation supporting regional media and democratic change. 48 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1X 8LT, UK Tel: +44 (0)20 7831 1030 Fax: +44 (0)20 7831 1050 The opinions expressed in IWPR's Reporting Central Asia are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the publication or of IWPR. ISSN: 1477-7924 Copyright © 2006 The Institute for War & Peace Reporting REPORTING CENTRAL ASIA No. 457
