WELCOME TO IWPR'S REPORTING CENTRAL ASIA, No. 681, August 1, 2012 TAJIK REBELS LAY DOWN ARMS IN BADAKHSHAN News of local politician's killing followed by internet blocks. By Lola Olimova
EDITORIAL COMMENT HOW WILL BADAKHSHAN RECOVER FROM VIOLENCE? Violence has dealt a blow to all that has been achieved since the end of civil war. By Abakhon Sultonnazarov KYRGYZ SECRET POLICE TO MONITOR WEB Media rights activists question wisdom of getting security agency to scour internet for hate speech. 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By Lola Olimova Armed rebels who clashed with the Tajik military in the mountainous southeastern Badakhshan region have begun laying down their weapons, but the killing of a local politician who criticised government policy has raised new tensions. The interior ministry reported on July 31 that 200 weapons had been handed over to the authorities following an offer of amnesty for anyone who disarmed voluntarily. Officials say 48 people died in clashes last week between government troops and supporters of the renegade military commander Tolib Ayombekov in and around provincial center Khorog. Ayombekov, an officer in the border guards service, had refused to be questioned about the July 21 murder of provincial security service chief Major-General Abdullo Nazarov, or to surrender men suspected of involvement. The latest official figures indicated that 17 members of the security forces, 30 of Ayombekov’s armed supporters, and one civilian died in the fighting, although some local residents quote higher figures. Forty-one of the rebels, five of them nationals of near-neighbour Afghanistan, were captured. “We were very frightened,” one Khorog resident told IWPR. “The children were crying all the time, and the grenade explosions and non-stop exchange of fire scared them. On the first day, the food situation was OK.… But then we ran out of water, the bread we had dried up.” She described how, during a lull in the fighting, people left for safer parts of town or surrounding villages . “One of our neighbours, a 60-year-old man, died of a heart attack. A young woman had a miscarriage but was unable to get medical help,” she said. “What we went through was a nightmare.” Since a ceasefire agreed on July 25, the Tajik authorities have remained in negotiations with the rebel force, and calm has been restored in the main, although there have been sporadic, localised clashes in some parts of Khorog. Government troops are still deployed in the town but have withdrawn from the nearby Roshtkala district, according to RFE/RL radio. (See Uneasy Truce Holds in Tajikistan's Southeast.) Landlines started working again on July 28, and mobile phone networks are partly functional. People trapped by the fighting, including some foreign tourists, have been able to leave Badakhshan for the Tajik capital Dushanbe. The ceasefire was arranged by a mediating team consisting of local officials, residents and representatives of the Ismaili branch of Islam that people in Badakhshan follow. These included local clerics and representatives of the Aga Khan Foundation, which has worked to develop the region over the last two decades. The Aga Khan himself, who wields considerable influence as leader of all Ismailis, played a key role in persuading the rebels to accept a truce, urging his spiritual followers to refrain from violence, to work for peace and to uphold the law. Moves towards stability were upset by the death and apparent deliberate murder of Sabzali Mamadrizoev, the Badakhshan branch leader of the Islamic Rebirth Party, IRP. Mamadrizoev disappeared shortly after attending a July 23 rally in Khorog where participants called for a halt to the fighting. In his own speech, he criticised the Tajik government for the poor social conditions which forced much of Badakhshan’s working-age population to go abroad. His body was discovered three days later some distance from his home. A local IRP member who did not want to be identified told IWPR, “After the rally, Mamadrizoev was detained by law enforcement forces, and driven to a place known as Kala. There he was severely beaten and then shot with a Kalashnikov.” Although the IRP’s roots are in the Sunni Muslim majority of Tajikistan, Mamadrizoev was a local man and Ismaili by faith. IRP national leader Muhiddin Kabiri condemned the killing at a July 30 press conference, and urged the Tajik authorities to investigate this case with the same rigour as they would apply to the murder of Major-General Nazarov. Suspicions about the possible involvement of government forces in Mamadrizoev’s death were heightened by a video released on Youtube which shows men in military uniform shooting a man and leaving his body in the street. Kabiri acknowledged that it was unclear whether this was Mamadrizoev, but said that “even if this man is not Sabzali Mamadrizoev, but another person – even a criminal – he had a right to humane treatment and due process”. The day after the footage appeared, Youtube was blocked in Tajikistan. The authorities have also blocked access to other websites including the BBC, the Tajik-language ozodagon.com, and the Russian sites vesti.ru and ferghana.ru. The head of the Association of Internet Providers, Parvina Ibodova, said the sites had been blocked on verbal orders from the state communications agency. “We don’t honestly have time to update people on the various sites being blocked,” she said. “They block some in the morning and unblock them in the evening…. It’s being done unofficially, with no notification in writing, by phone, SMS text or fax.” Lola Olimova is IWPR Tajikistan editor. EDITORIAL COMMENT HOW WILL BADAKHSHAN RECOVER FROM VIOLENCE? Violence has dealt a blow to all that has been achieved since the end of civil war. By Abakhon Sultonnazarov The losses in the remote southeastern province of Badakhshan following the recent violence amount to much more than human casualties, large though those are. The latest count indicates that fighting between the Tajik security forces and members of a rebel armed group left 17 government troops and 30 of their opponents dead. Officials say one civilian also died, although some estimates put the figure higher. The violence is a blow to the national unity which Tajikistan has been trying to forge since the end of the five-year civil war in 1997. It has only been in the last few years that people in this distinctive part of the country, Badakhshan, have really begun to feel like citizens of Tajikistan. The Pamiri people, who have a strong sense of regional identity, have only gradually come to share in a common sense of national identity. During the civil war, this region took the side of the United Tajik Opposition against the government. The military operation launched by the central authorities has shaken the Pamiris’ emerging confidence in the Dushanbe government. It now seems as if a couple of days of heavy fighting have completely reversed all the positive developments in the relationship between Badakhshan and Dushanbe since the civil war. The mood among Pamiris is a mixture of disappointment, anger and indignation at how the government treats its people. The violence has also had a serious negative effect on the regional economy. Many smaller companies have taken out bank loans to build premises and do business, and this effort has been hard hit by the fighting. One businessman, for example, has lost thousands of US dollars because he has been unable to market the vegetables he transported all the way from Dushanbe. This military operation is uncannily similar to the one launched in 2010 in the Rasht valley, a powerbase of the civil war-era armed opposition. But the authorities failed to take into account the fact that Badakhshan is different. Khorog, the provincial centre, is a small town where everyone knows everyone else. Whenever there is trouble, everyone unites behind the common cause – even those who would otherwise be enemies. The authorities clearly believed that when they moved against renegade border guards officer Talib Ayombekov and his men, it would all be over in a matter of hours. After all, they already had substantial numbers of troops deployed in Badakhshan, for military exercises held in early July. The government moved in army, special forces, and national guard units numbering between 2,000 and 3,000 and equipped with armoured vehicles and helicopters. This to deal with a rebel force of 150 to 200 men, which was refusing to surrender four suspects in the killing of a high-ranking security official. People in Badakhshan were resentful of what they saw as the disproportionate military response, and of the civilian casualties that the authorities were initially reluctant to admit. They were also upset by the deployment of inexperienced young soldiers as cannon-fodder, to draw the rebels out into the open so that army snipers could target them. One Khorog resident told me that while the fighting was under way, wounded soldiers were not given treatment, and it was left to local women to take them into their homes and care for them. Now that mobile phone links have been restored, I have been able to get through to friends and relatives in Badakhshan. They are ordinary people – teachers, doctors, and lecturers – who do not support former warlords like Ayombekov. One of these friends described how a neighbour’s teenage son was killed by a military sniper in his own back yard. It may have been because he was wearing an Afghan-style scarf round his neck – a fashionable item among Badakhshan youngsters, not the mark of a militant. It has taken years for Badakhshan to become more closely integrated with the rest of Tajikistan, and for its population to stop feeling so neglected. This geographical isolation was reinforced during Soviet times, because Badakhshan was administered directly from Moscow and had better transport links with neighbouring Kyrgyzstan than with the rest of Tajikistan. Since the civil war ended, things have been changing slowly but surely. One of the most important factors has been the construction of a road allowing Badakhshan to trade with neighbouring China. This has turned the region into an important trade route, as a gateway for cheap Chinese goods which used to come via Kyrgyzstan. Another positive step came when President Imomali Rahmon visited Badakhshan in 2007, and issued instructions for the national media to provide better coverage of this remote region. In a country with a strong top-down hierarchy, the president’s recommendations were followed, so that state-run TV no longer confined itself to a brief mention of Badakhshan in the weather forecast. Another driving force for change is Badakhshan’s young people, who did not live through the civil war and are not burdened by prejudices towards others Tajiks, as their parents might have been. As members of the internet generation, with greater opportunities to travel and study abroad, they are more receptive to the ideas of globalisation, and regional or kinship ties do not play such a central role in their self-identification as they did for their forebears. I am from Badakhshan, but live outside Tajikistan. When I meet my fellow-countrymen, what matters to me is that they are from Tajikistan, not what region they come from. Better transport, trade links with China, and a rising standard of living have all helped improve Badakhshan’s relationship with Dushanbe, political as well as economic. This has played out at a day-to-day level, as Pamiris develop a loyalty towards Tajikistan as an integral whole, while other Tajiks stop viewing them as different because of their distinctive language and culture and their Ismaili faith, and see them just as fellow-countrymen. In the last five or six years, people have moved into Badakhshan from other parts of Tajikistan in order to benefit from the flourishing trade with China or to set up businesses. As they have settled, mixed marriages have taken place – previously a rare occurrence. This recent outbreak of fighting has cast a shadow over these achievements. It has undermined Pamiris’ faith in central government and planned seeds of suspicion and fear that this kind of violence might be repeated. The Tajik authorities must therefore make every effort to restore public confidence, including assistance to rebuild damaged homed and businesses. They must also refrain from actions that might rekindle conflict. One positive step would be to withdraw most of the troops. It is one thing having a moderately-sized military unit on the ground, but the continued presence of thousands of troops is unlikely to defuse tensions. Finally, a real effort is needed to address the issue of public mistrust of the law-enforcement agencies, seen as corrupt and inefficient, so that people come to feel they can turn to the police and expect to be protected. It is no secret that when people in Badakhshan fail to obtain justice from the police force, they approach informal groups. When a relative had his car battery stolen, the police took no action, so he asked an influential street gang leader for help and the stolen item was found in no time. In that context, the authorities’ initiative of tapping into the local community – mothers, elderly people and religious leaders – to negotiate a way out of the crisis offers some hope. It is also promising that a preliminary agreement is in place on setting up special units including rebels as well as police to help restore stability. Unless they bring these fighters on board, the authorities will find it hard to maintain peace. After watching how this military confrontation has unfolded, the casualties, and the blow this has done to post-civil war efforts to build peace in Tajikistan, I am still optimistic about the future, but only cautiously so. Abakhon Sultonnazarov is IWPR regional director for Central Asia, based in Bishkek. KYRGYZ SECRET POLICE TO MONITOR WEB Media rights activists question wisdom of getting security agency to scour internet for hate speech. By Timur Toktonaliev Observers have questioned the need for Kyrgyzstan’s security service to monitor websites to identify hate speech. The State Committee for National Security, or GKNB, is setting up a system to monitor the internet, with a particular focus on news sites with the .kg domain name, and plans to launch it in early autumn. Using a web search engine that looks for certain words or phrases, the agency will seek to identify content liable to incite hatred on grounds of ethnicity, religion and even regional origin, in the wake of the ethnic violence that rocked southern Kyrgyzstan in 2010. Critics have questioned why the security service has got involved in this sensitive project, given its lack of transparency and a reputation for trying to stifle criticism of the government. The project was first made public in April, when GKNB Shamil Atakhanov referred to it in parliament. It followed recommendations from a Kyrgyz parliamentary commission that investigated the June 2010 violence in and around the southern cities of Osh and Jalalabad, when more than 400 people died in clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks. Tatiana Vygovskaya, director of Egalité, a conflict reduction group, argues that civil society groups are capable of identifying inflammatory content on their own. Her organisation has been monitoring television, radio and online news sites for hate speech since the 2010 bloodshed, and she sees no need for the secret service to start doing essentially the same thing. Vygovskaya said the GKNB lacked the expertise to examine documents for hate speech and come up with findings that the public would see as objective and unbiased. Her own media monitors received one year’s training before starting work, and even then they still made occasional mistakes. But if the GKNB made an error, she said, “it can have real consequences for people – it can lead to imprisonment”. Begaim Usenova, media expert at the Bishkek-based Media Policy Institute said that letting the security committee monitor the internet was not the most effective way of tackling incitement, and created the risk of censorship. “Haven’t they got anything else to do? They could cooperate with us and read our reports,” Usenova said. The security service will conduct its monitoring using a special search engine, which Vygovskaya suggested would be too crude a mechanism. “The programme will not perform [contextual] analysis, which is the reason we’re concerned. Any article could be picked up,” she said. An IT security expert who asked to remain anonymous said information about the search engine the GKNB would be using was limited, and suggested it take a more open approach to discussing the technology, and disclose which kinds of key words the system would look for. He also expressed concern that the agency might link its new search engine for open-source material with its existing database of surveillance material from email, SMS text and phone intercepts. Use of the latter material, he said, was unregulated and far from transparent. “The more secrecy there is, the more that is left unsaid, and the more things are kept hidden, the greater the suspicions will be that people are covering up something they are afraid of,” the IT expert concluded. The GKNB took several weeks to respond to IWPR’s questions about the new system, and when it did, it said its technical department had no specific information about how it would work. However, the agency stressed that it always operated within the law, and promised that checks would be put in place to prevent the system being abused. Some rights activists point out that the GKNB’s previous efforts to combat incitement to hatred have faced problems. The GKNB has a special commission that includes legal professionals and linguists to deal with alleged breaches. Earlier this year, committee members refused to review a statement for possible inflammatory content when they discovered it was linked to an influential politician. The GKNB acknowledged the problem, and proposed legislation to ensure the neutrality of members, such as providing them with anonymity and paying them instead of having them work for nothing. Experts like Usenova point out that although the media are not immune from carrying inflammatory material, the most scandalous examples come from politicians, which the media simply report on. Usenova recalled one incident in parliament earlier this year when a lawmaker gave a dressing-down to an ethnic Kyrgyz government official for addressing the chamber in Russian rather than Kyrgyz. The incident prompted a debate on ethnicity and language, in which some commentators pointed out that it was not unlawful to speak Russian in parliament. Russian serves as a lingua franca and is denoted a second “official language”, after the state language Kyrgyz. Since the debate was widely covered in the media, some are now asking whether this kind of reporting could fall foul of the GKNB’s monitoring system. Nor is it clear whether there is enough hate speech on the internet to justify the security agency’s involvement. Public complaints about alleged cases of incitement are rare. Out of two reported cases when members of the public have complained about hate speech, one has reached court. Vladimir Farafonov, an ethnic Russian journalist charged with inciting ethnic hatred in a series of online articles, was the first writer to be prosecuted since the 2010 conflict. Although many found his derogatory remarks about ethnic Kyrgyz distasteful, his trial earlier this year was viewed as a test of free speech and the fairness of the judiciary. When Farafonov’s trial started in March, the prosecution asked for an eight-year prison sentence. But following an outcry by Russian nationalist politicians in Moscow, he avoided prison and was instead fined just over 1,000 US dollars. In the other case, Ata Jurt leader Kamchibek Tashiev gave an interview in February suggesting that Prime Minister Omurbek Babanov was unfit to run the country because he was not of “pure Kyrgyz” parentage. In that case, the GKNB’s commission of experts reviewed Tashiev’s interview at the request of the state prosecutor, and concluded that no offence had been committed. Timur Toktonaliev is an IWPR contributor in Bishkek. **** http://iwpr.net/ ********************************************************** 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. The opinions expressed in Reporting Central Asia are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the publication or of IWPR. 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