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Islamic blame
game
By B Raman
The
violent uprising of the people of Andijan in
Uzbekistan on May 13 has drawn a strong response
from Uzbek authorities, resulting in the death of
hundreds of people, according to some reports. The
anti-government elements which organized the
uprising claim to have captured 30 Uzbek soldiers
and to be keeping them in their custody.
The uprising was preceded by a raid by
supporters of the banned Hizbut Tehrir (HT) on a
local prison in which the authorities had detained
a group of 23 Muslim businessmen whom they had
arrested on June 23, 2004, and accused of
belonging to an Islamic extremist organization
called the Akramia group. The raiders were
reported to have forcibly got the so-called
Akramia group members released.
On coming
to know of their release, a large number of local
residents came out onto the streets and captured a
number of government buildings. The Uzbek security
forces, after heavy fighting, managed to free the
buildings from the control of the supporters of
the so-called Akramia group and the HT.
The arrested Muslim businessmen, whose
trial started at Alatankul on the outskirts of
Andijan in February, had formed an Islamic mutual
fund to help poor Muslims and to undertake charity
work with its earnings. The authorities suspected
it of being a front organization of the HT, a
charge which was vehemently denied by the
businessmen. They contended that they had no links
with the HT and that their objective was purely
philanthropic, with no political agenda.
Despite this, the authorities filed a
charge-sheet against them under Articles 242
(setting up a criminal organization), 159
(undermining the constitutional basis of the
Republic of Uzbekistan), 244-1 (preparing or
distributing documents that contain a threat to
public safety) and 244-2 (setting up, leading and
participating in extremist religious
organizations) of the Criminal Code.
The
names of the arrested businessmen are: Rasuljon
Ajikhalilov, Abdumajit Ibragimov, Abdulboki
Ibragimov, Tursunbek Nazarov, Makhammadshokir
Artikov, Odil Makhsdaliyev, Dadakhon Nodirov,
Shamsitdin Atamatov, Ortikboy Akbarov, Rasul
Akbarov, Shavkat Shokirov, Abdurauf Khamidov,
Muzaffar Kodirov, Mukhammadaziz Mamdiyev,
Nasibillo Maksudov, Adkhamjon Babojonov, Khakimjon
Zakirov, Gulomjon Nadirov, Musojon Mirzaboyev,
Dilshchodbek Mamadiyev, Abdulvosid Igamov,
Shokurjon Shakirov, and Ravshanbek Mazimjonov.
Bakhrom Shakirov, father of Shokurjon
Shakirov, said in an interview on February 18:
The detainees are not members of any
underground organization. They are devout
believers and entrepreneurs. They set up a
mutual benefit fund and tried to help one
another in commercial matters, following Islamic
teachings. They used the money in the mutual
benefit fund to carry out charitable work and
regularly transferred money to children's homes
and schools. A broad-based social welfare scheme
was set up at the companies run by the detained
businessmen. Staff at the companies received
material help when they married (staff were
often even provided with an apartment) and when
they were ill the employer paid in full for all
the medicines and sick leave. Any employee at
the company knew quite well that if anything
went wrong the company management and his
colleagues would always come to his aid. The
Islamic businessmen worked out a genuine minimum
subsistence wage in Andijan (which was several
times higher than the official minimum wage) and
agreed to pay staff a wage that was higher than
this figure. It's true that Muslim prayers were
read out at these Islamic companies, but this
was a voluntary matter. They didn't demand that
workers should be believers, but people at these
companies gradually came to understand the truth
of Islam. These Islamic companies gradually
became famous throughout Andijan, and the local
media regularly carried positive reports about
the charitable activities of the businessmen who
are now under arrest. Even now, while the
businessmen are in prison, local television is
showing glowing reports about their charitable
work. It is the popularity of these Islamic
companies among the population that has provoked
the authorities' harsh response. The state has
begun to see these businessmen as ideological
competitors, because their activity has truly
demonstrated the superiority of Islamic
economics. The authorities described
the arrested businessmen as belonging to the
Akramia group, meaning that they were the
followers of Akram Yuldashev, presently in jail
after having been convicted on a charge of
terrorism.
In 1992, Yuldashev, then
a 29-year-old math teacher of Andijan, published a
pamphlet titled "Yimonga Yul" (Path to faith) on
what he projected as the superiority of Islamic
moral values. This brought him many supporters,
and his pamphlet was widely read. In 1998, the
authorities arrested him on a charge of possessing
narcotics and he was jailed for 30 months.
However, he was prematurely released in December
1998. At the time of his arrest, he was working in
a furniture company owned by the Shakirov family.
He was again arrested in February 1999 following
explosions in Tashkent, accused of participating
in acts of terrorism and sentenced to 17 years in
jail. The charge-sheet filed against him described
him as the head of the Akramia, whose objective,
it was alleged, was to convert Uzbekistan into an
Islamic state ruled according to Sharia law.
The wife of Yuldashev, in an
interview, denied that her husband had any links with the
HT or the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) and
accused the authorities of falsely projecting him
as the Osama bin Laden of Uzbekistan.
The
speculation in Andijan was that the so-called
Akramia group was either a front organization of
the HT or had been formed by dissidents from the
HT, who were dissatisfied with its policy of not
resorting to terrorism. The members of the group
denied that they called themselves the Akramia
group. They said they belonged to a
birodari (brotherhood) group without any
political agenda. According to them, their only
objective was to propagate the true values of
Islam, make Muslims better Muslims and help poor
Muslims.
No stopping the Hizbut Tehrir
The HT has been operating in the Central
Asian region since 1995, when it was brought to
Uzbekistan by some members of the Pakistani
diaspora in the United Kingdom. In fact, a HT
office was set up in Uzbekistan five years before
its appearance in Pakistan itself. Severe
government suppression forced its members to move
to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Since 2000,
the HT has reportedly become the largest
fundamentalist organization in the Central Asian
region. It is now trying to spread its activities
in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Xinjiang region
of China. It has been banned in all the Central
Asian Republics and Pakistan. The ban has had no
effect on its activities and its ability to
attract followers. It has a strong presence in the
Ferghana Valley.
The HT was formed in
1953 by Sheikh Taqiuddin an-Nabhani al Falastini, a
judge of the Shariat Appeal Court in Jerusalem.
After Nakhbani's death in 1979, Abad al-Qadim
Zalum, a Jordanian, took over as its leader. The
party's headquarters are in London, where it
operates legally. Its multi-language website is
also reportedly operated from London. The London
headquarters is headed by Sheikh Omar Bakri
Muhammad, a 42 year-old Syrian, who reportedly
supervises its activities in the Central Asian
republics, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and
Southeast Asia.
The HT, which says it
abjures violence and uses agitprop
(agitation-propaganda) methods for propagating its
ideology, concentrates on the penetration of the
student community, the armed forces and the
security agencies. It has also managed to build up
a large following among Muslim medium and
small-scale entrepreneurs. It advocates what it
describes as the Islamic democracy in which Allah
and not the people will be sovereign and an
Islamic version of the free market economy in
which private entrepreneurs accept a moral
responsibility for the welfare of their employees.
The enterprises are expected to serve the cause of
religion and the community. Every member of the HT
is required to contribute 10% of his or her
earnings to the organization. Its other sources of
funding are not known.
In view of its
emphasis on propaganda, it tries to invest in
printing presses and publishing houses directly or
through intermediaries. Two modern underground
printing presses of the HT were discovered by the
police at Hudzhand in Tajikistan in 2003.
According to Uzbek sources, it has the largest
following in Uzbekistan, with about 20,000
members, of whom about 7,000 are in prison. The HT
of Uzbekistan is led by one Vahid Omran. Its
striking progress in recruiting members in
Uzbekistan is attributed to the poor economic
conditions there and the brutally repressive
nature of the regime.
It is a largely clandestine
setup, organized in a large number of
autonomous cells of five members each. Each cell
and its members are supposed to know the identity
of only their immediate superior and not of
others.
The HT has not come to notice for
its control of any madrassas (seminaries).
It recruits its student members from all
educational institutions - religious or secular,
government or private-owned. It also advises its
clerics to avoid attracting attention to
themselves. They are discouraged from keeping long
beards and advised to trim them and even to dress
themselves in Western clothes.
Many
suspect the HT to be a political front
organization of al- Qaeda. Both advocate an
Islamic caliphate, but their road maps to
achieving this objective are different. Al-Qaeda
advocates resort to terrorism, but the HT does
not. Al-Qaeda speaks of the right and the
religious obligation of Muslims to acquire and
use, if necessary, weapons of mass destruction,
but the HT does not - at least openly. Since the
HT has a large number of educated followers in
Central Asian nations, which were important
centers for research and development in the
nuclear and missile fields in the erstwhile USSR,
there is a greater possibility of the HT being
able to attract to its ranks Muslim scientists of
Central Asia well versed in nuclear and missile
technologies.
The two main fundamentalist
organizations of Uzbekistan are the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is a member of
bin Laden's International Islamic Front and the
HT, which is not. The IMU has a large proportion
of Muslim soldiers of the ex-Soviet army, who had
fought against the Afghan mujahideen in
Afghanistan during the 1980s. They went to
Afghanistan as convinced communists and returned
to their homes as converted jihadis inspired by
the example of the mujahideen. The HT, on the
other hand, has a large proportion of post-1991
students, business entrepreneurs and security
forces personnel with very little exposure to the
jihad of the 1980s.
It is remarkable that
within 10 years of its emergence in Central Asia,
the HT has made long strides in the area,
particularly in Uzbekistan. Apart from the poor
economic conditions and the repressive policies of
the governments of the region, this is also
attributable to the fact that the Islamic faith
and loyalty to the religion have always been
important motivating factors in the Ferghana Valley
area, right from the days of the first Andijan
uprising of Muslims against the tsar's army in
1898.
The post-1991 resurgence of Islamic
yearnings in Uzbekistan and its neighbors was
first noticed and exploited not by local religious
leaders, but by those who came from outside,
mainly from Pakistan. In the Caucasus region
(Chechnya and Dagestan), it was the indigenous
Muslims who started the Muslim rights movement and
took to jihadi terrorism, and foreign jihadis
subsequently joined them. But, in the Central Asia
republics, it is the foreign jihadis who started
the movement, which subsequently attracted locals
in large numbers.
Two
other organizations in Uzbekistan have come to notice for
their jihadi activities - the so-called Akramia group,
to which a reference has already been made, and
the Hizb an-Nustra (the Party of Victory). Some Uzbek
analysts describe them as dissident groups of the
HT, consisting of members who left the HT because
of its policy of not resorting to terrorism.
After independent Uzbekistan came into
existence in 1991, the authorities followed a
liberal policy towards Islam. They permitted the
reopening of many mosques, which had been closed
down by the Soviet government before 1991, and the
construction of new mosques in Andijan, and let
the local Muslims go on pilgrimage to their holy
land in Saudi Arabia. There was a mushrooming of
new mosques funded by Saudi money. But after the
emergence of the HT in 1995, they reversed this
policy.
Since 1998, the anger of the
Muslims of the Ferghana Valley has been aggravated
by the refusal of the authorities to give
permission for the construction of new mosques in
Andijan. The authorities even converted the main
mosque in the town into an art museum, and another
into a center for the welfare of women and
children.
In 1998, the government of
President Islam Karimov passed a new law requiring
all existing mosques to re-register. Fresh
registration was refused to a large number of
mosques. Out of about 2,200 mosques in Andijan,
only 42 were re-registered, and the remaining were
forced to close down on the grounds that they had
been started without authorization. In Namangan,
another town in the Ferghana Valley, only 240 of
1,000 mosques were re-registered, and the
remaining forced to close down.
When
Muslims started praying in the streets in response
to calls of the HT, the police arrested them and
accused them of being Wahhabis. Abduvali Mirzoev,
a prominent imam who was Andijan's best-known
Islamic leader, was arrested and allegedly sent to
a labor camp. The HT followers alleged that he had
been illegally kidnapped by the Uzbek security
service while he was on his way to the airport to
catch a flight to Moscow. Since then, the HT has
observed every year the anniversary of the day of
his alleged abduction as a day of protest in
Andijan.
In a recent pamphlet, the HT
said:
Sheikh Abduvali Qori made a great
contribution to the growth of Islam in
Uzbekistan. Thanks to God, the number of Muslims
unbelievably increased in Uzbekistan due to his
efforts and lectures. He schooled a lot of
students and educated the people on the
teachings of Islam. His vast Islamic knowledge
won him a reputation both at home and abroad as
a great Muslim scholar. The government of
Uzbekistan, which is fiercely fighting against
Islam, has become increasingly alarmed by this
situation and therefore attempted several plots
against Sheikh Abduvali Qori. One of the
government plots against the Sheikh Abduvali
Qori involved a terrible arson. As a result, his
house and property were completely destroyed.
The people who witnessed this tragedy remember
that the sheikh cried about his books, which he
had collected all his life and treasured a lot.
It is a disgusting fact that the Uzbekistan
government exercises ransom, abduction and other
kinds of terror against Muslim scholars instead
of honoring them. But, all of these inhuman acts
of terror failed to stop and prevent him from
continuing to educate the people on Islam.
The incredibly increasing popularity of
the sheikh among the people both at home and
abroad indeed frightened President Karimov and
his entourage. After it failed to find a single
reason to arrest him, the government resorted to
abducting the Sheikh Abduvali Qori. Afraid of
causing unrest among the Muslims who loved the
Sheikh Abduvali Qori more than their own
fathers, the government used its NSS [National
Security Service] officers to commit this crime
covertly. On August 29, 1995 the government of
Uzbekistan abducted the Sheikh Abduvali Qori and
his accompanying student, Ramazon Matkarimov, in
Tashkent airport when they were boarding to fly
to a World Islamic Symposium that was to be held
in Moscow. The repression of the
followers of the HT and the IMU intensified after
February 1999, when 16 people were killed in
explosions in the capital Tashkent, for which the
authorities blamed Islamic extremists. Thousands
of suspected members of these organizations were
arrested. They continue to be in detention without
trial.
The only madrassa in
Andijan, founded in 1990 by Adiljon-Haji
Abdusalamov, a respected religious leader, was
ordered to be closed down in 1998 on the ground
that its management had violated laws relating to
public health. He was arrested and jailed for two
years. Thereafter, the government has not
permitted the opening of any school for religious
instruction.
In a statement issued on June
17, 2003, Dr Imran Waheed, of the HT based in
London, who allegedly coordinates the activities
of the HT in Uzbekistan, said:
Tens of thousands of Uzbek Muslims
have been unlawfully arrested, thousands have
been tortured and dozens have been killed in
extra-judicial executions. Uzbek Muslim women
have been threatened with gang rape during
interrogation. Muslims in prison report that
they have been subjected to continuous and cruel
battery, repeated anal rape and the insertion of
metal bars in the anus, incarceration in
basement cells in conditions intolerable for any
human being and the injecting of HIV infected
blood for adhering to their Islamic prayer
rituals and refusing to seek clemency from
President Karimov.
The
most recent example of this onslaught is that
of Orif Eshonov, a 38-year-old member of
the non-violent Islamic political party Hizbut Tahrir
and father of four young children, who was detained
by the Uzbek security services in Karshi in
early May. After being held incommunicado he
was brutally killed in custody on May 15. His body
had heavy bruising to the arms, shoulders,
upper chest, legs and soles of the feet. There
were open wounds to one arm and his back. Several
ribs had been broken and needles had been
inserted under his fingernails. The
campaign against independent Muslims continues with
the blessing of the US government and the silence
of European governments - last year Uzbekistan received
$500 million in US aid and in a May 14 document
the US State Department reported that Uzbekistan
is making "substantial and continuing progress"
in meeting human rights and democracy
commitments. While [US President George W] Bush and
[British Prime Minister Tony] Blair fete Karimov for
his allegiance in the "war on terror", tens
of thousands of Muslims continue to languish in
the dark and dingy dungeons of Uzbekistan.
America's ally, Karimov, has waged an intense
and relentless campaign against Muslims
in Uzbekistan. Muslims will never bow down
their heads before this arrogant, tyrant ruler - the
increased oppression will be an incentive to
further intensify the work for the removal of
such tyrants. Since 2003, the HT has
organized a series of demonstrations by women in
Andijan to protest against the continued detention
and alleged torture of their relatives by the
local authorities, and since February it has been
organizing protests against the detention and
trial of 23 Muslim businessmen. It was this
protest movement which triggered off the violent
uprising of May 13.
The HT keeps up a
virulent campaign not only against the Uzbek
government and the US, but also against the Jewish
community and Israel. It often refers to Karimov
as a Jewish stooge. During World War II, more than
200,000 Jews escaped extermination in West Europe
by fleeing to Central Asia. Anti-Semitism was not
prevalent in the Central Asian republics of the
erstwhile USSR to the same extent as it was in the
Slav republics of the USSR.
After the
collapse of the USSR in 1991, Islamic
fundamentalism made its appearance in the region
through Pakistani organizations such as the
Tablighi Jamaat, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and through the HT,
which came from the UK via Pakistan. This led to
anti-Jewish feelings on the one side and anti-Slav
feelings on the other. The Pakistani organizations
spread the Wahhabi ideology, which led to the
republics becoming a hotbed of jihadi
extremist/terrorist activities in pursuit of the
objective of an Islamic caliphate.
The deterioration in the economic
conditions consequent to the collapse of the USSR also led
to inter-ethnic tensions among Muslims themselves.
In 1989-1990, there was a massacre of Meskhetin
Turks in the Ferghana Valley area of Uzbekistan.
There were frequent instances of anti-Armenian and
anti-Jewish violence in Andijan and there were
violent clashes between Uzbeks and Kirghiz in the
Osh region.
As a result of these
developments, there was a decrease in the Jewish
population from about 150,000 in 1989 to about
22,000, of whom about 12,000 were in Uzbekistan,
8,000 in Kazakhstan, 1,500 in Kyrgyzstan and the
remaining 500 in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
B Raman is additional secretary
(retired), cabinet secretariat, government of
India, New Delhi, and, presently, director,
Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and
distinguished fellow and convener, Observer
Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter. Email:
itschen36@gmail.com
(Copyright 2005 B
Raman) |
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