Uzbekistan: Where Journalism is Branded Terrorism

International Herald Tribune – September 21, 2005

Galima Bukharbaeva

 

 

NEW YORK I stand accused of terrorism. My crime? Doing only what I am doing now: reporting in the international media. The authorities in Uzbekistan make no distinction between journalism and terrorism.

 

As a journalist, I witnessed first hand the massacre in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijon on May 13, 2005, when government troops fired from armored personnel carriers at crowds of unarmed demonstrators on Bobur Square, murdering hundreds, if not thousands of people. After I reported and commented on these bloody events for CNN, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and The Wall Street Journal Europe, the Uzbek state accused me of abetting terrorism.

 

On Tuesday, Uzbekistan's Supreme Court began hearings in the first Andijon trial, and the authorities will present a meticulously scripted set of lies and forced confessions to make their case. In the grand tradition of Stalinist show trials, there are, of course, numerous defendants. Announcing his entirely fabricated initial conclusions last week, the general prosecutor named 15 people in a grand conspiracy to bring down the Uzbek state.

 

The outcome of the trial is, of course, easy to predict. There is no judicial independence in Uzbekistan, and the government's interpretation of Andijon is clear: the events of May 13 were not a public demonstration by desperate people after long years of government oppression, but a terrorist act, organized from outside by an Islamist extremist group with the support of international media. In this initial trial, ordinary citizens who were simply dissatisfied with the authorities will be convicted as terrorists. In the next trial, journalists who wrote the truth about Andijon will be sentenced as their accomplices.

 

Fellow journalists also charged with providing "informational support to terrorism" include Marcus Bensmann, who reported from Andijon for Deutsche Welle, the German TV channel ARD and the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung; and Andrey Babitskiy from RFE/RL; as well as the Uzbek journalists Matluba Azamatova of the BBC and Alexey Volosevich from the Internet news agency Ferghana.ru.

 

The fabricated conspiracy is offensive to the victims of the government's mass murder and insulting to the intelligence of the international community, but sadly it is hardly a surprise. The absurd accusations against the media are really only a logical step for Uzbekistan. After shooting so many unarmed civilians in broad daylight, they have to come up with some elaborate story to silence and discredit the thousands of witnesses who were there that day.

 

Against those who survived the slaughter and are still inside the country, the authorities have unleashed a massive wave of repression. Thousands of people have been arrested in Andijon and throughout the country. Many have been tortured for confessions and forced to make public recantations. Their families, friends and neighbors have been harassed. Some witnesses have disappeared. New reports released this week by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International detail these efforts by the Uzbek government to erase local memories.

 

Tashkent is also going after those who took their memories with them when they escaped the country. First, Uzbekistan tried to blackmail neighboring Kyrgyzstan into handing over witnesses who fled there as refugees after the massacre. Now, hundreds have been relocated to safety in Romania, where they are being interviewed by international journalists. And for those who reported the massacre to the world in the first place - in terms that simply do not correspond to the official version of events - there are the trials: Tashkent's formal attempt to rewrite history fully and comprehensively.

 

The humanitarian evacuation of Andijon refugees from Kyrgyzstan to Romania by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the readiness of many European countries to accept them is at least an indication that the international community does not believe Tashkent's rewritten version of history. The world knows Andijon was a massacre.

 

But accepting the truth is not enough. The West has to take bold action based on that truth. It should examine targeted sanctions on members of the Uzbek elite and on certain international companies involved in the cotton trade - a key export for Uzbekistan. At the very minimum, the UN must appoint a special rapporteur on events in Andijon. That person would probably not be able to gain full access given President Islam Karimov's refusal to allow an international investigation, but a report from a high-level official who had interviewed refugees would at least formally challenge the regime's attempt to rewrite history.

 

Now living abroad - and although the Uzbek authorities are still harassing my family back home - I am freer to speak the truth about Andijon. But for all those who have been brutally silenced within Uzbekistan itself, such a high-level report would be their very voice.

 

(Galima Bukharbaeva, a journalist from Uzbekistan, now lives in New York.)