Tag Archives: religious freedom

Tajikistan blocks Iran’s application to join the SCO

SEPT. 20 (The Bulletin) — Tajikistan is blocking Iranian membership of the Russia and China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) because it accuses Tehran of supporting a banned Islamic party, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported. The SCO is often viewed in the West as a military organisation, although its functions and institutions go further. It is focused on Central Asia, although this year India and Pakistan joined. SCO ascension needs approval from every member.

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— This story was first published in issue 344 of The Conway Bulletin, now called the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on Sept. 24 2017.

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2017

Uzbek authorities take 16,000 people off terror blacklist

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SEPT. 2 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Uzbekistan have removed 16,000 people from a blacklist of 17,000 people with alleged links to extremist groups, media reported. Analysts said the move was another attempt by Pres. Shavkat Mirziyoyev to pursue more liberal policies and to create a clear departure from Islam Karimov, who ruled the country as an authoritarian dictator.

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(News report from Issue No. 342, published on Sept. 7 2017)

Georgia closes second school linked to Gulen

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TBILISI, AUG. 360 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Georgia closed a second school linked to Turkey’s Gulen movement, nearly four months after they detained one of its senior staff members and accused him of being linked to terrorism.
Turkey has pressured its neighbours into arresting and deporting people it has linked to a failed coup last year that it blames on so-called Gulenists. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have, so far, refused to bend to the pressure but Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and, increasingly, Georgia have acquiesced.
In an interview with the Georgia-based Open Caucasus Media, Gia Murghulia, deputy head of the education ministry’s Council of Authorisation of Secondary Schools said that it had revoked a licence for the private Demirel College in Tbilisi.
He insisted, though, that the school had been closed for teaching failures and not for any political reasons.
“We are not interested in political aspects,” he was quoted as saying.
Others were sceptical and said that the closure was political.
In May, Mustafa Cabuk, a Turkish manager at the school was detained for his alleged links to the Gulen movement. He has since been fighting extradition attempts, saying that he would be tortured if he was sent back to Turkey.
Georgia has also revoked the licence of a school in Batumi linked to the Gulen network and detained a Turkish businessman.
In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gulenists, followers of the exiled of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, headed out from Turkey and set up a series of schools and universities across Central Asia and the South Caucasus.
Georgia has been fostering increasingly close ties with Turkey. It jointly hosts a gas pipeline running from the Caspian Sea to Europe, is developing commercial interests and hosts joint military exercises.

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(News report from Issue No. 342, published on Sept. 7 2017)

Tajikistan increases anti-headscarf campaign

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AUG. 2 2017 (The Bulletin) — Police in Tajikistan have detained and fined women for wearing hijabs, Islamic headscarves, the Forum 18 News Service reported. Last month, the authorities said they were launching an official campaign against what they described as non-traditional clothing. Forum 18 reported that women have felt “humiliated” for having to remove their headscarves in public.

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(News report from Issue No. 336, published on Aug. 5 2017)

Uzbekistan’s Pres. Mirziyoyev reaches out to Muslims

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TASHKENT, JUNE 15 2017 (The Bulletin) — Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev hosted an iftar, a religious dinner eaten after sunset during the Islamic festival of Ramadan, for the first time in Uzbekistan, possibly a sign that he is trying to woo pious Muslims.

The dinner featured 1,200 people and was televised, a medium widely used by the Uzbek authorities when they want to get a message out to the population.

One Uzbek man in his 20s said that this was a clear signal that Mr Mirziyoyev was trying to make a clean break with the policies of former president Islam Karimov who distrusted and marginalised Islam.

“It seems that our president began taming imams with soft power,” he said.

Another young Uzbek was more direct and said that Mirziyoyev may have other priorities.

“Putin was also a Communist and a KGB agent and now he manipulates the masses via the Russian Orthodox Church,” he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin who promoted the Orthodox church and rebuilt cathedrals once he took power, in direct contrast to the Soviet Union’s treatment of religion.

“So does Mirziyoyev, I think.”

Although there has been a gradual increase in some civil liberties in the past nine months or so, people in Uzbekistan are still wary of discussing politics and both men declined to be named.

Uzbekistan is officially a secular republic, although its population is predominantly Muslim. After independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Karimov argued with leaders of a popular Islamist movement. He ended up banning them, leading to the creation of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) which launched a series of bomb attacks in the 1990s.

Karimov also blacklisted hundreds of pious ordinary Muslims and tried to ban some practices, such as the iftar.

On a trip to Bukhara in the south of the country earlier on June 15, before his iftar, Mr Mirziyoyev also suggested that he was going to roll back some of the Karimov-era restrictions on Muslims.

He said that he wanted to rebuild the 15th century madrasah Mir Arab and also that it might be time to move some people off an official blacklist of Muslims.

“All the blacklisted can’t be radicals. You should speak to them, recheck their views and learn if there are any innocent who were blacklisted inequitably,” he told an audience of thousands on a conference call that lasted several hours with religious and secular leaders across the country.

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

Turkmenistan has imprisoned Gulenists, says HRW

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JUNE 9 2017 (The Bulletin) — The New York-based Human Rights Watch accused the Turkmen government of illegally detaining and imprisoning 18 men allegedly linked to the Gulen network that Turkish President Recep Erdogan accuses of plotting a coup.

In its report, Human Rights Watch said that the men were part of a group of 100 men arrested in September and October last year after a request from Turkey.

“The men’s families found out about the arrests in Turkmenistan only through unofficial contacts. They were allowed no contact with their loved ones until after the trial, which was closed and held at the pretrial detention centre. Four state- appointed lawyers served as the men’s defence counsel,” HRW said in its press release.

In Turkey, the security forces have rounded up thousands of supporters of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen. In Central Asia and the South Caucasus, Turkey has asked the authorities to detain and deport people linked to Gulen, mainly in the education sector.

Gulenists travelled to these newly independent former Soviet republics in the 1990s and set up what are now some of the region’s best-regarded universities and schools.

Human Rights Watch said it had seen a summary of the verdict handed out to the men which said that the court had found them guilty of offences linked to the incitement of social, ethnic and religious hatred and also involvement in criminal organisations.

Turkmenistan has one of the worst records for human rights and free speech and is considered a secretive, closed-off country. It has not commented on the Human Rights Watch allegations.

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(News report from Issue No. 332, published on June 12 2017)

UN human rights chief visits Uzbekistan

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MAY 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, started a tour of Uzbekistan, the first since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Mr Zeid met with Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Uzbekistan leader since September and the man credited with opening up the country, at the start of his trip.

During their 1-1/2 meeting, Mr Zeid urged Mr Mirziyoyev to show restraint in his campaign to root out radical Islamists.

“As in other countries, I have emphasized that the answer to the risk of radicalisation is not simply heavy-handed security measures and repressive policies which breed resentment and frustration, thereby making it easier for extremists to recruit new supporters,” he was quoted by Voice of America as saying.

Mr Mirziyoyev took over from Islam Karimov who was loathed by human rights activists for ordering soldiers to shoot and kill anti- government in Andijan, in the east of the country, in 2005 and for locking up his political opponents.

Analysts, though, cautioned that major policy changes were unlikely.

“Important economic reforms are currently underway, but the Uzbek administration, in close proximity with the powerful Uzbek security services, will not risk giving any oxygen to the political situation under which thousands of prisoners have been incarcerated for dissent for nearly two decades,” said Kate Mallinson, a Central Asia analyst.

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)

Kazakhstan looks to ban Salafism

ALMATY, OCT. 14 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan appeared to signal that it would ban Salafism, a form of Islam, after its new minister for religious affairs, Nurlan Yermekbayev, described it as “unacceptable”.

Mr Yermekbayev’s comments, at his first press conference as minister for religious freedom, will strengthen analysts’ views that the ministry, created last month, was designed to clamp down on religious freedom.

“We consider that for Kazakhstan, Salafism is an unacceptable and destructive religious movement. In

general, Kazakhstan’s society has a negative attitude to this alien understanding of faith, leading to radicalism,” the official Astana Times newspaper quoted him as saying.

“Our future work will focus on preventing the spread of literature and the work of the websites promoting the ideology of Salafism.”

Salafism is an ultra-conservative form of Islam that has its roots in Egypt. It has been blamed for the spread of radical Islam.

Previously, Wahhabism, has been blamed for encouraging a series of terrorist attacks in Kazakhstan and banned by the government.

But Kazakh officials have now blamed a series of gun attacks in Aktobe, in the west of the country, in June on a group of Salafists.

Kazakhstan, like its neighbours, has been clamping down on pious Muslims, increasingly worried that they are destabilising the country and acting as a possible fifth column.

Human rights groups have described the clamp-downs as attacks on human rights and free speech.

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(News report from Issue No. 301, published on Oct. 21 2016)

Kazakhstan retiriertes Hijab ban

OCT. 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan said that it had reiterated a ban on hijabs at school despite a number of complaints from parents since the ban was introduced in January. Kazakhstan is officially a secular states although the vast majority of people are Muslim. Headscarves have also become a more common sight on the streets of Kazakh cities over the past few years.

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(News report from Issue No. 301, published on Oct. 21 2016)