Condoleeza Rice meeting with Tajik opposition figures and wearing a hijab. Photograph courtesy of a friend (CC-usage).

Editor’s note: Hillary Clinton: rushed, unprepared, and unclear. Condoleeza Rice: careful, prepared, and very clear. But were both hypocritical and insufficient, just in different ways? Tajik civil society and journalists debate the two Secretaries of State’s visits to Tajikistan in 2005 and 2011. neweurasia’s Alpharabius reports.

Recently, a peaceful debate almost erupted into a verbal fight between several of my friends in the Tajik civil society and journalistic community. The faultline was between those who adore Hillary Clinton and those who are fond of Condoleezza Rice. During her term as Secretary of State, Rice had visited Tajikistan, and although it’s been only two weeks and several years since Clinton and Rice visited our nation, feelings are still hot among the Tajiks.

In Dushanbe, Clinton discussed bilateral and regional issues with President Rahmon and Foreign Minister Zarifi, then held a town hall meeting “with Tajiks from across the spectrum of activities; from human rights activists to religious leaders, to members of the media, women leaders, students, and educators,” as she put it herself. A friend of mine, who was invited to the town hall meeting, states that he met with some civil society representatives, but that the audience was mostly pro-government:

“Neither were there leaders or well-known activists of political parties, or any well-known independent journalists, nor the actual religious leaders, who are currently under the government pressure.”

Now compare this to Rice, who met with the leaders and activists of the opposition when she visited Tajikistan in October 2005. Of course, this interaction did not bring about any substantial changes in Tajikistan, but it nevertheless at least showed that the United States had knowledge of the political situation in Tajikistan and made an attempt to pay some attention to the opposition. Indeed, Rice warned Tajik authorities against further oppression and suffocation of political freedom in the country.

In a recent interview with the weekly Ozodagon, the leader of the Social-Democratic Party of Tajikistan, Rahmatillo Zoirov, criticized the US Embassy in Dushanbe for “dividing political parties from the civil society”. According to Zoirov, Rice brought a list of 16 issues related to the situation in Tajikistan and requested the Tajik authorities to focus on those issues, yet Clinton limited herself to a few broad declarations.

Zoirov adds that he was disappointed by the Embassy’s attitude towards democratic values in Tajikistan and added that the reason this important is because “the position of the embassy is [effectively] the position of the administration,” in terms of the impression it makes.

However, some of my friends disagree, pointing out that Clinton was sharper than Rice in pointing out the issue of religious freedom, since the government is under extreme criticism for the recent adoption of the law that prohibits citizens under the age of 18 from attending mosques. They add that Rice also donned an Islamic scarf when she visited a girls’ religious school, precisely during the peak of our nation’s heated dispute about the headgear.

However, again in defense of Rice, is the fact that her visit was much more clear than Clinton’s in terms of message. One friend put it this way:

“The picture of Condi wearing the Islamic scarf and talking to bearded Islamic teachers was a much more stronger signal to the Tajik government than Clinton’s broad-spectrum declarations, who was talking about serious issues, but smiling simultaneously.”

I, personally, am a fan of Clinton, for I have unpleasant and disappointing impressions of Rice as Bush’s warmonger. I’ll never forger her “conviction” about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whereas Clinton is a much more soft-mannered and nuanced person. And yet, I must also agree with my friends that ultimately Clinton’s visit to our nation seemed unprepared, rushed, and unclear, with the real conversations happening behind closed doors and the town hall just a decoration.

This post, originally by Jim Brooke, is from NewEurasia.net partner Kanal PIK TV English

The Tajik Air jet was still taxiing to a stop at Dushanbe’s airport, but the men on board were already in the aisles, smiles on their faces, happy to be home.

Home alive that is.

I don’t know if below my feet on the plane was any “Cargo 200” – Soviet slang for bodies sent home in zinc lined coffins.

A few days before I arrived in Dushbanbe, Tajikistan’s Migration Service announced that during the first eight months of 2011, the bodies of 603 Tajik gastarbeiters had been repatriated from Russia. (By comparison, 1,811 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan over the last 10 years.) With about 700,000 Tajiks working in Russia, that factors to an annual mortality rate of around one to 1,000.

The high death toll, which is little changed in recent years, is largely due to lethally lax safety procedures on Russian construction sites. The Migration Service collects data on flights arriving from the 17 Russian cities that have direct service to Tajikistan’s two international airports, in Dushanbe and Khujand.

But one detail jumped out of the latest report. Of the 603 deaths, 67 were attributed to “attacks by nationalist groups.”

Russia’s media largely ignored this item. But the following week, a group of Tajik public figures sent an open letter of protest to Russian authorities, the United Nations, and the Council of Europe.

“We, representatives of the Tajik and international public, are extremely alarmed by the growing intensity of the efforts of radical neo-Nazi organizations in the Russian Federation stimulating the growth of xenophobic sentiments in society. Therefore we are calling on the Russian authorities to take more resolute measures to resist the growth of nationalist extremism in the country,” the letter read.

After a little internet research, I calculated that a Tajik working in Russia today runs the roughly same risk of lynching as an African American did in the American South in 1930.

To continue reading this post, click here.

Esquire-Russian analyzed UN’s World Population Prospects (2010 revision) and The Economist data and came up with a map that shows a forecast of the extinction of various nations based on the so-called net replacement rate – the average number of girls, delivered by an average woman in a lifetime in a particular country and survived until the end of the reproductive period at these levels.

According to the map, countries which has less than millennium to exist are marked in brown. “Light browned” nations will live in the 3000-3299 years period. “Milky” identifies those who live from 3300 to 3999 years more. “Orange” countries will exist from 4000 to 9999, and those countries colored in “gray” will live for 10,000 or more.

All green countries on the map are the luckiest — they will never disappear, the “immortals.” Read the full story »

Editor’s note: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Uzbekistan and Tajikistan this past weekend. High on her agenda was the problematic issue of press freedom and human rights in the two countries. neweurasia’s Tomyris, however, wonders what may have been said — or not said — behind closed doors.

US Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, made her way to and through Central Asia this past weekend – stopping in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – on October 22nd and 23rd.

Here’s a summary of Clinton’s agenda: In Tajikistan, she met with President Emomali Rahmon and Foreign Minister Hamrokhon Zarifi to discuss bilateral and regional issues. She also met with locals, to – quite democratically – hear the voices of the people. And in Uzbekistan, Clinton met with President Islam Karimov and Foreign Minister Elyor Ganiev. Cars and technology were on her mind in Tashkent – Clinton visited the new General Motors Powertrain plant where she spoke about the Technology Entrepreneurship Program and Techno-Prize Competition.

About Tajikistan, but also alluding to similar issues in Uzbekistan, Interfax-News reported:

“The United States is concerned by the state of the freedom of the press in Tajikistan…”

And thus there was much discussion about the importance of opening up the media landscape in both former Soviet counties.
Read the full story »

Editor’s note: Good news — sort of. Muhammad Yusuf Ismailov and Urunboy Usmonov have been found guilty, but with very commuted sentences. neweurasia’s Alpharabius reports. “The international community has succeeded in bringing sufficient pressure onto the situation to make the Tajik authorities rectify themselves,” he writes, “[But] in the end, this two-faced/face-saving sentencing just demonstrates further the weakness of the Tajik justice system.”

Two different trials against Tajik journalists Muhammad Yusuf Ismailov and Urunboy Usmonov have resulted in strikingly similar sentences: both were found guilty, but not to the extent that the prosecutors had wanted. The result? The Nuri Zindagi correspondent, Ismailov, was fined 35,000 somoni (~7,200 USD), and the BBC reporter, Usmonov, was formally sentenced to three years in prison, only to have that immediately commuted by the recent amnesty.

To review, Ismailov was accused of slander and blackmail, punishable up to 16 years in prison, while Usmonov was accused of religious extremism faced up to five years. Prosecutors frequently failed to provide evidence sufficient or proportional to their desired indictments, and chargers were dropped literally one after another during trials. Ismailov was charged of inciting ethnic tensions, but the prosecutors could neither define the term nor provide evidence; the accusation of slander was similarly weak. without clear endorsement. The only allegation that stuck in any sense was that of insulting officials, as the State Language Committee was of the opinion that the tone of his articles were derisive. Nevertheless, this same Committee — which is by no means independent, by the way — said that he did not deserve such a steep sentence, and anyway, the constitution protects freedom of speech. Meanwhile, Usmonov originally was accused of being a member of the banned Hizb-ut-Tahrir movement, whose own members denied this. The prosecutors ultimately attempted to charge him for failing to inform authorities about the movement, but in fact, according to Tajik law a journalist has the right to keep his sources anonymous.

The Tajik National Association of Independent Media (NANSMIT) deemed Ismailov’s trial an act of “political revenge” launched by the local authorities who were the subject of criticism in his articles. The accusation against Usmonov was just gibberish in the eyes of everyone who knows him well. The Committee to protect Journalists (CPJ) has said,

“Both journalists are being punished for nothing other than their independent reporting on issues of public interest. Usmonov is charged with extremism, while Ismoilov faces defamation, insult and extortion charges. All charges have been fabricated, CPJ research shows.”

The international community has succeeded in bringing sufficient pressure onto the situation to make the Tajik authorities rectify themselves. Besides the CPJ and NewEurasia, there was of course RFE/RL and VOA, the BBC added its noteworthy might to Usmonov’s cause in particular, and the OSCE representative on freedom of press, Dunya Miyatovic, openly accused Tajik authorities of not responding to her letters about the cases. Supporters also formed groups on Facebook defending the reporters.

How should we assess the sentences? On the one hand, the Tajik authorities clearly realised that they were going to be in for a public relations whipping had they decided to push forward with the harsher sentences, and they calculated that they were not up for suffering the lashes. On the other hand, they needed to save face to their own power-bases. The journalists already suffered trial, and even if their sentences have been reduced, their reputations have been harmed among many of the Tajik readership who simply don’t know the subtleties of the cases. So, in the end, this two-faced/face-saving sentencing just demonstrates further the weakness of the Tajik justice system.

Incidentally, there’s a call from among some of my colleagues that Ismailov and Usmonov should launch lawsuits against their accusers. If this happens, the tables could very well turn, and perhaps the Tajik justice will finally muster the courage to exert its independence and bring about real rule of law in the country…

Photograph provided to neweurasia's Alpharabius (CC-usage).

Editor’s note: The trial of Nuri Zindagi reporter Mahmadyusuf Ismoilov has been momentarily adjourned due to “sickness” on the part of a judicial aide — although a friend of neweurasia’s Alpharabius caught the aide shopping. Were that not enough, prosecutors have opened a case against Ismoilov’s lawyer. Is this Tajik justice?

The trial of Mahmadyusuf Ismoilov, a regional reporter for the Dushanbe-based independent weekly Nuri Zindagi whom I blogged about this past weekend, was adjourned yesterday until October 29.

The apparent reason was that one of the judicial aids to judge Saodat Aliva became sick. However, an acquaintance of mine has said that she met the aid in the local market yesterday and the individual seemed healthy — certainly healthy enough to go shopping. (My acquaintance tried to take a photo of the aide using a mobile phone, which resulted in a small confrontation between them…)

Calling out sick at a key moment in a sensitive judicial process is a widespread trick here in Tajikistan, as our judges often resort to it when they do not feel that they have a clear signal from “above” about how to proceed.

Read the full story »

Editor: The BBC’s Urunboy Usmonov is not the only journalist in Tajikistan in trouble with political authorities: local reporter Muhammad Yusuf Ismailov (Makhmadyusuf Ismoilov) is facing 16 years in prison for reporting about corruption. neweurasia’s Alpharabius warns that Ismailov’s international obscurity makes him a softer target than Usmonov — and his case more dangerous for independent media in Tajikistan.

The news has been chocking: prosecutors have demanded a 16-year jail term for a journalist just because he wrote the truth about social problems and corrupt authorities. They accuse him of “inciting ethnic tensions”, “insulting officials”, and “extortion”. The next court hearing is scheduled for this Monday, October 3. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, if convicted, Ismailov will be the first journalist to suffer this in Tajikistan in a decade.

Muhammad Yusuf Ismailov (Makhmadyusuf Ismoilov) was arrested in November 2010 after publishing a story earlier that summer in the now-defunct Dushanbe weekly Nuri Zindagi about widespread abuses by local authorities in the Asht district of northern Tajikistan [Ed.: Alpharabius has provided us pdf copies of the article in question which you can download at the bottom of this post]. It was very good, fact-based investigative reporting.

Today, Ismailov, 51 years old, ill and physically disabled, has been in jail for more than 10 months. There was some hope that he might have been released when the government issued the recent amnesty to commemorate 20 years of Tajikistan’s independence, but this failed to happen (instead, I’m told that prosecutors had offered to reduce the sentence they are seeking from 16 years to 14 — how “kind” of them!)

The crux of the case against Ismailov are two sets of testimony: one from 12 state employees of the Asht district government, the other from the Tajikistan Language Committee. According to Nuri Zindagi’s chief editor, Dzhuma Mirzo, several witnesses have changed their testimony in favor of the defendant. Meanwhile, the Committee argues that perhaps the Ismailov crossed the line and should be held accountable for inflammatory and extortive rhetoric. In my view, this argument is simply not true. Let’s look at this point by point.

Read the full story »

All too often we hear of journalists threatened, injured or – in worst case scenarios – even killed, for the work they do. Getting up, dusting themselves off – cut and bruised – they bravely fight for a free press, believing in the informative word above all. The recent story of a Tajik journalist’s will and want to forgive his attackers – thought it came out the attack was not targeted at his media work – still sets a great hypothetical and everyday example of how often times the work of journalists is to unite us by keeping us informed, at the end of the day, not to divide us – even in the most troublesome and difficult of situations and circumstances.

On August 31st, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service reported that Khurshed Atovullo (Niyozov), journalist and editor of the independent Tajik weekly “Farazh“, was attacked on his way to an Eid al-Fitr celebration.

Absolutely not in the spirit of Holy Ramadan – he, his brother and brother-on-law were attacked by men armed with clubs. While on their way to a friend’s house in Tajikistan’s capital city Dushanbe, their car was blockaded, and the men forced out. It turned out the attackers were teenagers, who were immediately tracked down by police, after the Tajik journalist and editor called in their license plate number to the authorities.
Read the full story »

Before, it was Kyrgyzstan, now it is Tajikistan:

Today I had a chat with a friend of mine and she informed me that the authorities had told her 22-year-old relative that he cannot continue his studies in Tajikistan, otherwise his diploma will not be acknowledged by the Turkmen authorities.

At first I was surprised — are our students banned from Tajikistan of all places?! So, I did some asking around and also checked RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service (their story in Turkmen here). Actually, the surprise didn’t go away, but it was joined by anger.

Read the full story »

Just as neweurasia regretted to learn that Urumboy Usmonov “still may face unjust criminal prosecution” – we again regret to learn that he was mistreated while in detention.

BBC‘s Central Asian Service, 10 year long Tajik journalist was arrested on June 13th and held in northern Tajikistan for suspicion membership in the Islamic Movement Hizb ut-Tahrir. The journalist was released on bail on July 14th. For more information, see: “Alleged religious association lands a BBC journalist in Tajik detention” and subsequent neweurasia pages.

In terms of physical torture, Usmonov was reportedly beaten and burnt with cigarettes while being held by authorities. Journalism.co.uk informs that Usmonov:

“…told a court that he was tortured and forced to sign a confession during his time in detention.”

The Associated Press reported that Fayzinisso Vokhidova, Usmonov’s lawyer, said the journalist avoided:

“talking about the alleged torture earlier for fear of worsening the mistreatment.”

Read the full story »