By IPS Correspondents
MOSCOW, May 29 1998 (IPS)

More Islamists are going on trial in Uzbekistan, charged with involvement in last year’s unrest in the south-eastern city of Namangan, as president Islam Karimov backs up a draconian new law on religious activism passed this month.

Seven more defendants appeared in court this week charged with ‘committing crimes of an extremist nature’ with the intention of undermining ‘regional social and political stability’. At least 12 have already been jailed on similar charges in the city.

Major changes to the country’s penal code announced last week and a new law on religion makes it a crime to set up public or religious organisations without permission, punishable by fines up to 100 times the minimum salary (750 soms a month) or up to five years in jail.

‘Propagandising’ on behalf of banned religious groups can be punished by up to three years of corrective labour; attempts to convert believers from one religion to another or ‘any other missionary activity’, is punishable by a fine or 15 days of detention for a first offence; for “appearing in public in religious attire,” except officials of registered religious organisations, the punishment is a fine or 15 days detention.

On Tuesday New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged Karimov’s government with carrying out “unchecked repression” against Muslims who had opposed the state-controlled Muslim Board of Uzbekistan.

“The government is subjecting Muslims on a mass scale to beatings, show trials, expulsions from universities and jobs, and lengthy prison terms,” said Holly Cartner, director of HRW’s Europe and Central Asia division. “The government is painting all Muslims with the same brush – those who may have criminal intent, and average Muslims who simply wear a beard or go to the mosque.”

Karimov blames Islamists in Namangan, a city in the south-eastern Fergana Valley, home to a third of Uzbekistan’s 22 million people, 90 percent of them Muslim for violence in the region.

Their alleged activities included murdering government officials, and plans to blow up water reservoirs and power plants, he claimed, telling parliamentarians that he would personally execute the convicted men if needed.

The Fergana Valley has a long tradition of Islamic piety. Once the iron grip of the atheist Soviet system began to loosen in the mid-1980s, its inhabitants started to show their religious colours.

Between 1986 and 1991, the number of mosques in Namangan, with a population of 360,000, rose from two to 26, including one run by Wahhabis. By then the all-Union Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP), a socio- political organisation, had established itself in the Fergana Valley, as had a local socio-religious body, called Adalat (‘justice’).

Though these organisations had differing priorities, they were all opposed to Karimov’s insistence on keeping the state and the mosque apart.

Publicly, Karimov took the oath of his office on the Koran and went on to allow a weekly programme on Islam on state-run television. Privately, it combined its legal suppression of Islamists — the 1992 Uzbek constitution bars the formation of political parties based on religion or ethnic nationalism — with extra-judicial actions.

In 1995 Abdu Wali Mirzoyev, a charismatic cleric in the Fergana Valley town of Andijan, disappeared on his way to the airport. He was widely believed to have been abducted by the secret police. Last September a similar fate fell Nehmat Parpiyev, a former bodyguard of Mirzoyev.

In response, in early December masked men in Namangan decapitated a police officer, notorious for his brutality. In a gun battle that followed three more policemen were killed as well as a suspect.

The dead suspect was described by the authorities as a Wahhabi, a follower of the puritanical sect of Wahhabism within the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam. Uzbek Islamists are often, wrongly, labelled as Wahhabis, though there is a wide network of Wahhabis, who, often financed by affluent Saudi nationals, functioned as an Islamic sect, with their own mosques and theological schools.

Nevertheless the government imposed curfews in Namangan and other Fergana Valley cities and arrested scores of residents as extremist Islamists, while maintaining silence about the events on the state-run radio and television. It also banned broadcasts of the call to prayer from mosques by loudspeakers during Ramadan.

And at Karimov’s behest, the parliament went on to outlaw the Birlik Popular Front, a secular political movement, on the basis that the members of the banned IRP had penetrated it, and were using it as a stalking horse.

The problem is that by suppressing simultaneously the secular opposition — centred around democracy, human rights and Uzbek nationalism — Karimov has created a situation where those who disagree with his government, and the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), find that they have little choice but to support Islamists. Due to their traditional ties with the mosque, Islamists have continued to function, albeit semi-clandestinely.

During the interim, Karimov’s woes on this front have increased due to the events in the adjoining Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

Karimov’s own efforts to derail the Tajik peace process by encouraging an ethnic Uzbek military officer, colonel Mahmoud Khodabardiyev, to rebel against the central authority in Tajikistan failed.

Now Karimov is reluctant to push this line of action further for fear of triggering violence between ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks in Tajikistan. Such conflict, he apparently estimates, will spill over not only in Uzbekistan, which has a Tajik minority, but a also in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, of course, has been largely ruled since September 1996 by the Taleban — ultra-radical fundamentalists with friends among the Saudi royal family, itself wedded to Wahhabism.

So far the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance has managed to hold on to the Afghan area adjoining Uzbekistan, thus insulating the Karimov regime from the destabilsing impact of the Taleban in Kabul.

The Northern Alliance includes an ethnic Uzbek leader, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who is close to Karimov. Dostum is also the least Islamist of the Northern Alliance leaders — indeed he may well be described as a virtual secularist.

But the other factions in the Northern Alliance, dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Hazaras, are close to Iran, which is known to be one of the main suppliers of arms to them.

Were Karimov to play his Dostum card to the hilt, he would end up destroying the fragile unity of the Northern Alliance, thus paving the ground for the Taleban regime to reach the border of his republic.

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