POLITICS-UZBEKISTAN: Karimov Keeps His Gun Ready For Islamists

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dilip Hiro

LONDON, May 7 1998 (IPS) - Beleaguered Uzbek president Islam Karimov, in Moscow for an economic summit this week, was looking for more than just business opportunities during his stay. He also wanted wider backing for his own battle against his Islamist opposi tion.

At his insistence, a joint statement issued Thursday by Karimov and Russian president Boris Yeltsin also pledged their joint commitment to fight “radical Islamic groups in former Soviet Union” — from the Muslim majority Central Asia and the Caucasus t o all corners of the Russian Federation.

In Namangan, 200 kilometres east of the Uzbek capital Tashkent, the trials of members of a group accused of having links with radical Islamists in Tajikistan and Pakistan is under way. Seventeen are charged with plotting to replace Karimov’s secular reg ime with an Islamic one.

On the eve of the trial last week, Karimov urged parliament to stiffen the law on religious activity in the republic. He blames Islamic fundamentalists in the south-eastern Fergana Valley for violence in the region.

Their 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 Uzbek parliament stiffened its existing 1991 law on religious activity on May 1. The new legislation stipulates that religious groups must have a minimum of 100 members instead of the 10 required by the previous law, and they must register with the g overnment. All unregistered religious associations are henceforth liable to criminal prosecution.

Tension between the staunchly secular regime of Karimov, intent on keeping the state and religion apart, and Islamists, who want to run the state according to Islamic principles, dates back to the early 1990s, and is concentrated in the Fergana Valley. .

The Fergana Valley, containing a third of 90 percent Muslim Uzbekistan’s population of 23 million, has a long tradition of Islamic piety. As the grip of the atheist Soviet system loosened in the mid-1980s, its inhabitants started showing their religious

colours. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of mosques in Namangan, a city of 360,000, rose from two to 26.

The upsurge in the number of mosques created an environment which enabled Islamists to widen their appeal. Due to their traditional ties with the mosque, Islamists managed to function albeit semi- clandestinely.

As for the government, 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, it seems, 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, follower of the puritanical sect of Wahhabism within the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam. Uzbek Islamists are often, wrongly, labelled as Wahhabis.

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 o f the call to prayer from mosques by loudspeakers during Ramadan.

But last month, reversing its earlier policy, the authorities decided to give maximum publicity to the trials of suspected militant Islamists.

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

Following a peace treaty between the secular government of Tajikistan and the Islamist-led United Tajik Opposition (UTO) last June, the administration of Tajik president Imamali Rahmanov began sharing power with the UTO in February.

By so doing, reckons Karimov, the Tajik president has unwittingly accorded a respectability to militant Islamists in former Soviet Central Asia that they had lacked so far. 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 lso 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.

Until now, Karimov’s antipathy to political Islam has led him to maintain a safe distance from the Islamic Republic of Iran, keeping relations with it to the barest minimum.

Iran has reciprocated in kind. On Wednesday the state-run Iran Radio criticised Karimov for “suppressing Muslims,” arguing that he did not differentiate between “Islamic extremists” and “Islamic reformists”.

This was by far the most outspoken charge Iran had levelled at the Uzbek president. Little wonder that Karimov sought, and received, solace from Yeltsin on the subject of militant Islam.

Analysts noted, however, that their joint statement did not refer to any particular plan of action, and that it was meant merely to demonstrate common thinking.

For the beleaguered Karimov even that was preferable to saying nothing on the subject.