Is Karimov Too Tough on Terror? When the Uzbek government stepped up its crackdown on terrorism, it came under fire from more than the radicals who wish to re-establish the Islamic caliphate

Insight on the News, Jan 19, 2004

Byline: Douglas Burton, INSIGHT

Uzbekistan - While the attention of U.S. policymakers was absorbed by Afghanistan in 2002 and by Iraq in 2003, the political fate of a new strategic partner in the region, the Republic of Uzbekistan, has been unfolding slowly in the background. A large former Soviet air base there became a staging area for the U.S. attack on the Taliban regime early in 2002, and U.S. troops remain stationed there as their colleagues scour the mountains of eastern Afghanistan for a spider hole containing Osama bin Laden.

Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, the former Communist Party boss during the Soviet period, has had his hands full for the last 12 years steering his country toward a market-based economy and a more democratic republic, while simultaneously fighting a small group of armed rebels closely allied to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. After car bombings killed 14 people in the capital city of Tashkent in 1999, the government stepped up its crackdown on a group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which operated freely at that time from Afghanistan with the support of the Taliban. Uzbek security forces also arrested and jailed more than 4,000 persons (watchdog groups say 7,000), chiefly young men belonging to Islamist organizations, including a shadowy underground Islamic group, Hizb ut-Tahrir al Islami (the Islamic Liberation Party, pronounced HIS Boot Tuck-Rear, or HT). The group until now has eschewed violence, but government officials say HT members are ready and eager to set up a strict Islamist state in Tashkent.

Karimov's critics are legion in the Western press, at the U.S. State Department and within the human-rights community. "The government is the terrorist," Margarita Assenova, a human-rights activist for the Washington-based Freedom House, tells Insight. Assenova, who spent several months in Tashkent showing local citizens how to make official complaints about human-rights abuses, says the government uses the terrorist threat as an excuse to suppress any opposition group. Meanwhile, the International Crisis Group (ICG), a multinational conflict-resolution organization based in Brussels and Osh, Kyrgyzstan, reported in July 2003 that "In Uzbekistan mass arrests of Muslims many but not all members of radical political groups have led to serious mistrust between authorities and the population and radicalization of those who have suffered from a brutal police force."

Such criticisms are exaggerated and naive, says Stephen Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam and a recognized expert on Islamic extremism. "It is hard to understand how people who are working underground to overthrow the elected government and re-establish the Islamic caliphate can be any further radicalized," he tells Insight. "The whole weight of the ICG report is to downplay the threat of Wahhabism, the threat of radicals as represented by Hizb ut-Tahrir." Schwartz has argued that in a post-9/11 world the doctrine of pre-emption trumps the presumption of innocence until proven guilty of terrorism.

As Schwartz has written in The Weekly Standard, "Groups like HT that do not presently carry out acts of violence nonetheless prepare an environment conducive to violence. Identifying the advocates of extreme ideology with the practitioners of terror does not undermine the campaign against terrorism. The campaign against terrorism is undermined by weakness, irresolution and apologetics, not by identifying the enemy."

At present Hizb ut-Tahrir operates freely out of its London headquarters but is legally banned in all Central Asian nations and all nations in the Middle East. Its ideology envisions a strict Islamic state and the re-establishment of the ancient Arab caliphate. The movement, which began in Jerusalem in 1953, sent preachers and missionaries by the droves to Uzbekistan following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since it operates clandestinely its membership is unknown, but it claims to have 10,000 adherents in Uzbekistan and, according to the ICG report, HT has become the most prominent challenge to the government's secular leadership.

HT literature is virulently anti-Jewish and some of it indeed is threatening. According to Uzbek officials, the following exhortation in the magazine Al Vaiy was distributed by HT three months prior to the September 11 attacks:

"A faithful Muslim should exercise all the methods to fight against infidels. There is no difference whether he will stand at a distance and fight ... or, without jumping by parachute, will direct the plane to where the infidels are gathered."

The article goes on to say: "If the enemy uses the weapons of mass destruction, as is happening in Palestine, then we will immediately put into action similar weapons. In this case, there will be no difference whether the enemy or peaceful citizens are killed as a result of using explosives. ... If an old man might help the enemy, for instance, by giving his opinion or showing the methods of killing Muslims, he should also be killed." Imran Waheed, a spokesman for HT in London, denied that the article was published by his organization.