Uzbekistan Suppressing Resistance

Abdurahman Aliyev had just walked into his home when he heard a loud knock on the door. A police officer shoved a piece of paper and pen at him and ordered him to confess to belonging to a banned Islamic group, vow to break ties with it and pledge never to get involved in politics.

“So I asked, ‘Why? Is there any reason why I should write this?’ He said only that his boss had told him to have me write this letter,” said Aliyev, 59, director of a farmers’ cooperative that replaced the Soviet-era collective farm system.

“I didn’t sign the paper,” he said. “It would be like putting a noose around my neck.”

Reports of similar police warnings and threats have mushroomed throughout the Uzbek sections of the Fergana Valley in recent weeks, usually delivered to political activists, human rights workers, farmers, journalists and families or friends of some 6,000 prisoners jailed on charges of belonging to outlawed religious groups.

The crackdown was sparked by the March uprising in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, where opposition demonstrators ousted longtime leader Askar A. Akayev after alleging fraud in parliamentary elections.

The protests began in Osh, on the Kyrgyz side of the Fergana Valley. They caused new jitters for Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov, whose own legislative elections in December were widely criticized as deeply flawed.

Since the uprising began, Karimov’s government has sealed the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border, ordered more neighborhood patrols in towns and villages across the Fergana Valley, warned valley residents to shun demonstrations, ordered them to hand over anyone who looked or behaved suspiciously, warned residents to stay out of Kyrgyzstan’s political business and, according to opposition politicians, launched a fresh crackdown on dissenters.

The campaign appears to be going far beyond the religiously observant -- the longtime focus of repression -- to target all who would resist the government’s tight control of all economic activity.

Last year, violent protests broke out at markets in Kokand and other Fergana Valley towns over new trade laws that required vendors to get special licenses to import goods and banned their sale through intermediaries.

“Now the government is saying that simple peasants and farmers are members of religious extremist groups,” said Sabid Ostabayev, a rights worker in Namangan, a dilapidated town of 350,000 overlaid by a maze of above-ground water pipes that look like they haven’t been repaired since the Soviet Union collapsed 15 years ago.

He referred to allegations against Aliyev, who was once a member of the town council and a strong critic of a system in Uzbekistan that requires farmers to sign production contracts with the government.

Each year, farmers are told what to grow, how much and at what price to sell it. Most farmers are ordered to grow cotton, preventing them from growing more lucrative crops. Aliyev has complained bitterly about the practice, and thinks that is why he has been targeted -- that and the fact that he is an ethnic Uighur from China’s Xianjiang province, a restive region with an active militant underground that borders the Fergana Valley.

His lineage already got him into trouble in 2003, when he was refused an exit visa to travel to his homeland, which he left in 1963 when his father, a Chinese diplomat, fled Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution. Authorities said they could not give him permission to leave because he was a “terrorist,” Aliyev said.

The new crackdown could be courting fresh trouble in the turbulent Fergana Valley, propelling disillusioned young people with no jobs, no prospects and no channel for expressing their frustration into the embrace of religious extremist groups, Ostabayev said.

“Today, in this situation where the government is not allowing the opposition, and the economic situation here is so bad that if some extremist religious leader goes out on the street and says ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ against the government, there will be lots of people who will follow him,” Ostabayev said.

Residents here say Karimov is justifying his crackdown by citing the threat of Islamic extremist groups funded by the lucrative drug trade in this region.

“They call everyone who is unhappy with the government a terrorist. They call me a terrorist,” said Nazir Zakir, a rights activist and radio journalist. “If people who are unhappy with the government are terrorists, then there are 26 million terrorists in Uzbekistan.”

The Uzbek government refused to answer written questions about the crackdown. But one official who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity claimed that allegations of a new clampdown were “absurd,” and that there was no sign discontent had risen above the norm.

An estimated 6,000 people in Uzbekistan’s jails are charged with religiously motivated crimes; many are from the Fergana Valley. They often are imprisoned for praying at the wrong mosque or openly criticizing the government, rights workers say.

Among them are Ahmed Modmarov’s three sons and two nephews. He says open dissent is on the rise.

“I tell you, people are fed up. The nation itself is starving: People have to take a loaf of bread on credit and repay it when their pension checks come,” he said, sitting on a red carpet in a cement house in Margallan, a Fergana Valley town renowned for its hand-woven silks.

“I remember two or three years ago, people would say, ‘Karimov is trying his best.’ But no more. Now 100% of the people here have no good words for Karimov. People are ready to revolt.”