http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/world/755679
Muslim men under siege in Uzbekistan
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4,000 to 5,000 jailed in past three years, rights advocates, religious leaders say
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By DOUGLAS FRANTZ
New York Times
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan – Beneath the silk head scarf, her eyes were filled with thought and prayer, grief and anger. Her voice was soft and urgent, as if spilling out the story of her husband might somehow bring him home.
“He was just the imam in the mosque,” Munira Nazarov said, patting the youngest of her six children, a boy of 7. “He used to talk to people about studying the Koran and other good books. He didn’t talk about politics.”
Her husband, Obidhon Nazarov, the chief religious figure at one of Tashkent’s largest mosques, went into hiding in March 1998 after being followed for days by the security police.
Unable to find him, the authorities imprisoned his two brothers, a brother-in-law and an uncle. They detained his wife for 10 days, and men still pound on the door of his house with the butts of their Kalashnikov rifles in the middle of the night.
A largely unnoticed war is being waged in this Central Asian nation of 24 million.
According to foreign and Uzbek human-rights advocates and religious leaders, 4,000 to 5,000 Muslim men have been imprisoned in the last three years. There is evidence of systematic torture, from beatings to extraction of toenails. Some prisoners have died.
Religious leaders and human-rights advocates contend that the government of President Islam Karimov, which has already banned opposition parties and silenced the independent press, is using a trumped-up threat of radical Islam to stamp out the last vestige of dissent.
“The repression of religious people is worse than it ever was during the Soviet era,” said Mikhail Ardzinov, chairman of a banned human-rights group who was detained and beaten in 1999.
Government officials deny using torture, but they justify other harsh steps by saying they are battling religious extremists determined to turn the country into a state like Iran or, worse, Afghanistan.
Karimov vowed in September to press the crackdown, telling state television, “This plague and sickness are capable of infecting the minds of young people.”
Since the Soviet Union collapsed, there has been a slow resurgence of Islam in traditionally Muslim Central Asia. The governments have tried to control its growth, sanctioning mosques and overseeing religious schools.
But officials across the region, who tend to have an authoritarian bent, fear Islamic extremism. Some dangers are concrete.
Tajikistan fought a five-year civil war against Islamic insurgents that ended in 1997, leaving at least 50,000 dead. This summer, soldiers from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan battled 100 to 200 rebels from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.
U.S. officials say the group has ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan and to Osama bin Laden.
But in Tashkent, the targets of Karimov’s campaign are members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, or the Party of Liberation, which says it promotes Islam as a religious and a social force.
Its leaders urge Muslims to pray five times a day and to study the Koran to prepare for a future Islamic government.
The Hizb-ut-Tahrir criticizes the Uzbek government for corruption and repressing Muslims, but has not, Western diplomats say, promoted violence.
Chaasime Minovarov, deputy director of Uzbekistan’s State Committee on Religious Affairs, which monitors religious groups, said thousands of men had been arrested for advocating replacement of the current government with an Islamic state.
He said that Hizb-ut-Tahrir has the same ideology as the gun-toting Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, but that the religious party may ultimately be more dangerous because its members appear nonviolent.
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“When the time comes, they will become warriors and they will start using weapons,” Minovarov said. “The government of Uzbekistan is trying its best to bring the influence of this group to zero.”
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[This message has been edited by jalal_ud_deen (edited November 27, 2000).]