Recent reports
Prior to the recent terror attacks in Uzbekistan
which claimed at least 19 lives, a spate of reports from
the region shows ongoing Islamist activity and
law-enforcement efforts to contain it. One report
details the state of affairs in the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan (IMU) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Other
reports suggest that Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (Party of
Islamic Liberation - HT), an organization that now
stands at the center of concerns over rising Islamist
activity in Central Asia, is increasingly tailoring its
recruiting efforts to match local dynamics in Tajikistan
and Kazakhstan, targeting individuals from the dominant
ethnic group with a higher education and ties to state
institutions.
In Tajikistan, the authorities
arrested a group of HT activists in Khujand in February.
Various reports placed the number of individuals
detained between 14 and 22. Tribune.uz, an independent
Internet publication funded by George Soros' Open
Society foundation, reported on February 25 that the men
were all aged 20-22 and from middle-class families.
Moreover, they were all ethnic Tajiks "whose parents
came from the most 'Tajik of regions' of southern
Tajikistan". Previously, ethnic Uzbeks and Uzbek
citizens from the Ferghana Valley had figured
prominently in reports of HT activity in Tajikistan.
Asia Plus-Blitz also reported that three of the
activists were relatives of officials in the Kulob city
government and prosecutor's office.
In
Kazakhstan, a court in Shymkent sentenced 23-year-old
Nurzhan Zhakipov to three years in prison for HT
activities on March 2. In a March 3 report, Kazinform
contrasted the Zhakipov case with another HT-related
incident in November 2003: "Not long ago in Shymkent,
Arysi, and a number of other regions in the southern
Kazakhstan Okrug, some 20 HT members were tried. In
November, they took to the streets for an unsanctioned
demonstration in which their organization called for the
overthrow of [Uzbek President Islam] Karimov's regime.
They were fined 18,900 tenges [US$135] each; two
participants who resisted arrest were sentenced to 10
days in jail. The majority of the people who have been
'nabbed' in connection with HT are poorly educated and
ignorant. This is why Zhakipov so surprised the
journalists at his trial - he is a man from an urban
family who attended Soviet school and received a higher
education ..." A March 5 report in Kazakhstanskaya
Pravda noted that "while the recruitment activities of
HT emissaries in Kazakhstan initially focused on
low-income individuals, recent efforts have targeted
potential members among government officials,
law-enforcement authorities, well-off businessmen,
intellectuals, and students".
In Kyrgyzstan, on
February 17, a court in Bishkek sentenced two IMU
members - both Uzbek citizens - to death for their role
in a December 2002 explosion at a Bishkek market that
killed seven people. A March 2 report in Vechernii
Bishkek described how "unofficial" mullahs - possibly
with HT ties - in the southern Aravan region were
inculcating the tenets of radical Islam in young people.
According to the report, if 100-120 young people in the
area are receiving a religious education from "official
clerics", an equal number is learning different lessons
from what the article terms "nontraditionalists".
A March 1 report by Deutsche Welle focused on
IMU members, many of whom fled to Pakistan after the
US-led antiterrorist operation smashed the Taliban
movement, and with it the IMU's stronghold in
Afghanistan. According to the report, a group of
approximately 120 militants has relocated to Pakistan's
northern Balochistan province. The group consists of
fighters from Central Asia, Tatarstan, ethnic Russian
converts to Islam, and people from the Caucasus; many of
them are IMU members. Operating in groups of 25-30, they
have recently moved to mountainous regions of Pakistan,
including the city of Quetta, capital of Balochistan
province.
The same report featured an interview
with a former IMU member, who said that the IMU's
leaders now reside in Wana, Pakistan - scene of the
recent Pakistani military operations to track down
al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters seeking refuge in
the tribal regions. The movement's key leader remains
Tahir Yuldashev. His first deputy for financial affairs
is Dilshod Hojiyev. The military commander is Ulug'bek
Holik, who also goes under the name Mohammed Ayub. All
of the men are originally from Uzbekistan's Namangan
Oblast.
The IMU maintains a number of unofficial
daftars, or offices, in Tajikistan, Afghanistan,
Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. An office in the Pakistani
port city of Karachi handles financial contributions,
primarily from Arab countries. According to the main
source for the report, a 34-year-old Uzbek native of
Navoiy Oblast who recently took advantage of an amnesty
offer and returned home from Pakistan, the fighters also
earn money on their own "through military operations
financed by Pakistani special services against American
forces in Afghanistan and through raids in Kashmir".
The source also told Deutsche Welle that a split
had taken place in the IMU, with a group of combat-weary
fighters rebelling against Yuldashev. In order to combat
the dissenters, Yuldashev apparently summoned Ilhom
Hojiyev, also known as Commander Abdurahmon, from
Tajikistan. Ilhom Hojiyev is the cousin of Juma (aka
Jumaboi) Namangani, the IMU military commander believed
(not confirmed) to have been killed when the Taliban
fell in late 2001.
In Uzbekistan itself, harsh
measures against any hint of Islamist activity remain
the order of the day, with courts routinely meting out
long prison terms for any real or suspected HT
involvement. But with severe restrictions on the media,
the situation is difficult to gauge. Human rights
organizations charge that some 5,000 political prisoners
are better characterized as victims of a repressive
regime than as wild-eyed Islamists intent on installing
a fundamentalist regime of their own. Meanwhile,
Uzbekistan's role as a strategic partner of the United
States in the "war on terror" has politicized the debate
over the threat of radical Islam, often to the detriment
of dispassionate analysis.
The main players:
HT and the IMU As the reports above indicate,
Hizb ut-Tahrir and the IMU and are the primary
organizations of concern in Central Asia.
The
HT's rise to prominence in Central Asia marks a
departure from the usual pattern for radical groups.
Most groups achieve notoriety through the "propaganda of
the deed", committing acts of terror or making obvious
attempts to seize power. Instead, HT has drawn notice
for its radical program and conspiratorial
organizational structure. The organization's stated
goals are the restoration of the caliphate and the
establishment of strict Islamic law. It operates through
a network of secretive party cells reminiscent of the
underground network the Bolsheviks employed as they laid
the groundwork for their successful seizure of power in
Russia in 1917.
Founded in the early 1950s by
Palestinians in Jordan, HT is today active in more than
30 countries worldwide, including Western Europe. It
arrived in Central Asia in the mid-1990s, and is now
active in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan. Only in the latter is it seen as having a
possibly significant presence, however. According to a
June 30 report by the International Crisis Group,
"Estimates of [HT's] strength vary widely, but a rough
figure is probably 15,000 to 20,000 throughout Central
Asia."
As noted above, the perception of HT as a
threat stems from the radical nature of the
organization's program, which implies the overthrow of
all of the region's current regimes. US Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs,
Elizabeth Jones, told the House Committee on
International Relations on October 29: "[HT] is
stridently anti-Western. Although there is no confirmed
evidence of HT's involvement in violent actions as an
organization, HT propaganda has praised martyrdom
operations against Israel and called for attacks against
coalition forces in Iraq. HT leaflets have also claimed
that the United States and the United Kingdom are at war
with Islam, and have called for all Muslims to defend
the faith and engage in jihad against these countries.
It seeks to replace the regimes of the region with a
supranational Islamic caliphate."
The IMU has
followed a more traditional path. Historian Fiona Hill
of the Brookings Institution provided a useful summary
of the group's history and activities in her prepared
statement to the above-mentioned House committee
hearings: "The IMU was a self-proclaimed radical Islamic
and political group, which was formed around 1997 by two
ethnic Uzbeks from the Ferghana Valley with the express
goal of overthrowing the government of President Islam
Karimov and establishing an Islamic state in Uzbekistan.
Having been expelled from Uzbekistan in the early 1990s,
the two founders of the IMU [Juma Namangani, the group's
military leader and a former Afghan veteran, and [Tahir
Yuldashev], its political leader] followed the pattern
of other Islamic militant leaders. They traveled
variously and separately in Muslim countries including
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United Arab
Emirates - as well as to Chechnya - and established
contacts with Islamic movements, financial sources and
intelligence services. After the 1996 Taliban takeover
of Afghanistan, the IMU founders established close
relations with Taliban leaders and were reported to have
secured the support and financial backing of Osama bin
Laden in their creation of the IMU.
"From
1997-2001, using the remote mountainous regions of
Tajikistan as its base, the IMU carried out kidnappings,
assassinations and other atrocities, including a series
of armed raids deep into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan that
also targeted foreign visitors and tourists. Eventually,
the IMU relocated its base of operations permanently to
Afghanistan, extended its mandate to overthrow all
regional governments - changing its name to the Islamic
Party of Turkestan [IPT] - and threw in its lot with the
Taliban. President [George W] Bush named the IMU as one
of the terrorist movements linked to Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda network in his speech to Congress on September
20, 2001. At this juncture, reports from the region and
Western intelligence sources put the numbers of IMU
militants at between 3,000-5,000 ... It was only the US
intervention in Afghanistan that curtailed IMU
activities in Central Asia. The IMU's military commander
was killed in action with the Taliban near Mazar-e
Sharif in Afghanistan in November 2001, and its
political leader went into hiding."
The
threat: Real or imagined? With the
geographically isolated IMU still regrouping militarily
and HT maintaining a policy of nonviolent
organization-building, observers differ, sometimes
profoundly, in their assessments. The majority view is
that the increasingly repressive regimes in Central
Asia, and in Uzbekistan in particular, themselves pose
the greatest threat to regional stability by creating
ideally wretched conditions to nurture an implacably
radical opposition. Meanwhile, a vocal minority insists
that the IMU, HT, and perhaps other movements that have
yet to catch the public eye, still represent the gravest
danger.
Examples of the former view abound. In
her prepared statement to the House committee, Fiona
Hill wrote: "I would suggest that harsh government
repression of dissent is as much, if not more, of a
threat to Central Asian stability today and in the
immediate future as the radical Islamic movements ..."
Martha Brill Olcott, senior associate at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, seconded
this view in her own prepared statement: "The Central
Asian elites are exaggerating the threat to the state
that is posed by those advocating radical Islamic
ideologies, and US policymakers will be making a grave
mistake if they allow shared goals in the 'war on
terror' to blind us to the short-sighted and potentially
dangerous policies that are being pursued in the region
with regards to religion."
In a spring 2003
article in the Journal of International Affairs, Edward
W Walker wrote: "There is little risk that Islamists
will come to power in the region soon, especially now
that the collapse of the Taliban means Afghanistan is no
longer a safe haven. The greater risk is that Central
Asia's ruling elites will use the specter of Islamism as
an excuse to avoid economic and political reforms that
would mitigate the conditions under which militant
Islamism takes root and survives."
A December
22, 2003 study by the International Crisis Group titled
"Is Radical Islam Inevitable in Central Asia: Priorities
for Engagement", suggested a similar conclusion. The
study warned that "if Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan are to avoid the fate of other countries in
which terrorist or extremist movements have emerged ...
it is imperative to build open political systems ...
Authoritarian regimes relying on fear and repression,
while stifling individual freedoms will only discredit
democracy and push people to act outside constitutional
frameworks."
This view is not universally held.
In his prepared statement to the House committee, Ariel
Cohen of the Heritage Foundation noted the unsavory
nature of the region's authoritarian regimes without
defining it as the most pressing danger. Instead, he
stressed that "anti-Americanism, extremism and preaching
the violent overthrow of existing regimes make Hizb
ut-Tahrir a prime suspect in the next wave of violent
action in Central Asia ...." He concluded: "Hizb
ut-Tahrir represents a growing medium and long-term
threat to geopolitical stability and the secular regimes
of Central Asia and ultimately poses a potential threat
to other regions of the world. It seeks to overthrow and
destroy existing regimes and establish a Sharia-based
caliphate. Hizb may launch terrorist attacks against US
targets and allies, operating either alone or in
cooperation with other global terror groups such as
al-Qaeda. A Hizb takeover of any Central Asian state
could provide the global radical terror movement with a
geographic base and access to the expertise and
technology to manufacture weapons of mass destruction."
Prospects and conclusions Even those
observers who disagree on the extent of the Islamist
threat generally concur that the current drift of the
region's regimes is less than encouraging. In fact, the
leitmotif of recent writing on radical Islam in
Central Asia is the following contradiction: writers
insist that the best remedy for Central Asia's ailments
is to strengthen civil society, pursue economic reforms,
encourage greater political participation, expand basic
freedoms and improve socioeconomic conditions for the
populace; yet the same writers glumly conclude that the
dominant trend is movement in the opposite direction.
Conditions are worsening - slowly in countries like
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and with
gathering speed in Uzbekistan.
But the miserable
conditions that observers note are not particular to
Central Asia. Sadly, many of the world's countries are
dismal places ruled by dingy regimes. Those places where
Islamist movements have come to power - Iran, Sudan and
Afghanistan, for example - have suffered from pervasive
misgovernment, gross socioeconomic inequalities, and a
dearth of basic freedoms. But many other nations labor
under similar curses, and Islamists have had scant
success in exploiting them to their advantage.
In fact, the single greatest failure of the
Islamist movement to date is its inability to fashion a
global movement to match its global agenda. In Iran,
Sudan and Afghanistan, indigenous movements came to
power with indigenous agendas under particularly
favorable indigenous conditions. Though their stated
aims at times extended beyond their borders, these
dissimilar movements proved largely incapable of
expanding their influence beyond the ethnic, sectarian,
linguistic and state boundaries in which they arose.
This fact has not been lost on Central Asia's
regimes. Even Uzbekistan, the most heavy-handed among
them in its repression of Islamist activity, hammers
away at this tension between the national and the
supranational in its official anti-Islamist propaganda.
For example, an article in Uzbek on the pro-government
website stability.uz takes an explicitly nationalist
stance against HT's pan-Islamic program: "According to
HT's strategy, Uzbek territory that was acquired [for
Islam] through 'a jihad war' is not Uzbek territory;
rather, the Uzbek people have the right to use those
lands. The right to exercise sovereignty over
Uzbekistan's territory would, according to their
ideology, belong to the centralized structure of the
reconstituted Islamic caliphate ... [HT supporters] say
prayers, fast, and know a few lines of the Koran, but
they have no profound knowledge of the basic tenets of
the Islamic faith. Nevertheless, they claim that their
ideas represent absolute truth. These self-proclaimed
'defenders and armies of Islam' appear to be marionettes
in the hands of those who hope to Arabize Central Asia."
But if pan-Islamic movements have often
foundered on contradictions between the national and
supranational, this failure does not in and of itself
consign radical groups with supranational aims to the
ash heap of history. The global terrorist international
as exemplified by al-Qaeda, for example, has proved
itself capable of mounting destructive attacks in
diverse locations. It is here that conditions in Central
Asia are particularly worrisome. In an October 2001
article in Prospect (No 68), Anatol Lieven of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recalls: "I
gained certain insights into the roots of Muslims
extremism during my work as a stringer for The Times in
Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late 1980s - not only
through meeting some precursors of the Taliban among the
Afghan mujahideen, but among radical groups in Pakistan.
I especially remember a long conversation with some
young members of a 'fundamentalist' group in Lahore.
Some of them came from longstanding Lahori families,
others from recent migrants from the countryside. None
were from the bottom of society. Instead, they came from
that classic breeding ground of fascistic and religious
extremism, the proud but struggling lower middle class
and actual or former upper peasantry.
"They were
under threat not only of sinking into the immiserated,
semi-employed proletariat ... but of only being able to
escape and rise through entry into the junior ranks of
organized crime, and especially heroin smuggling ... In
these depressing circumstances, adherence to a radical
Islamist network provided a sense of cultural security,
a new community and some degree of social support -
modest, but still better than anything the state can
provide."
In his prepared statement to the House
committee, Stephen Blank, a professor of national
security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of
the US Army War College, disputed arguments linking
poverty and extremism, echoing Lieven's comments: "We
have rarely seen that the Islamist parties or movements
or their recruits are the result of the kind of poverty
and societal degradation that we find in Central Asia.
If anything we find the opposite, that these recruits
are often from educated upwardly mobile backgrounds
whose ascent is somehow blocked or 'cramped' by the
structure of the existing society ..."
It is in
this context that one notes with some concern the
anecdotal evidence of better-educated and
better-connected recruits to HT. HT itself does not
appear to represent an imminent threat to the entrenched
regimes of Central Asia, nor does it seem to have a
coherent blueprint for achieving its radical goals. But
its increasing ability to draw a new class of adherents,
if confirmed by further evidence, may indicate that HT
is on the verge of an organizational breakthrough, or
that it may soon serve as a stepping stone to more
direct, and possibly more destructive, forms of
extremist activity.
The preceding suggests that
observers need to move from general questions about the
"threat of radical Islam in Central Asia" to specific
queries about the precise numbers and backgrounds of new
sympathizers, as well as any ties between existing
organizations like HT and other groups with a more
proactive agenda. Though some information is available,
too much of it stems from media controlled or hobbled by
regimes with a vested interest in presenting a specific
version of a "threat" that they can then exploit for
their own purposes. The information needed to answer the
questions posed above cannot be gleaned from tidy
reports of varying veracity; it must often be obtained
the old-fashioned way - on the shifting ground where it
first emerges. From our present vantage point, the
availability such vital information may well be the most
pressing issue of all.
(Compiled by Daniel
Kimmage.)
Copyright (c) 2004, RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut
Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
