Dmitriy Nurullayev and Aziz Yuldashev, natives of Uzbekistan residing in the United States, returned to their hometown of Jizzakh in late December 2011 to visit family. Both are officers of Awareness Projects International, a non-profit engaging in human rights education work in Uzbekistan and elsewhere.

On 2 January, Nurullayev was summoned to the local police department, where he was told to report to the main Jizzakh police department on 3 January. This first interview, conducted by two SNB officers, lasted an hour. The officers asked questions about Nurullayev’s past and present activities and accused him of desiring to overthrow the government of Islom Karimov by forming social and political movements among the youth. The agents were very aware of Nurullayev and Yuldashev’s non-profit group and the operations of their human rights projects in Uzbekistan.

The content of the programming at the camps was no doubt controversial in the eyes of Uzbekistan’s repressive government. The camps were held each summer 2007-2009 and covered issues such as human right, HIV/AIDS, and gender equality. Nurullayev was present for the 2007 and 2009 camps. He says that one topic on which he spent a lot of time was Uzbekistan’s political structure and how Islom Karimov is the unquestioned, sole authority over every part of government. He also told students that Karimov’s current term in office, his third, is unconstitutional, given the prohibition on more than two consecutive terms. Nurullayev says he also discussed mistreatment and sexual abuse of women, the widespread use of forced child labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry, and the catastrophe of the Aral Sea. The SNB agents told Nurullayev that his conclusions about Uzbekistan and everything he taught children during these camps were merely myths, and that spreading this information placed him at risk of being declared an enemy of the state for trying to destabilize the country’s youth.

Picture drawn by an attendee of one of Nurullayev's summer camps in Uzbekistan when asked to express his feelings on human rights in Uzbekistan.

The interview on 5 January lasted several hours and was conducted by the same SNB agents. The officers questioned Nurullayev extensively about his involvement with a Peace Corps Volunteer that lived with Nurullayev’s family in 2004 and 2005 and who later helped Nurullayev attend college in the United States. The agents claimed the Volunteer and his family work for the CIA and said that their association meant Nurullayev was also a CIA asset. They accused Nurullayev of having received training from the Volunteer on how to create social and political instability in Uzbekistan. The agents further claimed that Nurullayev was selected by the State Department to receive a FLEX scholarship to attend high school in the U.S. in order to receive additional training on how to destabilize Uzbekistan. The agents took down Nurullayev’s U.S. address and the names of everyone with whom he had meaningful contact. They also forced him to give them his email address and password.

The SNB officers then told Nurullayev he had a chance to help himself out of his situation by agreeing to work for the SNB. When he asked whether or not he had a choice, the officers angrily told him that he could choose to do as they told him or he could choose to be found to be an enemy of the state and sentenced to 17 years in prison, telling Nurullayev, “You know what happens to boys like you in prison.”

Nurullayev agreed with everything they demanded after that, signing a statement acknowledging he now works for the SNB, is willingly under their watch, that he will report significant life changes to them, that he will find and report to them any information they demand, and that disclosing this to agreement to U.S. officials would result in him being sentenced to 17 years in prison in Uzbekistan. He was told that he would be required to report back to the SNB in no more than two years. The agents reminded him before he left of the mess he had created and that they were offering him a chance to clean it up.

Aziz Yuldashev teaching at a summer camp in Uzbekistan

He says that Aziz Yuldashev, who is also back in the United States, had almost the same experience with SNB agents in Jizzakh. Yuldashev worked alongside Nurullayev on their organization’s programs in Uzbekistan and was active at the summer camps. He too was questioned extensively about his human rights work and that he was compelled to sign a nearly identical agreement. Like Nurullayev, Yuldashev also reported the incident to U.S. authorities.

Their story, sadly, is far from the worst of tales of harassment and abuse of activists by Uzbekistan’s security services. However, it does highlight the extents to which the SNB go to totally neutralize any and all threats to the regime and their tactics of neutralizing activists and dissidents by forcing them to sign agreements that can compromise their credibility among other activists and frighten them into staying out of Uzbekistan.

The stars aligned and two interviews I gave over the last week for different-language’d public media have been published.

The first is with Dutch Public Radio, and it’s about the U.S. decision to lift restrictions on providing certain kinds of military equipment to the Uzbek regime. (See more here.)

The second is with VOA Uzbek, where I talk about the inherent tensions between human rights advocacy and broader strategic U.S. goals in the region. (See more here.)

The Dutch text can be machine-translated in Chrome (or whatever you use), but the Uzbek one is a bit harder to work with. Anyway, there’s that.

For at least the last seven or eight years, the Prokudin-Gorskii collection of color photos of the Russian empire taken in the early 20th century, gets noticed and reported by journalists, history buffs, and photography enthusiasts. Less well known is that the Turkestan Album, a series of volumes on the people, architecture, history, and economy of Russian Turkestan commissioned by General von Kaufman, the Empire’s first Governor-General in Turkestan, was also digitized by the Library of Congress and made available several years ago. (Many thanks to Fergana News for writing about this, which reminded me that I had a draft post on this from 2007.)

The bulk of the photos in the collection were taken in 1871 and 1872, while some images in the historical volume date back to 1853. The collection contains well over 1,000 photos and is a phenomenal resource not only for a glimpse into Central Asia of the mid- to late-19th century, but also into how the Russian Empire viewed the people of these territories.

(P.S. — Fergana News also recently posted some interesting photos of clay structures in Uzbekistan taken between 1974 and 1989.)

This B-52 is not a part of the “military aid” the U.S. will provide Uzbekistan.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Obama administration waived a ban on military assistance to Uzbekistan in a move to bolster ties with a nation that is part of a vital supply line to Afghanistan, but was cut off from aid because of alleged human-rights violations…

The U.S.-funded supplies to Uzbekistan wouldn’t include weapons and ammunition, and would be limited to items meant to bolster the country’s border and transportation security. The military equipment would include body armor and other protective equipment, night-vision goggles and thermal-imaging sensors for border-patrol forces, according to officials familiar with the waiver.

In other words, there’s nothing really new here, but now it’s all signed and in action (see my earlier post for the full text of the waiver language and the law governing its usage). The real sticking point is going to be how human rights groups react to the move: unsurprisingly Human Rights Watch is voicing strong objection. In an interview with Uznews, Hugh Williamson, Director of HRW’s of Europe and Central Asia division, said:

This is a fundamentally wrong decision, and sends the wrong signal to Uzbekistan and to the world… The human rights situation has only worsened over the last nine years, and therefore Uzbekistan has done nothing to merit the lifting of these sanctions.

Williamson went on to say that US could have continued to use the transit route through Uzbekistan without lifting its sanctions, which is just not the case (and he would have known that had he spoken with any officials involved in these negotiations).

Officials, too, dispute that the rights situation is worse from 2010-2011. The WSJ quotes a State Department spokesperson as noting that Tashkent has taken some steps to curtail illegal labor trafficking, and released some imprisoned political activists. “We do not want to overstate Uzbekistan’s progress on human-rights issues, but it is appropriate to note positive developments just as we discuss setbacks,” she said.

Such limited praise surely won’t endear the State Department or the U.S. government to human rights activists, who continue to protest the imprisonment of political dissidents (like this small protest about human rights in Paris), and whose reports don’t include any language indicating limited progress on some issues.

So now that Uzbekistan will get night-vision goggles and bullet-proof vests, will the U.S. become complicit in the regime’s abuses? Maybe. Given how ineffective total disengagement was at improving the situation I’m still not sure what the other options are, given the broader strategic priorities the U.S. has in the region (i.e. Afghanistan, which, considering its deadliness and extent, really shouldn’t be discounted in these discussions the way activists usually do). But that doesn’t mean the U.S. government has any better or other options.

This remains the least-bad decision to make going forward, at least until the war in Afghanistan is wound down. Once that happens, there should be an immediate reevaluation of U.S. policy toward Tashkent. But until then, I think everyone needs to grit their teeth and end one war before trying to score points on a neighboring dictatorship.

Last week, the US Helsinki Commission held a hearing on Kazakhstan’s stability, looking at the violence in Zhanaozen and the recent parliamentary elections and questioning whether or not Kazakhstan is as stable as its government claims. The testimony, which can be found here is interesting and worth taking a look at. Included with the expert testimony are also statements from Kazakhstan’s embassy and from the Alga People’s Party and People’s Front.

Sean Roberts identifies in his testimony several changes in Kazakhstan’s economy and society to which the government has been poorly prepared to respond and which increase the possibility that recent violence in Kazakhstan is the beginning of a longer period of less stability. They are:

1. The rapid growth of Islam’s popularity in Kazakhstan’s society, an process going on since the early ’90s has recently become more apparent in public. This public religiosity, which does not suggest the threat of terrorism or a near term move toward political Islam, is poorly understood by the government and the country’s secular middle class.
2. The growth of ethnic Kazakh nationalism, also ongoing since the early ’90s, but recently taking on new characteristics that heighten tensions.
3. Rising and unmet economic expectations.

I’m paraphrasing, but on the first two items, Dr. Roberts argues that the thoroughly Soviet education and background of Kazakhstan’s leadership leaves it out of touch and unable to adequately respond to the public. The government’s response to labor strikes, including the violence in Zhanaozen, he says, show that the government was not prepared to deal with dissatisfaction over unmet economic expectations. Dr. Roberts says that these challenges are not extreme nor likely to cause widespread unrest in the near term, but that the stagnancy of the political system means that the government lacks mechanisms to deal with large socio-economic changes. [Note: Alima wrote about the crisis of unmet expectations at length recently.]

This is good, succinct analysis of the situation that puts risks to Kazakhstan’s stability in good context. The risks are there, the government is ill-prepared to deal with them at present, but it’s unlikely that it will be overwhelmed by them soon.

These risks, however, aren’t present only in Kazakhstan. They exist in similar forms and combinations throughout Central Asia. Growing segments of society throughout the region are bringing (or attempting to…) Islam into the public square, where it is responded to with shock and terror by secular officials. National economies are failing to meet the expectations, and in many areas, even the basic needs, of the public. And though nationalism is not so clearly a problem the way it is Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in the rest of Central Asia, there are small signs that society is challenging the state’s monopoly on defining what it means to be Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz, etc.

In talking about risks to stability, there is often a tendency to focus on presidential succession, the specter of fundamentalism and political Islam, and a more recent tendency to talk about replication of the Arab Spring. Recent history should make it abundantly clear though, that analysts, experts, and observers are taken by surprise in the region. Game-planning what happens after Karimov dies or a resurgence of the IMU activity in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan might be worthless because they assume state and society lack the mechanisms to respond to and manage succession or terrorist groups.

The greatest risks to stability throughout the region are medium- to long-term risks arising from the three aforementioned factors and the oppositional relationship between state and society. Devising a list of indicators and warnings based on the three factors Dr. Roberts identifies — rising public religiosity, increasing nationalism, and under-performance in the economy — are more likely not only to lead to better anticipation of the trajectory of stability in Central Asia but also to provide a better idea of when serious risks to stability are likely to arise.

Photo by Tiina Oikarinen

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross ups the ante in his “friendly” sparring with me on the Mukhtarov arrest:

Foust argues that “just because Mukhtarov said some scary things on the Internet, that doesn’t mean he committed any traditionally-defined crimes in doing so. To criminalize this sort of correspondence veers dangerously close to creating thought-crimes.”Again, the correspondence wasn’t criminalized — see the above-referenced case of Youssef al Khattab, which we also mentioned in our initial post, as it is instructive about the latitude individuals are given to “say scary things on the Internet,” in Foust’s parlance. Muhtorov’s arrest, rather, is based on multiple factors: what he said on the Internet about his desire to join the IJU, along with the fact that he immediately began searching for tickets to Turkey upon doing so, along with telephone conversations that further clarified his intentions with respect to the IJU, along with telling his daughter that she would never see him again except in heaven, along with quitting his job before finally purchasing his plane ticket to Turkey.

And blah blah blah. Since Daveed can’t be bothered to quote me accurately (or even reference the times posting things to the Internet WAS declared a crime) in his no-longer theoretical evisceration, like the multiple times I did not limit my complaint about the Mukhtarov case to things said on the internet or the phone (“he allegedly got ideas from a website and bought a plane ticket”), I really don’t feel the need to play into his gambit of insulting my intelligence, reading skills, or honesty. Think I’m exaggerating?

[W]e assume it is the latter, both because it’s always best to assume good intentions in one’s debating opponents, and also because we have not known Foust to be purposefully dishonest in his previous writings…this post hopefully clarifies for Foust the distinction between crimes and acts that his previous posts misapprehend.

If that’s how he plays a friendly debate, he wins all debates on all topics, Forever. I’d suggest he declare victory and go home, but he already did that. Well done.

The end.

My friend and frequent sparring partner Daveed Gartenstein-Ross thinks I wrote “an epistemological wreck” about the Mukhtarov case last week. He raises some good points, and also neglects some follow-up work on what we covered here. So in the spirit of collegial debate, I figured I should respond.

One thing Daveed and I disagree on is the presumption of Mukhtarov’s guilt. That doesn’t mean he’s not guilty — I am trying to keep an open mind — but as I noted in a followup post, Mukhtarov has a truly bizarre personal history as a human rights activist resisting Karimov’s tyranny that makes me question if he really did convert to become a terrorist after being evacuated to the U.S. as a refugee. That doesn’t mean he didn’t (it’s happened before) but given how commonly groups that resist Central Asian regimes are called terrorists — and how fuzzy they’re defined, and how much they engage in bombast on the Internet, both of which are germane to this discussion — I do think it’s better to stay skeptical rather than gullible about the indictment.

Now, despite Daveed and my agreements on the pitfalls of relying on the Uzbek government to designate groups as terrorists, that doesn’t mean there’s something weird going on about the arrest. As Daveed notes, Mukhtarov does seem to have fallen afoul of the “material support” laws in the U.S. My argument, poorly stated in that initial post, was that those laws are themselves inherently flawed, a point JM Berger also picked up on in the comments and as I repeated. Saying the law is flawed is not the same as saying Mukhtarov broke no law, which is what Daveed (incorrectly) reduces my argument to.

All that being said, and this is separate from me and Daveed, there is a growing chorus of skeptics that seem to allege some sort of weird-ass plot between the Uzbek government and the State Department, or whatever, to trade Mukhtarov, a prominent dissident, in exchange for access to the NDN. That is, put simply, silly and completely without data even to suggest it is the case. I can say that more than one U.S. official working on Uzbek policy was genuinely surprised by Mukhtarov’s arrest, and it almost certainly wasn’t a feature of the NDN negotiations (and it isn’t something either State or DOD would do anyway). That being said, Turkey does have a large Uzbek population, and that population is vocal in its dissidence and opposition to the Karimov regime. There are perfectly legitimate and innocent reasons for Mukhtarov to travel there, whatever his emailed statements have said.

Back to Daveed’s point: about the real threat posed by the IJU, he too engages in some epistemological perfidy. While scolding me for reducing the Mukhtarov indictment to “crimes on a chatroom,” Daveed pulls from the indictment itself a list of crimes that include sending emails favorable of Juma Namangani and saying he supports the goals of a website administrator. I fail to see the distinction, even if he is working on semantics rather than specifics, between “email correspondence with a website administrator” and “crimes on a chatroom.” It comes down to a lot of big talk on the Internet (including the bay’ah, because who ever engages in hyperbole on the Internet, ever?) and the purchase of a plane ticket. I don’t dispute that that can constitute a U.S. crime — I do, however, think that is a dumb basis for a law.

Then there’s Daveed’s point that the IJU is a really real thing that does stuff and is scary. His evidence for it indicates the problem with designating such groups: the 2007 Germany investigation was for supposed operatives of the Islamic Jihad Group, which might be the same thing as the Islamic Jihad Union (or it might not, since the two maintain different websites and claim responsibility for different attacks). While the IJU website administrators claim responsibility for a lot of attacks, this is hardly unique within the community of crazy dudes with beards and websites (the KavKaz Center is a great example of such wannabe terrorist bombast). Apart from the IMU, which does have a defined organization, web presence, and has openly engaged in militant activities, the IJU/IJG groups are much harder to define, more difficult to pin down, and half the time don’t even correspond in Uzbek (the German operatives could not communicate in Uzbek, but rather spoke German).

Now, getting ideas from a website or chat group (like the three Germans) and buying explosives can legitimately be called a crime. But Mukhtarov didn’t do that: he allegedly got ideas from a website and bought a plane ticket. This is the crux of my skepticism with this case: lots of people talk big on the Internet, and lots of groups that don’t exist much outside of the Internet and Northwest Pakistan like to lay claim to things to appear more powerful than they are. Think of when Zabiullah Mujahid had to withdraw a Taliban claim to have assassinated Berhanuddin Rabbani — sure they could have actually done it, but they also use claims and retractions strategically to achieve messaging goals. Just because a group says it has global aspirations, that doesn’t mean they are capable of global action or warrant a global response. And just because Mukhtarov said some scary things on the Internet, that doesn’t mean he committed any traditionally-defined crimes in doing so. To criminalize this sort of correspondence veers dangerously close to creating thought-crimes.

So when Daveed says that I argued the IJU doesn’t exist, he’s misrepresenting my argument, and when he says that I think the Uzbek authorities duped the U.S. into arresting Mukhtarov, he is misrepresenting my argument once again. I did neither of those things: I argued that the U.S. gets bad information from the Uzbek government, and that this has led some analysts and officials to overstate or hype the threat posed by these groups, and that some of them, like the IJU, either do very little or exist mostly on the Internet and thus don’t really post a vital risk to anyone. Despite his lengthy bluster about the indictment, none of the facts and arguments Daveed produces — when he even produces them accurately — address those concerns, and simply noting that the IJU websites want Europeans hardly justifies such an angry response to skepticism about a terrorism indictment (and don’t even get me started on the ridiculous playing up of “khorasan” that pollutes the Counterterrorism writing on this stuff).

In short, Daveed’s and my disagreement comes back to an argument we had about a year ago about the nature and process of radicalization: whether you take people at their literal word or not. The way the U.S. government tends to view radicalization treats it not only as something that can be easily tracked using indirect indicators, and as something that is driven by ideology rather than environmental factors — think of the dispute over whether religion actually does play a role in radicalization in this post. There, Daveed had rejected taking people at their word when discussion their descent into radicalization and terrorism; here, however, he seems to think that bombast on the Internet constitutes an appropriate threshold for arresting someone.

Daveed seems to think that if someone talks big on the Internet then boards a plane to a country with a major dissident population from your distant homeland, it makes sense to arrest that person on suspicion of terrorism. I think that makes no sense, since it doesn’t constitute anything we’d normally consider criminal. That Daveed lapses into caricature while complaining that I’ve done the same? Well… this is the Internet, after all. People engage in bombast.

On Thursday, Twitter announced that it would begin to selectively block tweets on a country by country basis. The decision prompted an immediate outcry from free speech advocates as well as a more measured response from scholars of social media, several of whom praised Twitter’s relative transparency while noting that it has no choice but to comply with the regulations of individual governments.

One of the most passionate defenders of Twitter’s new policy is Zeynep Tufekci, who described it as an “excellent policy which will be helpful to free-speech advocates”. Tufekci sees Twitter’s selective censorship as an improvement over the broad censorship practiced by other internet companies, in which content deemed offensive by one is deleted for all. Under the new guidelines, a tweet deemed inappropriate by the leaders of a particular country will only be censored within that country.  To the rest of the world, it will be labeled as “blocked”, a development she describes as “excellent” because it renders state attempts to suppress speech transparent.

Tufekci, a scholar and advocate of free speech in the Arab world, has been criticized by some who see her post as a rationalization of censorship. While I disagree that this is her intention, her article does prompt troubling questions about the nature and purpose of Twitter: both for activists and their supporters. Tufekci’s thesis proceeds from the assumption that local activists get global followings. It assumes that Twitter activists are internationally connected and have a network of trusted advocates who will notice, and care, when their words are censored. This view is reflected in guidelines for online activists released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on which Tufekci consulted, that place the onus of activism on international digital networks facilitated by interpersonal trust.

In some parts of the world, particularly in the Arab region that is Tufekci’s focus, these points might make sense. But for much of the world, they highlight a fundamental misapprehension of the role social media plays in activist networks. The weaknesses of Twitter’s censorship policy reflect the weaknesses of Twitter itself.

*             *             *

Last summer, two Uzbek journalists, Malohat Eshonqulova and Saodat Omonova, went on a hunger strike to protest censorship and corruption in Uzbekistan’s state-run media. For one month, they tweeted the details of their strike from the Twitter account @Malohat_Saodat. They spoke of their physical agony, of the challenges facing reporters in Uzbekistan, and of the hypocrisy and corruption of the government of Uzbekistan. They posted videos of their strike to YouTube, and tweeted the links. Most of their tweets were in Uzbek, although some were in Russian. By the time of their final post, they had tweeted 730 times, had amassed around 65 followers, and had attracted no international media attention or global outcry. Malohat and Saodat’s near death on Twitter scarcely merited a retweet.

Why did this happen? First, Malohat and Saodat were writing in Uzbek, which few outside Central Asia can read. I translated some of their tweets into English and encouraged people to follow them, and several people did in response. But their case still attracted little interest. This brings me to my second point – almost no one cared about Malohat and Saodat because they were Malohat and Saodat. They were two journalists from Uzbekistan, a country with which few profess familiarity and whose activists do not use Twitter as a primary social medium.

Malohat and Saodat were subject to Twitter’s inherent popularity contest, in which the very few command the attention of the very many. In this system, well-connected English-speaking activists serve as the Justin Biebers of political dissidence: they attract followers based on brand recognition, and give the illusion that self-made internet performance breeds success. Malohat and Saodat did many of the things their Arab counterparts did, shortly after their Arab counterparts did them. Yet the world remained indifferent to their plight.

*             *             *

This is a story of Twitter activism before Twitter censorship. Now imagine what will happen once Twitter begins selectively censoring. What will become of the activists who lack both clout and Klout? Tufekci argues that Twitter’s transparency arrangement will focus attention on maligned activists – but this assumes that people outside the censored region will care. In reality, it is people within a particular region who follow regional crises most closely. Malohat and Saodat were ignored by the world, but they were followed closely by Uzbek activists and Uzbek independent media. I do not know what Uzbekistan’s policy on Twitter will be, but given its long history of internet censorship it will likely be one of the countries that demands Twitter block controversial content. And so cases like Malohat and Saodat’s will disappear from Twitter entirely, hidden even from their limited target audience.

Tufekci is correct that Twitter’s policy is realistic – as she points out, “the Internet is not a ‘virtual’ space, and cyberspace is not a planet which can float above all jurisdictions forever.” But realistic does not mean right. Twitter’s policy privileges the already privileged, hurting nascent dissident movements and the regional activists who struggle to promote them.

A curious press release went out today that urges the US public and government to support investment in Central Asia, especially in Uzbekistan. (Unsurprisingly, it is currently the top news item at The American Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce at the moment). The release casts US business as the force that should be left behind to secure American strategic interests in Central Asia after troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2014. The release argues that lawmakers will be dropping the ball on achieving long-term benefits to the US should they fail to get behind US investment in the region.

The argument in the press release contains nothing that is self-evidently ridiculous or false, but it is three paragraphs heaping with wishful thinking. In other words, it’s probably perfectly crafted to excite at least a few members of Congress.

Karimov’s government would surely be over the moon to have the US government encouraging massive investment in Uzbekistan, but it should not be forgotten that Uzbekistan ranks almost as poorly in economic freedoms as it does in political rights and civil liberties. It is a terrible climate for foreign investors, with perhaps a few exceptions, where US investors stand risk to suffer as bilateral relations deteriorate. Additionally, investors should be cautious about the finances of the Uzbek state. Official economic statistics are unreliable and suspect, and there are some indicators — major interruptions in gas and power supplies and last year’s massive overhaul of consumer trade outlets — that suggest powerful elites are looking for new stones to squeeze to sustain their lifestyles. Instead of encouraging US businesses to walk into an uncertain environment where they face shakedowns by bureaucrats and cotton campaign labor organizers, Congress would be better served to press Uzbekistan to improve its business climate.

More importantly though, does the US even have a post-2014 strategic policy for Central Asia of any sort, let alone one that a community of US investors in the region could support? The answer to that appears to be “no.” If that is indeed the case, this press release reads instead as a call not for the US government to support US investors in the region as much as it does a plea for it not to abandon them.

Side note: The author of this press release works for the US-Ukraine Business Council. Does anyone know why, aside from freelancing, he’d be writing something that seems more in the lane of the AUCC

Photo: Tashkent, Chorsu Bazaar by Arian Zweger

I wrote earlier today about the weird trumped up Uzbek Terror hype machine, and how it might have snagged a man for committing, essentially, a thought crime. Jamshid Mukhtarov is currently in custody on suspicion of providing material support to the Islamic Jihad Union.

We’ll set aside questions of whether the IJU exists anywhere outside of an Internet chat room. What’s interesting is the history of Mukhtarov himself. Registan.net contributor Sarah Kendzior is digging through a lot of Uzbek-language material on him, but from what she and I have dug up before, he used to be a fairly well known figure in the Uzbek human rights movement in Jizzakh, in the Ezgulik Human Rights Society. In 2005, Mukhtarov wrote for Ferghana.ru:

“Human rights activists and oppositionists giving the population of Dzhizak the alternative information on the tragic events in Andizhan this May are being suppressed and harassed,” Dzhamshid Mukhtarov of Human Rights Society Ezgulik told foreign journalists on December 22. According to the activist, 15 representatives of the human rights community were assailed and beaten and threatened with displacement in Dzhizak itself and its environs.

Mukhtarov himself barely avoided arrest on fabricated charges of being an Islamic fundamentalist in August 2005. He avoided detention only because Birlik leader Vasila Inoyatova phoned the then Interior Minister Zakir Almatov on his behalf. Mukhtarov’s activeness in the human rights movement rekindled his conflict with law enforcement agencies.

David Walter blogged about the incident for Registan.net:

Another very interesting nugget that comes out of these stories, though, is that in Dzhizak in particular (I don’t necessarliy recall seeing this in other regions) these human rights activists, when they are arrested, are rung up on charges of “islamic extremism” rather than the more sophisticated (but equally vague) financial charges that Tashkent authorities like to use. The Dzhizak authorities seem consistently more exhuberant about enforcing and maintaining the party line (along with an enthusiastic strain of America-bashing) and less concerned about being openly corrupt than their Tashkent peers.

So Mukhtarov has been caught up in a web of trumped-up charges of extremism before. But his story is more complicated than that. A leaked State Department cable (sigh, I’m so sorry) describes Mukhtarov as being at the center of a power struggle within Ezgulik. Vasila Inoyatova, the woman who had kept the Jizzakh authorities from arresting Mukhatarov in early 2005, later asked the Jizzakh authorities to dissolve that branch of Ezgulik in December of 2005 after the local director stopped filing reports and began speaking out against her. Mukhtarov took over control to the Jizzakh branch, but also didn’t file reports. He then left Uzbekistan for Russia to earn money for a few months.

By the time Mukhtarov came back, in October of 2005, he wanted to realign the Jizzakh Ezgulik branch from Birlik to the Free Farmer’s Party (a Ferghana.ru profile of him, from December of 2005, notes that Mukhtarov was also involved in trying to defend local farmers from having their land seized by corrupt local authorities). The Jizzakh branch of Ezgulik was dissolved soon afterward. The problem is that the Free Farmer’s Party wants to overthrow the regime, while Birlik, the party the Tashkent headquarters of Ezgulik associated itself with, favored more gradual evolution in governance.

So even back then, Mukhtarov had openly expressed solidarity with regime change in Tashkent — hardly a crime, but it did make him a target for the authorities. According to the Common Language Project, in 2006 Mukhtarov was caught distributing Human Rights Watch literature about the Andijon massacre and was placed under house arrest for trumped-up “sexual harassment” charges. He was quickly smuggled over the border to Kyrgyzstan.

I know that we can’t go home until President Karimov is ousted. I’m sure that if I were to return now I would be killed. It is hard to maintain hope that things will change and we will be able to return home — everyone is so afraid after what happened in Andijan.

While in Kyrgyzstan, however, Mukhtarov ran into some problems. JM Berger, who runs the Intelwire site and published Jihad Joe, a study about domestic radicalization in the U.S., sent along a grab from Lexis-Nexis. 24kg reported in 2006 that Mukhtarov, living in exile in Osh, complained thatKyrgyz special forces threatened to hand him over to the National Security Service of Uzbekistan if he didn’t leave the country. According to employees of the committee on migration and employment, 24kg reports, Muhtarov made fabricated reports and appeals to various international organizations complaining of persecution.

I can’t find out how he wound up in the U.S., though around that time many countries, including the U.S., were granting asylum to Uzbeks who fled the violence in Andijon. While Mukhtarov and his family were not direct victims of Andijon, they did have to flee the country in response to his activism about it. It’s possible he managed to get asylum that way.

Mukhtarov today, courtesy Radio Ozodlik

Something happened to Mukhtarov while he was in this country. Maybe. In this photo, taken in 2008, he appears a bit nebbish perhaps but certainly no radical. In the photo above, provided by Radio Ozodlik, Mukhtarov seems to have taken on the fashions of Islamist militarism. It’s a pretty shocking change for a man who argued to passionately, and at such great risk, for the rights and freedoms of his family and countrymen.

However, the only thing the U.S. federal authorities have revealed is that Mukhtarov is, apparently, guilty of sending some emails. They call that “material support” because it was to people believed to be associated with a Foreign Terrorist Organization. It’s awfully thin gruel for a terror investigation.

What is bizarre is what a dramatic change this is for Mukhtarov. Weirdly, his family was mentioned in the 2005 Uzbekistan country report published by the State Department, but that’s been taken offline (cache is here for the time being). He has a history of being hounded by the authorities for his outspoken views on rights, and for being falsely accused of Islamism by the government of Uzbekistan.

Are the current charges similarly trumped up? We just don’t know, and both Sarah Kendzior and I are looking into this a lot more (expect her to write when she’s finished digging through VOLUMES of Uzbek-language material). But for right now we’re just putting this out there to see if anyone else is able to come up with something.

This is a truly bizarre case, one of the weirdest I’ve seen. And it has a helluva lot more questions than answers.