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FORUM 18 NEWS SERVICE, Oslo, Norway
http://www.forum18.org/
The right to believe, to worship and witness
The right to change one's belief or religion
The right to join together and express one's belief
========================================== =======
Tuesday 19 December 2006
UZBEKISTAN: GOVERNMENT TRIES TO DENY RELIGIOUS FREEDOM REALITY
Uzbekistan increasingly claims that it is a country of religious
tolerance, where religious freedom is respected, Forum 18 News Service
notes. This is despite the state TV company's attacks on religious
tolerance and religious freedom, the persecution of independent Muslims,
Protestants and Jehovah's Witnesses, and tight restrictions on members of
other communities. In an echo of Soviet-era practice, religious leaders
have increasingly been co-opted to support false claims of religious
freedom. A "non-governmental" opinion poll centre has claimed that it has
carried out a poll proving that "only" 3.9 percent of respondents had said
their religious rights are restricted in Uzbekistan. Marat Hajimuhamedov,
who was involved in the survey, laughed and declined to comment when Forum
18 asked him how the survey accorded with religious believers' experience
of police raids, fines, imprisonment and harassment of religious
communities.
UZBEKISTAN: GOVERNMENT TRIES TO DENY RELIGIOUS FREEDOM REALITY
By Felix Corley, Forum 18 News Service <http://www.forum18.org>
While independent Muslims, Protestants and Jehovah's Witnesses face
persecution and members of other religious communities face tight
government-imposed restrictions, the Uzbek authorities are stepping up
efforts to promote their spurious claims that Uzbekistan has a
religiously-tolerant government that respects religious freedom. Forum 18
News Service notes that - in an echo of Soviet-era practice - religious
leaders have increasingly been brought in by the government to help
promote this message.
These efforts come against a backdrop of increasing government control
over all aspects of religious life. Among recent developments, the
authorities in the Andijan [Andijon] region have instituted a new ban on
the Muslim call to prayer from mosques, another court has ordered
confiscated Christian literature to be burned and the government's
Religious Affairs Committee has banned the Jehovah's Witnesses from
importing Bibles (see forthcoming F18News article).
To help promote the government's image of a country that respects
religious freedom, the results of an opinion poll allegedly carried out
across Uzbekistan by the Ijtimoiy Fikr (Social Opinion) centre were widely
distributed in the official media on 13 December under the headline
"Religious rights in Uzbekistan are respected - poll". The report was
carried by the websites of various Uzbek Embassies, such as those in
Germany and Israel. Ijtimoiy Fikr is a government-founded
"non-governmental" opinion poll centre in the capital Tashkent led by Rano
Ubaidullaeva, a member of the Academy of Sciences.
Close observers of the polling agency's work over recent years - who asked
not to be named - pointed out to Forum 18 that the agency is not
independent. They report that the alleged results of polls the agency
publishes do not always accurately reflect the results the agency gets and
on occasion the published "results" - particularly over sensitive issues -
have been fabricated.
The alleged results of the opinion poll on religion were released less
than two weeks after Uzbek national state television broadcast an
anti-Protestant and anti-Jehovah's Witness programme entitled
"Hypocrites". The programme accused these groups of promoting drug
addiction, turning converts into zombies and wanting to promote fights
between people of different faiths. The programme interviewed a Russian
Orthodox and a Jewish representative, who both claimed that Uzbekistan
guarantees full religious freedom (see F18News 19 December 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=890>).
The Tashkent-based Armenian priest Fr Gevorg Vardanyan and two ethnic
Armenian leaders have also defended the Uzbek government's record. They
described the designation of Uzbekistan by the US State Department in
November as a "Country of Particular Concern" for its violations of
religious freedom as "an injustice to which we cannot be indifferent". "To
consider Uzbekistan as a state where there are no religious freedoms," they
assert, "is a crude political demarche insulting above all those who avail
themselves of these freedoms, the ordinary believers of our country,
whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or representatives of other
faiths."
The comments by the three Armenians came in their article in the
government's Russian-language paper Narodnoe Slovo on 16 December
reporting on a service in Tashkent to commemorate the victims of the 1988
Armenian earthquake. They said nothing about the then very recent
imposition of massive fines on six Baptists, and the order by a court that
Christian literature, including copies of the Bible, should be burnt (see
F18News 27 November 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=877>).
In her 13 December report of the Ijtimoiy Fikr opinion poll results,
Ubaidullaeva claimed on the Ijtimoiy Fikr website that "only" 3.9 percent
of respondents had said their religious rights are restricted in
Uzbekistan. It claimed that 82 percent had said they are not, while the
remaining 14.1 percent were unable to answer.
On the website, Ijtimoiy Fikr gave no information about how many people
had been polled, where they lived or how they had been selected to ensure
they represented the wider population. Forum 18 notes that fear of
responding on a sensitive issue would also have hindered accurate polling.
However, Marat Hajimuhamedov, who heads the sociological monitoring
department at Ijtimoiy Fikr and who was involved in the survey, told Forum
18 that more than 1,700 adults were surveyed in face-to-face interviews
across Uzbekistan at the end of November and the beginning of December.
"Everything was done according to international survey standards," he
insisted to Forum 18 from Tashkent on 19 December. He said the sample was
weighted for age and geographical location.
Hajimuhamedov told Forum 18 that respondents did not give their names but
had to give their addresses to allow verification of the results. He
insisted that his centre guarantees the secrecy of responses and that
respondents would therefore have no reason not to give accurate answers.
He did not explain how this matches the reports of a wide range of
respected human rights and media organisations, including Forum 18, which
point to a pattern of widespread control and repression used by the Uzbek
government against its own citizens.
He insisted to Forum 18 that the results of the question as to whether
respondents are able to practice their faith freely are accurate. "The
rights of believers are respected here in Uzbekistan," he maintained. "The
overwhelming majority of the population - more than 90 percent - will tell
you that." Asked how that accords with religious believers' experience of
police raids, fines, imprisonment and harassment of religious communities,
he laughed and declined any comment.
On its website, the polling group also claimed that 22 percent of Muslims
have been able to make the haj pilgrimage to Mecca in the fifteen years
since Uzbekistan became independent, an unlikely claim given that in
recent years the government has allowed only about 4,000 Muslims to
conduct the haj each year. For this year's haj which is about to begin,
the Uzbek government has allowed only 5,000 pilgrims to travel compared to
Uzbekistan's quota from the Saudi authorities of some 25,000 (see F18News 7
December 2006 <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id= 884>).
However, Hajimuhamedov told Forum 18 that the question - put only to the
90 percent or so of respondents who identified themselves as Muslim -
actually asked whether they or members of their immediate family had been
on the haj. He was unable to explain why an inaccurate impression had been
given in the website report or how even then such a high percentage could
respond positively, given the tight government restrictions on pilgrim
numbers.
Forum 18 notes that, in what has become customary practice, the
widely-distributed report of Ijtimoiy Fikr's alleged findings and the
"Hypocrites" television programmes both spoke repeatedly of religious
freedom and religious extremism and violence in the same breath,
establishing in viewers' and readers' minds that religion is a dangerous
force that the government is right to control and restrict.
One Tashkent-based Protestant - who declined to be identified for fear of
reprisals - regards the "Hypocrites" programme as part of an increased
anti-Protestant and anti-Jehovah's Witness campaign that began in 2005.
The Protestant cited the instructions from the Tashkent city mayor's
office in December 2005 to check up on all aspects of religious
communities' life (see F18News 11 January 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=714>). "Commissions from
the architect's office, fire department and all manner of agencies came to
each church," the Protestant recalled. "Sometimes officials came openly,
sometimes secretly." The Deputy Head of the city administration at that
time claimed to Forum 18 that "there is no campaign against religious
believers."
Also part of the campaign were orders to heads of schools and institutes
in spring 2006 to investigate the religious affiliation and practice of
staff and students, a campaign stepped up in the new academic year in
September. Yet again, Uzbekistan repeated its claim that members of
religious faiths "freely practice their faith." Forum 18 has itself been
accused of trying "at every opportunity to accuse Uzbekistan without
foundation of repressing believers." (see F18News 28 November 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=878>).
The Protestant said the campaign was stepped up in summer and autumn of
this year, with police raids, the closure of churches and the expulsion of
foreigners connected with or accused of being connected with religious
communities (see F18News 10 October 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?artic le_id=852>). The latest foreign
humanitarian aid group to be accused of being a front for missionaries is
the US-based Northwest Medical Teams International. The government
press-uz.info website accused the group on 28 November of tax-evasion and
cooperating with aid groups that have been fined or closed down for
allegedly proselytising among the population.
Unlike foreign Muslims, Protestants and Jehovah's Witnesses who have faced
deportation for working with local religious communities at their
invitation (see eg. F18News 6 September 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=838>), the Russian
Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian Apostolic and Jewish faiths can use foreign
clergy.
Andrei Kuraev, a Moscow-based deacon of the Russian Orthodox Church, says
he has faced no problems visiting Uzbekistan twice this year and speaking
in churches and the Orthodox seminary in Tashkent, as well as in
universities and other institutions. "The only conditions came not from
Uzbek officials but from our bishop [Metropolitan Vladimir (Ikim) of
Tashkent], who said I should not use the word 'mission' and should not
criticise Islam," he told Forum 18 on 18 December. "I gave all my lectures
wearing my vestments. Of course I had to inform the authorities in advance
where I was going and what I would say."
Deacon Kuraev believes it was a "political decision" to allow him to come
to Uzbekistan and speak, while Russian, Ukrainian, American and Korean
Protestants have been expelled for doing the same. (END)
For a personal commentary by a Muslim scholar, advocating religious
freedom for all faiths as the best antidote to Islamic religious extremism
in Uzbekistan, see <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id= 338>.
For more background, see Forum 18's Uzbekistan religious freedom survey at
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_ id=777>.
For an analysis of whether the May 2005 Andijan events changed state
religious policy in the year following, see
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article _id=778>. For an outline of
what is known about Akramia itself, see
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article _id=586>, and for a May 2005
analysis of what happened in Andijan see
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article _id=567>.
A survey of the religious freedom decline in the eastern part of the
Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) area is at
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_ id=806>, and of religious
intolerance in Central Asia is at
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_ id=815>.
A printer-friendly map of Uzbekistan is available at
<http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpedition s/atlas/index.html?Parent=asia&Rootmap=uzbeki& gt;.
(END)
© Forum 18 News Service. All rights reserved. ISSN 1504-2855
You may reproduce or quote this article provided that credit is given to
F18News http://www.forum18.org/
Past and current Forum 18 information can be found at
http://www.forum18.org/
--Boundary_(ID_DeJ6wTD 7/+6C5QKbLPSAOA)--
http://www.forum18.org/
The right to believe, to worship and witness
The right to change one's belief or religion
The right to join together and express one's belief
========================================== =======
Tuesday 19 December 2006
UZBEKISTAN: GOVERNMENT TRIES TO DENY RELIGIOUS FREEDOM REALITY
Uzbekistan increasingly claims that it is a country of religious
tolerance, where religious freedom is respected, Forum 18 News Service
notes. This is despite the state TV company's attacks on religious
tolerance and religious freedom, the persecution of independent Muslims,
Protestants and Jehovah's Witnesses, and tight restrictions on members of
other communities. In an echo of Soviet-era practice, religious leaders
have increasingly been co-opted to support false claims of religious
freedom. A "non-governmental" opinion poll centre has claimed that it has
carried out a poll proving that "only" 3.9 percent of respondents had said
their religious rights are restricted in Uzbekistan. Marat Hajimuhamedov,
who was involved in the survey, laughed and declined to comment when Forum
18 asked him how the survey accorded with religious believers' experience
of police raids, fines, imprisonment and harassment of religious
communities.
UZBEKISTAN: GOVERNMENT TRIES TO DENY RELIGIOUS FREEDOM REALITY
By Felix Corley, Forum 18 News Service <http://www.forum18.org>
While independent Muslims, Protestants and Jehovah's Witnesses face
persecution and members of other religious communities face tight
government-imposed restrictions, the Uzbek authorities are stepping up
efforts to promote their spurious claims that Uzbekistan has a
religiously-tolerant government that respects religious freedom. Forum 18
News Service notes that - in an echo of Soviet-era practice - religious
leaders have increasingly been brought in by the government to help
promote this message.
These efforts come against a backdrop of increasing government control
over all aspects of religious life. Among recent developments, the
authorities in the Andijan [Andijon] region have instituted a new ban on
the Muslim call to prayer from mosques, another court has ordered
confiscated Christian literature to be burned and the government's
Religious Affairs Committee has banned the Jehovah's Witnesses from
importing Bibles (see forthcoming F18News article).
To help promote the government's image of a country that respects
religious freedom, the results of an opinion poll allegedly carried out
across Uzbekistan by the Ijtimoiy Fikr (Social Opinion) centre were widely
distributed in the official media on 13 December under the headline
"Religious rights in Uzbekistan are respected - poll". The report was
carried by the websites of various Uzbek Embassies, such as those in
Germany and Israel. Ijtimoiy Fikr is a government-founded
"non-governmental" opinion poll centre in the capital Tashkent led by Rano
Ubaidullaeva, a member of the Academy of Sciences.
Close observers of the polling agency's work over recent years - who asked
not to be named - pointed out to Forum 18 that the agency is not
independent. They report that the alleged results of polls the agency
publishes do not always accurately reflect the results the agency gets and
on occasion the published "results" - particularly over sensitive issues -
have been fabricated.
The alleged results of the opinion poll on religion were released less
than two weeks after Uzbek national state television broadcast an
anti-Protestant and anti-Jehovah's Witness programme entitled
"Hypocrites". The programme accused these groups of promoting drug
addiction, turning converts into zombies and wanting to promote fights
between people of different faiths. The programme interviewed a Russian
Orthodox and a Jewish representative, who both claimed that Uzbekistan
guarantees full religious freedom (see F18News 19 December 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=890>).
The Tashkent-based Armenian priest Fr Gevorg Vardanyan and two ethnic
Armenian leaders have also defended the Uzbek government's record. They
described the designation of Uzbekistan by the US State Department in
November as a "Country of Particular Concern" for its violations of
religious freedom as "an injustice to which we cannot be indifferent". "To
consider Uzbekistan as a state where there are no religious freedoms," they
assert, "is a crude political demarche insulting above all those who avail
themselves of these freedoms, the ordinary believers of our country,
whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or representatives of other
faiths."
The comments by the three Armenians came in their article in the
government's Russian-language paper Narodnoe Slovo on 16 December
reporting on a service in Tashkent to commemorate the victims of the 1988
Armenian earthquake. They said nothing about the then very recent
imposition of massive fines on six Baptists, and the order by a court that
Christian literature, including copies of the Bible, should be burnt (see
F18News 27 November 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=877>).
In her 13 December report of the Ijtimoiy Fikr opinion poll results,
Ubaidullaeva claimed on the Ijtimoiy Fikr website that "only" 3.9 percent
of respondents had said their religious rights are restricted in
Uzbekistan. It claimed that 82 percent had said they are not, while the
remaining 14.1 percent were unable to answer.
On the website, Ijtimoiy Fikr gave no information about how many people
had been polled, where they lived or how they had been selected to ensure
they represented the wider population. Forum 18 notes that fear of
responding on a sensitive issue would also have hindered accurate polling.
However, Marat Hajimuhamedov, who heads the sociological monitoring
department at Ijtimoiy Fikr and who was involved in the survey, told Forum
18 that more than 1,700 adults were surveyed in face-to-face interviews
across Uzbekistan at the end of November and the beginning of December.
"Everything was done according to international survey standards," he
insisted to Forum 18 from Tashkent on 19 December. He said the sample was
weighted for age and geographical location.
Hajimuhamedov told Forum 18 that respondents did not give their names but
had to give their addresses to allow verification of the results. He
insisted that his centre guarantees the secrecy of responses and that
respondents would therefore have no reason not to give accurate answers.
He did not explain how this matches the reports of a wide range of
respected human rights and media organisations, including Forum 18, which
point to a pattern of widespread control and repression used by the Uzbek
government against its own citizens.
He insisted to Forum 18 that the results of the question as to whether
respondents are able to practice their faith freely are accurate. "The
rights of believers are respected here in Uzbekistan," he maintained. "The
overwhelming majority of the population - more than 90 percent - will tell
you that." Asked how that accords with religious believers' experience of
police raids, fines, imprisonment and harassment of religious communities,
he laughed and declined any comment.
On its website, the polling group also claimed that 22 percent of Muslims
have been able to make the haj pilgrimage to Mecca in the fifteen years
since Uzbekistan became independent, an unlikely claim given that in
recent years the government has allowed only about 4,000 Muslims to
conduct the haj each year. For this year's haj which is about to begin,
the Uzbek government has allowed only 5,000 pilgrims to travel compared to
Uzbekistan's quota from the Saudi authorities of some 25,000 (see F18News 7
December 2006 <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id= 884>).
However, Hajimuhamedov told Forum 18 that the question - put only to the
90 percent or so of respondents who identified themselves as Muslim -
actually asked whether they or members of their immediate family had been
on the haj. He was unable to explain why an inaccurate impression had been
given in the website report or how even then such a high percentage could
respond positively, given the tight government restrictions on pilgrim
numbers.
Forum 18 notes that, in what has become customary practice, the
widely-distributed report of Ijtimoiy Fikr's alleged findings and the
"Hypocrites" television programmes both spoke repeatedly of religious
freedom and religious extremism and violence in the same breath,
establishing in viewers' and readers' minds that religion is a dangerous
force that the government is right to control and restrict.
One Tashkent-based Protestant - who declined to be identified for fear of
reprisals - regards the "Hypocrites" programme as part of an increased
anti-Protestant and anti-Jehovah's Witness campaign that began in 2005.
The Protestant cited the instructions from the Tashkent city mayor's
office in December 2005 to check up on all aspects of religious
communities' life (see F18News 11 January 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=714>). "Commissions from
the architect's office, fire department and all manner of agencies came to
each church," the Protestant recalled. "Sometimes officials came openly,
sometimes secretly." The Deputy Head of the city administration at that
time claimed to Forum 18 that "there is no campaign against religious
believers."
Also part of the campaign were orders to heads of schools and institutes
in spring 2006 to investigate the religious affiliation and practice of
staff and students, a campaign stepped up in the new academic year in
September. Yet again, Uzbekistan repeated its claim that members of
religious faiths "freely practice their faith." Forum 18 has itself been
accused of trying "at every opportunity to accuse Uzbekistan without
foundation of repressing believers." (see F18News 28 November 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=878>).
The Protestant said the campaign was stepped up in summer and autumn of
this year, with police raids, the closure of churches and the expulsion of
foreigners connected with or accused of being connected with religious
communities (see F18News 10 October 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?artic le_id=852>). The latest foreign
humanitarian aid group to be accused of being a front for missionaries is
the US-based Northwest Medical Teams International. The government
press-uz.info website accused the group on 28 November of tax-evasion and
cooperating with aid groups that have been fined or closed down for
allegedly proselytising among the population.
Unlike foreign Muslims, Protestants and Jehovah's Witnesses who have faced
deportation for working with local religious communities at their
invitation (see eg. F18News 6 September 2006
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?articl e_id=838>), the Russian
Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian Apostolic and Jewish faiths can use foreign
clergy.
Andrei Kuraev, a Moscow-based deacon of the Russian Orthodox Church, says
he has faced no problems visiting Uzbekistan twice this year and speaking
in churches and the Orthodox seminary in Tashkent, as well as in
universities and other institutions. "The only conditions came not from
Uzbek officials but from our bishop [Metropolitan Vladimir (Ikim) of
Tashkent], who said I should not use the word 'mission' and should not
criticise Islam," he told Forum 18 on 18 December. "I gave all my lectures
wearing my vestments. Of course I had to inform the authorities in advance
where I was going and what I would say."
Deacon Kuraev believes it was a "political decision" to allow him to come
to Uzbekistan and speak, while Russian, Ukrainian, American and Korean
Protestants have been expelled for doing the same. (END)
For a personal commentary by a Muslim scholar, advocating religious
freedom for all faiths as the best antidote to Islamic religious extremism
in Uzbekistan, see <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id= 338>.
For more background, see Forum 18's Uzbekistan religious freedom survey at
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_ id=777>.
For an analysis of whether the May 2005 Andijan events changed state
religious policy in the year following, see
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article _id=778>. For an outline of
what is known about Akramia itself, see
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article _id=586>, and for a May 2005
analysis of what happened in Andijan see
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article _id=567>.
A survey of the religious freedom decline in the eastern part of the
Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) area is at
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_ id=806>, and of religious
intolerance in Central Asia is at
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_ id=815>.
A printer-friendly map of Uzbekistan is available at
<http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpedition s/atlas/index.html?Parent=asia&Rootmap=uzbeki& gt;.
(END)
© Forum 18 News Service. All rights reserved. ISSN 1504-2855
You may reproduce or quote this article provided that credit is given to
F18News http://www.forum18.org/
Past and current Forum 18 information can be found at
http://www.forum18.org/
--Boundary_(ID_DeJ6wTD 7/+6C5QKbLPSAOA)--