Central Asia: Governments Wary Of Independent Media

Tajik journalist Jumaboi Tolibov spent nearly six months in jail in 2005 (RFE/RL)

Being an independent journalist is a hazardous occupations in Central Asia. People in the region are hungry for the truth about what is happening in their countries, but governments there are often determined to provide them with only a sanitized version of events.

PRAGUE, April 28, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- "Journalists, like human-rights defenders in some of the countries of Central Asia, work in conditions of tremendous adversity because many of the governments in Central Asia want to do everything to avoid public scrutiny of government policy, public scrutiny of government processes, of government budgets of any kind of government work," said Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division for Human Rights Watch.

"They want to avoid scrutiny because they want to avoid accountability," she added. "For any journalist this poses tremendous problems because they can't get information. Often when they write, they know the kinds of problems they can face if they observe the principles of professionalism. So they have to write under self-censorship."

Elections Spell Trouble For Journalists

That is generally the situation throughout Central Asia, though the problems vary in degree from country to country. But there have been times when all these countries have imposed restrictions on the media.

Nuriddin Qarshiboev is the director of the National Association of Independent Media in Tajikistan (NANSMIT). He said in the years his group has been working a trend is discernible.

"In the seven years our organization has existed, we have concluded that during the period before elections the government tightens controls [over the media] and there is an increase in violations," Qarshiboev said.

Such tightening of controls and increases in violations against the press occur throughout the region.

"General elections are the time when scrutiny over media policy and media independence is the greatest," said Oliver Money-Kyrle, the director of the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists. "And it's a time when governments are most sensitive toward the reporter but it's also the time when they're being watched most closely by foreign governments."

International monitors have observed elections in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan for more than a decade now -- officials in Turkmenistan have not issued the type of invitation necessary for rights groups to monitor elections.

Kyrgyzstan's presidential election in July 2005 was the first regional election in which foreign monitors did not find any media bias for pro-government candidates or harassment of the independent media.

Tajikistan will hold a presidential election in November, and NANSMIT's Qarshiboev says independent print media are already facing problems.

"The fact is that 'Nerui Sukhan' and 'Ruzi Nau' weren't officially banned, but they do not have an opportunity to be printed [in Tajikistan] or get subscriptions," he said. "The newspapers don't have the right to be printed in state-owned publishing houses and privately owned publishing houses are afraid of losing funding and resist printing these newspapers."

The Andijon Effect

Central Asian governments also have a record of cracking down on the media after major events such as widespread unrest.

Last year in May, Uzbek troops and police opened fire on hundreds of protesters in the eastern city of Andijon. The Uzbek government calls the event an attempted coup and says its troops fired to put down a rebellion, killing 187 people in the process. Others say it was a demonstration, not a rebellion, and that casualties were far higher than the government's figures.

Galima Bukharbaeva, who was working for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, was a reporter on the scene. She left Uzbekistan a few months later and now lives abroad.

RFE/RL's bureau in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, after it was closed in December 2005 (RFE/RL)

The Uzbek government cracked down on the independent media and later moved against foreign media -- refusing to renew licenses for RFE/RL and Deutsche Welle -- and ordering the closure of several foreign organizations that helped train journalists. Bukharbaeva said that one result of Andijon was the demise of independent journalism in Uzbekistan.

"The biggest problem in Uzbekistan today is that journalism, independent journalism as a profession, is simply forbidden," she said.

(Shukrat Bobojonov of the Uzbek Service and Salimjon Aioubov of the Tajik Service contributed to this report.)