THE wealthy farmer stroked his beard and helped himself to another skewer of lamb as he explained why he had led an uprising in this sprawling border town in eastern Uzbekistan.
Bakhtiyar Gulamjanogli said: “We must live by the Koran. We will establish a paradise, growing orchards, working the fields and making natural products.”
Two days later, he was beaten and bundled away as President Karimov sent troops to retake Karasu. Mr Gulamjanogli will probably join the 6,000 or so political prisoners in Uzbekistan’s jails, notorious for their use of torture. But his message echoes loudly around the bazaars, mosques and plantations of the Ferghana Valley, which cuts through Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Fourteen years after the Soviet Union’s collapse thrust independence on these Central Asian nations, poverty, corruption and political repression are driving increasing numbers towards Islamic extremism. As the region’s ageing Soviet-era leaders teeter and fall, many regional commentators predict that Islamists, rather than Western-trained democrats, will fill the political vacuum.
Stanislav Belkovsky, the head of the National Strategy Institute in Russia, said: “What happened in Andijan is just the beginning. I consider that in the coming two to three years, an Islamic revolution and the Islamisation of Uzbekistan are unavoidable. Of course, this will be accompanied by bloodshed.”
The prospect of an Islamic revolution in this resource-rich and strategically important region is sounding alarm bells in Washington, Moscow and Beijing. Their chief concern is the increasing popularity of Hizb ut-Tahrir — the secretive Islamist group that President Karimov blames for suicide bombs in Tashkent, the capital, last year and the violence around the eastern city of Andijan in the past week.
Hizb ut-Tahrir, which has its headquarters in London, is banned in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, whose governments regard it is a terrorist group. But the group says that it advocates only a peaceful struggle for an Islamic caliphate in Central Asia, and denies any involvement in the recent violence. Most Western officials and regional and terrorism experts tend to agree.
One Western official in the region said: “They are worrying insofar as they do not subscribe to democratic principles and want an Islamic state, but we have no evidence to suggest that they are involved in, or advocate, terrorist activities.”
That, however, makes the group even more problematic for the region’s governments and, by extension, the West. Western governments cannot condone the violent suppression of its alleged members, especially after Uzbek troops shot dead hundreds of protesters in Andijan last Friday.
The protests were triggered by the trial of 23 businessmen accused of belonging to a previously unheard-of group called Akramiya, which the Government says is a branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Yet the more liberal approach of neighbouring Kyrgyzstan has only made the group’s adherents more visible and bold.
They distribute propaganda leaflets around the southern cities of Osh and Jalalabad and staged their first public demonstrations there earlier this year. Faruk, 25, an ethnic Uzbek trader, said he joined just over a year ago. “Hizb ut-Tahrir helps people to solve political, economic and social problems,” he said. “That’s why it is attracting so many people.”
He declined to estimate how many members it had in the region, saying only that there were many. “Its impact is growing not just in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, but all around the world as Muslims unite to establish an Islamic caliphate,” he said.
He pulled out a leaflet with a statement from Hizb ut-Tahrir on the massacre in Andijan. It said that the violence was organised by President Karimov in cahoots with Russia and the United States and that 10,000 people were killed.
“The policies of Uzbekistan are so severe and so cruel, they are on the level of genocide,” Faruk said. “Their aim is to keep killing the members of Hizb ut-Tahrir.”
Hizb ut-Tahrir was founded in the 1950s as a Leninist revolutionary party fighting imperial rule in the Arab world. It began operating in Central Asia after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 sparked a renaissance of Islam with dozens of Saudi, Turkish and other groups funding new mosques and schools. Osh, for example, had four mosques in Soviet times. Now it has 50.
One imam in Osh, whose mosque was funded by a Saudi charity, said: “The extremists came in at the same time as the moderates. After perestroika, a lot of people started having difficult times and these extremist groups gave them money.”
In the late 1990s, Hizb ut-Tahrir was eclipsed by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which staged guerrilla attacks and kidnappings and allied itself with the Taleban in neighbouring Afghanistan. But the IMU was decimated fighting US-led forces in Afghanistan, and decapitated when Juma Namangani, its military leader, was killed there in 2002. Since the IMU’s decline, Hizb ut-Tahrir has taken its place as the region ’s dominant Islamist group.
Nick Megoran, a political geographer who spent three years in the Ferghana Valley, said: “Whereas the IMU was a few disaffected and exiled individuals, Hizb ut-Tahrir has been able to tap into more widespread social dissatisfaction.”
When a mob overthrew President Akayev of Kyrgyzstan, two months ago, opposition leaders quickly moved in to take his place. “If the Karimov Government collapses in the same way, there are no opposition leaders to move in, so there could be more potential for them [Hizb ut-Tahrir] to play a role,” Mr Megoran said.
Hizb ut-Tahrir, also known as the Islamic Party of Liberation, believes that it can achieve an Islamic state in three steps.
First, it will educate Muslims about its ideology and aims, then spread those views within the Government and military, causing secular regimes to topple. Some regional experts say that it has already achieved the first goal in Uzbekistan. Its focus on poverty and corruption strike a chord in the country because the Karimov clan’s monopoly on business has left millions in poverty.
Many Uzbeks are also angered by American support for President Karimov because he allowed the US to use an airbase on Uzbek territory for operations in Afghanistan in 2001.
Tamara Makarenko, an expert on Central Asia at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University, said: “Not only extremists, but ordinary people are increasingly seeing the Government as corrupt, incapable of ruling, and too in line with the West.”
