Tajikistan: Radical Group Uncovered in South

There are signs that the clandestine Islamic group Hizb-ut-Tahrir is gathering strength in parts of Tajikistan that lie far from its traditional recruiting grounds.

For local policymakers, one of the comforting truths about the group has been that its activities are confined to Uzbekistan and its neighbouring parts of southern Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and northern Tajikistan, all of which have substantial ethnic Uzbek communities.

These assumptions have begun changing over the last year or so, as police have announced arrests of suspects in urban centres far from the Uzbek border.

But the arrest in February and March of 35 alleged Hizb-ut-Tahrir members in the town of Kulyab and the nearby Hamadoni, Timurmalik and Vose districts are the first reported sighting of the group in Tajikistan’s deep south – a rural, impoverished region bordering on Afghanistan.

News of the arrests will come as a shock to those who believed the banned party would not be able to recruit outside the northern province of Soghd, except to a lesser extent in the capital Dushanbe. In the six years that Hizb-ut-Tahrir has been active in Tajikistan, only one person from Kulyab has been convicted on charges relating to membership of the group – and he was a resident of Dushanbe.

Narzullo Valiev, head of the security ministry’s operations unit in the Kulyab area, told IWPR that an extensive network had been discovered in Kulyab. The fact that all 35 detainees were ethnic Tajiks shattered the myth that Hizb-ut-Tahrir was “totally Uzbek” in composition, he said.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir-al-Islami – the Islamic Liberation Party – is a clandestine network of Middle Eastern origin which took root in Central Asia in the years that followed the end of communism, gaining prominence only from the mid-Nineties when it began a leafleting campaign in Uzbekistan and the authorities responding by arresting anyone suspected of joining the group.

The organisition is avowedly opposed to armed violence, and has not been clearly identified as the author of attacks in the region, unlike the guerrillas of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. But its radical agenda of replacing Central Asia’s secular governments with an idealised Islamic “caliphate” has unsettled local leaders, and Uzbek security forces have arrested and jailed thousands of members.

The trials in Uzbekistan have been roundly condemned by international human rights groups, which allege use of torture and other serious flaws in the judicial process. Possession of Hizb-ut-Tahrir leaflets alone can lead to arrest.

Tajikistan banned the group in 2001 but has jailed far fewer people – around 120 to date.

Kulyab deputy police chief police colonel Faizali Mazoriev fully shares his government’s concern about the group, calling it “an anti-constitutional organisation with the capacity to threaten a state that is still weak”.

Abdujabor Shamsov, the Kulyab public prosecutor who is responsible for 22 of the arrest warrants issued so far, is equally unsympathetic to claims that the group – however objectionable its views – is not doing anything illegal.

“Anti-constitutional activity has to be resolutely prevented in good time,” believes prosecutor Shamsov.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir has proved resilient in the face of such official hostility – its diffuse cellular structure, with few known leaders, means that it has been impossible to stamp it out even when governments adopt a policy of mass arrests.

And for some people, it offers a simple and potent message. Jumakhon Alimi, head of the Kulyab human rights group Parallax, says Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s ideology is more immediately comprehensible than the complex teachings of traditional Muslim clergy. Everything an aspiring member needs to know is set out in a pre-selected list of books and brochures, written in accessible language.

According to Alimi, the most likely recruits are young men who believe their lives are being made worse by a political system that neglects their needs.

The leaflets found in Kulyab are cleverly focused on real concerns facing people in Tajikistan –the annual exodus of migrant workers to Russia, shortages of gas and electricity, the mining of the Tajik border by the Uzbek military, and the expensive homes and cars acquired by the Tajik elite. These are issues that everyone worries about, but will rarely hear discussed candidly elsewhere, allowing Hizb-ut-Tahrir to position itself as a group that really cares about people’s lives.

The Tajik government is largely drawn from Kulyab, and as a result many people from the area have found jobs in Dushanbe or otherwise benefited by association with the regime. But life for the majority who are left out of the political system remains at least as hard as in other regions.

The alleged activists picked up in this round of arrests are not the poorest or most desperate. Deputy police chief Valiev told IWPR that the 35 men – all in their twenties – had jobs working as small-time traders or interior decorators. Two were relatives of Kulyab’s deputy mayor.

Another was a contract soldier with the Russian army division based in Tajikistan – the first time a suspected Hizb-ut-Tahrir activist has been identified within the military.

According to a local man who was detained as a suspect but released because no evidence was found against him, money is not a factor in motivating people to join the radical group. “No one minds a bit of money these days,” the man – a 20-year-old trader who asked not to be named – told IWPR. “But who would distribute leaflets when you know you’ll get 12 to 18 years in jail if you get found out? You’d be better off robbing a bank.”

Not everyone believes the way to tackle Hizb-ut-Tahrir is by clamping down on it. Some fear that the leaderships in Tajikistan and other Central Asian states are keen to justify their authoritarian rule in the face of western calls for reform, so they exaggerate the security threat posed by Islamic groups. That drives these groups underground and could in the future create a much more real threat of Islamic militancy.

“Persecution of the party’s members, and frequently of people with only tenuous links to it… has led to radicalisation of the movement and has also had an effect on the broader population,” said a lecturer at Kulyab university, who asked to remain anonymous. “This has been done deliberately, and that continues to be the case. All too often, governments in the region use Hizb-ut-Tahrir as justification for their own inability to carry out political and economic reforms.”

Right now, the lecturer sees no evidence that Hizb-ut-Tahrir has violent intentions. “I don’t see anything threatening about a utopian caliphate as an alternative to today’s grim reality,” he said.

But he warns, “Government persecution may [further] radicalise the party. It has won the support of thousands of young people, who are committed to an idea of overthrowing the region’s governments and establishing an Islamic system…. So far they have not yielded to calls to engage in armed struggle, but I wouldn’t rule it out when one sees how the government persecutes them using ever tougher measures.”

Paradoxically, Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s apparent success in winning support in Kulyab may partly stem from the fact that the area is the power-base of President Imomali Rahmonov and his government.

Local officials dislike Tajikistan’s legal Islamic party, the Islamic Rebirth Party, IRP, because it was on the opposite side in a bloody civil war, in which the battle lines were drawn more along regional than ideological grounds. When the conflict ended in 1997 the IRP became legal and was even awarded a few seats in government, but memories in Kulyab clearly die hard. The local authorities have made a point of denying the party the right to hold public meetings and begin organising there.

That has left something of a vacuum for more radical Islamic groups to fill, says Abdusamad Ghafurov, the IRP’s deputy head in southern Tajikistan.

The banned group is hostile to the legal party, accusing it of betraying Islamic ideals. The IRP is in turn suspicious of the newer, more radical Islamic force, and has been at pains to stress its own adherence to constitutional democracy as opposed to Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s anti-government agenda.

“We don’t recognise the methods used by Hizb-ut-Tahrir. And that’s not just because they regard us as ‘infidel traitors’,” said Ghafurov.

A member of an international human rights organisation, who asked to remain anonymous, agrees that “persecution of the IRP – something that clearly forces supporters of political Islam to seek more radical alternatives – should come to an end”.

The human rights activist offers an alternative prescription for tackling radical Islamic groups, based on creating a more open political system where legitimate opposition is tolerated to a greater extent and the public can get information from a free press.

Turko Dikaev is an independent journalist in Tajikistan.