Things Just Get Worse

Although the media scene varies from country to country in Central Asia, it tends to be measured in terms of how unfree it is. Over the last year, political turbulence in Kyrgyzstan and violence in Uzbekistan have made a generally dismal picture even worse, many local analysts say.



The picture across the region is far from uniform. In its latest survey "Freedom Of The Press 2006", the media rights watchdog Freedom House classed the media in all five Central Asian states as “not free”. However, Kyrgyzstan found itself at the top end of this lowest of categories, because of liberalisation in the wake of the March 2005 revolution which ousted President Askar Akaev.



Uzbekistan, on the other hand, slid further towards the bottom of Freedom House’s global list because of the clampdown on media following events on May 13 last year, when security forces opened fire on crowds of civilian protesters in the eastern city of Andijan.



In the absence of an independent investigation, eyewitness accounts suggesting hundreds of dead stung western governments into calling the Uzbek leadership to account.



Angered by criticism from governments that it had regarded as strategic allies in the "war on terror", the administration in Tashkent blamed the messenger. Uzbek officials even went so far as to suggest that reporters working for IWPR, the BBC and other outlets played a role in fomenting what they depicted as an Islamic uprising. By the late autumn, international media organisations had either closed down or were under mounting pressure from the authorities to pack up and leave.



TOO MUCH FREEDOM?



These two events - the Kyrgyz revolution and Andijan - had a ripple effect right across the region, informing the way governments viewed their own media.



In the Kyrgyz case, Central Asian leaderships began worrying whether excessive amounts of freedom might encourage their own citizens to rebel. And in some ways, Andijan provided them with an easy answer - best to crack down now and worry about human rights later.



Outside Kyrgyzstan, the effects of regime change were felt almost immediately on local media, well before the wider political ramifications became clear. Even the apparently unshakeable Turkmenistan’s president Saparmurad Niazov is reported to have been concerned at the sudden removal of a fellow-leader in Central Asia, although this had little effect on independent media in his country, since this was crushed out of existence more than a decade ago.



President Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakstan, a country with a shared border and much in common with Kyrgyzstan, was more immediately concerned at the implications for media - and subsequent events in Andijan would only harden attitudes in his government.



“Revolution and regime change in Georgia and Ukraine put the administration in Kazakstan on its guard,” said Adil Jalilov, director of the Medianet group. “The events that followed in Kyrgyzstan and then Andijan convinced the regime once and for all that a clampdown was necessary.”



UZBEK MEDIA SHUTDOWN AFTER ANDIJAN



Since the Kyrgyz revolution spread from the south of the country, which has a large ethnic Uzbek population, the government in Tashkent was alarmed at the prospect that people inside Uzbekistan might think they could do the same. State-controlled broadcasters and newspapers were deployed to portray the turbulence in Kyrgyzstan as dangerously anarchic - contrasting sharply with the upbeat domestic news items which are the staple fare of government media.



But if there was any sense of complacency among Uzbek leaders who thought signs of dissent could be easily swatted by the country’s substantial police force, it was shattered on May 13.



As the little-known name of Andijan gained notoriety in the world media, Uzbek leaders reacted by simply shutting down. The main government news agency became the sole conduit for the “authorised version”, and small local media outlets - already tightly controlled at the best of times - were read the riot act.



“When we learned about events in Andijan from internet news sites, we asked our editor to find out whether there were any reports on our own news agencies that we could present to our listeners,” said a newsreader at one FM radio station in the country. “Under no circumstances could these events be reported from non-official sources - there were even cases where radio stations were closed down for broadcasting material before it had been commented on by the official news services.”



In the weeks and months that followed, the small number of reporters working for international broadcasters and other news outlets, including IWPR, at best stopped work altogether, and in many cases fled the country. Foreign reporters liable to dig up uncomfortable facts were refused entry visas.



“The biggest difficulty in our work used to be that state officials didn’t want to give interviews or prevented us from getting hold of information,” said one of the local journalists who stayed behind and is no longer reporting. “Nowadays, even saying you were preparing material for the foreign media would mean taking an enormous risk.”



Another effect of the departure of media development organisations has been to end training for local journalists in Uzbekistan.



“Our television company previously worked with such organisations as Freedom House, the OSCE, Internews and others,” said a TV company employee. “All this of course helped increase staff professionalism, and we received equipment. Now there is none of that.”



The next step for the authorities was to seal up any cracks in the hermetically sealed bubble they had created. State media became even more strident in its attacks on pernicious foreign influences, and in December the law was changed to make life harder for reporters working with international media outlets.



As one local journalist recalled, “Our editor discussed these amendments with us, and warned us that from now on, all contacts with international media would be regarded as criminal. I love my country dearly and I want my children to be able to speak freely in the future. But fear of criminal prosecution has forced me to stop working with international media.”



President Niazov might have been expected to applaud his Uzbek counterpart Islam Karimov’s ruthless suppression of public protests. But he seems to have taken both the Kyrgyz and Uzbek events as signs that his neighbours were falling apart, and it was best to steer well clear of both of them. That, anyway, was the message sent out when his rigorously controlled media failed to give even a heavily biased account of what happened in Andijan. Official broadcasters and newspapers simply ignored it, and talked instead about the latest Turkmen cabinet meetings.



However, times have changed even in Turkmenistan, and people with access to satellite TV were able to watch Russian news reports, although that necessarily meant mostly urban rather than rural residents.



“Those people who are potentially capable of mounting an uprising [the rural poor] remained unaware of what happened in Andijan - and that was the aim of the authorities; to stop the news from being disseminated among the masses,” commented a local human rights activist at the time.



SCREWS TIGHTEN GRADUALLY ON KAZAK AND TAJIK MEDIA



In Tajikistan and Kazakstan, the aftershocks from Andijan were also clearly felt in government attitudes towards the media. But after the immediate impact, the overall picture is one of a longer-term trend towards marginalising independent media - often equated with the opposition press in the minds of suspicious officials.



The Tajik leadership had been getting tougher with non-state media in any case. Two leading independent newspapers - Nerui Sokhan and Ruzi Nav - remain firmly closed, and the authorities have stalled on issuing permits for new media to operate.



As Ruzi Nav's chief editor Rajabi Mirzo put it, "The closure of our paper and a number of others was a hard lesson to other owners and editors. They have become more cautious about what they publish…. Right now there is no tangible pressure on the media, since what's the point of punishing journalists when they're pretty careful about what they publish anyway and don't want to lose their jobs?"



Media industry observers initially ascribed the clampdown to a desire to curb free expression ahead of the parliamentary election in February last year, but when things failed to ease up, they began suggesting that a mixture of fallout from Andijan and concerns about the November 2006 presidential election were to blame.



RESTRICTIVE POLICIES PURSUED THROUGH THE COURTS



Tajikistan and Kazakstan have seen occasional assaults on journalists and arrests for libel and other alleged misdemeanours. But in both countries the picture is complicated by the fact that disputes over media freedom are often framed within complex technical matters such as broadcast frequencies and stakeholder ownership, or legal battles over what constitutes defamation.



In Tajikistan, for example, the secretary general of the Media Alliance, Zebo Tajibaeva, argues that free speech is alive and well, and that it is the journalists who ought to be more careful about what they write when they choose to criticise the powers that be.



Marat Mamadshoev, editor of the weekly Asia Plus, recounted once case which, on the surface, looked like a mundane disagreement over bureaucracy, “Over a year ago I tried to register a new newspaper. But the justice ministry returned the documents four times because of alleged mistakes in them, and I couldn't realise my plan."



The point is, says Mamadshoev, that virtually no new print media outlets are getting through these complex obstacles and winning permission to start up.



The same kind of thing happens in Kazakstan. Once again, an election - the December vote in which President Nazarbaev won an easy victory - compounded fresh memories of Kyrgyzstan and Andijan to evoke a tougher approach from the authorities, but the general trend remains the same.



"Attempts are made to employ various methods to close down newspapers which do not support the policies of the state," said Seitkazy Mataev, chairman of the Kazakstan Journalists’ Union. "The judicial process is used, and journalists are [also] beaten up - the most recent case of the latter involved the executive secretary of the Aina Plus newspaper."



According to Makhambet Auezov, political commentator for the Delovaya Nedelya newspaper, “One might say that the state directly controls the major electronic media, and more or less indirectly tries to influence the print media. Those outlets regarded as unruly are vulnerable to frequent tax checks, or strange incidents where safes full of documents get stolen."



Auezov sees a parallel trend where the Kazak government is seeking to exert even stronger control over major TV stations which are, in formal terms, commercially owned, though none ever deviates far from the official editorial line. He believes three major channels - Khabar, Kazakstan and El-Arna - may be consolidated within one management structure in which the state has a larger shareholding.



When it comes to the basic principle of freedom of expression, the positions of the Kazak government and its critics remain worlds apart.



Opposition journalist Sergei Duvanov, for example, speaks of an "invisible censorship" in which - although the official censor's pen is banned under the constitution - "every editor knows the list of subjects it's better not to mention and the issues it's best to avoid raising unless you want trouble".



However, Culture and Press Minister Ermukhamet Ertysbaev insists his office is the natural protector of journalistic freedoms.



“Our position is that if any paper is closed down by the authorities, the ministry will always protect the interests of that newspaper. If executive and administrative authorities exert pressure on local newspapers, the ministry will of course always protect the interests of journalists and the media,” he said.



That role may be made harder by new legislation passed in January. Changes to the law resulted in what the Adil Soz free speech group says is the toughest media legislation in the former Soviet Union. The new arrangements equip Ertysbaev's ministry and local government bodies with substantial levers of control over the media.



In Tajikistan, too, media legislation - this time intended to defend journalists' rights - went before parliament. The draft law, submitted by lawmaker Yusuf Ahmedov in November last year, had laudable aims, but was shot down after the government argued there was no need for improved protections for reporters.



WHICH WAY WILL KYRGYZSTAN GO?



Finally, there is Kyrgyzstan itself, where the media scene is as complicated and contradictory as the broader political situation, one year on from the revolution that was supposed to change everything.



Regime change and a measure of liberalisation meant that media outlets - or rather their owners - were shuffled around to produce a new configuration of political forces, replacing the simple pro- and anti-Akaev divide that existed previously.



According to political analyst Aziz Soltobaev, so many new emerging political players tried to find a voice in the media that the picture became totally fragmented.



“Only last year, 26 new media outlets were registered, not counting internet publications which mostly operate without registering,” he said. “If you look at market volumes and at the amount of advertising that traditionally supports media, this has gone down significantly recently. The explanation is simple: many outlets are backed by influential sponsors who want to have their own mouthpiece.”



Some see the multiplicity of voices as a good thing. Nadyr Momunov, press secretary to President Kurmanbek Bakiev, argues that freedom of expression is strong even if it is still a work in progress.



“Everything is fine with freedom of speech here. Of course there are some problems, but one needs to be tolerant. And demanding real steps from the president in the space of one year is unrealistic, as well," said Momunov.



"We're operating by a different principle: respect the opinions of others, don't suppress them.”



Those sentiments would be echoed by many journalists across Central Asia, if not by Momunov's equivalents in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.



The real question now is whether Kyrgyzstan will develop along the lines of one of its neighbours, or whether a more enlightened attitude to press freedom will prevail. When the chief prosecutor of Bishkek, Uchkun Karimov, warned the Litsa and Komsomolskaya Pravda newspapers in January that they were overstepping the mark by publishing defamatory material about President Bakiev, many feared a downturn,



But the overriding mood of the moment seems to be that stagnation has set in, rather than a radical deterioration or improvement.



Elvira Sarieva, executive director of the media development organisation Internews Kyrgyzstan, lists reforms that the Bakiev government has failed to implement before concluding, "There have been no changes in the media sector over the last year - and even if there have been changes, the people have not sensed them.”



This report was compiled to mark World Press Freedom Day (May 3) by Kumar Bekbolotov, Baurjan Tleusenov (pseudonym) and Cholpon Orozobekova in Kyrgyzstan, and other IWPR contributors in the region. The names of interviewees in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have been withheld out of concern for their security.