Journalists Worry Uzbek Bureaucrats
By BURT HERMAN
Associated Press Writer
TERMEZ, Uzbekistan - As police meticulously noted every detail about a group of journalists stopped at a checkpoint near Khanabad air base, an Uzbek bureaucrat boasted: "We have enough computers and computer operators to register all of you."
Confronted with possibly the most international attention it has received since its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan is now showing its growing pains in dealing with the small army of foreign journalists who have arrived to cover its role in aiding U.S. operations in neighboring Afghanistan.
Many journalists have been detained, either briefly or for hours. Requests to visit military sites or border posts take days for an answer, and then are invariably denied. Even a simple trip to the bazaar to speak with locals can be cause for a sit-down talk with an undercover cop.
Before U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Uzbekistan last week to secure its cooperation and use of an air base for the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks, Human Rights Watch warned about Washington giving the country "a green light to add further abuses to its already abysmal rights record."
President Islam Karimov asserts in his book "Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the 21st Century" that the press is vital to fostering stability and that measures should be taken "to guarantee social and legal protection of the journalists' activity."
That book was written in 1997. Just a few years later, after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe declined to send observers to the 2000 presidential elections because there were clear abuses of power, Karimov appears to have backtracked.
"The OSCE focuses only on establishment of democracy, the protection of human rights and the freedom of press. I am now questioning these values," he said, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
Opposition voices are regularly silenced in the country, and free flow of information restricted. Mikhail Ardzinov, head of the Independent Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan, said his Tashkent apartment is bugged and he has been subject to regular harassment by authorities.
He said even his Internet access is blocked to the Web sites of opposition parties whose leaders have been pushed out of the country.
Although there are a few Internet cafes across the country, many people don't know how to use the technology that would give them unbiased information from the outside world.
In this still-isolated country, there's also little awareness about the ease of global communications.
One reporter using the Internet on a laptop computer at the only hotel in the border town of Termez spoke to a cleaning lady who insisted "you can't send information about here to the outside world."
Local journalists in Uzbekistan also often double as press officers for the government, churning out the boastful stories about local cotton production or new government buildings that still sound straight out of Pravda.
Security around the foreign media has been most intense in the city of Karshi, near Khanabad air base where U.S. planes have been seen landing.
The many reporters who descended on that city have indeed all been registered by the faithful bureaucrats at the local Interior Ministry office, and police and soldiers also moved in to monitor the lobby at the grimy Hotel Karshi where most correspondents were staying.
During one dinner with journalists, a local press official in Termez who also identifies himself as a journalist asked a foreign reporter suspiciously: "Why do you always write everything down?"
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