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This morning's mail from Central Asia

This morning's mail brought us a press release from the Office of the Official Spokesman of Hizb ut-Tahrir In Pakistan [1]. Mr. Naveed Butt denies responsibility for the Hizb ut Tahrir for the three coordinated explosions that took place in Tashkent on Friday at the state prosecutor's office, which put 15 suspected al Qaeda followers on trial for bomb attacks in March that killed nearly 50 people, and the US and Israeli embassies. The Friday bombings killed the three bombers, a police officer and Ambassador Tzvi Cohen's bodyguard at the Israeli embassy, wounded a police officer at the US embassy who died of his wounds over the weekend, and wounded another seven at the state prosecutor's office.

A google search for human rights and any of the following: uzbekistan, turkmenistan, tajikistan, kazakhstan and kyrqyztan is a rich and rewarding experience, but the keyword of the day is uzbekistan. The first line of the Human Rights Overview is Uzbekistan has proven over twelve years of independence to be one of the most repressive countries in the Central Asia region. It doesn't get a lot better after that, other than regime in power in Tashkent is an ally of the regime in power in Washington.

From the initial government responses-on-record Friday to the present, President Islam Karimov has fingered the Hizb ut Tahrir for the attacks, when no forensic evidence could have yet been analysed to support such a claim, just as Jose Maria Aznar assigned blame to ETA for the Barcalona bombings, before forensic evidence could have supported any claim for causality. Another group, Islamic Jihad in Uzbekistan, claimed responsibility for the attack hours after it took place.

Since the main-line media are running with Karimov's story (evil Hizb ut Tahrir terrorists), and the response by the Hizb ut Tahrir isn't likely to see much daylight, I'm going to post some of here, with very minor edits to suite my tastes.

In order to continue state oppression on Hizb ut-Tahrir, President Karimov blames Hizb for bomb blasts

Office of the Official Spokesman of Hizb ut-Tahrir In Pakistan
Suite # 11, Moeen Centre
20 Abbot Rd., Lahore. Pakistan
Tel: 0300 441 6500

Hizb ut-Tahrir has no connection with the three bomb blasts carried out near the Uzbek Court and outside Israeli and American Embassy in Uzbekistan. The real motive of Uzbek President Islam Karimov to implicate Hizb ut-Tahrir in these bomb blasts is to gain legitimacy and moral ground for the ongoing state oppression and torture of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Uzbekistan. It is ridiculous that Karimov insists on holding Hizb responsible even though another group has already accepted responsibility for these blasts.

Currently Hizb's activists constitute the largest number of prisoners in the Central Asian jails. Moreover, everyone knows that Hizb is a political party and considers participating in armed struggle to achieve her goals, a violation of Shari'ah. Furthermore, getting rid of the Capitalist system and establishing Khilafah is a political change, requiring political and intellectual struggle, not military preparation. Hizb ut-Tahrir aims at mobilising the masses by producing political and intellectual awareness in them, so that they may achieve their rights by implementing Islam.

Today, people have reached the conclusion that if they were to gain liberation form the current slavery, it is absolutely imperative for the Ummah to unify and live under Islam. Khilafah is the only ruling system capable of unifying Muslims under a single leadership and implementing Islam, whilst the democratic ruling system is incapable of achieving either of the goals.

For those with working DEBKAfiles filters, their piece on who's who in Uzbeckistan is worth reading in toto, and the sections on the Hizb ut-Tahrir are better than anything I'm prepared to write. Here is the link. Its been above an hour and the ad.debka.com "data" still hasn't wended its way to Maine, but I'm not interested in anyone's advertisers, and you may not miss it either. The bottom line is that the US print journlists are running the Karimov script, and they probably should be a little less uncritical. Between 5 and 10 thousand nostalgic crypto-monarchists living mainly in Samarkand and Bukhara are about as "terrorist" as the subscribers to Burke's Peerage & Gentry.

A post on the difference between the restoration of the Caliphate and establishment of an Islamic Republic is on my queue of things to do, but I don't always get around to doing what I should do, as I've still got an item in my todo queue on Iran, something I promised myself sometime during the early Return of the ... One True King series.

[1] We started getting interesting mail from Central Asia after the first few Return of the ... One True King series were published.

[Sources: Le Monde, Globe and Mail, Reuters, Ha'aratz, DEBKAfiles, Muslim Uzbekistan]

Posted by at August 4, 2004 09:39 AM | TrackBack