When Shavkat Mirziyoyev became President of Uzbekistan in 2016, he vowed to launch ambitious reforms. Over the following years, his government abolished exit visas, settled border disputes, and opened the country to international investment. Those attempts at improvement won accolades; in 2019, The Economist declared Uzbekistan its country of the year.
But others are more cautious in their praise.
Freedom House's recently released report on Uzbekistan notes that while the reforms have led to improvements, the country "remains an authoritarian regime with little movement towards democratisation."
Uzbekistan has a long way left to go on the path towards real change. The atmosphere faced by the country's journalists is a case in point.
A new turn?
At the end of January 2020, prominent Uzbek businessman Komil Allamjonov and the president's elder daughter Saida Mirziyoyeva established the Public Fund for the Support and Development of National Mass Media. This new organisation intends to help develop journalism in Uzbekistan, defend press freedom, and "strengthen freedom of speech." Allamjonov and Mirziyoyeva had previously worked together at the Agency of Information and Mass Communications (AIMC), which supposedly performed the same role as their new foundation.
It remains an open question why Allamjonov and Mirziyoyeva felt it necessary to create another organisation with exactly the same role. It is possible that a nonprofit was better suited to achieve their lofty goals. After all, NGO status does confer certain advantages, allowing an organisation to fundraise independently to support its operations. In any case, it appears its founders have been fighting hard for journalists for some time. President Mirziyoyev already takes selfies with bloggers and berates media-shy officials.
But is the picture really so rosy? Are we really witnessing the emergence of a new fourth estate, able to influence public life and help create civil society in Uzbekistan? It may seem so from afar. But in reality, Uzbekistan's journalists still experience pressure from the government and state officials.
Direct threats are no longer necessary; there are many other ways to disrupt the media's work. Despite repeated criticism from the president, officials continue to deny journalists access to information. There are practically no publicly available statistics. Online and print media have negligible influence on public debate. Regular internet access has yet to become commonplace in many regions of the country. Not all media outlets are prepared to speak out about controversial topics, and practically all the country's television channels belong to state officials.
A chat with the security services
During the rule of Uzbekistan's first President Islam Karimov, journalists faced significant obstacles to their work. The authorities intimidated and harassed journalists, drove them out of the country, put them on trial, and arrested them. Each publication was assigned a "curator" — an employee of law enforcement agencies such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the State Security Service (SNB). They would regularly instruct the editor or owner which topics to ignore and which to amplify.
After Karimov's death in 2016, Uzbekistan underwent a "thaw"; a term used in reference to a similar period in the Soviet Union following the death of Josef Stalin. Over the course of Shavkat Mirziyoyev's first year in power, the reception rooms started to fill up again. That is to say, online and offline spaces emerged where people could meet state officials and ask questions. They could demand solutions to problems of public space, housing, and communal services. Officials entered into dialogue not only with ordinary citizens, but with journalists. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that this trend has continued to the present day. In fact, journalists are once again feeling the strong arm of the state.
During one of the training sessions, the editor of a popular media outlet in Uzbekistan admitted to me that he had been summoned to meet with the SNB after he returned from a press tour of the USA. The security services demanded to know exactly what he had done while overseas, whom he had spoken to, and what motivated him to go on the trip. Several bloggers have said much the same: they were invited to a chat at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and asked why they attended journalistic trainings. They were informed in no uncertain terms that doing so was wholly negative and against the interests of the state. Fear clearly remains an effective means of control, given that none of these respondents agreed to be quoted with their name.
A similar situation occurred with a non-staff reporter at Hook.report, the publication where I work as an editor. While working on an article about religious refugees, we sent a request to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the name of the editorial office. We needed to find information on the number of religious refugees who had returned to Uzbekistan and how the state responded to their presence. Instead of an answer, our colleague was summoned to an informal conversation at the ministry. When he arrived, he was escorted to the counter-terrorism department where he was intimidated by ministry staff. They threatened him with a prison term and prosecution for promoting and abetting terrorism. They said that his family could face problems. He was gone for five hours. But things changed when he told them that he had brought a dictaphone to the meeting and may have been recording their words. It was perhaps the only thing which saved him from further pressure. Our colleague was released, but only after being warned "not to ruin [his] life."
Another example concerns a journalistic training course which was held in another post-Soviet state. It later turned out that one of the participants had collaborated with the SNB and had been covertly recording the training sessions. Upon arriving back in Uzbekistan, several participants received verbal threats from the SNB. If they wrote or said too much, they were warned, they would be prosecuted under Article 155.2 of the criminal code (on undergoing training or travelling in order to commit terrorist acts). Several participants said that these threats compelled them to seriously reconsider their prospects in Uzbekistan. However, so far they have decided to stay in the country. This seemed like a situation where the AIMC could have stepped in to help.
Naturally, the first thing on the participants' minds were the threats they had received from the SNB. Secondly, they had several reasons not to trust the AIMC. The businessman Komil Allamjonov, who headed the agency until recently, is closely connected to policymaking circles under president Mirziyoyev, just as he was under the previous president. According to several websites in Uzbekistan, it is rumoured that, under Karimov, Allamjonov worked closely with the country's chief tax official Botir Parpiev. With Parpiev's assistance, Allamjonov allegedly founded a business empire which includes the state of the art driving school Avtotest (which has gained a monopoly under Mirziyoyev's government), the newspaper Solik Info (to which all state institutions must subscribe, even though it is an independent publication), the Milliy TV channel, and the Bem automated accounting system among other assets.
This was the background against which Allamjonov became a presidential secretary. After a few months, he left that post and was transferred to the leadership of the AIMC, which was then known as the Uzbek Press and Information Agency. Upon taking up this post, Allamjonov decided to reach out to the country's bloggers and journalists – but not to all of them. A few representatives of the press were invited to a first meeting with the AIMC's new director on June 14, 2019 – a meeting which divided the journalistic community into those loyal and those disloyal to the government.
