Uzbekistan deports Tajik journalist

[Bengal_Tiger]

Uzbekistan Deports Retired Tajik Journalist



September 05, 2011
DUSHANBE -- A retired Tajik journalist says he has been deported from Uzbekistan on spurious grounds, RFE/RL's Tajik Service reports.

Hamid Atakhanov, 70, told RFE/RL on September 5 that on August 20 he was invited to the prosecutor's office in the central Uzbek city of Bukhara where he was told he is being deported from the country.

Atakhanov said the official explanation was that he is accused of igniting hatred between Tajiks and Uzbeks and also because he is active on environmental issues.

Atakhanov said the prosecutor showed him two letters sent by residents of Bukhara that led them to decide he must be deported. He said prosecutors did not give him enough time even to say goodbye to his family.

Atakhanov worked as a journalist for several different Tajik newspapers and for the Russian daily "Izvestiya." He lived for a number of years in Russia before moving to Bukhara in 2003 to take care of his ill wife.

Nuriddin Qarshiboev, the head of Tajikistan's National Association of Independent Journalists, said his organization has found a temporary home in Tajikistan for Atakhanov and is trying to find a job for him.

Atakhanov said he is going to ask human right organizations to help him get permission to return to Uzbekistan and care for his wife.

http://www.rferl.org/content/uzbekis.../24318936.html

[Bengal_Tiger]

1. Afghanistan borders both countries and has Uzbeks and Tajiks in its population.

2. There have been Uzbek and Tajik tensions in the past within Uzbekistan.

Samarkand was traditionally a Persian-speaking city in history and so was Bukhara.



Samarkand, a very important place in Islamic history.



Bukhara, one of the classical Islamic world's most famous cities and home of the legendary Imam Bukharee (rahmatullahi alaih).

The communist USSR divided the Muslim states of Central Asia a few times and the final division was in to 5 states, 4 Turkic and 1 Persian-speaking.

It has been said that the "ethnic" differences between the Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kazakhs and Kyrgyzh are partially artificial and arbitrary with Moscow creating borders (Uzbekistan has a vertical straight line on its western border with Kazakhstan) and that they are all Turks speaking different dialects of Turkish within West Turkestan.

3. Uzbeks and Kyrgyz fought each other last year with Uzbeks being ethnically cleansed from parts of Kyrgyzstan.



Uzbeks and Kyrgyz come together to remember the conflict last year and pray.


4. Around a 1/4 of Afghanistan is Uzbek and Dostum was one of their leaders during the war.



Dostum and Karzai.

[Bengal_Tiger]

The Soviet Union is accused of having carried out divide and rule and for instancing placing mainly Armenian "Nagorno Karabakh" in Azerbaijan and mainly Tajik Bukhara and Samarkand within Uzbekistan.

However these border divisions also affected Russians, with mainly Russian east Ukraine becoming part of Ukraine and mainly Russian northen Kazakhstan becoming part of mainly Muslim and Turkic Kazakhstan.

[Shayesta]

Even in far North of Afghanistan Tajiks and Uzbeks don't get along with each other, and to my information came that they are those very same Tajiks and Uzbeks who fled Tajikistan and Uzbekistan during Russian colonisation several decades ago. Indeed, even in Northern Afghanistan the Uzbeks are seen as plunderers who have only destroyed Tajik land.