The Ugly Uzbek

ALMOST FIVE months after Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, ordered his security forces to massacre hundreds of mostly unarmed demonstrators in the city of Andijan, European governments are finally taking steps to punish his regime...

After Sept. 11, 2001, the United States cultivated Mr. Karimov despite mounting evidence that he was one of Asia's most brutal rulers. The reason was simple: The Pentagon coveted the Karshi-Khanabad airbase, which Mr. Karimov provided as a staging point for U.S. air and rescue operations in Afghanistan. Under pressure from Congress, the State Department finally suspended several aid programs to Uzbekistan last year. But the action was publicly disavowed by the Defense Department, which quickly supplied Mr. Karimov with alternative funding. After Andijan, the State Department joined in denouncing the violence and helped to organize the evacuation of several hundred refugees from neighboring Kyrgyzstan to asylum in Europe. The security relationship, however, remained intact until the aggrieved dictator himself ended the base deal in July.

Mr. Karimov didn't stop there. His thugs have beaten some of Andijan's survivors into confessing that the prison break and anti-government demonstration that preceded the massacre were funded by the U.S. embassy, which supposedly gave its support to an Islamic terrorist group linked to al Qaeda. This allegation would be merely ludicrous if not for the fact that American soldiers have fought and died in neighboring Afghanistan while combating that very extremist movement. As it is, it is a gross insult by a ruler who has benefited extraordinarily from the U.S. intervention.

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan -- Harakatul Islamiyyah -- was founded in 1996, from followers of the Muslim Brotherhood and several small groups of the Central Asian "Wahhabi" trend, which is only loosely related to the Wahhabi school of Islam predominant in Saudi Arabia. It is under the leadership of Mohammad Tahir Farouq (Tohir Yuldashev) as commander and Al-Zubair bin Abd al-Rahim as the religious authority.

IMU's members include individuals who fought in Tajikistan's 1992-97 civil war on the side of the Islamists, who lost. Thousands of militants fled Tajikistan to the safety of the Islamist networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since the mid-1990s, IMU fighters have trained at camps in Afghanistan, some controlled by Osama bin Laden -- IMU is believed to receive assistance from the Taliban. Since early 1999, its activities have become more violent. The IMU has a clear record of terrorist activity including a 1999 car bombing in Tashkent (the capital of Uzbekistan) which killed sixteen people, and the August 2000 seizure of numerous hostages, including four American mountain climbers, who were able to escape after being held hostage for six days. In the past two years, most of the activity of the IMU took place in neighboring Kirghizistan, where thousands of Uzbeki Islamists have taken refuge.

On August 25, 1999, the IMU published its first platform and declaration of Jihad against the Uzbeki regime, whose leadership was actually the former leadership of Communist Uzbekistan during the Soviet era. The declaration, "A message from the general command of the Islamic movement Uzbekistan," signed by Al-Zubair bin Abd al-Rahim, announced the primary objective of its Jihad as "the establishment of an Islamic state with the application of the Shari`ah, founded upon the Qur'an and the Prophetic Sunnah". An interesting point in the declaration was the "regret that Foreign Mujahideen (Al-Ansaar) as of yet have not entered our ranks". This shows the desire of the IMU to globalize its struggle, following the successful model of the Chechen Islamist rebels.

On September 15, 2000, the State Department issued a fact sheet in conjunction with its designation of the IMU as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under U.S. law. In its annual report of Patterns of Global Terrorism for the year 2000, published in April 2001, the State Department added the IMU to the list of international terrorist groups.

Besides the IMU, there are two other Uzbeki Islamist groups which are influenced by the Islamist trends of the Arab world. The first, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami -- the Islamic Liberation Party, was accused by the Uzbeki authorities of several terrorist operations in the 1990s, including an attempt to assassinate Uzbeki president Islam Karimov in February 1999. Hundreds of its members have been imprisoned in the past two years. The second is the official Muslim Brotherhood, which acts so far as a political group rather than a terrorist one, but some of whose members joined the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan.

I guess some Islamic terrorists are ok depending on who you are.

Moscow seems to think Iranian and Syrian Islamic terrorists are ok while Chechen and Albanian and Uzbek Islamic terrorists are not.

Washington supports Pakistani, Palestinian, and Saudi Arabian Islamic terrorists while condemning the Iranian and Syrian varieties.

France supports pretty much all Islamic terrorists except the Algerian ones. The rest of Europe is asleep with it head up it's a$$.

Would be nice if politicians could get a clue and realize that all Islamic terrorists are the same. As it stands now the terrorists are playing western politicians as fools.

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