tokyo
10-31-2001, 07:35 AM
Uzbek Internet Something of An Anomaly
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan -- One of the odder features of the Uzbek capital is the Internet cafes. They're everywhere.
"They joke that there are more Internet cafes in Uzbekistan than there are supermarkets in New York," says Mikhail Ardsinov, a human rights activist.
"It's crazy," agrees Josh Machleder, an American and the country director for Internews, a grant-funded press advocacy group. "I remember two years ago the UN was doing feasibility studies on whether an Internet cafe could even exist here. Now they're popping up everywhere."
Sometimes the cafes have coffee and snacks on hand. Sometimes they are just banks of computers. Always they are busy -- with young people paying from 50 cents to $1 an hour to check their e-mail accounts, skim the news, or to play together in an Internet-linked computer game. (A popular one involves teams of U.S. commandos blasting and knifing their way through a pack of "terrorists" in an unspecified Muslim-looking state.)
For e-mail accounts, most Uzbeks seem to be using Yahoo or Hotmail; some also use Russian-language portals like Mail.ru. A popular site for news about Uzbekistan is Ferghana.ru. As to other news sites people read, that's as varied as the Internet itself. I've seen people reading everything from Eurasianet.org to Gazeta.ru to Salon.com. And it's possible to access even "subversive" publications. I've checked out Kavkaz.org, for example, the news site of the Chechen fighters. Machleder says he can access the sites of anti-government political and/or religious groups. "I get Hizb-u-Tahrir sites, Erk sites, Birlik sites," he says.
This is remarkable because in all other respects, Uzbekistan is a typical police state. There is no free press or political opposition; Karimov's critics are jailed or exiled; torture in Uzbekistan is, according to Human Rights Watch, "systematic;" etc.
"There's only one government television station and you could say it has a monopoly on information dissemination," says Machleder. He adds that there are journalists trying to do good work (such people risk jail or exile), and that some provincial TV stations, "although they're primarily there for entertainment," make halting efforts at local news coverage. They risk having their license pulled, as happened to a station in 1999 that reported on a "state secret" -- a domestic airline crash.
So, how does the Internet fit into this authoritarian system?
For now, it seems to be developing relatively openly. But there are signs the state intends to take a leading role on where it goes from here. President Islam Karimov in May declared that Uzbekistan's 25 million people would see Internet access spread across the land by 2003. But his government has also ordered all Internet service providers to run through Uzpak, a state-run server; and Machleder says there is talk about having providers use the Chinese government's system to block some sites.
Some of Karimov's critics bridle at talk of how free and widespread the Internet seems to be at the moment -- perhaps for fear that blather about the Internet as democracy's handmaiden will fool the international community into thinking Uzbekistan is a nice place. Ardzinov, for example, says with some irritation that only about 7,000 people or so in the whole country have shown they have the money and desire to go on-line. "It's irrevelant," he says. Maybe so, but it certainly is convenient.
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, is a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com].
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan -- One of the odder features of the Uzbek capital is the Internet cafes. They're everywhere.
"They joke that there are more Internet cafes in Uzbekistan than there are supermarkets in New York," says Mikhail Ardsinov, a human rights activist.
"It's crazy," agrees Josh Machleder, an American and the country director for Internews, a grant-funded press advocacy group. "I remember two years ago the UN was doing feasibility studies on whether an Internet cafe could even exist here. Now they're popping up everywhere."
Sometimes the cafes have coffee and snacks on hand. Sometimes they are just banks of computers. Always they are busy -- with young people paying from 50 cents to $1 an hour to check their e-mail accounts, skim the news, or to play together in an Internet-linked computer game. (A popular one involves teams of U.S. commandos blasting and knifing their way through a pack of "terrorists" in an unspecified Muslim-looking state.)
For e-mail accounts, most Uzbeks seem to be using Yahoo or Hotmail; some also use Russian-language portals like Mail.ru. A popular site for news about Uzbekistan is Ferghana.ru. As to other news sites people read, that's as varied as the Internet itself. I've seen people reading everything from Eurasianet.org to Gazeta.ru to Salon.com. And it's possible to access even "subversive" publications. I've checked out Kavkaz.org, for example, the news site of the Chechen fighters. Machleder says he can access the sites of anti-government political and/or religious groups. "I get Hizb-u-Tahrir sites, Erk sites, Birlik sites," he says.
This is remarkable because in all other respects, Uzbekistan is a typical police state. There is no free press or political opposition; Karimov's critics are jailed or exiled; torture in Uzbekistan is, according to Human Rights Watch, "systematic;" etc.
"There's only one government television station and you could say it has a monopoly on information dissemination," says Machleder. He adds that there are journalists trying to do good work (such people risk jail or exile), and that some provincial TV stations, "although they're primarily there for entertainment," make halting efforts at local news coverage. They risk having their license pulled, as happened to a station in 1999 that reported on a "state secret" -- a domestic airline crash.
So, how does the Internet fit into this authoritarian system?
For now, it seems to be developing relatively openly. But there are signs the state intends to take a leading role on where it goes from here. President Islam Karimov in May declared that Uzbekistan's 25 million people would see Internet access spread across the land by 2003. But his government has also ordered all Internet service providers to run through Uzpak, a state-run server; and Machleder says there is talk about having providers use the Chinese government's system to block some sites.
Some of Karimov's critics bridle at talk of how free and widespread the Internet seems to be at the moment -- perhaps for fear that blather about the Internet as democracy's handmaiden will fool the international community into thinking Uzbekistan is a nice place. Ardzinov, for example, says with some irritation that only about 7,000 people or so in the whole country have shown they have the money and desire to go on-line. "It's irrevelant," he says. Maybe so, but it certainly is convenient.
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, is a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com].