(RSF/IFEX) – Tajikistan’s journalists and independent media are increasingly being harassed in the approach to the 27 February 2005 legislative elections, RSF warned, pointing to a politician’s aggressive behaviour towards BBC Farsi-language correspondent Iskandar Firuz, and the closure of the independent weekly “Nerui Sukhan” and seizure of its latest issue. Firuz was accosted on 29 […]
(RSF/IFEX) – Tajikistan’s journalists and independent media are increasingly being harassed in the approach to the 27 February 2005 legislative elections, RSF warned, pointing to a politician’s aggressive behaviour towards BBC Farsi-language correspondent Iskandar Firuz, and the closure of the independent weekly “Nerui Sukhan” and seizure of its latest issue.
Firuz was accosted on 29 January by the deputy president of the People’s Democratic Party of Tajikistan (PDPT), at a polling station in the Shokhmanssur district of the capital, Dushanbe, where he had gone to cover a meeting between candidates and voters. After destroying the journalist’s cassette tape, the PDPT official reportedly told him, “Go and complain to whomever you like, I’m not afraid of anyone.”
In a letter to President Imomali Rakhmonov, RSF said it was “very worried by this attack on a journalist who was just doing his job in the run-up to the legislative elections.”
In a separate incident, on 26 January, the offices of “Nerui Sukhan” were shuttered and all 3,000 copies of its latest issue were seized as part of an operation ordered by the tax office against the privately-owned printing works Kaikhon. The company had allegedly failed to pay its taxes and printed newspapers without a permit.
“The closure of one of the last independent newspapers by this roundabout route, using the tax office, shows that the authorities are bent on gagging all dissident voices,” RSF added it in its letter to the president.
“Nerui Sukhan”‘s (“Force of Words”) weekly print run of approximately 3,000 copies has been published since January 2003 by the Fund for the Memory and Defence of the Rights of Journalists.
Nuriddin Karshiboyev, head of the Association of Independent Media, said the reasons given by the authorities for closing the paper were clearly spurious. “Why would you seal the newspaper’s office if there is just a tax problem involving Kaikhon, the company that prints it?” Karshiboyev enquired.
The move follows the 18 August 2004 tax department closure of another printing works, forcing the opposition paper “Ruzi Nav” to move their printing operation to Kyrgyzstan until one of its issues was finally seized by the authorities at Dushanbe airport on 4 November. The newspaper has since been dismantled (see IFEX alerts of 27 January 2005, 1 September and 24 August 2004).
Only a handful of independent newspapers remain – “Najot” (the newspaper of the Islamist Renaissance opposition party), “Biznis I Politika”, “Asia Plus” and the online newspaper http://www.avesta.tj.
The attack on Firuz was preceded by attacks and threats against other journalists in 2004, which point to a sharp decline in working conditions for members of the profession. Mavluda Sultonzoda, of “Ruzi Nav” and “Nerui Sukhan” newspapers, received threatening letters on 3 August after writing an article critical of the president and government entitled, “Who is Rakhmonov?” (see alerts of 1 September, 24 and 13 August 2004). Former “Ruzi Nav” editor-in-chief Rajabi Mirzo was himself the victim of a physical attack in Dushanbe on 29 July, after he published a series of articles exposing government corruption (see alerts of 1 September, 24 and 3 August 2004).
