Kyrgyzstan Declares War on Imams

Posted GMT 10-18-2006 23:20:14

Kyrgyz secret services have decided to establish total control over the activity of Islamic clergy. According to operational data, clerics are getting more and more actively involved in the radical organizations, including filling supervising positions there. Similar situation is especially dangerous as «the Kyrgyz pattern» might be in the long term demanded in the scale of the entire Central Asia...

The National Security Service (SNB) of Kyrgyzstan has developed a special plan on strengthening the control over the republic's Islamic clergy. This was told by a high-ranking source in the diplomatic department of one of the Central Asian region countries. According to his information, the plan contains a list of actions directed to activation of gathering of data on current activity and external contacts of the Islamic clerics.

The paramount attention in this document is paid to the following aspects of activity of the clergy:

Content of appearances in mosques, in the lessons in religious educational institutions, and during informal meetings with the believers;
Content of the religious literature, audio and video materials distributed by clerics;
Structure of visitors of mosques, in particular their ethnic belonging and political views. Special interest is represented with possible contacts of clerics with the activists of the illegal Islamic fundamentalist organizations, especially of the Jihadist persuasion;
Participation of clerics in private business, first of all, in partnership with foreign businessmen, in particular from the Arab countries, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Britain;
Personality of the foreign sponsors allocating donations to concrete clerics;
Foreign trips of clerics, both on religious and commercial motives. First of all it concerns those clerics who from the end of the 1990s
the beginning of the 2000s more than one to three times had gone abroad behind the CIS borders.

The following categories of the Islamic clergy are representing heightened interest for the SNB:

Persons who have arrived from Uzbekistan since the first half of the 1990s, and even more those who have arrived within the last six to eight years;
Natives of Kyrgyzstan of Uzbek and Uighur origin, living or having earlier lived in the southern part of the republic, especially in the urban centers of Osh, Jalalabad and Batken areas;
Persons younger than 35 years of age, having received religious education of Islamic clergy outside the CIS after proclamation of the state independence, especially in such countries as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan and Egypt;
Persons combining duties of cleric with private business, especially those who have continuous contacts with the foreign partners.

The plan is developed and will be realized with an active assistance of secret services of Uzbekistan and Russia. It is aimed not only at revealing the secret supporters of the fundamentalist movement in the environment of the Islamic clergy. In opinion of the SNB analysts, such clerics play far not the last role in the activity of the organizations of radical trend. It is determined by the fact that they have continuous contacts with many believers and the legal right to conducting religious propagation. Moreover, by experience of the Middle East countries (in particular Palestine and Jordan), and also other republics of Central Asia (especially Uzbekistan), attendants of mosques and teachers of Islamic educational institutions may privately participate in the medium and the highest level of leadership of the fundamentalist movement. While other prominent members of the organizations of similar trend are compelled to operate in the conditions of conspiracy, clerics are public figures. This lightens the task of tracking their activity, including that of an illegal character. And the most important, «monitoring» of their contacts can reveal the leaders of the radical organizations not only at a regional and state level, but possibly also those of the regional scale. It is even more believable if to take into consideration that, according to some data of secret services, a part of the Central Asian leadership of such organizations as Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Islamic movement of Turkestan is located in Kyrgyzstan. From there they have been spreading their activity to the neighboring republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

Kyrgyz pattern

The SNB has reacted by its new plan to the more frequent reports on involvement of the Islamic clerics in the activity of radical organizations. Some religious figures in the south of Kyrgyzstan, having entered the official clergy at the end of the 1980s

the beginning of the 1990s, still in the first half of the 1980s apprehended the ideas of Islamic fundamentalism from the adherents of this ideology in the Eastern Uzbekistan. During the 1990s the growth of their influence, promoted by the local social and political realities, financial support from the Middle East and also by moving here of some of the Islamic activists from Uzbekistan, was marked in the south of the republic. However, these radical elements were of Central Asian origin and directly did not participate in the activity of the fundamentalist organizations introduced from outside.

The latter began to actively establish their presence in the region from the end of the 1990s. The organization Hizb ut-Tahrir was allocated especially among them. In the beginning of the 2000s, the foreign Islamists even took under their protection some groups of the Central Asian adherents who earlier adjoined the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan (nowadays the Islamic movement of Turkestan). In 2001-2003 information on contacts of separate representatives of the official clergy of South Kyrgyzstan and the Hizb ut-Tahrir, and about conducting in local mosques of propagation of ideas of this organization, started to arrive to the SNB.

The situation aggravated noticeably this spring. The clerics began to be dispossessed not only of the literature of radical content, but also of weapons and explosives. In April, the chief Mufti of the republic, Murtalla azhy Zhumanov, recognized that some imams have been secretly preaching ideas of Islamic fundamentalism. In July, the Chief of the Interior Ministry's Main Directorate of Counteraction to Extremism and Illegal Migration, Osmonaly Guronov, held a part of clergy responsible for the «close cooperation with the terrorist organizations». Similar charges were expressed by the Head of Department of the Directorate of Interior of Batken area (South Kyrgyzstan), Erkin Esenaliyev. In the beginning of August, the senior lecturer of the SNB Educational Centre, Talent Razzakov, declared in an interview to the agency Kabar that in the struggle against religious extremism, «seminary students, attendants of a cult imams of mosques, the Muftiat frequently have been taking an expectant attitude».

Tension has increased in the relations between the state and a part of the official clergy even more after the destruction on August 6 of the most popular imam in the south of the republic, Muhammadrafik Kamalov. He was killed during an exchange of fire between the members of the law enforcement bodies and the members of the

Islamic movement of Turkestan. Though the representatives of authorities do not exclude that the imam could have been taken a hostage by the insurgents, the SNB sources brought to a focus his close contacts with the radical Islamists, and also his frequent trips together with his brother Sodik to Saudi Arabia and Iran. Moreover, at Kamalov's funeral, the chief Mufti of the republic, Zhumanov, under pressure of the supporters of the murdered imam, was compelled to declare him fallen in the struggle for the belief (shakhid). As consequence, according to the Kyrgyz news agency AKIpress, the secret service «started examining activity of the Mufti for his participation in the terrorist activity».

Official statements about the contacts of the clerics with Islamists, and also announcements of the officials in this respect, have been showing a growing involvement of clergy in the fundamentalist movement. Though Kyrgyzstan is set down to the least Islamized countries of Central Asia, in the long term the given process may become "a pattern" for other republics of the region from the point of view of involving official clerics in the activity of the Islamic organizations. This is promoted by both, the general tendencies in the development of the Central Asian Islamic clergy, and the political specifics of several of the neighboring republics.

By Ulugbek Djuraev
www.axisglobe.com