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Media and elections in Central Asia

Olivia Allison

Kazakhstan’s Information Minister Altynbek Sarsanbaiuly, the only opposition member of the presidential administration, resigned from his post in protest Sept. 20, saying the Sept. 19 election for the lower house of parliament had serious shortcomings, including seriously biased media. This result has cast a negative shadow on Central Asia’s election-time media environment, which began with these elections. Over the course of the next year, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are all set to hold parliamentary or presidential elections, or both, in 2005. In all Central Asian countries, serious pressure on the media has already begun, and appears to intensify.

BACKGROUND: Sarsanbaiuly’s resignation was the final step in a long line of strong statements against corruption and media bias toward pro-presidential parties in the run-up to Kazakhstan’s parliamentary elections. In particular, he criticized stations owned by President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s daughter Dariga, including Khabar and KTK, presenting monitoring results that show these stations’ extreme bias in favor of the pro-governmental parties Otan and Asar, while Channel 31 was found to be least biased by a Western-sponsored monitoring project during the campaign.

Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, lost its popular independent TV station Pyramida, when station management sold shares to a government affiliate late this summer. Presently, Kyrgyzstan has no prospect of an independent TV station during upcoming local, parliamentary and presidential elections, one Western media observer said.

Although Tajikistan’s parliamentary elections are still months off, the government is crudely persecuting the main print media outlets in the capital, Dushanbe. Tajikistan’s Islamic Renaissance Party’s printing press was closed Aug. 18, ostensibly for tax reasons, effectively stopping the distribution of the opposition papers Nerui Sukhan and Ruzi Nav, as well as the IRP’s own newspaper. This occurred shortly after Ruzi Nav editor Radjabi Mirzo was beaten outside his home.

Uzbekistan’s parliamentary elections, which will begin in December, have also prompted a new round of clamping down on media. The media-support organization Internews Uzbekistan has been suspended by court order for six months; its international counterpart, Internews Network, now faces another inspection; and five of Internews’ partner TV stations were stripped of broadcasting licenses in August. Internews Uzbekistan’s director Khalida Anarbaeva last week called these actions “a tactic to stop the functioning of non-state media before this year’s elections”.

These types of pressures resemble Kazakhstan’s pre-election media persecution, when oppositional newspaper Assandi Times was shut down through a prominent and expensive libel case. Central Asian governments’ behavior sets a pattern making sure the media is pressured or owned by pro-government figures, so as to stop coverage of election irregularities.

IMPLICATIONS: From a more open media environment in 1991, Central Asian presidents have increasingly pressured the media, as they have attempted to remain in power past their term limits—only Tajikistan has so far elected a president aside from the last Soviet-era leader. The examples cited above show the variety of steps Central Asian governments take in tightening their grip on the media environment. However, several subtle and more systematic tactics have also emerged to play a significant and lasting role in Central Asian media’s reality, including election legislation regulating media coverage and selective enforcement of other media laws.

Central Asian governments recently adopted laws to control the media. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan adopted similar election laws in the past year, both of which guarantee candidates “equal access” to media. These stipulations have been criticized by free-speech activists, who say these regulations decrease editorial independence, but some international political organizations say these laws close the gap between pro- and anti-governmental parties’ access to media. An Almaty-based Kazakhstani media lawyer said in an interview in May that this was a positive law “in theory,” but doubted these rules would be enforced fairly.

During Kazakhstan’s recent campaign season, these election code stipulations and Central Election Commission regulations seemed a positive development, giving opposition politicians legal basis for complaints about access to media. The NGO Elections and Democracy conducted monitoring showing the media’s significant bias in favor of pro-presidential candidates, prompting some outcry from opposition and free-speech activists.

Kyrgyzstan’s election law is more restrictive, as it forbids campaigning “through foreign media,” a vague clause which could affect Russian-based newspapers that have Kyrgyzstan supplements, as well as popular Western-supported radio programs like BBC and Radio Liberty. “It’s pretty clear that this restriction has been put in place to paralyse the work of independent journalists during the elections,” Kuban Mambetaliev, director of the Public Association of Journalists, wrote on Sept. 10. Furthermore, Kyrgyzstan’s election code forbids the publication of “opinion polls, election forecasts and other research linked to elections,” potentially forbidding the publication of the monitoring like Kazakhstan’s, which prompted so much debate.

Tajikistan has yet to pass a new election code. In Uzbekistan, a working group for parliamentary journalists will serve as a partial control mechanism during elections. Furthermore, no opposition parties are registered, so the election campaign will be less active than in the other three countries. Throughout Central Asia, media laws are enforced selectively and tactically, as the Tajikistan tax situation indicates. While tax fraud occurs widely because businesses face a long line of taxes too expensive to pay, tax officials usually initiate inspections after a media outlet has offended a governmental official or brought up sensitive issues. Kazakhstan’s situation is better than elsewhere, as the value-added tax has been suspended for media outlets since 1995.

Licensing and registration are also carried out selectively. Uzbekistan’s government has refused to register new media outlets for months and Kyrgyzstan’s broadcast licensing has completely come to a halt this year. Media outlets needing to renew their licenses are only receiving three-month extensions, rather than the normal two-year licenses, which will keep the television and radio on a short leash. Tajikistan has not licensed any independent stations in its capital, Dushanbe, although an application from media holding Asia Plus has been under consideration for three years.

Kazakhstan’s frequency licensing procedure has become more transparent in recent years, although the competitive nature of licensing implies that stations with the most resources and political connections are at an advantage.

Libel, defamation and “protection of dignity and honor” cases are often filed by governmental figures in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan against oppositional or critical media outlets. This trend has finally caught on in Tajikistan, which had experienced no such cases until this spring. Now, two defamation cases are under consideration.

CONCLUSIONS: Central Asian problems mirror declining press freedom in other post-Soviet republics, particularly Russian, where the government has been closing the most independent-minded television stations and political programming for several years, establishing what Oleg Panfilov calls “an authoritarian regime with a docile press that will not challenge the President”.

Kazakhstan’s media faced an easier time this year than in 1999, one Kazakhstani media observer said, because the government was more assured of success in these presidential elections. The less confident a government is of success in democratic elections, the more likely it is to harshly clamp down, the observer said. Mechanisms for limiting press freedom—like these media and election laws—have been set up years in advance, and are likely to be used more systematically in other countries during elections, as the present regimes struggle to retain power.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Olivia Allison is an independent writer currently traveling Central Asia.

http://www.cacianalyst.org/view_article.php?articleid=2707

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