Uznews, Tashkent, 13 Mar 2009 – Uzbekistan has occupied its deserved place among the world’s worst enemies of the Internet in Reporters Without Borders’ report. Along with 11 other countries, such as Turkmenistan, North Korea and Burma, Uzbekistan is regarded as a country where the government fully controls the Internet use of its citizens.
In the report, Reporters Without Borders stressed that UzPak is the only Internet provider in the country that has access to international networks and all access providers have to connect via this network.
Even though websites do not need to be registered and no licence is needed to set up them, the government controls its citizens’ access to information, blocking resources that are critical of the regime, despite President Islam Karimov’s repeated statements that he wishes to see his citizens expressing themselves freely.
The network has therefore developed and the number of users never ceases to grow, the report says.
“But diversity of opinion is not to be expected,” it says, backing this up by a recent case of blocking Russian blog platform Livejournal.
In 2005, the journalist and nephew to the president, Jamshid Karimov, was forcibly admitted to a psychiatric hospital after posting a series of online articles on corruption of the local administration and the state of the peasantry in Jizak Region.
The same year, the editor of the independent news website Tribune-uz.info, Alo Hojayev, decided to suspend its online work after coming under pressure from the government.
Even though the former foreign minister, Elyor Ganiyev, once said that Uzbekistan did not have the capacity or the technical knowledge to block access to the Internet, the government has a list of “sources of information that provide destruction news” and threaten “security of information”.
“It generally concerns independent news websites and those which defend human rights,” the report notes.
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