ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- Leaders of top news websites in Uzbekistan were invited on August 5 to the Agency for Mass Information and Communications for a briefing on the recent detention of a popular blogger on extortion charges.
The message of the briefing was clear, if not stated in as many words: The accusations against the blogger were grounded in fact, and the arrest was not to be treated as evidence of a clampdown on freedom of speech.
According to a website editor at the meeting, staff of the agency that is part of the presidential administration showed the journalists video footage of the blogger, Olimjon Haidarov, allegedly "taking several thousand US dollars from the victims, by means of extortion."
The editor, who spoke to RFE/RL's Uzbek Service on condition of anonymity, said officials presented several other police videos to make their case.
But Haidarov's brother, who spoke to RFE/RL on July 29, told a different story.
Salimjon Haidarov said Olimjon had told him in a short telephone conversation that he had been "set up" by law enforcement in Fergana Province, where the blogger lives.
"My brother called me yesterday," Haidarov said. "I talked with him for about a minute. He told me: 'I was set up. When I was standing and talking with a friend, they came up to us, twisted my hands, and forced me to take this money.'"
That was all Olimjon managed to communicate, his brother said.
Olimjon's lawyer subsequently told Salimjon Haidarov that his client would go on a hunger strike to protest his arrest.
The Freeze After The Thaw?
Haidarov, who has more than 35,000 followers across Telegram and Facebook, already had his cards marked by the authorities.
In December, the blogger was fined by a court the equivalent of nearly $2,000 for "spreading false information" after filming a protest of workers outside a factory in Ferghana that had ceased working due to the gas shortages sweeping the country.
His case was one of 10 highlighted in a June report by the Berlin-based nonprofit the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights called Uzbekistan: President's Broken Promises Put Journalists And Bloggers At Risk.
While acknowledging that President Shavkat Mirziyoev's arrival in power in 2016 brought positive changes to Uzbekistan in terms of press and speech freedoms, the report's authors wrote that "in the last two years, the climate for freedom of expression, assembly, and association has seen significant backslide towards repression."
New legal provisions criminalizing insults to the president with prison sentences of up to five years and stronger punishments for "public calls to mass disorders" in 2021 are just two developments that the group cited as chilling the political atmosphere after the earlier thaw.
Valijon Kalonov, a blogger who was regularly critical of Mirziyoev on a number of issues and even called for protests to block his reelection in 2021, became the first person to be charged in connection to the law punishing "defamation" of the head of state just months after it was passed.
The judge presiding over Kalonov's case ruled that he was dangerously mentally ill, and the blogger has remained in a maximum-security psychiatric facility in Mirziyoev's home province of Jizzakh ever since his trial ended in December 2021.
But a law that Uzbekistan's bloggers appear to be falling foul of even more often than those laws is one that already existed in the criminal code: extortion.
Uzbek Forum Director Umida Niyazova argued that this is no coincidence.
"Extortion charges are often brought against activists and bloggers, firstly, to avoid the political component in a case and make it look like an ordinary criminal offense," Niyazova told RFE/RL in an interview.
"Secondly, practice shows that extortion charges are easy to fabricate. It is not necessary to present material evidence -- it is enough for someone to write a statement to police that some blogger extorted money," Niyazova said.
'He Lost Consciousness During Torture'
In May 2021, the sentencing of anti-corruption YouTuber Otabek Sattoriy to 6 1/2 years in jail in the southern province of the Surxondaryo region had seemed like a watershed moment in Uzbekistan's freedom of speech experiment.
And so it has proved.
As in many recent cases affecting Uzbek bloggers, Sattoriy's detention was accompanied by a disproportionate show of force, with more than 20 members of law enforcement raiding the family home where he lived with family, including his father, Abdumannon Sattoriy.
Sattoriy senior has repeatedly told media outlets that his son's needling coverage of local officials was inspired by the words of Mirziyoev, who called on journalists and bloggers to expose government shortcomings and promised that he would "stand behind" their work.
But Sattoriy was convicted on counts of extortion and libel after prosecutors accused him of using his channel to blackmail local entrepreneurs.
That trend has continued ever since.
Earlier this month, Abduqodir Mominov, the face behind the Koz'gu YouTube channel with nearly 250,000 subscribers, was sentenced to seven years and three months in jail.
The noted government critic was found guilty of "large-scale extortion" and "violation of privacy with serious consequences," another fashionable charge to which multiple bloggers have succumbed.
In an August 16 interview with RFE/RL's Uzbek Service, Mominov's mother Sabokhat Abdullaeva said alarmingly that her son's arrest in February did not occur after questioning at a police station, as police had suggested, and claimed that her son was tortured while in detention.
Citing a conversation with her son at a Tashkent prison this week, Abdullaeva said Mominov was "attacked by a group of unknown people [who] tied his hands and feet while loading him into an unmarked car" on the day of his arrest.
"He said that he lost consciousness many times during the torture," Abdullaeva told RFE/RL, claiming that her son sustained a broken rib during beatings and expressing concern that unspecified "medicines" were being added to Mominov's food in jail.
The Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to Abdullaeva's allegations.
Mirziyoev has publicly condemned torture, which became a calling card of the reign of his authoritarian predecessor, Islam Karimov.
He also signed a decree prohibiting courts from using evidence obtained through torture early on in his rule.
But in another flashback to Karimov's time, Uzbekistan's Mirziyoev-era authorities are not hiding their intent to pursue their critics abroad as well as at home.
Last week, the Interior Ministry announced a warrant for the arrest of Sanzhar Ikramov, a blogger who it said is most likely based in Turkey. He operates a politically themed YouTube channel with more than 200,000 subscribers.
Ikramov's crime, according to the Interior Ministry?
An extortion case dating back to 2011.
A Blogger Blacklist?
For all the suspicion that these cases are politically motivated, the Uzbek blogosphere that exploded during Mirziyoev's post-Karimov opening is not without its flaws -- a fact that many popular bloggers admit.
Speaking to RFE/RL's Uzbek Service in connection with the latest arrests and sentences targeting bloggers, media analyst Hairulla Kilichev said that independent bloggers and journalists often find themselves used in political intrigues or battles among other public figures who wish to discredit each other.
Kilichev sees a kind of association of bloggers as an answer to this problem, and said that he has drawn up a list of legal recommendations that would lessen bloggers' legal vulnerability.
"Unfortunately, among the activists of social networks there is disunity and no desire for collective action," Kilichev said.
Kilichev also fears things may get worse before they get better when it comes to freedom of speech in Uzbekistan, arguing that authorities are currently working through a "blacklist" of bloggers with large or rapidly growing followings.
"In their view, the more active the blogger the greater his danger to society," Kilichev explained.
A lack of income is another factor making Uzbek bloggers vulnerable.
Sirojjidin Adilov, curator of the Sirojiddin Media YouTube channel with half a million subscribers said that prior to 2021, Uzbek YouTubers were able to monetize their content.
That became impossible from around April of that year, a development that some observers speculated was connected to YouTube's refusal to set up a representative office in Uzbekistan.
"Now bloggers are inclined to work with and take money from people who contact them. That is to say that they are working on a unilateral basis," Adilov said. "If before it used to be possible to make good money through a YouTube channel, now bloggers are ready to work for a pittance."
In the meantime, many of the protagonists who have helped enrich and diversify Uzbekistan's media space during the Mirziyoev years are now dropping out of the game.
According to RFE/RL's Uzbek Service, around a dozen Uzbek bloggers have in recent months made announcements that they are no longer posting as a result of pressure and fears for their personal safety.
