As Uzbek blogger Umid Miraliev passes through the streets of central Tashkent, he does so with a pronounced limp -- the result of a violent assault that he suffered in May.
Footage of the attack that Miraliev's brother managed to film as the pair came under assault showed a group of angry men bursting into a residential courtyard in their native Qashqadaryo Province armed with sticks and spades.
The faces of several men were clearly visible in the dramatic scenes.
Miraliev and his brother recall around six men piling out of a black Chevrolet minivan prior to the fracas, which took place as the pair were visiting the home of the local neighborhood committee head.
At least three have been arrested to date.
But Miraliev has doubts that the incident will be fairly investigated insofar as he believes the violence was ultimately ordered by local authorities in Qashqadaryo, for whom he has been a thorn in the side for several years.
"In the provinces, the governor is the only law," Miraliev told RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service. "If he wants to fire a prosecutor for disobedience, he can."
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Born into a family of smallholders, the 48-year-old Miraliev has become part of a category that simply did not exist in Uzbekistan prior to the death of strongly authoritarian first President Islam Karimov: the provincial blogger.
Typically using YouTube as well as Telegram and Instagram to embrace a small free-speech opening under Karimov's successor, Shavkat Mirziyoev, these grassroots activists have highlighted problems on the ground in the communities where they live, typically accusing provincial and district administrations of corruption and incompetence.
Ostensibly, Uzbekistan's president has offered them his support.
In a speech marking Uzbekistan's day for media workers last month, Mirziyoev said that the "firm positions and impartial words" of bloggers were helping to "wake up some dormant leaders at the local level, making them work in a new way [and] live with the concerns of the people."
In 2020, the message was much the same.
Mirziyoev implored journalists and bloggers to "expose the mistakes and shortcomings of old-fashioned leaders."
That call now looks like an Uzbek version of China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign in the 1950s, during which criticism of the Chinese Communist Party was actively encouraged before an extensive crackdown once the feedback became too much.
One of the first Uzbek bloggers to learn that there were lines that could not be crossed was Otabek Sattoriy, a blogger from the town of Termez near the border with Afghanistan, who was arrested in a heavy-handed police raid targeting his family home in January 2021.
Sattoriy, a vociferous critic of alleged official corruption in his hometown, was then sentenced to more than six years in jail on charges of extortion and slander, before being granted early release in February 2024.
Like Miraliev, he had cited Mirziyoev's exhortation to "expose shortcomings" as an inspiration for his blogging career.
But Sattoriy has shown no signs of picking up where he left off, and Miraliev admits that he has been "broken, like other bloggers."
"Each district and town [in Qashqadaryo Province] used to have its own bloggers and activists. I'm not sure where they are now," Miraliev said.
'They Couldn't Find Anyone'
It is no longer shocking to hear of Uzbek bloggers and online voices of all different types being incarcerated.
Monitoring carried out by the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia in tandem with the International Partnership for Human Rights found that more than 100 bloggers and online activists had been the subject of what the groups called "politically motivated court decisions" in the last 3 1/2 years.
In the joint report published this month, the authors noted incidents of bloggers critical of the Uzbek regime and Mirziyoev being kept in psychiatric facilities, prisons, and under house arrest.
"Today, those who speak out on issues which the authorities deem to be politically sensitive or potentially disruptive, be they journalists, bloggers, social media commentators, human rights defenders, or others, could potentially be at risk of detention, imprisonment, intimidation, harassment, other types of limitations of freedom, as well as torture and ill-treatment," the authors argued.
Miraliev told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service that he had already experienced many of these ills even before being attacked by men he had never met and left with serious injuries to his head and elsewhere.
In October 2022, he was arrested on what he would later find out were charges of fraud and libel, with the latter pertaining to comments made in his videos against Abdusamad Khasanov, head of the Shahrisabz district, which is in Qashqadaryo Province.
Complaints against Khasanov and other officials were commonplace in the videos that Miraliev published between 2018 and the time of his arrest.
In one interview, a quartet of farmers said that they had been encouraged by the government to grow potatoes on their plots but added that authorities in Khasanov's district had then failed to provide them with water.
As a result, their crop failed, leaving them with loans they were unable to pay off, they complained.
Extortion and fraud charges are an increasingly common line of attack against Uzbek bloggers, but Miraliev said they failed to stack up, even in a legal setting where the odds are strongly weighted against defendants.
The authorities "went around trying to find someone who would say that I had taken money from them, but they couldn't find anyone," he said.
Miraliev was released from jail in January 2023, but then sentenced in May 2023 to a stint of limited freedom that lasted until last month and required him to make regular check-ins with local authorities.
Now that he is free -- if still under pressure -- Miraliev has been travelling to Tashkent in the hope that authorities in the capital will seriously investigate the May 26 attack that occurred in the last full month of his sentence.
There's no sign of that so far.
RFE/RL's Uzbek Service asked for comment from Khasanov and other Qashqadaryo Province officials, but had received no response at the time of publication.
This year, Uzbekistan fell 11 places in the press-freedom rankings of the international watchdog Reporters Without Borders, placing 148th out of 180 countries.
Komil Allamjonov, head of information policy in Mirziyoev's administration, acknowledged that news in May but insisted "the president's position on freedom of the press and freedom of speech is tough and clear, clearly indicating that without freedom of speech, development is impossible."
"Of course, we must admit that there are still many problems that affect the change in press freedom ratings," Allamjonov added.
"But if we do not bring the press into the legal field, and ensure that disputes are resolved in court, then we will be bogged down in chaos instead of achieving improvements."
