Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov in April, 2011.

(Credit:
Getty Images)

This is an installment in the WorldWatch series, “The world’s enduring dictators,” inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, in which CBSNews.com takes a look at the men who continue to rule their lands unimpeded by law. See a complete explanation of the series and a list of others profiled here.

Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan

Length of rule: 20 years. Karimov took power after winning by a rather large margin in the first post-Soviet era presidential election in Uzbekistan in 1991. Karimov has since continued the trend of producing overwhelming and questionable election results, even ignoring constitutional term limits, when he ran and won a third term in 2007.

Most despotic acts: Karimov and his regime are frequently accused of harsh and arbitrary crackdowns on human rights workers, journalists and Muslim activists, all in the name of fighting terrorism. The United Nations called the use of torture in Uzbekistan “systematic.” A former British ambassador to Uzbekistan accused it of boiling dissidents to death. More recently, in 2005, hundreds of protesters were slaughtered in the infamous Andijan massacre, which included what some described as mass summary executions by state security forces. Reporters Without Borders calls Karimov one of the world’s “Predators of Press Freedom,” saying he “is still breaking his own records for repression and paranoia.”

Outlook for change: Karmiov’s regime, including his own daughter, have taken steps recently to combat the public perception of their country’s paltry human rights record, even going so far as to kick Human Rights Watch out of the country in March. Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, Karimov’s daughter and current Uzbek ambassador to UNESCO, has a lawsuit for libel against a French website underway in a Paris court after the website referred to her as a “dictator’s daughter,” and accused her of attempting to “whitewash her country’s image.” While it is apparent that Karimov uses radical Islamism as an excuse for political crackdowns, there is definitely plenty of spillover of radical elements from neighboring Afghanistan. Still, Karimov’s security forces have a pretty tight grip on the country, and the European Union has begun wooing Uzbekistan for its energy reserves, regardless of its human rights record. All that, combined with the Karimov regime’s firm control over internal media, make his reign very likely to continue for some time.

Uzbekistan stats:

Population: 28,128,600; Uzbek 80 percent, Russian 5.5 percent, Tajik 5 percent, Kazakh 3 percent, Karakalpak 2.5 percent, Tatar 1.5 percent, other 2.5 percent; Median Age is 26.

Constitution and the Rule of Law: Republic; Everyday law based on civil law system.

Economic Indicators: Overall GDP is $86.1 billion (world rank is 75); Per capita GDP is $3,100 (world rank is 167); unemployment rate is 1.1 percent (world rank is 6.)

Press freedom index world rank: 163

Category:

• Supreme Court

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, unanimously throwing out a suit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft from someone arrested but never used as a “material witness” in a terrorism case, has now erected a broad shield protecting the government and Bush administration officials for their conduct in the war on terror.

The justices have repeatedly rejected lawsuits from civil libertarians who contended top officials had stretched the law and violated the Constitution by ordering the arrest of Muslim men both in the U.S. and abroad, most of whom were never charged with terrorism.

“We are not getting a check on executive power in this area, and that is very dismaying,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, counsel for the Constitution Project, a non-partisan legal group in Washington.

The latest example came Tuesday when the high court ruled Ashcroft could not be sued by a former University of Idaho football player who had converted to Islam. In 2003 Abdullah al-Kidd was on his way to study Islamic law on a scholarship in Saudi Arabia when FBI agents arrested and handcuffed him at Dulles Airport near Washington. He was strip searched and held for 16 days in high-security jails.

He was supposedly wanted as a “material witness” for a terrorism-related trial in Idaho, even though al-Kidd had already cooperated with the FBI and answered agents’ questions. He was never called as a witness, and the main suspect was acquitted.

Al-Kidd then sued Ashcroft, alleging the nation’s top law enforcement official had deliberately misused the “material witness” law as a way to arrest persons, even when the government had no evidence they had done anything wrong.

Under the law, prosecutors can obtain a court order to hold a person who has testimony that is “material in a criminal proceeding.” Usually, they do so only when they believe the individual is about to flee.

Two weeks ago, the court also ended a long-running suit against a Boeing subsidiary for allegedly helping the CIA fly terrorism suspects to foreign countries where they were tortured. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, said this suit should be ended because it could expose “state secrets.” They won in a lower court, and the justices dismissed an appeal.

Civil liberties lawyers admit they have had little success with these or other suits, including allegations of illegal wiretapping and harsh interrogations, that name top officials. “It seems the court is reluctant to allow suits against top officials following 9/11,” Lee Gelernt, an ACLU lawyer for al-Kidd.

Al-Kidd claimed his arrest was an “unreasonable seizure” which violated the Fourth Amendment. A federal judge in Idaho and a divided 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco cleared his suit to go forward.

But in a unanimous decision in Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, the high court ruled the attorney general was immune from such claims. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in a key concurring opinion joined by three liberal justices said judges should be very wary of allowing suits targeting “national office holders” working “in the area of national security.”

“Nationwide security operations should not have to grind to a halt,” he said, while judges decide whether a top official has overstepped his authority.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing the lead opinion, said it did not matter if Ashcroft was falsely claiming that al-Kidd and others like him were valuable witnesses. An “improper motive” does not make the arrest unconstitutional, he said.

Kennedy spoke for the court two years ago in throwing out a similar suit against Ashcroft for allegedly ordering a round-up of Muslim men in the New York area for minor immigration violations. Since the 9/11 attacks were “perpetrated by 19 Arab Muslim hijackers … it should come as no surprise” that Muslim men were targeted for investigation by Ashcroft and the FBI, he said then.

Al-Kidd said he filed the suit to tell his story. “I wanted to clear my name and to have the American public hear my story,” he said in an earlier interview. “My goal was to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen to other people.”

The American Civil Liberties Union sued on al-Kidd’s behalf, not expecting to win damages from Ashcroft, but hoping to rein in the “material witness” law.

Justice Elena Kagan sat out the case.

———

(c) 2011, Tribune Co.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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When Katya Koren, a 19-year-old Muslim girl growing up in the Crimea region of Ukraine, entered a beauty contest, she couldn’t possibly have known what would result.

According to her friends, she just liked to wear fashionable clothes. The judges awarded her seventh place — but three young Muslims allegedly thought she deserved a different finish. Koren was brutally stoned to death.

Her battered body was buried in a forest and was found a week after she disappeared.

Police have opened a murder investigation and are looking into claims that three Muslim youths killed her, claiming her death was justified under Islam.

One of the three – named as 16-year-old Bihal Gaziev – is under arrest and told police that Katya had ‘violated the laws of Sharia.’ Gaziev has said he has no regrets about her death.

In an area governed by Shari’a law, Koren’s decision to compete in a beauty competition might actually be against the law. It seems relatively safe to say Shari’a includes no specific edict against pageants, but the Quran enjoins modesty without actually defining it. That means, in some places, some could construe Shari’a to prohibit such competitions.

Appallingly, in those places where Katya’s status as a beauty contest competitor might be considered against the law, the youths’ stoning of her might even be considered acceptable, said Andy Cochran, who runs the site 7thAmendmentAdvocate.org.

“In areas governed by strict Shari’a, it could, especially if the youths sought a ruling from a local imam first,” he explained.

Certainly, adultery is an offense considered in some places to be punishable by stoning — but a beauty competition seems a very, very far cry from adultery.

At any rate, talking about Shari’a is ”like talking about state law, without ever asking what state,” according to American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Michael Rubin, who writes regularly about issues related to the Middle East. “There is no universally accepted standardized Shari’a.”

In the end, it was sheer radicalism — not some subtle or advanced understanding of Shari’a — that led Gaziev to say what he said and to do what he presumably did.

“You’re talking about ignoramuses who are spood-fed Saudi-inspired radicalism and accept it blindly,” Rubin said in an e-mail.

And because Katya’s murder occurred in Ukraine, what matters more than what Shari’a has to say about modesty is what the Ukrainian authorities have to say about the case.

“Murder is murder,” Rubin wrote. “I would hope the Ukrainians would send them to the gallows.”

Still, Koren’s heart-breaking death is a reminder to cherish the culture of freedom we enjoy in the U.S., where just last year Rima Fakih became the first Muslim to be crowned Miss USA — to no real controversy. (Later, when Fakih spoke out against the proposed Ground Zero mosque, she found herself on the receiving end of criticism, but her participation in the pageant itself was rewarded by nothing except an enviable prize package and a Mikimoto crown.)

As Cochran puts it, “The Bill of Rights, which was first based on the Magna Carta signed in 1215, has led to a system of procedures fair to all parties, such as the use of juries in criminal and civil cases and standard procedures for each type of case. That system has been a beacon to societies around the world, for which men and women of all races, creeds and colors have fought and died.”

‘Muslims in the Middle East are on the defensive – they possess an undersiege
mentality,” explained Prof. Azyumardi Azra on Monday. “They are afraid of
interacting, and giving greater room,” whether to different Muslim sects or
members of other religions.

Later in the day, Arza delivered a lecture on
the interplay among the Indonesian state, democracy and the Shari’a, at Bar-Ilan
University’s international conference on Religious Law and State Affairs. The
conference, supported by the Tager Family Jewish Law Program in the university’s
Faculty of Law, advances research in Jewish law from a variety of viewpoints –
among them religious, historical and philosophical.

A professor of
history at the State Islamic University in Jakarta, Azra is the founder and
editor-in-chief of Studia Islamika, Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies, and
on the board of editors of the Journal of Qur’anic Studies at SOAS, University
of London. In 2010 he was granted an Honorary CBE (Commander of the Order of the
British Empire) from Queen Elizabeth II, for his dedication to promoting
interfaith understanding.

THIS WAS his first visit to Israel, and besides
his surprise over how green the country was, he noted how Jerusalem’s Old City
was full of Muslims, Christians and Jews – a meeting place of Abrahamic faiths.
But despite the religions’ common ground, the Middle East is not a place of
religious tolerance.

“The sectarianism in the Middle East among Muslims
leaves little room for compromise,” Azra said of the divisions among Sunnis,
Shi’ites, Salafites, Wahabites and other Islamic groups in the region. “Of
course the situation is getting worse with authoritarianism” prevalent in some
of those countries.

Could the current political upheaval in the Middle
East create the setting for a more moderate form of Islam to emerge?

“There are
problems in the current transitions,” he said. “First, because of the
long-entrenched military power, like in Egypt, which resulted in almost no civil
society. In Libya’s case, there is no viable political structure, only
tribalism.”

According to Azra, “the challenge for Arab countries to
develop democratic systems is huge. We must encourage civil societies. The
problem is that when you have socialbased mass organization – the Muslim
Brotherhood – they are very political, and not operational in cultural aspects
of improvement such as in social affairs or education, and enhancing
understanding among Muslims.”

To Arza, the lack of moderation in Middle
East Islam stems from the historical settings of the region.

“Muslims
have been on the defensive since the time of Napoleon Bonaparte in the late 18th
century. Many Muslims in the Middle East had been under the control of
Western powers. That’s why conspiracy theories are so prevalent.”

So,
while in the Middle East “there are reformists, and moderate forces,” those
might “not [be] powerful enough to bring the Muslims that have been under
conspiracy theories and under-siege mentality for so long” to a different phase,
he said.

“One of the necessary prerequisites for Muslims to develop now,
would be self-confidence among themselves, to bridge the differences amongst
Muslims, and between them and non-Muslims.”

Of course, the Middle Eastern
model of Islam is not the religion’s only modus operandi.

“In Indonesia
we have sectarian differences, but we give room for compromise. We are
fortunate, and have, in the last two decades, experienced religious convergence,
exchanges among different sectarians, an exchange of practices,” Azra
said. “This created [greater] room for compromise and
accommodation.”

The South Asian republic, home to the world’s largest
Muslim population, also has a very different attitude toward women than that of
this region.

“In the Middle East, Muslims are a male-dominated society.
Males play an important role at the expense of women, who have been segregated
for centuries,” Azra said. But in Indonesia, women can recite the Koran in
mosques, as their voice is not considered “arwa” – sexually arousing to men.
Middle Eastern Muslim men, as well as many Orthodox Jews, refrain from hearing a
woman’s voice in song, let alone liturgy. In addition, Indonesian Muslim women
pray together in the same mosque space as men do, on different sides but without
a dividing barrier.

As for the Western “impression of Islam as a radical
religion, since the colonial period, Westerners look at Islam only in the Middle
East, and identify it with that region and the Arabs, disregarding the fact that
Islam has a strong influence in South and Southeast Asia,” he
noted.

“ISLAM AND Judaism can learn from each other,” Azra added.
“Christianity, Islam and Judaism came from the same roots. We have a lot in
common, and should strengthen the commonalities among us. We should not only
look to differences; even among children in one family, there are differences,
but one needn’t emphasize them.”

Prof. Zvi Zohar of Bar-Ilan University’s
Faculty of Law, who was a member of the conference organizing committee, agrees
that Shari’a, the religious law of Islam, is very similar to
Halacha.

“There are many similarities which we can build upon and which
can be the basis for intellectual and academic conversation with Islamic
scholars and the people of Indonesia, a country with which Israel has no
diplomatic relations,” he said.

To Zohar, who is also one of the editors
of the biannual journal of law, religion and state published within the
framework of the program, it is fundamental to involve Islam in discourse such
as that hosted by the conference.

“In any discussion of the relationship
of law, religion and state, there are many reasons to inquire into Islam,” he
said. “Islam and Judaism are much closer in their structure and relation between
religion and state” than Christianity, for example.

“To our sorrow, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been escalated by certain quarters to be seen
as interreligious conflict,” Zohar said. “The founders of Israel had nothing
against Islam, it is merely a matter of [historic coincidence] that the people
living here were Muslims. We have every reason to be interested in entering into
dialogue with Islam, and must not let conflict obscure the common
grounds.”

He added, “If we talk together we could learn about each other
and see the similarities and common issues that are facing people in both
communities, and find that there is a spectrum in both. Indonesia is an
important country with an important culture of its own, and we are hopeful that
this will form the basis of future cooperation in a positive spirit.”

By Yasmine Saleh

CAIRO (Reuters) – The Muslim Brotherhood wants a diverse parliament after elections in September and is not seeking to impose Islamic law on Egypt, the head of the group’s newly formed political party said in an interview.

The Brotherhood, which has emerged as a powerful force after years of repression under ousted President Hosni Mubarak, has said it does not want a parliamentary majority, although rivals see it as well placed for a dominant position.

With secular politicians struggling to mount a challenge, Western investors are concerned about what a shift to an Islamic-leaning government would mean for Egypt, which relies on receipts from Western and other tourists and where tension between Muslims and the Christian minority have flared.

“We only use Islam as the basis of our party … which means that our general framework is Islamic sharia … We don’t issue religious rules in individual cases,” said Mohamed Mursi, head of the Brotherhood’s newly formed Justice and Freedom Party, which will contest the vote.

Liberal Egyptians in particular worry that the group could use for its own ends the second article of Egypt’s constitution, which makes sharia, Islamic law, a main source of legislation.

Egypt’s military rulers suspended the old constitution and introduced an interim one, but that article was unchanged.

Mursi, speaking in the group’s new five-storey headquarters in Mokattem on the outskirts of Cairo, dismissed such worries.

“We want to engage in a dialogue not a monologue,” he said. “The Brotherhood does not seek to control the parliament … We want a strong parliament … with different political forces.”

  Continued…