On 15 January, Kyrgyz police arrested a leader of the movement in the southern city of Osh. This arrest coincided with the announcement by the Tajik authorities, on 16 January, that they had arrested 99 members of the organization in 2005. Two of the arrested were high-ranking leaders of the movement in Tajikistan, according to Tajik Prosecutor-General Bobojon Bobokhonov. The Tajik authorities warned that the number of Hizb-ut-Tahrir members and sympathizers continues to grow. The arrest in Osh was not a big surprise, in a way: the Fergana Valley is famous as a hotbed of Islamic radicals in all three countries surrounding the valley – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The south of Kyrgyzstan, centered around Osh, is more religious than the north, partly because this region is inhabited by many ethnic Uzbeks, who are on the whole more religious than the Kyrgyz. Following the arrest of the local leader, the police searched his house and claimed they found 32 pistol bullets, plus video and audio tapes with extremist information. There has been no independent information of this and officially, Hizb-ut-Tahrir claims to be a non-violent movement.

The arrest in Osh was not a single case region-wide, as the arrests announced by Tajikistan show. (And in Uzbekistan, thousands of real or suspected Hizb-ut-Tahrir members might be languishing in prisons). All the countries in the region fear the movement’s longed-for theocratic state, which threatens to undermine their secular state structures. Tajikistan struggles continuously against Hizb-ut-Tahrir; not only members, but also sympathizers of the movement (who usually, it seems, spread the movement’s illegal leaflets) are arrested for their actions. And no exceptions are made on the basis of gender: 16 of the detained last year were women.

Already, 40 of the 99 arrested have been sentenced to various terms in prison of up to 12 years. The others are still awaiting trial. Since the emergence of Hizb-ut-Tahrir in Tajikistan in the second half of the 1990s, over 300 of its members have been arrested in the country.

And it’s no longer just the Central Asian states who fear the movement might not be as peaceful as it claims to be. Hizb-ut-Tahrir never was a purely Central Asian movement – although it has been very successful here since the demise of the Soviet Union. Hizb-ut-Tahrir, created in the Middle East in the 1950s, is an international Islamic movement with many followers all over the world. Indeed, the movement is very active in Western Europe among immigrant Moslems and has its international headquarters in London, where it has also aroused suspicion. Some observers think Hizb-ut-Tahrir members are linked to the July 2005 London metro bombings. There has recently been talk of banning the group in the UK, which would put the latter on a par with Germany, the Central Asian states, and with Russia, where the group also has been banned.

However, most of the movements’ followers are believed to be radical, but peaceful Moslems who want all the world’s Moslems to live under the rule of the Koran. This already is seen as a threat by the secular Central Asian states – a threat which they harshly try to neutralize with long prison sentences. Often, human rights organizations say, trials against Hizb-ut-Tahrir members are far from fair, especially in Uzbekistan, where the number of the group’s supporters is the highest in all Central Asia. It is most openly active in relatively liberal Kyrgyzstan, though, where it seemed to pursue political goals during the July 2005 presidential election. During that time, in some parts of the country leaflets with a political-religious content were spread, urging people to vote for a religious candidate (if there was one) or not at all.

And not only Hizb-ut-Tahrir makes the authorities nervous. The remnants of the once powerful Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which staged armed incursions into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in 1999-2000 but which reportedly was almost completely destroyed during the U.S. campaign against Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, is still seen as a threat – or so the authorities claim. Also in January, the Tajik Prosecutor-General accused the IMU of being “closely involved” in the explosions in January and June 2005 near the Emergency Situations Ministry in Dushanbe. “Several” (but unspecified) people linked to IMU have been arrested in connection with the bombings and several others were put on the international wanted list, he said.

It is not always clear in how far there really is an Islamic threat or how much the countries’ authorities make use of a small and not life-threatening threat for political purposes. But they do seem to fear Islamic radicalism. Harsh prison sentences do not seem to work to counter this, however, as Tajikistan has noticed.