On 5th of June, IA Radio Liberty reported: “Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev offered to deprive citizenship of the compatriots who joined radical religious groups and movements”. He said about this during a meeting in the administration of Andijan region on June 3. “For example, if in five mahallas 20-30 people will get off the right track, then we can calculate that five out of twenty have joined the worst, they will not return. They should not be engaged, they should be deprived of the citizenship of Uzbekistan. “I am ready to deprive them of their citizenship”, he said.
Сomment:
Such statement with the threat of deprivation of citizenship, coming from the mouth of the head of state of Uzbekistan, is not an isolated case in Central Asia. Earlier, in July 2016, Kalmukhanbet Kasymov, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kazakhstan made a speech with similar statements at a government meeting. The Ministry is working on amendments to the legislation providing for the deprivation of citizenship of persons who have gone abroad to participate in terrorist and extremist activities, including hostilities, as well as for the obstructing to their return to Kazakhstan. A little later in August 2016, the head of Kyrgyzstan Almazbek Atambayev signed a law according to which persons found guilty of terrorism and extremism will also be deprived of citizenship.
Today, when it comes to religious extremism and terrorism, everyone understands that this applies to Islam and Muslims, and especially active Muslims working to revive the Islamic way of life. It is clearly that these concepts were cultivated by the disbelieving colonizers represented by the USA, Britain, France and similar haters of Islam and Muslims.
Our rulers, in the pursuit of fame, in the service of the disbelieving colonizers, trying to curry favor with their masters, are waging an equally brutal war against Islam and Muslims. Accusing Muslims of terrorism and extremism, threatening with the deprivation of citizenship, torturing and killing Muslims in their prisons, the despot rulers demonstrate clearly their commitment to the disbelieving West.
The latest statement of the head of Uzbekistan in the Andijan region is not spontaneous, it was preceded by the more disgusting and cowardly act of Mirziyoyev, who ordered to form the special groups that must re-examine the cases of Muslims accused of extremism and terrorism on the so-called “black list” and ordered imams to work with the families of the convicted Muslims.
Over the past few months, imams of the mosques and their assistants in Andijan, Tashkent and other cities of the country have conducted preventive conversations in the homes of the Muslim convicted for religious reasons, as well as of the persons who have gone abroad and suspected of extremism who are in the so-called “black list”. If someone from the “black list” is sick, then they promise him a free treatment, if one of them wants to do business, then bank employees offer them a loan, if one of their family members is in prison, then his relatives are promised to release him, but only with one condition – he must give up his ideas, admit that he was wrong and become a friend of this tyrant criminal power!
All the convicted Muslims on charges of extremism and terrorism are pious and God-fearing sons of the Ummah of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, who tried strictly to practice their religion and encouraged others to follow Islam and thereby tried to revive the Islamic way of life.
For this good deal, this criminal regime attacked them and began to pursue trying to turn them away from the call to Islam. To date, for more than 17 years, tens of thousands of Muslims have been imprisoned in the cells of this despotic regime for the so-called “extremism” – that is, for the call to the Islamic way of life. Tens of thousands are forced to leave the country because of the danger of arrests and torture by the criminal regime.
The criminal regime in the hope that long years of imprisonment or long years of wandering in distant countries away from relatives and friends, weakened the faith of Muslims and hope to bribe them with the material blessings of this perishable world. How much this criminal regime of the tyrant is turned away from the truth!
But despite the various tricks of the criminal regime, we see how the Muslims of Uzbekistan continue to work to revive the Islamic way of life, not only in Uzbekistan itself, but also in other parts of the world. This does not give rest to the tyrant, and that’s why he is enraged and threatens the Muslims with the deprivation of citizenship. Do Muslims need a citizenship of the secular state with a nationalistic color!? Muslims must have the citizenship of the Islamic State of Khilafah (Caliphate) based on the method of Prophethood, on the revival of which tens of thousands of Muslims of Uzbekistan and millions of Muslims around the world are working!
Eldar Khamzin
Member of the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir