Uzbek authorities are investigating an assassination attempt that took place around 1:40 a.m. on October 26 in Tashkent’s Kibray District. Four people have been arrested so far. The Prosecutor General’s Office has not named the targeted individual or commented on a motive for the incident.
But the Prosecutor General’s Office has taken time to remind the media that “there is a criminal responsibility for spreading false, untrue and panic-inducing materials among the population in any form!”
Uzbek media have reported widely that the target of the October 26 shooting was Komil Allamjonov.
Allamjonov was dismissed from his most recent role heading the Presidential Administration’s Department of Information Policy on September 30, “in connection with the transfer to another job,” according to a Telegram post by the president’s press secretary, Sherzod Asadov. That new job was never announced.
Sources have separately confirmed to The Diplomat that Allamjonov was the target.
And yet, the Prosecutor General’s Office felt compelled to complain of “unconfirmed and unfounded information, as well as information that is not based on reliable official sources” being distributed, particularly via social media.
The office, in a statement, said, “Rights and responsibilities in the field of information are clearly defined in the legislation – this should be especially well felt by bloggers with an active and large audience, administrators of groups and channels in social networks. Because there are many people in society who accept any information they spread as truth.”
The office went on to “strongly request the mass media rely and refer only to the official information provided by the press service of the Prosecutor General’s Office when covering operational or investigative activities conducted by the prosecutor’s office.”
One problem is that the Prosecutor General’s Office has offered very little information. As noted above, they haven’t even confirmed who was the target of the October 26 shooting. This may not be unusual; law enforcement bodies the world over are notoriously (and often justifiably) tight-lipped about ongoing investigations. But media outlets draw from multiple sources to verify information before publishing, not just official press releases.
While the warning issued by the Prosecutor General’s Office seems targeted at bloggers, as opposed to more traditional media outlets, it nevertheless stems from a very Soviet understanding of media, steeped in the fundamental desire to control information.
In an ironically timed 1991 book titled “Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media,” journalism scholar Brian McNair wrote that:
The Soviets refer to their news media as “the means of mass information and propaganda.” The term … also alerts us to the [Communist] Party’s insistence that the Soviet media should function as engines of ideological production; machinery of social knowledge, to be harnessed and consciously directed to solving the tasks of socialist construction.
In essence, in the Soviet conception the media’s purpose is to convey information in support of the state.
This contrasted sharply with Western views on the role and purpose of media, “where the independent, impartial, ‘watchdog’ role of journalism is held to be paramount,” McNair wrote.
If in the former, media is merely a microphone to amplify “official” voices, in the latter it has its own voice. And this voice is grating to governments used to controlling the flow of information. The ghosts of this Soviet perspective linger across Central Asia to this day, even as the pace of information sharing has accelerated and sources of information have diversified and been democratized.