Press freedom

"I feel free here," says Malik Bobaev with a smile. His sense of relief is palpable. Malik has only been living in Germany for a matter of weeks. He was invited by the Hamburger Foundation for Politically Persecuted People. Malik is a journalist, like most of the people who receive funding from the Hamburg Foundation to live in Germany. But unlike others, Malik did not flee from his homeland. He wants to use his time in Germany to gain a fresh perspective on his life and his work. The distance, as Malik says, allows him to evaluate things in a more differentiated light.

Bobaev has been working as a journalist for the last 17 years. After completing his degree in philosophy at the University of Tashkent, he started work as an editor at a local newspaper. Critical reports were not appreciated, so he Malik moved to a newly established newspaper.

"We wrote critical articles to make the paper more interesting and readable," he told Deutsche Welle. In a country where the media is heavily censored, such reports were unwelcome. Malik wrote freely about human rights abuses, even when his colleagues warned him against doing so.

After the civil uprising in May 2005 in the major city of Andijan, the Uzbekistani government has sought to suppress all forms of independent journalism. The regime violently crushed social unrest and political protests. Demonstrators were simply gunned down.

Malik began working as a radio and Internet correspondent for the American broadcaster Voice of America. "I wrote about a great many things including political affairs, freedom of the press, the widespread use of child labor in Uzbekistan and human rights issues," he said.

Repression begins

In 2010, Malik was invited along with five other colleagues to the public prosecutor's office in Tashkent. The group was ordered to provide information relating to who they were working for, any trips abroad they had made and the details of any pseudonyms under which were working.

It was an attempt to frighten them, said Malik defiantly. That same year he was prosecuted for slander, defamation and the disruption of public order and fined a considerable sum of money.

"That was a truly absurd spectacle," Malik said dismissively. "I was found guilty of things which were, from beginning to end, absolutely untrue and even so I am lucky to have got away with an $8,500 (about 6,200-euro) fine and not five or eight years behind bars."

Malik's wife is extremely concerned. She pleads with Malik to stop his activities - he is a father of four children. But the 42-year-old sticks at it. The dissemination of state propaganda through his journalistic work is unthinkable to him.

While he understands the pressures his colleagues are under, Malik sees things differently: "They know that they do not write the truth," he said. But behind closed doors, people talk differently from how they write.

Exchanges with colleagues in Europe

Malik wants to use his time in Germany to meet Uzbekistani journalists and human rights campaigners who have fled to Europe. He wants to find out what kind of relationship they have to Uzbekistan living abroad. He would also like to meet his German colleagues - if he can learn enough English or German to be able to converse with them.

"For me the most interesting journalists are the ones who only have a superficial impression of Uzbekistan," he explained. In Germany, at least, people know more about Afghanistan than central European countries.

Malik spends most of his time in Germany at his kitchen table or the desk in his apartment in Hamburg. The city and its inhabitants remain somewhat strangers to him. He is envious that his colleagues here in the West are able to work so freely, seemingly without restrictions.

He hopes that one day freedom of press will be established in Uzbekistan, though Malik is realistic enough to know that such changes take time. Still, he is convinced: "The pressure is building up in Uzbekistan - until one day there will be an explosion."

Author: Janine Albrecht / hw

Editor: Kate Bowen