Living in Uzbekistan and being a journalist is really difficult, especially nowadays, as with upcoming presidential elections the Uzbek government is doing its best to put tighter control on all kinds of media (printed, broadcasted and online) in the country. Journalists from Uzbekistan say that today media in Uzbekistan is suffering its worst days. There is no independent news source in the country that covers the real facts of the country’s life. To this day, the only salvage for those, who wanted to breathe the air of free media, were proxy servers and anonymisers, special web sites that help to slip away from the blocks put by the government in the internet. However, according to article published in IWPR, the government’s control has on internet has become so tight that even the proxy servers through which banned sites can be seen are now blocked.

Sources from Uzbekistan, who wish to stay unidentified, informed me about the same situation happening in the country. They say the proxy servers that were available a month ago are not accessible today. “Server not found” has become a normal thing in Uzbekistan, says one my friends who studies in Tashkent. He says that when you enter some proxy servers the internet directs you to completely another site or just says that such directory does not exist. As my friend cannot use the proxy server any more, I am sending him the articles from blocked sites via email. Though, I have heard couple of times that security services of Uzbekistan deblocked some people’s emails and got personal information. So this way may also be insecure for internet users.

Taking into consideration the fact that in three weeks there will be presidential elections, one can assume that the control over media will become tighter. The pressure is not only on media workers but on the entrepreneurs too, who run internet cafes. The same article in IWPR says that internet cafes’ administrators in Uzbekistan are asked by the security services to limit technical possibilities of their computer and to demand from their customers the list of the sites they want to visit.

Visitors to internet cafés around the country say they have to submit a written list of web addresses they have visited, and administrators also demand to see any material that a customer plans to write onto a memory stick. Others say the USB ports for memory sticks and other storage devices have been removed from computers, while word-processing packages have been tampered with to block toolbar buttons such as “copy”, “save” and “send”.

It reminds me Turkmenistan, one of the most closed countries in the world, where in some internet cafes clients are asked to register in clients books and write the purpose of their visit.

Blogs are also blocked. The only blog platform that is active in the country is Livejournal. Though the main page of Wordress is accessible, the blogs on this platform are not accessible. Blogspot was also blocked for a long time, but recently it was unblocked. Maybe because there are almost no Uzbek blogs on Blogspot platform.

Neweurasia.net is not an exception too, as it is based on Wordpress blog platform. We were blocked in 2006 for the reasons we still do not know. Maybe, Uzbek security services see in us “the threat to overthrow the constitutional regime in Uzbekistan”? Well, I guess we will never know it.