TASHKENT - The violence in eastern Uzbekistan has thrown a spotlight on a little-known Islamic group called Akromiya, which critics charge is bent on violent revolt but others contend is simply an informal charitable network.
The Uzbek crackdown, which has left dozens dead in the eastern city of Andijan, erupted after weeks of protests over a trial there of 23 local businessmen accused of membership in the group boiled over.
Supporters of the defendants broke into a prison on Friday to free them along with 2,000 other prisoners. Soldiers moved against a subsequent mass rally in central Andijan, with witnesses accusing the troops of firing indiscriminately into the crowd.
Akromiya is named after Akram Yuldashev, a former maths teacher who is now serving a 17-year jail term for alleged involvement in a spate of bombings in Uzbekistan's capital Tashkent in 1999 that killed some 18 people.
It is the latest in a series of Islamic groups that this Central Asian nation's hardline regime has accused of trying to overthrow the government, accusations refuted by Akromiya followers.
Akromiya sprouted after Yuldashev published a pamphlet in 1992 titled "The Way to Truth." The pamphlet says that Islam should peacefully and naturally return to being the way of life in Uzbekistan, according to human rights officials in Uzbekistan and university officials in France.
The pamphlet also calls for people to provide charitable contributions as proscribed by the Koran, they said.
But Uzbekistan's autocratic leader Islam Karimov on Saturday claimed that Akromiya is an off-shoot of the better-known Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that advocates the creation of a caliphate, or Islamic state, by non-violent means in Central Asia.
Karimov dismissed the claims of non-violence by Akromiya and Hizb ut-Tahrir.
"Their aim is to overthrow the constitutional order," he said. Like Hizb ut-Tahrir, Akromiya aims to "unite Muslims and establish a caliphate following Sharia law."
He repeated oft-stated claims that the groups receive much of their backing from abroad and said that his security forces had intercepted telephone calls from neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan to insurgents in Andijan, which proved Akromiya's foreign backing.
But critics say the government's claims about Akromiya do not stand up.
"There's nothing in (Yuldashev's) book about using violence or challenging the constitutional order," said Talib Yakubov, a leading human rights campaigner in Tashkent.
"These days people just laugh when they hear terms like 'Wahhabism' or 'Hizb ut-Tahrir' -- they don't believe in them," Yakubov told AFP.
The current tensions gripping Uzbekistan flared last Friday, when the trial of the 23 local businessmen accused of Akromiya membership was due to reconvene amid expectations that the group would be sentenced.
The defendants' supporters in Andijan held that they were guilty of nothing more than being Muslims who provided charitable contributions, an opinion that appeared to have been endorsed by the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
"This isn't about terrorism. It's about people speaking out against poverty and repression," HRW said in a statement released on Sunday.
"The government can't use the war on terrorism to justify shooting demonstrators," it said.

05/16/2005 07:57 GMT