In its eagerness to counteract Islamic extremism, Uzbekistan has embarked on a Cultural Revolution-style naming and shaming exercise.

Parents are being hauled before public meetings and being admonished for the sins of their militant sons and daughters in scenes reminiscent of the public castigations common in 1960s China.



“This sacred land, where model family relations are rooted, never forgives those who do not care about their children’s future,” state TV warned last week.

This sacred land never forgives those who do not care about their children’s future

“Unfortunately, some people, who have forgotten their parental obligations and are bringing up their children as traitors [and] do not seem to realise it,” added the broadcast which aired on the country’s main state channel and was translated by the BBC.

The screens were filled with a sobbing elderly couple whose son is allegedly fighting with militants in Syria, filmed at a public meeting in the Andijan region in eastern Uzbekistan.

Other areas of the country were featured in the programme, but the choice of Andijan was telling. The city was the scene of a massacre in 2005 which the government blamed on Islamic extremists, a version disputed by many survivors and international human rights groups.

“What are the goals of these traitors? Who are they fighting for and dying for as dogs?” asked the voiceover rhetorically, as footage showed burials in foreign war zones.

President Islam Karimov frequently uses alarmist rhetoric about the threat of Islamic extremism to Uzbekistan and the wider region.

The 78-year-old autocratic leader has warned that a shared border with Afghanistan makes the country vulnerable and on 27 January the Taliban attacked a power line disrupting electricity supplies between the two countries.

According to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, 500 Uzbek fighters went to the Middle East to join militant ranks last year, but critics have accused the president of talking up the dangers to justify his repressive rule.

Human Rights Watch says that thousands of prisoners are being held on spurious charges inspired by their religious activity, and Tashkent regularly uses state-controlled media to warn against imminent danger.

Around the 10th anniversary of the Andijan violence last year, the state film studio released an apocalyptic movie set in the city about an Islamist plot, called “Traitor.”

The producers denied the film was a depiction of the 2005 unrest, calling it “the tragedy of a family which falls victim to religious extremism”, but it was widely seen as a bid to cement the government’s version of the unrest: fomented by extremists with the support of foreign influence.