RL AND JOB ARE INCOMPATIBLE

A visit to the RL/RFE Tashkent Bureau in the past cost Atabek Amankulov his job with the Uzbek National News Agency or UzA. An insider said that upper echelons of the news agency received a video tape from the camera installed near the RL/RFE Tashkent Bureau entrance showing journalist.

Amankulov himself never denied his visit. Summoned to his superior Anvar Babayev for "a friendly chat", the journalist explained what he had been doing in the office of the broadcaster but not even his confession enabled Amankulov to keep his job.

This author talked to the journalist afterwards and was given a thorough account of how Amankulov, not even an UzA employee yet, happened to visit the RL/RFE Tashkent Bureau in spring 2005. Uzbek newspapers published ads to the effect that RL/RFE needed young journalists for some new program. It was because of it that the then unemployed young journalist turned up there.

Amankulov never passed the screening. He eventually found a job with UzA, in the international news department. Unfortunately, it did not last. He was fired barely a month later. Amankulov has not been able to find another job ever since.

A former RL/RFE Tashkent Bureau employee says that this attitude is not restricted to only whoever visited the office just for the fun of it. Former journalists of the American radio broadcaster encounter problems with finding another job now.

The RL/RFE Tashkent Bureau was closed this January. A great deal of Uzbek journalists who used to work for it found political asylum in the West.