Zeyno Baran

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Zeyno Baran is the Director of the Center for Eurasian Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.. She worked as the Director of International Security and Energy Programs for the The Nixon Center from June 2003 until she joined the Hudson Institute in April 2006. Baran worked as the Director of the Caucasus Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies from 1999 until December 2002.^[1]^[2]

1 Hizb ut-Tahrir
2 Uzbekistan
3 References
4 External link

[edit] Hizb ut-Tahrir

Baran's Hizb ut-Tahrir: Islam's Political Insurgency, published in 2004, asserted that Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamist organization, is a "conveyor belt for radicalism and terrorism." She qualified her statement by saying, "While HT as an organization does not engage in terrorist activities, it has become the vanguard of the radical Islamist ideology that encourages its followers to commit terrorist acts."^[3]

[edit] Uzbekistan

In 2003 Baran "began second-track American efforts to engage with the Uzbek leadership to come up with better strategies to combat HT’s hold in Central Asia."[1]

Baran noted that she has "enjoyed the cooperation of the Uzbekistani government in its efforts, particularly that of former Uzbekistani Ambassador to the US Shavkat Khamrakulov and his successor, former Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komilov." She also declared that the "assistance of current Foreign Minister Sadik Safaev has also been invaluable (who served in Washington from 1996 to 2000)."

In testimony to the Committee on International Relations, Baran argued against U.S. plans to protest Tashkent’s human rights abuses by cutting off relations and terminating financial assistance. "The single-issue advocacy of the human rights groups, aided and abetted by HT itself, has only made matters worse, especially in Uzbekistan. Certainly there are serious human-rights issues in Uzbekistan, particularly regarding torture, but the anti-Uzbekistani sentiment currently prevalent in the West is counterproductive." [2] She asserted that disengaging with the Uzbek government would be counterproductive both on humanitarian grounds and in terms of U.S. strategic interests in Eurasia. Baran correctly predicted that after U.S. disengagement, China and Russian would embrace Tashkent and whatever limited democratic reform was underway would cease altogether. Baran also foresaw that the Uzbek government would punish the U.S. by revoking it right to use military bases in the country which had been used to facilitate Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.[3]