Islamic
Group Banned by Many Is Not on U.S. Terrorist List
By David B. Ottaway
Washington Post
Monday, December 27, 2004; Page A04
The group has been outlawed in all Arab countries, as well as in Turkey,
Pakistan, Russia and throughout Central Asia, where hundreds of its members
have been jailed. Germany, too, has banned the group because it "supports
the use of violence as a means to realize political interests," according
to the German Interior Ministry.
But the Bush administration, which has designated more than 390 groups and
individuals as "global terrorists," has declined to add this
particular one to the list.
How to handle Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami -- the Islamic Liberation Party or HT
-- has become the focus of a debate inside and outside the Bush administration
that weighs the president's promise to promote democracy in the greater Middle
East against the new imperatives of the fight against terrorism.
Two conservative think tanks, the Nixon Center and the Heritage Foundation,
are pressing the administration to designate the Islamic Liberation Party as a
terrorist group. Human Rights Watch, the Brussels-based International Crisis
Group, and experts at the liberal Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
and the Brookings Institution contend that such a step would fan the fires of
Islamic extremism.
Zeyno Baran, the Nixon Center's international security program director, has
held a series of workshops this year in Ankara, Turkey, and Washington to
highlight the party's revolutionary goals and tactics. She argues it should not
be protected on grounds of freedom of religion or speech. "It's not a
religious organization, it's a political party that uses religion as a
tool" and is drifting toward violence, she said.
Both Baran and the Heritage Foundation's Central Asian specialist, Ariel
Cohen, have testified in Congress urging designation. But others argue that
would incite Central Asian governments to crack down on all Muslim groups, making
the situation worse.
"It doesn't serve anybody's interest to go after peaceful Muslim
believers," said Acacia Shields, senior Central Asia researcher for the
New York-based Human Rights Watch. "There has to be a distinction made
between Muslims we have disagreements with and Muslims actively involved in
violence."
Despite the inflammatory rhetoric on its Web site and in pamphlets, the
Islamic Liberation Party does not explicitly espouse violence as a means of coming
to power itself. Nor has the party been found engaging in terrorism, according
to State Department officials.
The party is gaining followers throughout Central Asia, and some U.S.
officials say that a decision to brand it a terrorist entity could turn it into
another al Qaeda and undermine U.S. efforts to encourage the emergence of
moderate Islamic groups throughout the region.
The matter could be further complicated by the U.S. relationship with
Uzbekistan, which has permitted the United States to use an air base for its
operations against al Qaeda inside neighboring Afghanistan. The Islamic
Liberation Party -- though outlawed -- is becoming the main political
opposition to Uzbekistan's repressive secular government. To some U.S. human
rights groups, the party has become a symbol of the struggle for religious and
political freedoms against such repressive governments.
Although it has branches in many European countries, there have been no
reports of Islamic Liberation being active in the United States, though its
literature has appeared in some mosques.
Under a 2001 presidential order, a foreign entity can be designated a global
terrorist if it either engaged in an act of terrorism, provides material
support to another designated group or poses "a significant risk" to
U.S. foreign policy. A designation results in U.S. and U.N. sanctions that make
the group an international pariah.
Under another provision of the 2001 USA Patriot Act, the U.S. government can
also designate an organization if it "incites to commit" a terrorist
act. Seldom used to justify designations, the State Department did so on Dec.
17 in the case of a television network -- al-Manar -- that belongs to Lebanon's
Shiite political group Hezbollah.
"Our law says that the organization [al-Manar] can be put on the list
if it commits or incites to commit any terrorist activity," State
Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"The United States is having a very hard time dealing with this,"
said Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the
Washington-based Freedom House, a nonprofit that monitors political and
religious persecution worldwide. "It's a very fine line between inciting
and training for terrorism. Everybody's trying to figure out where to draw the
line."
One senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity
said that Islamic radicalism in Central Asia is "a serious and growing
danger not fully appreciated by people in this town." He called Islamic
Liberation "a factory" for producing radical Islamic ideas but said
on balance he still believes it should not be designated as a terrorist group.
"They say they want to overthrow secular governments, that it's okay to
fly planes into buildings," he said. "But they claim to be
nonviolent. They are using our language against us. . . . It's hard to nail
them."
Part of the administration's anti-terrorism strategy has been to try to
persuade Central Asian leaders to allow independent and moderate Islamic groups
to operate legally. Uzbek leaders, however, say they see nothing moderate in
Islamic Liberation's announced goals.
The party's aim "is gaining political power through religion,"
Zukhriddin Khusnidinov, an adviser to Uzbek President Islam Karimov, said at a
conference at the Nixon Center in Washington in October. "It is crucial to
outlaw all radical religious groups whose ideology generates international
terrorism," added Abdulaziz Kamilov, the Uzbek ambassador to Washington.
"It's kind of a conundrum for the U.S. government," said the
senior Bush administration official. "The rhetoric is really vile. The
question is: Do they have the right to freedom of expression?"
Arab and other Muslim governments have been pondering that question for 52
years. The party was founded in 1952 by a Palestinian judge, Taqiuddin Nabhani,
who lived in East Jerusalem, then under Jordanian rule. He broke away from the
Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based militant Islamic group, rejecting its
willingness to even consider cooperation with Egypt's secular authorities in
seeking power.
Jordanian authorities refused to recognize the party and arrested some of
its leaders, forcing it underground, where it continued to spread slowly
throughout the Muslim world. Today, it has branches in 30 to 40 counties from
Indonesia to Denmark, recruiting particularly on college campuses and at
mosques.
Still, little is known about this international organization that has
attracted tens of thousands of followers worldwide. Its Web site, www.hizb-ut-tahrir.org, says it is
"a political party whose ideology is Islam." Yet, it has shown no
interest in participating in elections and none in sharing power with other
parties.
Although its spokesmen renounce violence, the party's Web site describes a
three-stage plan aimed at "seizing the reins of power" across the
Muslim world. "It is forbidden to seize partial power," the Web site
states, and "the implementation of Islam must be comprehensive."
Its tactics for achieving these goals seem inspired by those of communist
parties. The first stage of its plan calls for indoctrinating recruits in small
"study groups" that subsequently morph into secret cells of five to
six people operating independently of each other, according to a report from
the International Crisis Group, which has issued several reports on the party.
Islamic Liberation was involved in failed coup attempts in both Jordan and
Egypt before renouncing violence in the mid-1970s. When Nabhani died in 1978,
another Palestinian, Abdul Kaddim Zalloum, a religious scholar educated at
Al-Azhar University in Cairo, became party leader and remained so until his
death in April 2003.
The current leader is Sheik Ata Abu Rashta, a Palestinian Jordanian Islamic
scholar about whom little is known, including his whereabouts.
© 2004 The
Washington Post Company