i keep despairing as i read what little news is trickling out of eastern uzbekistan. there are now reports that 700 people could be dead, making it a massacre on a tiananmen square scale.
but then, the reports may not be true. the uzbek government has shut the area to reporters, so the best we get are trickling reports which may, or may not, be exaggerated. then again, when a government bars reporters from looking at its handiwork, i'm usually inclined to not give that government the benefit of the doubt. so i think it's fair to assume that the truth is closer to the worse reports than it is to the better ones.
i find i've been reading wanderlustress a lot lately (it's a blog by a peace corps volunteer who was stationed in andijan. she was evacuated last week but has a lot of contacts in the troubled areas)
as for my instant message session yesterday, i can't say i got any insights into the situation. my friend didn't say much about andijan. he lives in a very different part of the country, claimed to know little of what was going on there, and, in any event, didn't want to talk about it. all he knows, he said, is from what the president (i.e. karimov) said on TV. much later in our conversation he wrote: "USA democratic" out of nowhere. i asked him what he meant by that and he wrote: "uzbekistan does not like USA." but i wonder if he meant "uzbekistan is not like [the] USA." his english is not perfect. so i asked him if he thought our countries were not friends and he misunderstood me, thinking i was asking whether we personally were friends. in the end, i never figured out exactly what he was trying to say.
i have two other contacts from uzbekistan (though one lives in russia now). i haven't heard from either of them since this thing began, even though i've written both emails. it's really weird how attached i am to uzbekistan. i only went there on vacation for just a few weeks more than a year ago now. and i never made it to andijan. and yet the news just seems more real because of the real uzbeks i know.
UPDATE: i took too long to plug wanderlustress' site. she deleted some of her most informative posts sometime in the past few hours. the guardian mentioned her site this morning and, i guess, she got a little skittish over how the peace corps (and her host country) would view what she wrote. not that i'm blaming her, of course. i might do the same thing if i were in her shoes.
