Top Quotes: “Restless Valley: Revolution, Murder, and Intrigue in the Heart of Central Asia” — Philip Shishkin

Introduction

“Imagine a region so rife with tensions and intrigue that in less than a decade it managed to produce two revolutions in the same country, murders straight out of a thriller, a massacre of unarmed civilians, a civil war, a drug-smuggling superhighway, and corruption schemes so brazen and lucrative they would be hard to invent. On top of all that, the region has served as a staging ground for the American war in Afghanistan.”

“Clandestine drug labs across Afghanistan turned booming poppy harvests into heroin, a ruinous drug that has spread misery, disease, and corruption throughout Central Asia.”

“With two revolutions in the space of five years, and many calamities before, after, and in between, Kyrgyzstan charted a highly unusual path of national development. In neighboring Uzbekistan, the regime proved far more durable and inoculated itself against challenges by retreating deeper and deeper into repression. Central Asia’s rich and difficult history, including Stalin’s ethnic gerrymandering, casts a shadow over the present, igniting yet more conflicts. The restless valley of the title refers to Ferghana Valley, where Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan come together in a jagged mess of borders, and where several of the book’s narratives converge.”

“Askar was Askar Akayev, the president of Kyrgyzstan, a small Central Asian nation that had never been an independent state until the collapse of the Soviet Union fifteen years earlier. The empire’s fall released the Kyrgyz from centuries of foreign dominion and made them masters of their own destiny. And what a ride it had been.

Independence began, as if often does, with a surge of euphoria and pride. An optical physicist by training, Akayev cruised to the presidency amid popular demonstrations cheering the historic moment. With the curved, bald rise of his bowling ball of a head fringed by a wreath of black curls, Akayev projected a measured, professorial, soft demeanor. His early governing style earned Kyrgyzstan the unlikely distinction of being a display window of Central Asian democracy, a Switzerland of the East. The Alpine comparison ended with the mountains that both countries possess in abundance. Kyrgyzstan was poor and rural, and Akayev’s good intentions got bulldozed by nepotism and corruption.

Despite its small size, Kyrgyzstan started playing a big role in international affairs. To manage and resupply the military campaign in nearby Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, the United States needed an air base in the region, and Akayev jumped at the chance to raise his country’s profile and earn some cash in the process. Ignoring grumbles from Russia and neighboring China, both leery of American soldiers camped in their backyard, Akayev allowed the United States to set up a sprawling military base on the edge of Bishkek’s international airport. The base became the main transit point for troops bound for Afghanistan. And it added yet another layer to Kyrgyzstan’s fat onion of corruption, intrigue, and geopolitical games that would dog the country for years.

And now, on the afternoon of March 24, 2005, Akayev was on the run toward Moscow, fleeing an uprising whose danger to his rule he so blithely underestimated. Meanwhile, things were getting a little tense in his old office. Some employees of the presidential administration hung back on the seventh floor, watching in shock as protesters surged into the president’s old digs and made themselves comfortable.

“You are wearing a fancy jacket, but your president is nothing!” one protester shouted to a woman who stood in the anteroom in a huddle of junior government officials. She wore a light leather jacket of no discernible luxury.

The government employees stuck around partly out of curiosity and partly out of a vague sense of duty. They hadn’t expected events to unfold at such a rapid clip. And neither did the revolutionaries. That morning, protest leaders had still planned to pitch tents in front of the presidential palace for an indefinite sit-in. Instead, they were now wandering, a little dazed, through the dark hallways of the trashed palace.”

““This is such a mess!” said Evgenii Razinkin, who introduced himself as a member of the presidential honor guard. He wore a military uniform and appeared to be in his midtwenties. He was unarmed. “We had enough bullets here to kill thousands,” Razinkin said. “But we gave our oath to the people, to the constitution, not to the president.”

Before fleeing the palace, Akayev told his underlings not to open fire on the protesters. Though his flight was later cast as a final act of cowardice, there’s no denying that Akayev helped avoid bloodshed by removing his much-despised physical self from the scene and obviating the need for his guards to defend him.

“Had he stayed, his guards would have had to shoot to kill.””

“Sometime in the seventh or eighth century — the exact dates are obscure in the foggy confluence of history and myth — a warrior named Manas united the Kyrgyz in a rebellion against the tribes of modern-day China.”

“After Akayev fled the country, his successor was cast as the nation’s great democratic hope. He clung to the job for five bad years — until he too was overthrown and chased out of Kyrgyzstan.”

“In 2011, in a curious move bordering on absurdity, the government ordered the demolition of Kyrgyzstan’s statue of liberty, a winged woman erected on Bishkek’s central square to celebrate the country’s independence. Workmen cut down this symbol of freedom and replaced it with an equestrian bronze statue of Manas in a helmet, his robe fluttering behind him. Never mind that another Manas on a horse had been sitting on a nearby street for years.

Not to be outdone, local authorities plunked down their own Manas statue in Osh, the country’s southern hub where the Kyrgyz had only recently fought with the Uzbek ethnic minority, for whom Manas either means nothing at all or stands as a symbol of Kyrgyz militancy. Osh leaders bragged that their Manas is the tallest equestrian statue anywhere in the former Soviet Union.

It doesn’t stop there. In 2012, yet another Kyrgyz president visited Moscow and unveiled yet another Manas statue in the Russian capital’s Friendship Park, the first Manas monument on foreign soil. As dignitaries pulled a ceremonial orange veil from the monument, the horseman that emerged featured grotesquely short legs. The steep price tag of the statue prompted wags to wonder whether the poor Central Asian nation was really in a position to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a bowlegged horseman abroad.

At the unveiling of the monument, the new Kyrgyz president stunned his compatriots further by announcing that Manas had been an ethnic Russian, an unorthodox interpretation of Manas’s genes considering his centrality to the Kyrgyz national identity. Having mobilized to wrest Manas from China a few years earlier, the Kyrgyz now watched their new leader voluntarily hand him over to Russia.”

“They wandered into their new Central Asian homeland sometime in the ninth century from the banks of the Yenisei River in southern Siberia. At the time, Central Asia was a chaotic agglomeration of rival Turkic, Mongol, and Persian tribes, shifting alliances, and campaigns of territorial expansion. In their new environment, the Kyrgyz didn’t hesitate to make their presence known. They briefly conquered and laid waste to a nearby Uighur kingdom, but eventually fell under the sway of the rising Mongol empire that blazed its way through much of Eurasia.”

“The conquest of Central Asia coincided in time with a momentous social shift within Russia itself. By imperial decree of 1861, the czar abolished agricultural slavery, better known as serfdom, which had been the bedrock of Russia’s economy for centuries. Some of the newly freed serfs headed to Central Asia in search of a new life and new land.

In Bishkek one day, I met an elderly Russian man whose greatgrandparents had been Russian serfs. Free but landless, his ancestors and their neighbors received parcels of land on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. They moved from the Russian heartland to the outer edge of the empire, building a new village that resembled the old one down to the street names. Such resettlement created tensions with the Kyrgyz, who saw their historical pastureland being transformed into farmland for Russian peasants. Unlike the British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires, which sought colonies across continents and oceans, the Russian empire expanded contiguously overland, like an ink stain on blotting paper.

In his waning years on the throne, the Russian czar scrambled for warm bodies to dispatch to the trenches.”

“In the late 1920s, the Soviets broke up what was once the single czarist province of Turkestan into five ethnic republics, including Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The divisions saddled the region with an erratic set of borders that sliced up ethnic groups, particularly in the Ferghana Valley, and sowed the seeds of future ethnic unrest.

Why did Moscow break up Turkestan? One theory is that the Soviets feared the rise of a unified pan-Turkic state, an idea championed by some Central Asian intellectuals at the time. Following the divide-and-conquer principle, Moscow decided it would be much easier to deal with five small ethnic republics than with a single Turkic one.”

“In the early 1990s, a vicious power struggle in the newly independent Tajikistan pitted the fledgling government against a coalition of Islamist and nationalist groups. Nearly fifty thousand people were killed, and many more displaced. The war drew in neighboring states too. The Taliban-led Afghanistan supported the opposition, while Uzbekistan — fearful of the Islamist stirrings within its own borders — backed the government. By the late 1990s, a tenuous ceasefire had been reached in Tajikistan. But the hardcore Islamist factions never bought into the deal and continued to nurture dreams of a regional holy war as they roamed the mountains in the tri-state no-man’s-land.”

“The government was lurching from crisis to crisis. In 2002, President Akayev ceded a piece of Kyrgyz territory to China, settling an old territorial dispute from the Soviet days. The sliver of uninhabited land in question lies in the remote mountains on Kyrgyzstan’s eastern border. Its transfer to Beijing was just a matter of time, but the deal rekindled historical fears of China gradually swallowing up its tiny neighbor — the same fears that drove Manas to urge his compatriots to fight back. Some opposition activists seized on the apparent secrecy in which the transfer was negotiated and criticized the already vulnerable and out-of-touch president.

A member of Parliament named Azimbek Beknazarov introduced a motion to impeach him. The government overreacted and arrested the maverick deputy, dusting off an old case dating back to his time as a police investigator.”

“He was thrown into a basement and told he would be jailed unless he toned down his criticism of the regime. Thousands of his supporters took to the streets, blocking the country’s main highway and demanding his release. Though the matter began with the Chinese land transfer, it quickly outgrew its original cause and was now focused on the heavy-handed nature of the regime itself. The Aksy district where the riots took place was among the poorest in the country, and the poverty helped stir antigovernment passions. Faced with the increasingly vocal protesters, some of whom were demanding Akayev’s resignation, the police panicked and opened fire, killing five people. The bloodshed tarnished the regime even further and energized the scattered opposition.

The authorities relented and released Beknazarov from detention. The dispute elevated him from an obscure regional populist to a national figure with a sizable following.”

“When Kyrgyzstan became independent, authorities scrubbed the militant Communist — and a non-Kyrgyz to boot — from the capital’s name, and it reverted to Bishkek again. The scrubbing wasn’t entirely complete: half of Frunze survives as FRU, Bishkek’s international airport code.”

“Ironically, Akayev was now falling prey to the very freedoms he had allowed in Kyrgyzstan in the 1990s. The seeds of the civil society planted in those Switzerland-of-the-East days had taken root and emboldened the opposition. Other post-Soviet regimes, such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Belarus, drove antiregime activists into a deep underground or out of the country, or simply put them in jail. They also curtailed the operations of NGOs, foreign and domestic, and kicked many of them out of the country. But Kyrgyzstan, by one estimate, was home to some five thousand NGOs promoting everything from rural health care to civic institutions.”

“Ahead of Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary elections, Baisalov set up ten regional offices and sixty cells across the country involved in promoting local self-rule, election monitoring, and other grassroots activism that would prove crucial in spotting election fraud and triggering the revolution.

A key candidate in those elections was Roza Otunbayeva, a petite, friendly woman with a helmetlike haircut and a quiet tenacity that allowed her to achieve big things in the Soviet Union, and even bigger things in independent Kyrgyzstan. One of eight siblings, Otunbayeva went to college in Moscow, where she studied German philosophy. It was the hoary era of stagnation and economic decay presided over by the buffoonish, unibrowed Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Armed with a philosophy degree, Otunbayeva returned home to teach dialectic materialism at Kyrgyzstan’s main university. That was a particularly obtuse branch of Marxism that became a required and hated subject for generations of Soviet students.

Otunbayeva didn’t linger too long in the dead-end labyrinth of Marxist thought. She escaped to climb the ladder of the Communist Party hierarchy, rising to the post of deputy prime minister of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. She then held a string of high-profile jobs at the Soviet Foreign Affairs Ministry, serving as Moscow’s envoy to the UN cultural arm in Paris and becoming the first woman to enter the rarefied top rung of Moscow’s foreign-policy establishment. In independent Kyrgyzstan, Otunbayeva’s star shot even higher. She was her country’s first ambassador to Washington and later a foreign minister.

In 2003, she worked in Georgia as second-in-command of a UN peacekeeping mission in a local separatist conflict. She was there to witness Georgia’s Revolution of the Roses, which deposed the country’s longtime president, Eduard Shevarnadze.”

“Otunbayeva had returned from Georgia a few months earlier, throwing herself into opposition politics with the same focus and discipline that had worked so well for her in her government career. Scenes from the Georgian revolution were still fresh in her mind. “Nothing terrible happened there; not a single window was broken, blood wasn’t spilled,” she told me. “People overcame their fear and said ‘enough.’”

Otunbayeva registered as a Parliament candidate in her old Bishkek university district. But that same day, five hours later, election authorities revoked her registration, citing a hastily issued ruling that seemed tailormade to trip up her candidacy. Having lived abroad for so long, Otunbayeva didn’t meet the residency requirements to run for public office never mind that her stint overseas was a government assignment.”

“Having been stricken from the ballot, Otunbayeva, another former ambassador, was battling the Akayev system on the streets. She and her fellow protesters chose yellow as their symbolic color and pitched a tent downtown, emulating their Ukrainian counterparts, who had earlier flooded Kiev’s main square with tents and orange banners. Otunbayeva’s political party set up a youth movement. Similar groups in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Serbia were instrumental in boosting support for the opposition among the young and the hip, lashing their generally contrarian mood to a political goal. As one of its first tasks, the Kyrgyz youth group, called Kel-Kel, or “Come Join Us,” set out on an important mission: buying forty pounds of lemons to distribute to passersby.”

“The parliamentary elections took place amid massive fraud. Establishment candidates, like the president’s children, all made it into Parliament, but many opposition candidates did not. The protest machinery constructed over the previous few years roared into action across the country. Baisalov’s election monitors rang alarm bells about fraud; Otunbayeva’s lemon youth army organized rallies in Bishkek. And influential southern populists, like Beknazarov, the bulldozer of the revolution, worked the crowds in their home provinces. The existence of Mike Stone’s printing press allowed the opposition papers to cover it all in scathing detail that whipped up the protesters’ passions even further. The president hailed from northern Kyrgyzstan, a more urban, more developed part of the country clustered around the capital. In the Soviet days, Moscow also favored the northern elites because they were better educated and, in effect, were more like the Russians themselves because of their long exposure to Russian colonization, which was more visible in the north.

In building a top-heavy system that enriched a small circle of allies, President Akayev cut off from power and money influential southern elites who now turned on him. The south of Kyrgyzstan was poorer, more rural, and more clannish, and it birthed a generation of kingpins who felt it was their turn to run the country. It’s no coincidence that the uprising began in the south, where protesters seized government buildings and chased out local authorities.

On what would be the final day of President Akayev’s fifteen years in office, crowds of protesters began gathering early in the morning on the edge of Bishkek, right in front of a psychiatric and substance-abuse clinic. Many arrived in buses from the south of the country, where uprisings had already toppled local authorities.”

“A few bushy fir trees grow behind the fence. As they approached the White House, the protesters first faced helmeted riot police holding shields. After the rock barrage, the cops dispersed, leaving behind some bloodstains on the pavement. The blood belonged to the cops and probably to some protesters too who, like me, got caught in the cross fire. Some scuffles took place but no one got killed. I saw a few revolutionaries parading around with plastic shields and helmets they’d taken from the police. With the cops scattering away, the protesters crashed through the cast-iron fence and faced the last line of defense: an army unit charged with protecting the White House.

““You need to resign, right now!” a woman protester told the commanding officer, and then turned around to her fellow protesters and said, “This man refuses to order the army to withdraw, he says he swore an oath.”

“Resign, resign!” Others picked up the refrain.

The officer, General Abdigul Chotbayev, was in a tough spot. Behind him, his soldiers formed a human shield around the White House. They waited for some sort of guidance from their commander. In front of him were the irate protesters telling him to take a walk. The commander stalled for time.

“You need to calm down, my dear sister,” General Chotbayev told the woman protester. Then he moved away from the crowd and pondered his choices some more. Maybe he got in touch with his superiors, or maybe he made his own decision, but within minutes the soldiers formed a neat line and trotted behind the White House, never to be seen again.

All that separated the protesters from the palace now were a dry fountain bed and a few feet of pavement strewn with debris, abandoned riot shields, and cobblestones. The revolutionaries began their final approach with yet more stone throwing, now aimed at the White House windows. Shattered glass rained down on the jubilant protesters, and a few diehards pried open an entrance door and climbed inside. Soon enough, their grinning faces poked through the broken windows on the other side. The crowd cheered. More protesters entered the White House through the breach and began rifling through offices and throwing things out of windows. A round military hat flew out of one window like a Frisbee. It painted an arc through the air, landed on its rim, and rolled into the fountain. A coffee table flew out next, crashing with a loud thud that snapped its wooden legs. Computer monitors followed. A couple of teenagers next to me were playing soccer with a white riot-police helmet.”

“A mixture of emotions propelled the people toward the White House: growing poverty, anger with a government that seemed increasingly disconnected from its own people, plain curiosity, the adrenaline of a revolution, and, in some cases, a desire to steal something useful. As I entered the White House, a man ran down the stairs hugging a computer monitor. “It’s a gift for my brother,” he said.”

“The revolution here was so fast and surreal that a man who woke up on a prison bunk became the nation’s security czar by the time he went to bed. Shortly after protesters took over the presidential palace, Felix Kulov, a former police chief and mayor of Bishkek, was sprung from jail and found himself cruising the citv’s mad streets in a white sport-utility vehicle, appealing to crazed crowds to stop the looting.”

“A Kulov aide told me his boss wished to return to prison after he was done mopping up the revolutionary mess, so that he could wait for an acquittal behind bars. But Kulov, of course, never went back to jail. Instead, he became prime minister.”

“Cholpon Bayekova was a petite chairwoman of Kyrgyzstan’s constitutional court. Chief justice since the early 1990s, Bayekova became popular among opposition activists because of a key ruling. The Akayev administration was harassing protesters by requiring them to seek advance permission for rallies, and Bayekova struck down that requirement as unconstitutional. Her ruling was prompted in part by the government’s moves to disperse demonstrations calling for Kulov’s release from prison. After the revolution, she became a legal advisor to the interim leaders, helping them shoehorn the patently unconstitutional regime change into some semblance of legality. “I could not imagine this scenario even in my wildest dreams,” she told me.”

Heroin

“Initially, the West settled on doing nothing at all in the flawed belief that one could fight insurgents without fighting drugs. Later, the West worked from the usual counter-narcotics menu, which includes eradicating crops, urging farmers to grow innocuous things like wheat instead, and hitting drug traffickers. Though nominally committed to fighting drugs, the Afghan government and police are riddled with corruption and have extensive links to the drug trade. The results are grim: in 2001, Afghan farmers planted eight thousand hectares with poppy. Nearly a decade later, the poppy-growing area swelled more than fifteenfold. Occasional year-to-year decreases in cultivation are as likely to be attributed to plant bugs and inclement weather as they are to any concerted counter-narcotics strategy.”

“Poppy is a versatile plant prized in this isolated and destitute part of Afghanistan for its medicinal and other qualities. In a strict Islamic society where alcohol remains a rarity, opium provides an easy substitute. Though it’s just as haram, or forbidden by religious law, to get high as it is to get drunk, for those willing to skirt the injunction opium is far easier to obtain than liquor. On any given evening you can see huddles of men squatting on a riverbank here with clouds of smoke hovering over their heads. The morphine content means it’s also a good though dangerously addictive painkiller. It wasn’t long ago that people here gave it to sick children: an adult would light an opium bowl, inhale, and then puff the smoke in the face of a child.”

“The explosion of heroin production in Afghanistan caught the weak government of this fractured nation completely unprepared. “We never imagined there would be heroin in Tajikistan,” General Rustam Nazarov, who headed the country’s Drug Control Agency, told me. “We weren’t ready.” The number of Tajik drug addicts seeking treatment has increased eightfold in ten years, according to government statistics. Intravenous drug use has touched off a serious AIDS problem. When I visited, Tajikistan had just negotiated its first-ever order of antiretroviral drugs. In a recent report, a UN agency concluded that “in the past ten years, Central Asia has experienced the highest increase in prevalence of drug abuse worldwide.””

Uzbekistan

“A veteran Soviet functionary, Karimov grew up in an orphanage in Samarkand. After an engineering stint at an aviation plant, he climbed the pole of the Communist party heirarchy and was in a perfect position to grab the reins of independent Uzbekistan.”

“Years of inflation kept adding zeros to the Uzbek currency, but the government never bothered to redenominate the som. So even small purchases, like cigarettes or bread, required multiple bills. Anything bigger required wads of soms held together by thin rubber bands. The Uzbeks are great experts at carrying, counting, and hiding voluminous stacks of bills. Fingers twirling, lips moving silently, they count their cash with robotic speed and dexterity, impervious to distraction.”

“In the late nineteenth century, the Russians conquered much of Central Asia. They soon faced revolts in several towns including Andijan, where two dozen Russian soldiers were killed by rebels, prompting a violent Russian crackdown. Later, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin — known for resettling entire peoples to suppress dissent and national consciousness — sliced up the Ferghana Valley in a fit of creative mapmaking, dividing clans and ethnic groups among three newly created Soviet republics: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.”

“Trouble in Andijan had started a few months earlier when the government rounded up twenty-three prominent local businessmen and charged them with an Islamist conspiracy. In the 1990s, after Uzbekistan emerged as an independent state from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the country began to reconnect with its Muslim faith, long suppressed by the Communists. Islamist diehards also popped up on the scene and, inspired by the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan, agitated for the creation of an Islamic state in Uzbekistan. The country’s secular dictator took no chances and cracked down. Over the years, his targets grew ever more esoteric, encompassing anything that carried a faint whiff of organized religion.

The twenty-three Andijan entrepreneurs never hid their Muslim faith, but what set them apart was their business acumen. Glossy brochures for their network of companies featured shoes, furniture, suits, candy, bread, and even shovels and hinges. The businessmen were respected in the city because they provided jobs and paid decent wages. Their companies spawned subcontractors, suppliers, and dealers, further deepening their economic power. “They were good businessmen, they never cheated anyone, they did charity work, they paid their taxes,” said Muzafar Itzhakov, an Andijan human-rights activist. “They gave employment to thousands of people here, and in our economic crisis not everyone can do this.”

The Andijan 23 were accused of belonging to an obsure and heretofore unknown Islamist group inspired by a treatise called Path to Faith, which prosecutors said showed their violent intentions.”

“While the businessmen awaited trial, their relatives, friends, and supporters held vigils in front of the courthouse. And at some point desperation began to set in. Their businesses crumbled and became worthless. The extremism charges could easily earn them fifteen years in jail, and torture is a well-documented feature of Uzbek jails. There was little doubt that the businessmen would be found guilty — Uzbek courts generally do not acquit people. So a plan was hatched to free them by force.

The merchants were held in a high-security prison perched behind an incongruously pink wall on the edge of Andijan. On May 12, a group of men broke into a garrison building in town, captured weapons, and moved swiftly toward the prison. Some of the attackers were relatives and friends of the jailed businessmen. You could look at it as Uzbekistan’s own version of France’s Bastille.”

“The gunmen took a few local officials hostage and moved toward Babur Square for an impromptu rally. With the prison break complete, the events of the day entered a crucial second phase. Thousands of local residents who had nothing to do with the inmates or the gunmen flocked to the central square. An old loudspeaker went around the crowd, and people took turns shouting into it. They talked about the dismal economy, about oppressive government policies, about everything, it seems, except Islamism.”

“Rumors rippled through the crowd that high-ranking Uzbek officials, perhaps even the president himself, were on their way to address the rally and somehow make things better. Such was the enduring appeal of the myth of the good czar. Through centuries of misrule and repression, people in the Russian and then the Soviet empire held out hope that all the abuse was orchestrated by midlevel bureaucrats while the man at the top was kept in the dark. If only you could bypass the evil entourage and tell the czar directly what horrible injustices were being visited upon his subjects, he would open his eyes in shock, punish the abusers, and make things right. You read accounts of victims of Stalin’s purges dragged into dungeons and forced by their interrogators to sign wholly fabricated admissions of guilt before getting shot like dogs, and the victims, incredulous to the last, say things like, “Does Comrade Stalin know about this?” or “It’s all a mistake, you must tell Comrade Stalin.” The myth of the good czar is a coping mechanism, a refusal to believe that the political system is really as rotten from the top as it seems. In Andijan that day, as protesters were expecting the Uzbek president to alight on the square and talk to them, security forces quietly cut off all retreats and prepared to turn the square into a kill zone.”

“Military vehicles converged on the place, and their occupants began taking potshots at the crowd of protesters. “A military vehicle rolled in from the direction of the theater [a few blocks away], fired off a few random rounds, and drove away,” Muhtarov re-called. “Then it rolled back in and did the same thing.” As the intensity of the shooting increased, people around him started dropping dead. Many had come to the square out of sheer curiosity. “All the kids wanted to see what was happening, you know how kids are,” a relative of a seventeen-year-old boy named Sardarbek Hasanov told me. The teenager died of a bullet wound to the head.

Muhtarov and other men encircled the women in the crowd within a human shield. Huddling in that formation, all unarmed, they moved down one of the main streets leading from the square. Heavy rain was falling on Andijan. Muhtarov’s huddle reached the Cholpon movie theater, in front of which sat several armored personnel carriers. Their machine guns rattled with gunfire.”

“Rahima recounted the search for her son. Early on Saturday morning, after a sleepless night, she ventured into town, which by then really did look like a gory set of a slasher movie. “There were all these bodies piled up on the side of the road. I saw more than a hundred in one spot, covered with sheets. I pulled the sheet from every single one to try to find my child.” Mamajonova paused to collect herself. “Some bodies had guts, brains spilling out. There was a corpse clutching a loaf of bread, and another lying on top of a bicycle.” But Yogdorbek wasn’t among them. Rahima and her older son Kadyrjon visited the local hospital — no Yogdorbek there either — and then went to the town’s main morgue. Soldiers were guarding the entrance, and they wouldn’t let Rahima in. She cried. So Kadyrjon went inside instead. There were so many bodies in there that workers had to stack the overflow in the courtyard. Kadyrjon estimated the number at about seven hundred. He eventually found his younger brother — he had five bullet holes in his body. The friend who had accompanied Yogdorbek on the meat-buying errand was dead too.”

“Back in the Soviet days, the Kyrgyz and Uzbek parts of Kara Suu were a single town with a river running through it. With independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan were left with an absurdly jagged border, a legacy of Stalin’s artificial divisions. In 2001, the countries punished each other’s citizens with visa requirements. Then, Uzbek authorities decided to tear asunder the two parts of Kara Suu in a more physical away. They destroyed the Kara Suu bridge and closed the border crossing. That decision deprived the residents on the Uzbek side of an easy way to see relatives in Kyrgyzstan and of a chance to earn money at a big outdoor bazaar in Kyrgyz Kara Suu. Many used to go there to buy goods from clothes to flour and then resell them back in Uzbekistan, where customs duties made similar merchandise far more expensive. Used to adversity, the Uzbeks found creative ways of dealing with the problem of the destroyed bridge. They strung thick ropes across the river and then used pulleys and baskets to haul cisterns of fuel and clothes, and sometimes themselves.

About twenty-four hours after the Andijan massacre, Kara Suu erupted in its own uprising. It was as if the antigovernment bug was contagious. More than a thousand people gathered on the main square to demand the reopening of the bridge. The crowd then burned a local police precinct and several other government buildings. Police and border guards fled. There were no reported casualties.

Having evicted the government, Kara Suu residents got down to business. As I stood on the Kyrgyz side of the river, I saw workmen welding thick metal sheets onto the skeleton of the old bridge. Once there were enough sheets to form an unbroken path across the river, people began to cross the bridge, first cautiously, as if expecting to be yelled at to stop, then more confidently. In the space of one hour, four boys wearing skullcaps crossed the bridge back and forth at least five times, carting heavy sacks of flour to the Uzbek side. “Now, these people have a chance to earn money, to feed their families,” said Bakyt, a Kyrgyz border guard watching over the pedestrian traffic. There were no guards on the Uzbek side, so I walked back into Uzbekistan.”

The New Regime

“Initially seen as Kyrgyzstan’s democratic savior, the new president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, instead built a regime that quickly matched and then surpassed the worst of its predecessor’s excesses.”

“As was common back then for most Soviet students, Sadyrkulov and his classmates spent a few weeks each year helping farmers collect the harvest.”

“With the full resources of the state at its disposal, the party swept the elections, Opposition groups were saddled with new requirements that set bizarre regional vote minimums on top of an overall national threshold a party needed to clear to be allowed into Parliament. “All the Parliament seats were being divided up and given out in a single place — in Medet’s office,” says Vadim Nochevkin, a journalist who knew him well.

The breathtaking fraud and insolence of it all pushed the opposition into the streets in the biggest antigovernment protests since the 2005 revolution.”

“Protesters pitched traditional Kyrgyz yurts on Bishkek’s central square. The authorities sent in the police to crush the yurts and evict the protesters. A yurt is more than just a tent. It’s a Kyrgyz national symbol that evokes the nomadic roots of the Kyrgyz tribes, a romanticized idea of itinerant horsemen still relevant for the Kyrgyz national identity today. The yurt’s crisscrossed support beams appear on Kyrgyzstan’s national flag.

So tearing down a yurt is both a bad omen and bad manners, and when the cops destroyed their yurts, protesters were furious.”

“Roza Otunbayeva, a key leader of the Tulip uprising, became foreign minister in the Bakiyev administration. Within months of assuming her new post, she began fielding strange requests from senior government officials. On a few occasions, President Bakiyev asked her to hire “several beautiful young women” so they could work in Kyrgyzstan’s embassies abroad, a request whose provenance and urgency Otunbayeva never fully understood. Another senior official lobbied her to appoint his son-in-law ambassador to China. Otunbayeva also suspected corruption in the new multi-million-dollar contract to print new Kyrgyz passports. She eventually resigned and became a dogged presence in the halls of the Kyrgyz Parliament. She often arrived at parliamentary debates armed with a loudspeaker so that she could be heard in case authorities cut off her microphone, which sometimes happened.”

“In the 1990s, as private enterprise began to blossom across the former Soviet Union, business disputes quickly acquired a dark side. Say, you opened a popular restaurant in a choice location in downtown Moscow, and others took note of your lucrative business and the valuable real estate behind it. But you weren’t interested in selling. One day, you show up at the restaurant to find that the locks have been changed. Someone you’ve never seen before tells you that you no longer own the place. You get upset and think it’s all a prank or a mistake, and turn to the police and the courts, only to learn that the restaurant has indeed been sold, multiple times, and is now owned by a firm registered in Cyprus. There are court decisions and share-transfer records to back this up. You appear to have signed some of them. You can sue the new owners, but they will protest in court that they acquired the restaurant fair and square, not from you, but from another company you’ve never heard of. Good luck untangling what happened and getting your business back. Corporate raids like this take different shapes and colors, but what they all have in common is the raiders’ ability to enlist the help of corrupt judges, cops, or taxmen to steal your business. And it has happened to companies far bigger than the hypothetical Moscow restaurant.”

The Murders

“To solve the mystery, Turganbayev and his small team of criminal investigators first needed to find the corpse that had supplied the contents of the New Year’s gift. They scoured Bishkek’s morgues and hospitals looking for a body with missing fingers and ears. They scrutinized police reports and death certificates, and finally stumbled upon a body that seemed to match the de-scription. On January 3, in the foothills outside the city, police had found a male corpse missing both ears and three fingers on his left hand. Strangely, authorities didn’t investigate foul play, on the assumption that the disfigurement had likely been inflicted by wild foxes. “Get over there quickly!” Turganbayev urged his underlings. They photographed the unidentified corpse and then fanned out across Bishkek’s homeless shelters and others spots where the homeless were known to congregate in the winter to keep warm.

Shown the picture, the indigents shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads until one vagrant finally recognized the dead man. “That’s Tolik the Singer,” he exclaimed to investigators. Tolik played the accordion well and liked to sing,

“So where is he now?” one investigator asked.

“Oh, he died at the end of December, right over there in the lobby of that apartment block,” the homeless man said, pointing his finger in that direction. Investigators found the dead man’s sister, who told them Tolik had become a vagabond shortly after their parents passed away. Alone and cold one night, he died.

Next, Turganbayev’s gumshoes found the local beat cop who had responded to the call about Tolik’s death. The young cop said that just as he arrived on the scene he saw two other, more senior policemen from another precinct loading the dead Tolik into their car.

“Hey, where are you taking him?” the beat cop asked them.

“None of your business, forget about it,” one of them said. Then the pair drove off with the body.

By analyzing transcripts of police dispatch records and interviewing witnesses, Turganbayev’s investigators eventually identified both of those policemen and established that they’d received an order from a higher-up to find a suitable corpse.

“Sir, are you joking?” one of those cops, Tynychbek Mamatov, asked his commanding officer when he gave him the bizarre order, according to his later testimony in court. But Mamatov and a colleague did as they were told.

Thinking no one would miss a dead bum, they took Tolik’s body and drove it out to a deserted field. Their commanding officer and three unidentified men trailed them in another car with tinted windows.

“Drop the body here and leave,” the commanding officer snapped at the junior cops.”

They were happy to oblige. Next, the men from the officer’s car approached Tolik’s body and cut off fingers and ears.

As Turganbayev pieced together the gory puzzle and moved up the police hierarchy, his team, like overzealous Internal Affairs sleuths everywhere, faced stonewalling and intimidation. From interviews, documents, and tips, Turganbayev began to form a suspicion that Janysh Bakiyev himself may have commissioned the New Year’s gift to Sadyrkulov as a way to warn the ambitious chief of staff to know his place in the pecking order.”

“There were indications that Sadyrkulov had already concluded that Janysh was behind the gift and that he confronted the president with the gruesome tale involving his powerful younger brother. And now Sadyrkulov too wanted the matter closed.”

“To anyone with a brain, the traffic-accident theory made no sense from the start. The spot where the Audi hit the Lexus is at the bottom of a U-shaped curve in the road. The Lexus was parked on the shoulder at the time of the crash. So to hit it, the Audi would have needed to round the curve slowly and carefully or else it would have simply crashed into the safety parapet at the lip of the cliff or rolled off the mountain.”

“In the meantime, the country’s opposition leaders, weakened and demoralized by Sadyrkulov’s death, kept looking for a way to shed some light on the murky story. Having been in and out of government and business for years, these opposition figures had their own connections within the Kyrgyz political establishment and law enforcement, and were collecting scraps of information and rumor about Sadyrkulov’s death. All their digging and guessing found an unusual outlet: a potboiler political novella about the final days of a character modeled on Sadyrkulov. The book’s goal was to embarrass the regime and provide the public with a competing storyline to all the traffic-accident drivel offered by the government. And so what if it was fiction.

The author, writing under a penname, was Emil Kaptagayev, a physicist and mathematician long active in the country’s political circles. In writing the novella, Kaptagayev wasn’t pursuing a secret literary ambition. Billing the work as fiction was the only way to string together bits and pieces of information, rumor, educated guesswork, and imagined scenes into a coherent narrative, scathing and prescient in its descriptions of the regime. Called The Bloody Path, the book is peopled by a cast of instantly recognizable characters whose names are only a few letters or transliterations away from their real-life counterparts. Janysh Bakiyev, the president’s fearsome brother, is Jaken; Medet Sadyrkulov is Meder. In the novella’s most chilling pages, Jaken has Meder kidnapped and thrown into a basement. There, Jaken sticks needles under Meder’s fingernails, shoots him in the knee, scalds him with a hot iron, cuts off an ear, and finally tells his underlings to kill him and make it look like a traffic accident.

Shortly after the novella was serialized in a local newspaper, masked men snatched the author on the street and took him to a wheat field outside the city. There they beat him for a few hours, checked his laptop and phone, and finally left him slumped on the ground. “You know what this is for,” one of his kidnappers told him. Surprised to be alive, Kaptagayev went into hiding,

As months dragged on, Erik Arsaliyev, the owner of the Lexus, grew despondent and grumbled publicly about what he thought was a hushed-up assassination of his friend and mentor. Arsaliyev was walking along the edge of a Bishkek park one day when a car drew up alongside him. Someone stepped out to tell Arsaliyev to shut up. “Otherwise, you’ll repeat your friend’s fate. It was your car that burned, but who knows, maybe the next time it will be your turn to burn. And when you burn, you won’t burn alone.” With that, the messenger hopped back into the car and sped off, leaving Arsaliyev dazed on the sidewalk. He had a big family. The entrepreneur once had a full head of hair, but in the weeks after the encounter it fell out in thick strands. Scared and depressed, he left town.”

“He penned an unflattering profile of Maxim, headlined “Max Bakiyev as a Tough Macho of Kyrgyz Politics.”

In private correspondence with Tekebayev, Pavlyuk wasn’t shy about his plans. “The overriding goal I’ve set for myself is working toward POLITICAL VICTORY, toward your ascent to power,” Pavlyuk wrote to Tekebayev in a pitch for a media project. (The capital letters are his, not mine.) The opposition leader liked what he heard and put Pavlyuk on a retainer. As is common for anyone who ever freelanced, the journalist nagged his employer for money “Please send my salary today, in full, if you can,” Pavlyuk e-mailed Tekebayev.”

“During the fall of 2009, Elena recalled, Pavlyuk appeared gloomy and brooding, in a state of constant pressure that seemed to age him rapidly. Then one day, a ray of sunshine entered his life. It concerned that media project for which he had trouble finding money. Suddenly, an intriguing e-mail materialized in his inbox from an outfit with a strangely long name: the Foundation for the Development of International Relations between the Countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the European Community. The e-mail said the foundation’s board of directors was planning to award a $105,000 grant “aimed at the support of independent print publications in Kyrgyzstan.” The email’s author, a woman named Marina, informed Pavlyuk that his colleagues had nominated him as a candidate for the grant.

“When he came home he was so happy, he said, ‘Finally . .’ Kolosova told me. He dashed off a response thanking Marina for the “hopeful letter.” Yet the initial joy was quickly tinged with suspicions. Pavlyuk and his girlfriend couldn’t find any trace of this foundation on the Internet. “We scoured so many websites,” she recalled. Pavlyuk wrote back to the mysterious Marina. “Could you please tell me what your foundation’s website is, its phone numbers, addresses? I’d like to learn a bit more about the foundation’s work, about the project, etc.” Instead, Marina wrote back to say that the pool of candidates for the grant was shrinking, from the initial two hundred to about three or five people. Pavlyuk, she told him, was still in the running. He was invited for an in-person interview in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where the final decision would be made.

The seasoned journalist kept trying to pin down Marina and her associates on details about the foundation. “Dear Marina, yesterday I got a phone call from a young man who introduced himself as Abay, and we discussed my possible trip on December 16,” Pavlyuk wrote. He asked the caller about the foundation’s mission and history. “But the line suddenly went dead so he didn’t give me any information about the location of the office, the phone number, etc. And I asked you, if you recall, to give me the foundation’s website. For now, I view our correspondence (my apologies) as a friendly practical joke.” Here Pavlyuk used a Russian expression for a wild-goose chase. “Where I am supposed to go – to look for an old man in the village?”

Kolosova recalled that Pavlyuk was told to just come to Almaty, where he would learn everything he needed to know about the foundation. A room in his name had already been booked at the Hotel Kazakhstan, an Almaty high-rise. “This is strange – nobody knows anything about this foundation, I wonder if I might be getting myself into a scam,” Pavlyuk wondered. He called the Almaty hotel and discovered that there was a fully paid reservation in his name for one night. Desperate for money, he suspended disbelief one more time. “Some of our doubts were dispelled, and he decided to go,” Kolosova said. Early in the morning on December 16, he kissed her good-bye and took a cab to Almaty. He checked into the Hotel Kazakhstan, where a prepaid reservation was indeed awaiting him, courtesy of his benefactors at the mysterious foundation. Later that day, a young man picked him up in the lobby, and they drove off in the man’s car, probably for the long-promised final interview about the $105,000 grant.

The next day, Kolosova got a phone call telling her that a man resembling Pavlyuk had fallen out of a sixth-floor window of a residential building in Almaty, a dreary Soviet-era apartment block. The man landed on the concrete canopy over the entrance, his legs and arms bound with tape. In the rental apartment, police found his jacket, laptop bag, and a roll of duct tape. Kolosova traveled to Almaty, hoping it was all some awful mistake, that the victim wasn’t Pavlyuk. But it was him – he was in a deep coma. He clung to life for five days, then died without regaining consciousness.”

Conclusion

“The reign of President Bakiyev ended the same way it began, with a revolution and an exile. He fled, first to a large ceremonial tent in his home village in southern Kyrgyzstan, and then out of the country. Facing an irate populace, his brothers, sons, and cronies ran for the exits too, not all of them successfully. Bakiyev eventually settled in Belarus, at the personal invitation of the local dictator. The only two presidents Kyrgyzstan had known in its twenty years of independence ended up as outcasts and fugitives: one in Moscow teaching physics, the other in Minsk living in a forced retirement. Bakiyev, the hopeful product of the optimistically named Tulip Revolution, mutated into a villain so quickly that his allies didn’t know what hit them. “We got tricked like little kids,” Roza Otunbayeva, the perennial opposition leader who helped bring Bakiyev to power, told me shortly after she helped overthrow him. “He made all the right speeches back then. During his five-year reign, nepotism and graft surpassed the excesses of the previous regime, while government opponents began to suffer suspicious deaths.”

“Kyrgyzstan was already convulsed by a chaotic protest movement. One of the sparks that set it ablaze was the government decision to hike tariffs for electricity, gas, and water. In places like Naryn, a Kyrgyz town where winter temperatures routinely drop to minus forty, higher tariffs meant people had to choose whether to buy bread or heat. All of this was happening against the backdrop of a regime that seemed aloof and corrupt. Not long before the revolution, the government announced plans to sell a major state-owned electricity utility to a well-connected firm for a song.”

“Their livelihood isn’t tied to a piece of ground, and by extension to the ruler of the domain. Historically speaking, nomads are much freer to speak up against their rulers than sedentary peasants, who have too much to lose.

On April 6, crowds swiftly captured the building of the Talas provincial administration. (Kyrgyz protesters are adept at this tactic, honed during the Tulip Revolution.) When the interior minister showed up to take charge of the situation, he too was captured and beaten to a bloody pulp. In Bishkek, the Bakiyev government panicked and started snatching opposition leaders ahead of yet another rally planned for April 7 in downtown Bishkek.”

“Much of the death was delivered from afar, by snipers picking off their victims from the safety of the White House roof.”

“Eighty-five people were killed during the revolution, most of them unarmed civilians.”

“On the evening of April 7, President Bakiyev and his entourage dashed from the White House to the Manas airport and boarded his official airplane. That night, protesters broke through the White House defenses and, in a spasm of righteous fury, trashed the building and many shops downtown. Wags would later refer to it as the Day of the Looter.”

“All this intrigue was aimed at the same woman who had appeared at so many other critical junctures of Kyrgyzstan’s history: Roza Otunbayeva, former diplomat and perennial opposition leader. She was now the interim president.”

“The most famous woman in the country’s history is Kurmajan Datka, who died in 1907. She bucked tradition by refusing an arranged marriage and wed an ambitious local chieftain instead. The man ruled over the Kyrgyz tribes within the Khokand Khanate. After Kurmajan’s husband was killed in a palace coup, she punished the plotters and assumed his mantle as the ruler of the Kyrgyz. She was awarded the high military rank of Datka (which loosely translates as “general”). She fought the Russian encroachments, but eventually pledged allegiance to Saint Petersburg. Then, two of her sons and two grandsons were accused of running a smuggling operation and killing customs officers. Despite her entreaties, the Russians publicly hanged one son and sentenced the rest of the accused to hard labor in Siberia. Crushed, Kurmajan gave away her cattle and settled into a solitary life in her home village. There are statues to Kurmajan Datka in Kyrgyzstan, and her face decorates the 50-som banknote. In the sheer number of monuments, museums, and place-names dedicated to her around the country, Kurmanjan is second only to Manas.”

“Each year, more than a tenth of Kyrgyzstan’s national income comes from scattered particles of gold buried under a glacier, high up on a mountain plateau close to the Chinese border.”

“The Turks of Central Asia have a bitter history. They used to live in southern Georgia, near the Turkish border. In 1944, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin decreed that they be resettled to Central Asia. Stalin was paranoid about the emergence of a fifth column among some ethnicities of the Soviet Union. One way to punish them and stifle their national spirit was to toss them around in the massive Soviet salad bowl. This is how one survivor described the ordeal: “At 4:00 a.m., four soldiers came into our house and said we had one hour to pack. We were not told where we would be sent. About 120 families were loaded into one freight car. We traveled eighteen days and nights to Central Asia. Many died of typhoid. At each stop they would unload the dead.”

In the village of Mayevka, outside Bishkek, the descendants of these refugees settled on a big collective farm, alongside the Kyrgyz and the Russians.”

“Something did change in April of 2010. At the time of the revolution, the gentle terms of Osmonov’s sentence allowed him to live at home and work regular jobs while checking in with his parole officer. By some accounts, Osmonov wasn’t hurting financially. Instead of the Audi burned in the crash, he was now driving a Mercedes. But he grumbled to his wife that he’d been shortchanged on the compensation agreed upon for staging the car crash.

“They promised him money and an apartment. But they didn’t keep their promises. My husband told me he was deceived and the money went to someone else,” the wife later told investigators. Barely a week after the revolution, Osmonov was murdered. His corpse was found among the gray apartment blocks on the edge of Bishkek. There were eleven stab wounds and signs of strangulation. Someone really wanted to make sure he was dead.

The interim government reopened the criminal investigation into Sadyrkulov’s death.”

“Janysh Bakiyev arrived at the country house about ten minutes after Sadyrkulov was brought there. Surrounded by goons and security operatives, the two enemies had a talk.

“You don’t understand normal language, bitch? What is it that you want? Ask for forgiveness!” Janysh yelled, according to witnesses who later testified to the police. It appears that Sadyrkulov didn’t cower or apologize even as security operatives kept punching and kicking him. The former chief of staff had always been stubborn and proud. After a while, Janysh ordered his operatives to “finish it.””

“Now Osmonov had to take care of the final detail. He was supposed to ram the Lexus with his Audi and push it over the edge of the cliff. The burning Lexus would have rolled down a steep gravelly mountainside and hit the boulders in a shallow creek at the bottom. The corpses would have been tossed around inside the car, and it wouldn’t have mattered that Kubat’s body had been placed in the passenger seat. It would have been so much easier for investigators to call it a traffic accident with a straight face. But Osmonov failed in that final mission. He did hit the Lexus, but the Audi didn’t have enough speed to push the heavy SUV off the road. The Lexus was a fireball by then, so Osmonov didn’t have the time or the guts to try again.”

“Bazar-Korgon, a majority Uzbek town ten miles from the Uzbekistan border, found itself within Kyrgyzstan proper. The police and the local government in Bazar-Korgon are predominantly Kyrgyz, in keeping with the country’s long-standing practice of filling government jobs with members of the titular nation. A few dozen Kyrgyz cops watched over a mostly Uzbek town, and that division began to matter a lot when the clashes began.

In the complex political tableau of postrevolution Kyrgyzstan in 2010, Uzbek leaders saw a chance to right a wrong. Despite constituting about 15 percent of the national population (and nearly half in some parts of the south), the Uzbeks felt they lacked political representation and official recognition of their language. Their push for more rights coincided with the rise of Kyrgyz nationalism, the two trends feeding off each other. None of this should have led to slaughter, but these tensions had simmered, unattended, for years. The power vacuum after the 2010 revolution brought forth the provocateurs, opportunists, and criminals looking to stir things up. Within a few hot, smoke-choked, frantic days of June, at least 426 people were killed, according to the official tally. By December, 381 bodies had been identified, and of those 72 percent were Uzbek. Ever since in keeping with the universal dynamic of civil wars Kyrgyzstan has been consumed with figuring out who is the true victim of the war and who is the culprit, as if such neat divisions are ever possible.”

“The regular folks here are often Uzbek, and the cops are almost always Kyrgyz. In 2005, Askarov estimated that of some fifteen hundred police in the region, only about ten cops were Uzbeks.”

“Next up in the war’s path was Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second-largest city and a bustling hub of the south. Tensions had been brewing there for years, as the Uzbek commercial class dominating the city rubbed up against the influx of poorer rural migrants, most of them Kyrgyz. In fact, an element of class had seeped into the conflict. Many rural Kyrgyz resented the Uzbeks for their perceived wealth. It’s a deeply flawed stereotype, but one that proved very resilient.

By June of 2010, scuffles were breaking out on street comers as rival gangs settled scores and responded to slights, real and imagined. One unsubstantiated rumor, for instance, was that Uzbek thugs were raping Kyrgyz women in an Osh college dorm. All of a sudden, the city became a rigidly demarcated matrix of warring blocs.”

“Osh demographics are shifting as Uzbeks with means are leaving the city. Over dinner at California Pizzeria, a cozy joint on a dark Osh street, one Kyrgyz woman told me it was hard to find good hairdressers, a trade traditionally dominated by the Uzbeks.

During the war, the Kyrgyz had the full machinery of the state at their disposal: the police, the security services, and highly sympathetic local officials. The Uzbeks had only themselves.”

“They call Uzbekistan a police state for a reason. Jokes about the multitude of cops on the streets are legion. An Uzbek stand-up comedian captured the issue in a skit on Russian television (such an indignity would never be allowed in Uzbekistan). In the skit, people from different countries wear their national dress, and the Uzbek comedian shows up in a police uniform, dangling a baton. (A brief note on language: in Russian, the word ment is derogatory slang for a cop.) When asked by the host where he is from, the comedian answers, “Tash-Ment,” mispronouncing the name of Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent. “And this is our national dress.””

“When a Russian cellphone service provider stepped on some toes, regulators yanked its license and left millions of its Uzbek customers with dead mobile phones.”