More Atrocities

A friend of mine who spent a great deal more time in Central Asia than I and knows a lot more people in the sort of public expat sector (embassy, NGOs, etc., as opposed to academics like me) has been forwarding me reports from people in the region. I haven't mentioned them in previous posts because of privacy issues, which is a reason for the following vagueness, but today he shared a message from an American who has been in a position to hear eye-witness accounts.

And they are horrifying. Which is not unexpected--when you hear about x number of dead and y number of injured, it's pretty easy to assume that some of those people are being tortured and killed in imaginatively awful ways, but press reports are pretty sterile and, I think, help contribute to the distance of the whole situation to most of us here in the US.

While the descriptions of some of mind-blowing cruelty that people are showing one another are sufficiently shocking, almost more so were the reports of Kyrgyz knowing in advance to leave Osh, telling their Uzbek neighbors they were off on holiday, etc. All of this remains rumor at this point, but I really think the worst of these events is still unknown. This message also confirmed reports that aid is not getting through to those who need it--it goes through Bishkek, where instead of making it to Uzbeks in Osh it gets siphoned off in various ways, including being sold on the black market.