BHHRG

The violent events in Andijan and other parts of Uzbekistan’s Ferghana Valley on 13th May, 2005, attracted worldwide attention. Unfortunately the intensity of the media coverage was not matched by impartial reporting. As in a number of cases over the last 15 years since the Romanian Revolution in 1989, rumours were reported as fact and the more grisly the allegation the more widely it was disseminated. Pundits repeated allegations of dubious origin. Opposition supporters were presented as journalists or experts rather than partisans. Whatever the faults of the government of President Karimov and its forces’ responsibility for casualties on 13th May, the widespread failure of Western media to report a violent jailbreak, the murder of prisoners by insurgents and their use of prisoners as human shields and hostages left foreigners with a one-sided impression of what happened and why it happened.
Knee-jerk anti-Americanism in the British and European media –echoed by the “liberal” US press - presented a misleading picture of the nature of the relationship between Uzbekistan and the West as well as Uzbekistan and its nearer neighbours, Russia and China. The heart of Central Asia is a region criss-crossed by oil and gas pipelines, even more lucrative heroin smuggling routes and an inter-ethnic tapestry of Balkan complexity. Uzbekistan’s future needs careful consideration. Glib demands by outsiders for regime-change and humanitarian intervention ignore recent experience from the Balkans to Iraq or neighbouring Afghanistan.
External intervention can easily make matters worse in Uzbekistan. Memories of grim events which followed the fall of previous regimes decried as the “worst in the world” such as the Shah of Iran or Mobutu in Zaire should temper media-led faith that President Karimov’s opponents must be better for Uzbekistan.