BHHRG

Whether William Randolph Hearst ever telegraphed the infamous phrase, “You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war” to Frederick Remmington after his complaint in 1897 that there was no sign of war in Cuba is open to doubt. However, the widespread acceptance of this iconic statement of the power of the press baron is very revealing since it simultaneously indicates that people suspect that much of what they are told as news is “imaginary” to put it kindly and yet still such is the power of images that they impose a picture of events on us.[1] That was in the age of newspapers. Today publics in the West are commonly supposed to be in thrall to the audio-visual media but strangely enough our own electronic age no longer requires pictures to confirm words. Vivid prose and radio pictures are all that the posse of journalists and NGO activists in Andijan on that dreadful day can offer us by way of description of events. Pictures exist of before the “massacre” and of its aftermath but not of the event itself. This is a curious omission in an age of ubiquitous photographic devices.
The camera can lie, and certainly it can be operated poorly or malfunction, or the photographer can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but pictures are better evidence than words, however eloquent. In our age of a multiplicity of photographic devices the absence of pictures of the shooting in Andijan’s central square is astonishing. Even though the protests at the trial of the 23 businessmen had not been running as long as those which paralysed Tiananmen Square in spring, 1989, enough international media and NGO reporters had been following the trial on the spot – at least according to their own accounts – to make one wonder why no cameramen, however amateur, were not on hand. Even in Timisoara and Bucharest in 1989 – then a much more “closed” society than Uzbekistan – locals photographed the demonstrations and clampdown, even though their pictures couldn’t receive international distribution or assessment until after Ceausescu’s fall on 22nd December, 1989. Although Uzbekistan is frequently referred to as a “Stalinist” society, it was by no means closed to foreigners and international NGOs before 12th May, unlike Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Whatever happened on the central square in Andijan on 13th May, no-one seems to have recorded it with cameras, video-apparatus or even camera phones![2] There were eyewitnesses a-plenty including foreign journalists. The German reporter, Marcus Bensmann , an eye witness, told the readers of the left-leaning TAZ, “Since on Friday on the central square in Andijan neither cameras nor photo-journalists were present, there are no pictures of the repression. Nevertheless the journalists saw with their own eyes how the troops of the Uzbek interior ministry shot at several thousand people from armoured vehicles.”[3] He did not explain why he did not have a camera-phone, for instance, to hand since in the circumstances a journalist can hardly have had his hands full taking notes.
International willingness to accept every aspect of horrific reports from Uzbekistan after 13th May had long been conditioned by occasional Western media reports of allegations of prisoners “boiled alive” or routinely tortured.[4] The grim reputation of Uzbekistan was helped by Western ignorance of the country’s history – apart from the name of its most (in-)famous son. Tamerlaine made pyramids of skulls out of his victims and he came from Uzbekistan. In fact he was born there hardly less than 700 years ago, but times change slowly out east. Modern Britain owes nothing to the legacy of a heretic-burning, prisoner-of-war slaughtering monarch like Henry V. But unlike us in Britain, Uzbeks are still in thrall to the methods of a six hundred year-dead limping tyrant, according to this simplistic version of history. Central Asia has had a very different recent history from the West but people there may be less ignorant about our past than we are about theirs. Even when expressing concern for human rights there, this type of Western media instant background history to Uzbekistan is really rather condescending and “orientalist.”  It tells us more about the poverty of Western education and the ghoulishness of its products that only the grisly exploits of Tamerlaine have entered popular, or at least journalistic consciousness, and, for instance, the scholarly and mathematical researches of his grandson Ulug Beg. (In fact, the crude restoration work on the Timurid architectural legacy as well as the quasi-systematization of Samarkand around the historic sites there have gone unnoticed by the media representatives passing through Uzbekistan.)
French commentators who backed the Iraq War like Liberation’s Patrick Sabatier wrote under the headline, “Severed Heads” on 18th May:
“Tamerlane, known to posterity for having erected pyramids of severed heads before rebellious cities he had sacked, is venerated in the Uzbekistan of Islam Karimov. It should consequently not surprise us that the latter would give his soldiers the order to fire into the mass of Andijan "rebels." Uzbekistan is far away; its fate seems to have no relation to everyday European life.”
Having proved his historical credentials, Sabatier wanted his Gallic anti-Islamic cake: “ Karimov is a tyrant, but his enemies are not much more respectable than he is: Islamists linked to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and emulators of Osama bin Laden.” However, it was all Karimov’s fault that such people were on the march: “ The poverty, unemployment, corruption, and brutality of the Karimov regime, direct issue from Soviet Totalitarianism, are more and more pushing young Uzbeks towards this religious fundamentalism.”
Scholars like Robert Irwin seem to want to run with the politically-correct hounds demanding action against Islam Karimov while keeping in with the politically-correct academics who see any criticism of foreigners as a symptom of “Orientalism”, a disease fatal to academic careers. In a review of Justin Marozzi’s pop-life of Tamerlaine written before the Andijan events, Irwin told readers of The London Review of Books “With Karimov, strong government shades easily into mass sadism. Oriental despots have proved useful in the West for pointing morals and adorning tales.” In practice, Irwin only quotes Karimov’s regime’s official newspaper saying that Uzbekistan should “conduct itself in the world with kindness and goodwill”, apparently characteristics of the would-be world conqueror. Any visitor to contemporary Uzbekistan should be struck by the gulf between Tamerlaine’s bloodthirsty Western reputation – “Giant the Jack-Killer” (C.S. Lewis on Marlowe’s play) – and the officially-sponsored cult of a national hero whose apocryphal Institutes are the basis of his local legendary status as law-giver and justice provider. In other words, Karimov has not embarked on an aggressive external policy, the sort of thing that Tamerlaine’s name conjures up in the West.[5]
Boiling alive and other “medieval” tortures not seen outside Fu Manchu’s chamber of horrors are allegedly commonplace in Uzbekistan. Depending on the source, Karimov’s regime was supposed to have been engaged in a campaign of terror and torture against largely-imagined Islamic fundamentalists since its establishment in 1991 or after the mid-1990s. Conspiracy theories attribute the car bombings and other terrorist acts to the authorities. Playing down the Islamic fundamentalist threat sometimes means playing up conspiracy theories. For instance, even Radio Free Europe speculated that the various waves of car bombings and other terrorist attacks in Uzbekistan were staged by the authorities to justify a crackdown on imaginary opponents. RFE’s Gulnova Saaaidazimoza wrote in late April, “Some observers have also suggested that the string of explosions in the cities of Tashkent and Bukhara in spring 2004 were organized by the SNB and targeted the MVD. Like the 1999 bombings, there is no firm proof to support this theory.”[6] In 1999, it would seem that President Karimov almost killed himself in the car bombing of the parliament in Tashkent!
The grisly fascination with the details of alleged tortures in Uzbekistan is given respectability by their sourcing to NGOs and diplomats. Apparently authoritative bodies like Human Rights Watch said it, so it must be s: “Last year Human Rights Watch released a 319-page report detailing the use of torture by Uzbekistan's security services. It said the government was carrying out a campaign of torture and intimidation against Muslims that had seen 7,000 people imprisoned, and documented at least 10 deaths, including Muzafar Avozov, who was boiled to death in 2002.”[7] The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has made the allegation that “in Uzbekistan, many prisoners are subject to torture techniques straight out of the Middle Age” a refrain in global media outlets as well as British newspapers.[8]
The media is less interested when the “House of Horrors” is investigated by outsiders who find that the authorities’ version of the facts is closer to the truth than the lurid accounts of dissidents and NGOs. For instance, the specialist Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Central Asia Report reported in January, 2005: “Uzbek authorities agreed to the participation of outside experts and Uzbek human rights activists in the investigation of torture allegations surrounding the suspicious death of an imprisoned.

Hizb ut-Tahrir member. “[9]

The Associated Press reported the autopsy results but the world’s press did not take up the story. It did not fit the horrorific stereotype already implanted in the minds of viewers and readers and it would no doubt confuse them if contradictory information was published.[10]
In its response to the EU’s demarche about Uzbekistan’s human rights, the Uzbek government declared on 28th March, 2005, its willingness to permit a similar autopsy in the case of Rakhimjon Kuldashev, who died after suffering a heart attack in police custody on 2nd January, 2005, according to the official version: “In this regard competent bodies of the Republic of Uzbekistan express their readiness if necessary to carry out joint investigation with the human rights organizations, independent experts and specialists like it was with cases of ‘[Andrej] Shelkovenko’ and ‘[Samandar] Umarov’.”[11]
Even after the Andijan crisis, although President Karimov ruled out the kind of inquiry demanded by the EU, he explicitly said the UN and OSCE officials in Uzbekistan should look into the events.[12] That concession is routinely NOT reported while the demand for an “independent” inquiry is repeated, without anyone pointing out that such an “independent international inquiry” may be independent of Uzbekistan but not of whoever appoints it.
Uzbekistan is not alone in facing charges of police brutality. Disputes about the numbers of those dying in police custody in Britain as well as the causes of death suggest that even in an “open society” rumour as well as charges of official cover-up have their place. For instance on 8th May, 2005, Black Britain reported, “According to the charity, Inquest, eleven black people died in custody in 2003, whereas the IPCC [Independent Police Complaints Commission] has recorded only two. However UFFC [United Friends& Family Campaign] spokesman, Ken Fero challenges those figures and insists there has been as many as an extra four hundred deaths in police custody since 1999.”[13]
Uzbekistan had a bad reputation before the latest crisis but much of that reputation is based on hear-say and perhaps relies on sources who have political motivations which ought to be clearly spelled out. Even if some of the charges against Islam Karimov’s regime were true, some of the “facts” widely reported about Uzbekistan seem debatable at best and in contradiction to observable reality in the country. For instance, a European Parliamentarian insists, “a visitor sees neither beards nor headscarves” in Karimov’s Uzbekistan which is simply untrue.
Beards of many kinds were seen by this Group’s rapporteurs in December, 2004, even in mosques![14] An American lawyer from New York working on an NGO programme to establish offices for public defenders[15] or defence counsel in the Ferghana Valley (including in Andijan) noted in 2004: “People are out in the fields again, hacking at the earth; the women – and they are mostly women – in bright, long dresses and scarves wrapped about their heads as they bend over furrowed ground… More men with caps and small beards (and, charmingly, on bicycles), and women with their heads covered. The State Department considers the Valley a “hot spot” in that it has the potential to bear religious, ethnic and/or nationalist violence; but it always seems very calm and open too.”[16] Maybe some beard-wearers have been persecuted, but observers on the spot can testify that beards and scarves are not in themselves suppressed. Those who claim that risk retailing hearsay as evidence for the prosecution.