The Atlantic – Joshua Foust: A Year After Revolution, Kyrgyzstan’s Minority Worse Off Than Ever
Source: The Atlantic, 10/30/2011
ASP Fellow Joshua Foust is a featured author.
Excerpt:
“OSH, Kyrgyzstan — “What is it like to lose everything?” An Uzbek man asked me over tea last week, his brow crinkled in obvious anguish. “Your wife killed, your daughter raped, your store smashed, your home burned down? What would you do?”
We were sitting in a bucolic place: a narrow, swiftly moving stream nearby gave a gentle burble while birds tweeted above us. The chaikhana, or teahouse, where we were eating lunch was nestled in the outskirts of Osh city, in an Uzbek neighborhood, called a mahallah. Narimon had invited me in this mahallah when he saw me taking pictures of some ruined buildings in the main city market. Narimon isn’t his real name, but like most Uzbeks here he is unwilling to speak on the record for fear of reprisal from the Kyrgyzstan government, which is dominated, like the country itself, by the ethnic Kyrgyz majority.
Last summer, crowds of young Kyrgyz men turned these Uzbek mahallahs into scenes of horrifying violence in what people here now call “The June Events” or even “The War.” Over the course of about 72 hours in June 2010, upwards of 2,000 people were killed, thousands more were beaten and raped, thousands of buildings and homes were torched, and nearly 100,000 Uzbeks fled across the border toward Andijon in nearby Uzbekistan…”
