Tony, all I can say is that anything written by Simon Tisdall will be US propaganda, or worse. He is the guy that caused a storm amongst Guardian readers by writing an article about Iraq in the Guardian (not Comment Is Free) whcih had absolutely nothing but unnamed spokesmen, US allegations stated as facts, and nothing else and so obvious that even Guardian readers were up in amrs.
We all know that Kyrgyzstan is important to the US, being one of the staging posts for the US in Afghanistan, but as to what is going on there, there is only one thing for sure; the CIA and probably Mossad will be part of it. _________________ In the end, it's not the words of your enemies you will remember, but the silence of your friends. Martin Luther King
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Jun 13, 2010 10:08 pm Post subject: Mob rule & genocide in Osh, Kyrgyzstan
All roads to the city sealed off!
While people rampage around killing
Kyrgyz ethnic clashes spread - death toll 113
Russia sent at least 150 paratroopers to Kyrgyzstan on Sunday to protect its military facilities as ethnic clashes spread in the Central Asian state, bringing the death toll from days of fighting to 113.
Ethnic Uzbeks in a besieged neighbourhood of Kyrgyzstan's second city Osh said gangs were carrying out "genocide", burning residents out of their homes and shooting them as they fled. Witnesses saw bodies lying on the streets.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3904608,00.html
The Killings in Osh, Kyrgyzstan are Stalin's Legacy
Osh lies in the heart of the Ferghana Valley. This extract from Murder in Samarkand gives essential backround:
I was determined to set an early example to the staff of getting around the country and wanted to travel to the Ferghana Valley. This high valley, a fertile flood plain where tributaries from the great mountains join to form the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, nestles in the foothills of the Himalayas, beneath the High Pamirs and the Tien Shan, the Heavenly Mountains. It was considered a likely ethnic and religious flashpoint.
The Ferghana Valley is very heavily populated, home to over ten million people. The five countries of Central Asia together have a land area substantially greater than all of Western Europe. Twenty per cent of the entire population of this vast region live in the Ferghana Valley, which has a land area similar to Belgium.
It is, in a very real sense, the heart of Central Asia, It ought to be the economic powerhouse of the region. To explain why it is not, I have to explain something about the crazy geography of Central Asia.
The Ferghana Valley is split between Kirghizstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The borders of these three countries, and not just in the Ferghana Valley, intertwine and convolute as though they were a jigsaw cut by a one armed alcoholic. In the Ferghana Valley, there are seven enclaves of Uzbekistan entirely cut off by surrounding countries.
This is the difficult bit to grasp: the borders are deliberately nonsensical and specifically designed not to create viable economic units, and in particular not to have any political, cultural or ethnic coherence. The names Kirghizstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan might give the impression that they are the ethnic home of the Kirghiz, Tajiks and Uzbeks. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. They are quite deliberately not that. For example, the major Uzbek town of Osh, in the Ferghana Valley, is over the border in Kirghizstan. The centres of the great Tajik culture, Samarkand and Bokhara, are not in Tajikistan but in Uzbekistan, even though 90% of the population of those cities remain Tajik speaking - although they are now subject to drastic Uzbek government attempts to choke the language out.
The Soviet Union was in theory just that - a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Kirghizstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were three of them. But whatever the theory, Stalin had no intention of allowing the republics to become viable entities or potential powerbases for rivals. So they were deliberately messed up with boundaries that cut across natural economic units like the Ferghana Valley and cut cultural and ethnic links.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2010 10:55 pm Post subject:
Kyrgyzstan: Picking up the pieces
By Eric Walberg - Online Journal Contributing Writer - Jun 25th 2010
Kyrgyzstan joined the rank of failed states this month: its central government lacks legitimacy and depends heavily on external aid, with the US base looming large, while the people are largely destitute, harassed by local thugs and drug barons, and looking to Moscow for a way out.
http://www.katu.com/news/96493094.html
Clashes in the south are worse than earlier reported, responsible for more than 300 killed, mostly Uzbeks, and setting off a massive wave of refugees, with 100,000 people crammed in camps on Kyrgyzstan’s border with Uzbekistan and tens of thousands more displaced. The clashes are almost certainly the result of a provocation organised by the clan of ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
The issues at stake are the referendum next Sunday to legitimise the interim government, and the drug trade, which Bakiyev’s clan still controls and is loathe to give up. Heroin comes from Afghanistan via Tajikistan and is repackaged in Osh before being transported west to Uzbekistan and north to Kazakhstan and Russia, according to the UN. The killing two weeks ago of Aibek Mirsidikov, one of the drug kingpins in the area, threatened the Bakiyev clan’s control. The rest is history.
Jalalabad province commandant and first Deputy Chairman of the Kyrgyz State National Security Service Kubatbek Baibolov charged that a group of Tajik citizens, hired by the Bakiyev clan, opened fire indiscriminately on both Kyrgyz and Uzbeks sparking the riots. Former Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev told RT.com that Bakiyev’s brothers, Ahmad and Janysh, paid criminals and unemployed youths “in suitcases of cash to start bashing people up and set everything on fire.” Bakiyev had cleaned out the banks and the Finance Ministry when he was ousted in April. Days before the current uprising, unemployed youth were suddenly flush with cash, said Akayev.
The ex-president’s son Maxim’s indictment by Italian investigators is what sparked his father’s overthrow in April. That the US was not the culprit this time (as opposed to the Tulip Revolution in 2005) is suggested by the fact that the new government continues to threaten to close down the US airbase -- this time, if Britain refuses to hand over Maxim, who was arrested Sunday at Farnborough airport when he arrived by private plane, fleeing an Interpol arrest warrant on charges of corruption and misusing state funds. He is, of course, seeking political asylum in Britain. “England never gives up people who arrive on its territory. But since England and the US fight terrorism, and the arrangement with the airbase is one of the elements of that fight, then they must give over Maxim Bakiyev,” warned Azimbek Beknazarov, deputy leader of the interim government.
This is not just a tragedy for the normally peaceful Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, but also an alarming development for the entire ex-Soviet space. Russia is now faced with the worst post-Soviet political crisis in its “near abroad,” where it insists -- rightly -- that it has special claims, having millions of Russians scattered throughout those countries, with intimate economic and cultural links from centuries of both imperial and state socialist development. But where there are claims, there are also responsibilities.
This is no better illustrated than the call by both sides, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz alike, for Russian peacekeeping troops to be deployed as disinterested mediators who understand the region and can communicate with locals, unlike NATO forces in Afghanistan. The spectre of Russians policing the streets of Osh raises none of the loathing and fear that US and NATO troops patrolling, say Marja, prompts. The peoples of virtually all the ex-Soviet quasi-states (except the Baltics) would rejoin a Soviet-type union in a flash as opinion polls continue to confirm two decades after its ignominious “collapse.” When Kyrgyzstan twitches, Russia feels it, and vice versa...........
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_6041.shtml _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Jul 04, 2010 2:13 am Post subject:
Kyrgyzstan inaugurates C.Asia's first female president
By Tolkun Namatbayeva (AFP) – 21 hours ago
BISHKEK — Career diplomat Roza Otunbayeva was sworn in as conflict-torn Kyrgyzstan's president on Saturday, making her the first female leader in the history of ex-Soviet Central Asia.
Standing before an audience of more than 1,000 cheering onlookers in a packed Soviet-era concert hall in the capital Bishkek, Otunbayeva solemnly took her oath and promised a new political era for increasingly-unstable Kyrgyzstan.
"As president, I will spare no effort to create a new political culture for the country based on a strict adherence to the rule of law," she told the assembled crowd.
"I must be principled and consistently make demands on all branches of government to ensure it. The new policy cannot be built on fantasies and illusions. It must become real and effective."
A former foreign minister and ambassador to Britain who took power on a wave of bloody street riots in April that ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, Otunbayeva takes office at a delicate moment.
Kyrgyzstan has been wracked by violence and political instability in recent months, and the inauguration comes just days after the approval of a new constitution making Kyrgyzstan the region's first parliamentary democracy.
The new charter, passed overwhelmingly in a referendum Sunday, slashes the powers of the president and sets the stage for parliamentary elections that authorities have scheduled for early October to bring in a permanent government.
Otunbayeva will serve as the country's caretaker president until after 2011 presidential elections, a position granted to her by last week's referendum, under which she has no right to stand in the next presidential polls.
Her government must also work to ease tensions in the south of the country, where deadly clashes between ethnic majority Kyrgyz and minority Uzbeks in and around the cities of Osh and Jalalabad may have killed as many as 2,000 people last month.
At least 75,000 fled to neighbouring Uzbekistan but all of these have now returned, leading international aid agencies to warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in dealing with the thousands of families left homeless.
Victims have told AFP the violence was an orchestrated campaign by armed Kyrgyz militias targeting Uzbeks, who make up about 14 percent of Kyrgyzstan's population of 5.3 million.
Otunbayeva struck a conciliatory tone over the violence, carefully avoiding attributing blame to any ethnic group, while promising that the government would do more to ensure the return of services to its citizens in the devastated south.
"Today Kyrgyzstan is going through one of the most dramatic periods in its history. Unfortunately, tragic events took place in the Osh and Jalalabad regions.... Dark forces have spilled blood of many innocent people," she said.
"For my part, I give my word that the state will do everything possible, as soon as possible to overcome the consequences of the tragedy."
But Otunbayeva faces a series of daunting tasks not limited to the violence if she is to bring a measure of stability to the country, said independent Bishkek-based political analyst Marat Kazakbayev.
"The hardest things now for Otunbayeva are to raise the national economy, resolve security issues and social problems and to prove to the world her ability to govern in difficult conditions," he told AFP.
Otunbayeva's first steps are likely to be watched closely by both Russia and the United States, each of which maintains military bases in the strategically-located country.
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