NYT interviews Ferghana.Ru editor
Excerpt from today's story on Andijan in the New York Times (registration required):
Daniil Kislov, the editor in Moscow of a Web site, Ferghana.ru, said the site's correspondent in Andijon saw 50 bodies in the city's morgue on Saturday, as well as 15 bodies in the city's central square on Saturday evening. On Sunday, the correspondent, Aleksei Volosevich, saw three more bodies, Mr. Kislov said.
Mr. Volosevich was not able to visit School No. 15, where The Associated Press had reported that 500 bodies awaited identification, citing an unidentified doctor. Mr. Kislov said the number of dead was less important than how they died.
"I do not think there is any difference between 50 and 500," Mr. Kislov said. "It is equally too many. The government's response was disproportionately tough." The resistance to the government has been variously described as peaceful demonstrators seeking reform, desperate criminals and Islamic militants, and could contain elements of all three.
The NYT is wisely being conservative with the death toll reports (from the same story linked to above), and explains why:
Reports of the number of deaths since the violence began varied widely, from dozens to hundreds of civilians. The Associated Press reported that residents of the village of Tefektosh had said the latest clashes left several soldiers dead. Uzbekistan's president, Islam A. Karimov, said Saturday that 10 government soldiers and "many more rebels" had been killed.
None of the reports could be verified, and it was difficult to determine who was fighting, and with what ambitions, although in addition to elements of a general uprising against a repressive government, armed and newly freed inmates were in the area of strife. Telephone service has been intermittent, and the Uzbek government has forced many journalists to leave.
2 comments:
Lyndon, thanks for your gerat work. I am one of the few American bloggers who is really focusing on the crisis in Ferghana. Your blog has been an indispensible resource, and I've linked to it.
Thanks, I'm doing my best with the limited time to blog and limited background knowledge of the situation in C. Asia that I have.
I did notice your blog on Sunday and am planning to reference your blog in a post on the blogosphere coverage of Andijan which I haven't yet had time to put together. There's not much good blog coverage out there (at least as of Sunday afternoon when I last looked in detail), but it looked like your blog was an exception to that rule and that you were trying to put up background stuff that hadn't been widely available - sort of like what my goal has been with translating stuff from Russian, i.e., to give people access to something they otherwise wouldn't see.
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