"Numbered toe tags" - the NYT on Andijan

This New York Times article ("Toe Tags Offer Clues to Uzbeks' Uprising," by C.J. Chivers, from yesterday's paper - you'll have to register to read it, but it's worth it) has one of the most even-handed accounts of what took place there that I've seen yet.

The most interesting information that I hadn't seen elsewhere was about another way of calculating the death toll:

The scale of death is fiercely contested. Mr. Karimov said 32 Uzbek troops and 137 other people had been killed. An opposition party says that at least 745 civilians died in Andijon and Pakhtaabad, a border town, the next day. The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, a Vienna-based group, says Uzbek troops may have killed 1,000 unarmed people.

An independent visit to Andijon by a photographer working for The New York Times also found indications that the death toll was much larger than Mr. Karimov has said. Bullet-riddled bodies were returned to families with numbered toe tags and certificates, families told the photographer and her translator. The numbers on the tags, they said, ranged from the teens to the hundreds.

And although the government has since tried to collect the certificates, they said, two families retained them and showed them to the photographer. One was No. 284. The other, which accompanied the remains of Rakhmatula Nadirov, 30, was 378. The same number was written on the dead man's leg, his mother said.

The article also has survivors' accounts of the demonstration in Andijan and of the flight of some of the demonstrators into Kyrgyzstan. It is a must-read if you are trying to stay current on the situation. Don't overlook it just because it's the "mainstream media," not surprisingly they are often better equipped than bloggers to cover stories in remote areas.