The authoritarian government of Uzbekistan mowed down hundreds of its own citizens last week in a crackdown on democracy demonstrations reminiscent of China's infamous Tiananmen Square massacre.
The initial trickle of news coverage and eyewitness accounts from this remote country is starting to gather momentum, as seen in a roundup of useful links and reader reports earlier today by the omniscient InstaPundit.
Now the Uzbek government is trying an old-fashioned Big Lie denial, which shows they haven't begun to grasp that we're in the 21st century.
The government and opposition leaders on Tuesday offered widely diverging death tolls and accounts of the violence in this U.S.-allied Central Asian country. The top prosecutor said 169 terrorists and troops were killed, but opposition activists maintained more than 700 died — most of them civilians.Prosecutor-General Rashid Kadyrov and President Islam Karimov held a news conference in the capital, Tashkent, blaming alleged Islamic militants for last week's unrest and denying that government forces shot and killed any civilians.
"Only terrorists were liquidated by government forces," the prosecutor said, adding that militants killed several hostages and innocent civilians.
Kadyrov said 137 "terrorists" and 32 troops were killed in the eastern town of Andijan — a sharp rise from the nine deaths the government originally announced on Friday. Some of those killed were foreign fighters, he said.
Uzbekistan has been a staging area for the U.S. military in the war on terror in central and southwest Asia, so the Bush administration has its work cut out to take the appropriate public stance.
This doesn't sound nearly strong enough:
The United States said on Monday it was "deeply disturbed" by reports that Uzbek authorities fired on protesters last week.Posted by Alan at May 17, 2005 09:36 PM"We certainly condemn the indiscriminate use of force against unarmed civilians and deeply regret any loss of life," the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said.
The comments were the strongest from the United States since the bloodbath, in which some witnesses and activists say government troops killed 500 people.