Posted on 11/04/2007 2:13:13 AM PST by Wiz
Behind every international story that you read, every radio report that you hear or television piece that you watch, there is likely to be a person that we - the reporters - rarely mention.
Often it is the first person we meet when we fly into a foreign country.
Someone who explains to us the nuts and bolts of the story we have come to cover, who fills us in on what is happening on the ground and puts us in touch with vital contacts.
This person is a local journalist.
And after we - the global media - exhaust our short attention span and leave, our local colleagues stay behind. They have the story that we tell in passing.
Their main sources are people in the streets and they are, more often than not, the first ones to get the word out.
In many ways, they are the real journalists. And the best I have ever known was Alisher Saipov.
Reporting reality
Twenty-six years old, slim, boyish and restless, Alisher had dedicated his entire life to telling the story of a place that many people know little about: Uzbekistan.
Methodical, passionate and thorough, he dug deeper than anyone else into the reality of President Islam Karimov's Uzbekistan
It is Central Asia's most populous country and home to what some have described as one of the world's most oppressive regimes.
An ethnic Uzbek himself, Alisher grew up just across the border from Uzbekistan, in the Kyrgyz town of Osh.
He used to say that gave him a degree of freedom, and the responsibility to speak up for those who did not have a voice.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
In Europe dissidents could gather and protest, the police standing watch, unable to do anything. However in Islamic countries there is no sense of free will, only submission. And submission will be beaten into the masses through massacres until it is thoroughly understood.
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Asia Pinglist. |
Technically Asia.
Belarus and Russia: they’ve been influenced so extensively by Asia and the Middle East. The Tsars of Russia have always be tyrant Kings.
But as to Tyrant Kings, they were never popular in England. Always ended up beheaded or worse, tricked into signing the Magna Carta. King John the First of England was one really pissed-off monarch!!
I was deployed to Uzbekistan in 2003-04. Uzbeks seemed to me to be mostly secular Muslims. I’m afraid that this time it’s not Islam that killed a disident, but an old fashioned Stalinist dictator. Karimov is more Andropov than Tamerlaine.
And it’s sorry as h**l that our State Department got us kicked out of the Karshi-Khanabad base following the Andijon incident. The Uzbeks I met were friendly and intelligent, a people whose talents for meteoric improvement in their lot have been ground under the heel of their Putin-loving despot.
Too bad for Uzbekistan and us, but worse for them.
One of the factors that may have kicked US out of Uzbekistan was the revolution of Kyrgyzstan, and the interference of Chicom’s SCO trying to kick us out of Central Asia, creating a new Iron Curtain around Central Asia. I feel sorry for the Uzbeks, but if we didn’t do much to contribute to the revolution of Kyrgyzstan, there would have been no opportunity for Alisher to move free in a democratic Kyrgyzstan today. We lost access to Uzbekistan, but at the same time gained a very valuable democratic frontier in Cental Asia, Kyrgyzstan. Let’s hope we have an opportunity to kick the but of Uzbekistan’s dictator and provide freedom to the people some day, but until then, we will have to be patient.
Hope that there’s a growing Uzbek democratic movement in exile in Kyrgyzstan. But then, the main motivator for now is the SCO and Karimov wants to be part of the new axis.
Meanwhile, what kind of SCO pressure is being put on the Kyrgyz democracy? Is democracy in Central Asia presumed by the Russians and Chinese to be ipso facto pro-western and therefore undesirable?
Anyway, Uzbekistan is not even bordered by the two Eurasian giants. Plenty of food for thought.
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