Funferal

(Lack of) coverage of Uzbekistan

I rarely watch network news. I generally use television for entertainment and it rarely occurs to me to browse by the news channels.
The only real exception is when I’m in a hotel, where the news channels tend to outnumber the others. The problem is that news channels also tend to annoy me. To put it mildly. The day the Iraq war broke out I was in a hotel in De Kalb, Illinois, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. I had to go out to a bar in order to stop kicking the furniture. Of course the despair over the war was a major concern in itself, but the despicable nature of the TV coverage just made things worse.
The reason I mention this now is that I am once again in a hotel and felt the need to turn on the TV to see whether and how the networks were covering the killings in Uzbekistan. Several hundred protesters were shot dead by police – reports yesterday were that 200 bodies had been sighted, I’m told by a colleague here that some reports are now saying 500 deaths – and it was for a time the top story on Google News. However, although there were links to online stories on CNN and elsewhere I was unable to find any mention – either reports or mention in the scrolling bar – on any of the cable stations.
Hardly surprising on one level, but still wrong. A friend on IM has just compared the protests to those in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The context is different, but how can you ignore protests involving tens of thousands – oh, wait, they do that regularly – that result in hundreds of deaths in a single day?
Uzbekistan, for those who may not be aware, is a key ally in the ‘war on terror’ providing key expertise in the fine art of torturing and killing people by immersing them in boiling water.Their officially announced role was as a base for troops entering Afghanistan, though they are probably also a destination in the ‘extraordinary rendition’ scheme. [That’s the “export prisoners to countries that specialise in torture, but don’t explictly ask for them to be tortured” model.] Which may explain the rather opaque response from the US:

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said: “We’ve been very clear about the human rights situation there, been very factual about it, but unfortunately the facts are not pretty.”

In other responses, the EU and the UK have condemned the killings. Putin has condemned the protests (quelle surprise!).