[LINK] "The more things change..."

[rfmcdonald]

The official explanation for last yeart's pogroms of Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan, Registan's Noah Tucker lets us know, is decidedly unimpressive, if perhaps unexpecpted. A hard-hitting examination of anti-Uzbek bigotries this is not.

The commission, headed by Abdygany Erkebaev, held a high profile press conference on the 11th. Erkebaev announced that after months of “intensive investigation” [scare quotes, not direct quotes] the commission–minus several members who publicly resigned in protest and lodged complaints about sloppy methodology and disagreements with the findings–had discovered that those truly to blame for the the June tragedy were…

everyone the government has blamed at one time or another for the past seven months.

Greedy, fanatic Uzbek nationalists? Check. Bakiev revanchists? Check. A murky alphabet soup of international Islamic terrorist groups with TIES TO AL-QAIDA? Check. International mafia groups? Check. Additional nameless Foreign Instigators attempting to derail Kyrgyzstan’s democratic progress? Check. (U.S. Special Forces? Can’t be ruled out.)

Naturally all these actors were working together in a vast, complex conspiracy that “we totally have evidence for, but we just can’t show it to you right now.”

In a special parliamentary session today with the members of the National Commission, the conspiracy got even better. Tantalizing details were added, the intrepid Mullah Abdulloh (who clearly must have been involved, since he does everything in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Central Asia) was meeting with Maxim Bakiev himself somewhere in… Tajikistan? And the Taliban were there. But don’t let yourself be distracted even for a second from the known fact that all of this is actually Kadyrjon Batyrov’s fault.

Well, and it’s also obviously the fault of Baxtiyar Fattaxov, the only ethnic Uzbek on the National Commission, whom JK speaker Keldibekov (Ata Jurt) insisted today should be removed from his post because Keldibekov claimed to have secret proof that Fattaxov was a nationalist-separatist who personally asked the UN for advice about how to secede from Kyrgyzstan.