The Andijan massacre: Islam Karimov and the slaughter that the world forgot
The bloodshed in 2005 was likely the worst state-sanctioned mass killing since Tiananmen Square
If one thing is clearer amid the confusion surrounding the illness and possible death of Islam Karimov, the 78-year-old former Soviet apparatchik who has ruled Uzbekistan since its independence, it is
his own political legacy.
Under Karimov’s watch, the country’s jails filled up with political prisoners, dissent was quashed, and religious freedoms suppressed by an omnipresent post-Soviet police state. His appalling rights record - which included reports of suspected Islamists being boiled alive - didn’t stop the US administration of President George W. Bush from cozying up to Tashkent as it prosecuted its war in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks; it won access to a strategic air force base on Uzbek soil.
That arrangement ended in 2005 after it was too unseemly for Washington to be in league with a dictator as grim as Karimov. On May 13 of that year, his regime presided over what was probably the bloodiest state-sanctioned massacre since Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Protests surrounding the trial of 23 local businessmen accused of links to Islamic extremism in the city of Andijan had gained momentum. Andijan is nestled in the Ferghana Valley, the cultural heartland of Central Asia. The trial attracted large crowds of locals, many of whom were also irked by the country’s grinding economic woes.