BISHKEK KYRGYZSTAN Uzbeks

KYRGYZSTAN VS. THE UZBEKS: MUSLIM ON MUSLIM VIOLENCE LEADS TO IMMENSE CRISIS

The ethnic cleansing of the Uzbeks is almost complete, and the humanitarian need is great, but yet no cry in the streets by the hypocritical Left are heard over the need to boycott the Kyrgyzstan regime.
You see folks, this is what “ethnic cleansing” actually looks like, something of which the Leftist loons and their minions keeps charging Israel with, just because a few Jews want to build a home in their ancestral homeland. The hypocrisy of the Left is all too clear in situations like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to pin the blame for the current unrest between these two groups on the Jews. KGS

Red Cross: Kyrgyzstan, scene of an “immense crisis”

Food is in short supply. Army is monitoring the limited sale of basic foodstuffs like vegetables, bread and butter. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes; many set on fire. Others are living without shelter or food, sleeping on the road. Violence could reignite at any moment.
Bishkek (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Kyrgyzstan is the scene of an “immense crisis”, the Red Cross (ICRC) said. Refugees are short of basic supplies such as food, water and shelter. People live in great uncertainty, fearful of violence that could break out at any moment.
The number of displaced people ranges “from several hundred to several thousand in number,” the ICRC’s Severine Chappaz said. Many families also have no news about missing members.
The Kyrgyz army has retaken control of the city of Osh with troops patrolling the streets. An uneasy calm has descended upon the area and a sense of foreboding hangs in the air.
A truce has allowed the ICRC to reach the riot-affected area, which had been cut off from the outside world for several days.
Officially, at least 200,000 people fled their homes, an estimate deemed low. Some 75,000 ethnic Uzbeks have fled across the border into Uzbekistan. Many are housed in temporary shelters, but the fate of many others is still unknown.
Other refugees are stuck at the border after Uzbek authorities ordered it closed. They lack food and shelter, and entire families, children included, are sleeping on the road, in the open air. Some have had their home torched. Everyone is afraid that violence might flare up again; no one wants to go back.

5 Responses

  1. The picture reminds me of a similar situation when Saddam Hussein's army threw out the Kurds from their region, after the first Gulf War.

  2. Muslim on Muslim violence is not exceptional in the Islamic world. Aamof, Muslim on Muslim violence has often revolved around geopolitical, strategic, socioeconomic and ethnic issues. This is clearly where Islam shows a tendency of being non-monolithic. Paradoxically, whereas Islam is an internationalist movement and therefore has an innate disregard for 'cultural identity', it is quite clear to me that cultural identity, intertwined with these issues, has always trumped the Internationalist Islamic Solidarity Card.

    To substantiate this claim, I will give a quick historical overview:

    1) The death of the Prophet in 632 sparked the Sunni-Shia split in Islam. The very essence of this conflict originated in political dissidence: Shia Muslims forcefully rebelling against the contemporary Sunni rulers.

    2) From the 650's onwards, the Umayyad Caliphate was established, which pushed its hegemony through all the way up to the Indus valley. Now both Sunni and Shia Muslims held (and still hold) a dim view of the Umayyads as being "morally corrupt". The Umayyad Caliphate was overthrown by the Abbasid Caliphate, which in turn was overthrown by the Ottoman Turks.

    3) The Indian subcontinent was overrun by the Mughals. They settled on the subcontinent alongside the previously established Sultanates of the Deccan, after having defeated the Sultanate of Delhi and the Sultanate of Gujarat. The Mughal emperors obliterated the Deccan Sultanates later.

    4) The Mughals had to suffer repeated invasions by Afghan tribes. In the long run, the Mughal Empire would fade by the decisive invasions of the Afghan Durrani clan.

    5) In 1738, the Persian emperor Nader Shah invaded Mughal India (Nader Shah had already done battle against the Ottomans and the Afghans). In 1739, he plundered the Mughal capital, Delhi, and took off with the Koh-I-Noor diamond and the original Peacock Throne.

    Of course, this is just a general overview of the history of the Middle East and the Islamization of the Indian subcontinent. Last but not least, I will list a few other significant events.

    1) 1971: East-Pakistan gains independence as Bangladesh, after having suffered mass genocide at the hands of their 'fellow Muslims' from West-Pakistan. (clearly an ethnic and political issue)

    2) On 6 October 1981, the Egyptian president Sadat was assassinated during the annual victory parade in Cairo by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an organization with links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

    3) Syria: The Muslim Brotherhood instigated a general insurrection in the conservative Sunni town of Hama in February 1982. The Syrian government (led by Hafez al Assad) crushed the fundamentalist opposition centered in the city of Hama, leveling parts of the city with artillery fire and causing between 10.000 and 25.000 of dead and wounded, mostly civilians (the Hama massacre)

    4) 1980: Saddam Hussein started the Iraq-Iran War, with the obvious intent of:

    a) staving off the growing influence of Shia Islam in his own country.
    b) annexing the border regions of Iran because he had his eye on the Iranian oil fields in the region.

    5) Unsuccessful in his attempt to bring Iran to its knees, Saddam Hussein decided to invade the way easier target Kuwait, again with the intent of annexing the Kuwaiti oilfields.

    There's a lesson to be learnt here: although Muslims in general are monolithic in the sense that they all adhere to the basic totalitarian concepts of Islam, they are by no means monolithic in the geopolitical sense. Muslim rulers can perfectly justify Muslim on Muslim violence for whatever reason they see fit, and to top it all off, they will probably all claim that their take on things is explicitly sanctioned by the Quran.

    Not only does the Sunni-Shia divide come into play (pitting Arabs against Arabs) but also the ethnic factor, pitting Persians against Arabs, Pathans against Tadzhiks or Uzbeks or even Panjabis,Turks against Arabs, and Turkic peoples like Uzbeks, Turkmen and Kyrgyz against each other.

  3. When Jews kill Muslims, it's a "massacre". When Christians kill Muslims, it's a "Crusade". When Muslims kill Muslims, it's the Weather Channel. Nobody cares!

  4. Which also explains perfectly why all those who want to criticize Islam can't possibly be called 'racists', seeing as Muslims are not a race !

    The largest Muslim communities today are Indonesia (237 million people according to a July 2008 estimate), Bangladesh (approx. 150 million people, homogenously Bengali by ethnicity), Pakistan (approx. 172 million people, ethnically heterogenous Baluchi, Pashto, Panjabi, Sindhi, Mohajir [Indian Muslims who fled India in 1947], Siraiki), Nigeria (approx. 146 million, and Black African) and last but not least, Turkey (approx. 71 million [and Turks are definitely not Arabs] and Iran (approx. 70 million people, of which 51% ethnic Persians, 19% other Persian peoples [Kurds, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Baluchi and Lurs] and 24% Azeri, a Turkic people)

    There's only one Arab country in the list with 75 million inhabitants, of which 90% are Muslim: Egypt ranking at number 5 ! Conclusion: although Arabs are clearly intent on assimilating other cultures to Arabism, within the global Muslim community they are a minority. There are more non-Arab Muslims combined in comparison with Arab countries !

    And last but not least, we shouldn't forget the Indian Muslims who are ethnically very diverse !

  5. What is actually quite typical is the fact that the Kyrgyz and Uzbek peoples don't really differ all that much from one another, neither culturally, ethnically nor linguistically. Both of them are Turkic-Mongol tribes.

    And still they are at each others' throats. Which suggests to me that they are quite apt at perceiving the relative distinctions between them as so apparent and manifest that they should identify each other as enemies in the cultural sense, to the point that it should warrant the perpetration of violence against one another.

    The same type of thing can be said about Afghanistan, for instance. When the Soviets left Afghanistan, the different Mujahidin factions that fought each other were mainly organized around ethnic fault lines. Thus, Pathan factions set upon the Tadzhiks of the Northern Alliance. When we consider the fact that both Pathans and Tadzhiks are ethnic Iranian tribes, (tribes with a common Persian ancestry) more or less the same thing happened like we see nowadays in Kyrgyzstan. Although both of these tribes were ethnically somewhat related (Tadzhiks are more closely related to the Iranians than Pathans are, though), they are both majority-Sunni. And still, religion did not unite both peoples, it did nothing to stop Muslim on Muslim violence. In the long run, only the differences between them seemed to count for something.

    It is quite curious to think that an internationalist ideology always lays the emphasis on 'all people being equal and united under the banner of the same core principles' whereas people seem to be more willing to identify themselves around the issue that seems to be more relevant to them: uniting around the concept of a specific cultural identity that is clearly distinguished from other cultural identities.

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