Thinking about Osh

Someone recently asked me if I felt any foreshadowings of the uprising/violence in Kyrgyzstan when I was in Bishkek (in Feb-May 2009).  My language skills were very basic at the time, but I remember one day my homestay family was buzzing with the rumors of revolution in the coming days.  My homestay mother warned me not to go to class.  I asked at the school, and the ever diplomatic Nargiza told me it is no problem to come to school, but "maybe you won't go to the center."  I did as I was told, going straight to school and straight home.  But the next day nothing had changed, and some other (more mischevious!) students said they had wandered down to the center to see what was going on but saw nothing.

Both my first home stay and the Kyrgyz students I lived with told me how the Kyrgyz didn't really like the Uzbeks, but I never heard anything forshadowing the horrors now raging in the south.

I suppose it is easy to disregard places such as Kyrgyzstan when violence and ethnic clashes flare.  I don't mean disregard the news, or the conflict, but the places themselves.  When we hear of a faraway place in crisis, if we don't know anything else about it, it seems natural to assume it is already a sort of wasteland, waiting for such a conflict.  Or maybe this is just me.  When I first saw a picture of a Rwandan landscape, lush and green, I was so amazed at how beautiful it was.  Hearing about the genocide as a child, I had pictured a hot, dry African desert, not fertile valleys.

But maybe I'm not the only one, maybe this is part of a larger problem.

When a crisis occurs in a place we know, or even just in a place where we have loved ones, it becomes so much more real.  It becomes a tragedy, perhaps a national one, perhaps a personal one...how do planes crashing into skyscrapers become all that 9/11 means today?  In our minds, certain images become the disaster.  Fire fighters and the New York City skyline, those who worked in the WTC...who doesn't' know someone in - or at least something about - New York City?  But if we don't have any associations for these faraway places, who can blame us (I think by "us" maybe I mean Americans, but I'm not sure) for being apathetic, ignoring the story and retreating to our own worlds?

As I read through the latest about Kyrgyzstan, and the violence in the south, I feel so attached to this story, and to this place.  There are plenty of things about media coverage of the conflict that bother me - headlining "ethnic conflict" without describing the complicated history of ethnicity in the region (although the New York Times takes the smallest of stabs at that today), and announcing that aid is arriving without mentioning reports that those distributing aid may be purposely withholding it from Uzbeks.

But the thing that bothers me most isn't rational, and an attempt to rectify it would never pass the editing desk of a major newspaper.

In short:  I want these reports to make people feel the way I do - I want them to impart what is special about this place, so it is not just another news story but a tragedy.  Osh is not some hot, dusty backwater that was waiting for this,  it is not something "south of Borat."  It's not Paris, it's not Samarkand, but it's got its own thing and I'd like to think that everyone that's been there has known it.


I wrote this post after visiting in May 2009.  In the post I quote from Kapuscinski's Imperium, where I think he sums up the feeling I had of Osh, even though he was writing about Uzbekistan:

They have sat for generations in this chaykhana, which is old, perhaps older than the
fortress and the mosque. Many things are different now - many, but not all. One
can say that the world is changing, but it is not changing completely; in any
case it is not changing to the degree that an Uzbek cannot sit in a chaykhana
and drink tea even during working hours.

Sitting in a chaykhane along one of Osh's main streets:

On Soloman's Throne, a UNESCO World Heritage Site which used to be a sacred pilgrimage point for Muslims and is now a great lookout point for the city, crowded with locals on the weekends:

I think of the village of Arslanbob a few hours from Osh, and I wonder what is happening in the remote, mostly Uzbek village.  Unfortunately, I can't find any news in English or Russian about the town. [Edit 18/06/10:  I received a reply from the Community Based Tourism Director, Hayat, in Arslanbob, and he said that, like always, Arslanbob is peaceful and quiet.]

By no means am I attempting the holier than thou road - I will readily admit that there are plenty of world headlines I skim because I have no attachment to the places in which they occur.  But something like Osh really forces me to think about the grand scale of human tragedy occurring every day, and the millions of people - including myself - who know nothing about it.