No Requiem for the Dead

In the aftermath of the mass shootings in Andijan, reports have emerged that injured people were summarily executed, and that many bodies, especially of women and children, were taken away and concealed by the authorities.

Uzbek president Islam Karimov, meanwhile, says that only nine people were killed in an operation to root out a dangerous group of Islamic radicals.

On the morning of May 14, journalists together with residents who were unscathed by the previous day’s violence were able to view the full scale of the catastrophe that had struck the city.

Andijan city centre and especially Babur Square were awash with the blood of men and women, young and old, who had come out, for the first time in many long years of oppression, to express their discontent with the regime’s policies. The blood of children was spilled there, too.

Body parts, brains and other internal organs along with personal items and children’s shoes were scattered within a radius of two to three kilometres of the square where the shooting began.

There were still 30 dead bodies on the square itself, and near the monument to Babur – the local boy who invaded India and founded the Moghul dynasty – lay ten more which people had collected together.

Men and women cried as they surveyed the scene.

“To the government, we’re just dirt. They don’t regard us as human beings,” said one of the women.

Eyewitnesses claimed that more than 1,500 people were killed by government bullets, although the nearest thing to an accurate estimate came from a local doctor who saw 500 bodies.

There is evidence to suggest that government security forces carried out deliberate extrajudicial killings once the mass shooting was over. The initial assault by security forces began when a convoy of armoured vehicles raked the crowd, estimated at 10,000-15,000, with gunfire without even stopping to take aim.

People scattered in all directions but continued to fall to the ground as high-velocity rounds reached them however far they ran.

Once the crowd had dispersed, eyewitnesses say the security forces went around finishing off the injured as they lay.

A middle-aged woman who gave her first name as Muqaddas told IWPR that at nine in the evening – three and half hours after the gunfire began – uniformed men were still shooting anyone who was moving.

“I myself saw how before the assault, a truckload of vodka was delivered to the military servicemen,” she said. “They got drunk, and in this condition they shot and killed the wounded. In my presence, they shot down a woman with two small children.”

The following morning, witnesses say, the authorities carted off most of the bodies using three trucks and a bus.

A secondary school, a technical college and local parks were turned into impromptu morgues. Hundreds of Andijan resident searched with tears in their eyes for missing relatives, on Babur Square itself and later at the collection points.

A city pathologist said that on the night of May 15, she personally saw more than 500 bodies at School Number 15 in the old town district. Armed soldiers stood guard, but people were being allowed in to identify relatives.

However, this school housed the bodies of men only. The remains of women and children were out of sight - somewhere near the construction-industry college, local people said – and, unlike those of the men, were not being released to relatives.

In his May 14 press conference, President Karimov said, “We do not shoot at women and children.”

But those who witnessed the assault say the fire was so indiscriminate that this cannot have been the case.

An Andijan man called Sadirakhun said female and children’s bodies were trucked to the secret site early on May 14. He suspects they may already have been buried in a mass grave.

“I smelled a strong putrid odour – the smell of blood. They don’t even bury dogs that way,” said Sadirakhun.

But that is not the only discrepancy between President Karimov’s account and what eyewitnesses actually saw.

Karimov said “not a single shot” was fired until six in the evening, whereas reporters timed the attack by armoured vehicles to 5.20 pm.

According to the president’s account, at 7.30 pm helicopters started hovering above the regional government office held by rebel forces, and forces moved to pursue them of as they began leaving the building in three groups.

In fact, by 7.30 that evening there were almost no people left alive and uninjured on the square outside the government building.

Karimov gave official casualty figures as nine dead and 34 wounded.

He said the rebellion was organised by members of a branch of the banned Hizb-ut-Tahrir group called Akramia, and that the rebels planned to establish an Islamic state with the help of the people of Andijan.

“They wanted to repeat the Kyrgyz [March revolution] scenario in Uzbekistan. Their actions were managed from the territory of Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan,” said Karimov.

But again, those who attended the rally dispute this version of events.

“This rebellion has nothing to do with religion. I did not hear cries of Allahu Akbar, and none of the rebels inside the regional administration building mentioned anything about an Islamic state,” said one western journalist who asked not to be named.

One of the protest leaders, Kabuljon Parpiev, told reporters shortly before the assault that they were not making political demands.

“We only want freedom, justice and protection of human rights. Also, we want the release of Akrom Yuldashev from prison,” he said.

Yuldashev is the man who the government says formed the Akramia movement of covert extremists, which was to figure so prominently in the prosecution case in the trial which sparked the protests. The 23 defendants insisted that they were not guilty of any crime and said Akramia existed only in the minds of prosecutors.

A clue to why the peaceful protests that accompanied the court hearings in the men’s trial on May 10-11 escalated into a major protest – including the storming of Andijan jail to free the men – may lie in a piece of paper IWPR reporters found lying in a puddle of blood after the shooting was over.

The letter, whose content suggests it was written by one of the 23 accused businessmen, is addressed to Andijan residents and talks about the economic and employment crisis facing them.

“We could tolerate it no longer,” the letter says. “We are unjustly accused of membership of Akramia. We were tormented for almost a year, but they could not prove us guilty in court. Then they started persecuting our nearest and dearest.

“If we don’t demand our rights, no one else will protect them for us. The problems that affect you trouble us as well. If you have a government job, your salary is not enough to live on. If you earn a living by yourself, they start envying you and putting obstacles in your way. If you talk about your pain, no one will listen. If you demand your rights, they will criminalise you.”

Then the letter makes a call to action, “Dear Andijanis! Let us defend our rights. Let the region’s governor come, and representatives of the president too, and hear our pain. When we make demands, the authorities should hear us. If we stick together, they will not do anything bad to us.”

The themes reflected in this document – poverty and political oppression – came up time and again at the May 13 rally.

The flow of information on the bloody end to the day and its aftermath was obstructed by the Uzbek authorities, who did everything they could to stop reporters getting the story out.

An AFP reporter’s camera film taken by IWPR contributors and the memory disk from the AP correspondent’s camera were confiscated. Many reporters found their mobile phones were blocked. Journalists from Russia’s NTV channel filed a live report as they were driven away under guard to the city of Namangan.

On May 15, a journalist and a photo correspondent working for AP were detained and deported from Teshiktosh near the border with Kyrgyzstan.

Ruslan Yarmolyk, reporting for the Inter Channel in Ukraine, said he was detained and strip-searched on May 15 by armed soldiers who appeared at his Andijan hotel and escorted him back to his room. “They undressed me, took off my shoes and confiscated all my video tapes. I’ve been in many hotspots, but my tapes have never been taken off me,” he said.

Many people in Uzbekistan whom IWPR has spoken to would like there to be an official mourning period for the dead.

But since the authorities insist there were no mass killings, it follows logically that there is to be no grieving.

Galima Bukharbaeva is IWPR programme director in Tashkent. Matluba Azamatova is an IWPR contributor covering the Fergana Valley