I must admit to being a bit skeptical when so many of Bobojonov’s claims cannot be verified (documents which have not been made available, an interview arranged by the Uzbek government with no outside corroberation.) In addition, some claims seem contradictory — would Yuldashev’s followers have been so detached from Islam to accept the watering-down of the Five Pillars, yet so sophisticated in Qur’anic analysis to pick up hidden references to unquoted suras?

I think it is right to say that Akromiya, whatever that means, was a loose enough organization that could be taken in several different ways, including those (by people like Parpiev) that advocated violence. At the same time, much of what Bobojonov claims seems a bit too close to the official Uzbek government smear campaign for me to not be skeptical.

I have yet to find a single citizen of Uzbekistan person who trusts the government here.

And I wonder why that might be? Why did hundreds of people gather in the square at Andijan, because they had read an obscure theological pamphlet, or because they were thoroughly pissed off with the Uzbek Government for closing the border with Kyrgyzstan, or simply because they were curious? Either way, I don’t think they deserved to die. We are no closer here to establishing the identity or numbers of the victims, and I do not for a moment believe the Uzbek Government’s claim that all those killed were ‘terrorists’, or even a majority of them. What may have begun as an attempted coup by the Akramiya turned into a general public protest against the brutality and incompetence of Karimov;s rule – and most of the crowd were unarmed. If you suppress all peaceful opposition to your rule, and criminalise dissent, that’s what’s going to happen. My sympathy is, to say the least, limited.

This is difficult, because I am familiar with Babajanov’s work, and have a lot of respect for him as a scholar. I don’t think he’s lying, and he’s not actually parrotting the absurd Government line (namely the BBC/CIA/Bin Laden conspiracy theory). I just don’t think this information really changes anything. I can’t pretend to much special knowledge, but I did vist Andijan and Kara-Su in 2002, before the border with Kyrgyzstan was closed. I stayed with a local businessman called Farkhat Ismailov who seemed to be running rackets of one kind or another in several bazaars around Kara-su, and I saw the cheap Chinese manufactured goods which had come in from Kyrgyzstan, and they appeared to be a mainstay of the local economy. When Karimov closed the border all that trade would have disappeared. Factor in the arrest of most of the Andijan region’s major employers as ‘extremists’ (and we still don’t know if they really were members of the Akramiya or any other ‘extremist’ organisation), the general crapness of life under Karimov, and the brutal suppression of dissent, and you have a situation where people don’t need to read about ‘Jihad’ or have a religious inspiration in order to revolt. If what Babjanov says is true, they saw the Akramiya’s attempt at a coup d’etat as their opportunity for redress, and understandably so. And, predictably, but not understandably, hundreds of them were shot, and hundreds more became refugees. So what’s new?

Laurence, if you’re implying that USAID may have funded Uzbek Islamic radicals because we trained Hamas members in the 70′s and 80′s then one needs only remind themselves of the fall of communism and 9/11. I’m not saying that the US doesn’t do shady things, I just think it’s not plausible that we would have paid Islamic radicals to overthrow a secular government last year. In the 80′s sure, but what worked for our own “best interests” in the 70′s and 80′s doesn’t work today.

In an effort to pressure the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel, the United States has suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority. But fortunately for the new Hamas-led government, its cabinet boasts well-trained economists, engineers and planners ready to tackle the fiscal straits. Where did they get that training? Start with Iowa.

Of the 24 cabinet members, four attended college or graduate school — or both — at U.S. institutions, and a fifth had a postgraduate fellowship here. Two other senior Hamas political leaders also earned advanced degrees in the United States.

They were among the hundreds of Arab students drawn to U.S. campuses in the late 1970s and 1980s, a time when the United States was trying to prevent the spread of the Iranian revolution in the Middle East. Some received subsidies through the U.S. Agency for International Development, and others won scholarships through the largely Saudi-funded Arab Student Aid International.

It does seem a little odd that Yuldashev would have such intimate details of what supposedly happened in Andijan (buildings set on fire to attract people, food served to people to make them stay, etc.) when he’s sitting in a maximum security Uzbek prison

That’s from the videotape. And the impression I get is not that he planned it, but that his followers did in the wake of his comments on the 61st surah.

I think your in-between description is what happened, and I also think that such an explanation is consistent with what’s described to be in the videotapes, first-hand reports, and comments by folks like Parpiev.