Feature
Bearing witness
by Matt Nippert
A Central Asian journalist exiled in New York sheds light on a little-publicised massacre in Uzbekistan last year.
Galima Bukharbaeva looks like a black-haired version of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. But singing is the last thing that the ethnic Tajik is contemplating right now. “In Uzbekistan I cannot sing, I cannot dance. It is impossible to even laugh,” she says. On May 13 last year, she was in the Uzbek town of Andijan – where the hills were alive with the sound of automatic gunfire.
Now living in exile in New York, this Central Asian journalist is also in possession of perhaps the most chilling audio recording ever committed to tape. In March, at a conference discussing the events at Andijan last year, she played the recording to a crowd of academics, diplomats and journalists. With a stern and determined face – she had broken down into tears when editing this audio the previous weekend – her disembodied voice speaks from the ghetto blaster on the table to her left.
Around 5000 people had gathered at the Andijan town centre – Borbor Square – to protest unemployment rates and the recent kangaroo-court conviction of 23 local businessmen on charges of “religious extremism”. During the previous night, elements of the crowd had seized municipal buildings and several dozen guns and ram-raided the local prison to free the newly imprisoned.
By morning on May 13, government troops began to arrive. Bukharbaeva says that soldiers and eight-wheeled armoured personnel carriers set up roadblocks throughout the town and around the square. Just after 5.00pm, she reports, “The protesters were surrounded – they began praying to Allah.” You can hear the sound of many people praying in Arabic, accompanied by what seems to be exploding strings of firecrackers and short rumbles of bass.
This audio reminds conference moderator and Columbia University lecturer Peter Sinnott of his time as an infantryman. The sustained crackling, he says, is the firing of assault rifles. “You heard a very high rate of fire. That was: ‘You’re just shooting – you’re not aiming.’ It’s rather indiscriminate.” Referring to the “much heavier sounds”, he says that the shorter, rumbling bursts are heavy machine-guns, “equivalent to a .50 cal”, mounted on the armoured personnel carriers.
(Major John L Plaster [retired], of the Army Reserve, wrote about this calibre of round in his 1993 book The Ultimate Sniper. He cited a man from Michigan who fired the bullets at wooden-framed houses, and with one shot punched a hole through six of them. “Not six walls,” Plaster emphasised, “six houses.”)
“The effect on a crowd, of course,” says Sinnott, “is tremendous.”
The gunfire increases to sound like hail on a corrugated-iron roof, as the praying diminishes in volume. In the end, there is silence, punctuated by sporadic single shots, then a click, and then nothing. This extraordinary and horrifying soundtrack came courtesy of a call a protester in Borbor Square made to the BBC via a cellphone. Bukharbaeva explains that the caller was shot, “but the line remained on and captured the sounds of his last breath”.
By the end of the five-minute sequence, several of the 80 audience members in the conference room are quietly shedding tears.
Bukharbaeva was one of only six journalists present at Andijan that day, and her testimony differs from the official Uzbek account that claims only 187 “armed Islamic terrorists” were slain. Human-rights groups allege that hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed women and children made up most of the casualties.
Another eyewitness to the killings, Lutfullo Shamsuddinov, spoke through a translator. He told of fleeing with most of the surviving crowd down Andijan’s main road, only to be met by more armoured cars. The street outside the local high school, he says, became a killing zone where hundreds were mown down.
“I tried to escape, but it was very difficult, because there was a shower of bullets, but also the rain had started,” says Shamsuddinov. When he returned to the scene early the next morning, he said he saw corpses being loaded onto three cargo trucks and a bus. “They were going in an unknown direction and to this day we don’t know where they took the bodies.”
The conference, titled “Andijan: The Politics and the Tragedy”, was an attempt to shed light on this little-publicised massacre. No one knows what really happened on that drizzly day last summer – as there has never been an independent inter-national investigation. Diplomatic pressure from the global community has so far come to nought. “Almost everyone has agreed to turn a blind eye,” says Bukharbaeva of the big-power politics of the region. “No one wants it to go further. It is too problematic: there is Russia, etc, etc.”
The United States, then using a strategic air base in the south of Uzbekistan to launch military operations against neighbouring Afghanistan, initially stopped short of outright criticism. Relations were further complicated by Uzbekistan’s reported involvement in the CIA’s renditions programme, where terror suspects were secretly flown to extralegal prisons in countries with dubious human-rights records. By November, even a muted reprimand from the United States led to the bases’ closure – and the associated men and materials left the country.
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