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Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Instapundit has a roundup of stuff on Uzbekistan.
Be sure to read all about it. Big stuff here. As I noted a few days ago, this is a tough one for us: we're sort of friends with the guys shooting civilians. The good news is we've been pushing Karimov to shape up for a while now. The bad news is he hasn't.
It's time for Mr. Bush to dig out his State of the Union and make sure he can read it with a straight face while contemplating Uzbekistan.
That doesn't mean we need to start bombing tomorrow, or even cut off relations. But it does mean that the pressure we've been exerting needs to be reapplied and with renewed force. Ideally, we have real estate agents sending Karimov proposals for warm and sunny places where he might like to live instead so that we can do this without further bloodshed. If not, we need to make it clear that whatever we do while working our way out of past arrangements, our hearts and minds are with the Uzbek people, not the government that represses them.
Incidentally, while the TurkeyBlog is not necessarily the best place to get up to speed on current events in Uzbekistan, the gbarto.com web sites are aware of the place, if only for its language. Here's our Itty Bitty Intro to Uzbek (from multilingua.info), here's a three lesson intro at our Language Pages and Uzbekistan and the other nations along the Old Silk Road come in for a mention or two at multilingua's Languages of the Islamic World page.
posted by gbarto at 7:16 PM
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