Greetings, gentle Registanis.  I spotted a couple interesting stories with similar themes.  The theme might best be titled, to borrow from the Daily Show, Clusterf@#$ to the Poor House [Central Asian Edition]  More after the jump. Bailouts Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbaev increased the grow...

One of the side effects of Kyrgyzstan’s move to deny NATO access to Manas airfield is a renewal in punditry about US-Uzbek relations. Take, for example, Chris Flavelle at Slate , who is viewing history through a weird lens. Uzbekistan’s human rights record is so odious that even the Bush...

Three years ago, a book came out that became one of my favorites from the non-fiction shelf of the year. Craig Murray, an activist and diplomat tells his side of a very tangled story involving his time as the Ambassador from the UK to Uzbekistan from 2002-2004 - a time where he spoke vehemently abou...

For some time now, NATO and Russia have engaged in on-again, off-again discussions about supplying Afghanistan via the Russian Federation. So consider this sequence of events: 1. An increasingly hard-currency strapped Kremlin offers Kyrgyzstan $2 billion in aid.2. Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev a...

As if things weren’t bad enough already.  Uzbekistan has shut off the gas to Tajikistan, and now Turkmenistan isn’t sending electricity. Personally, I find the infrastructure systems of Central Asia very confusing.  Thanks to the Soviet Union, the republics originally were intertwined....

Almost a week ago the BBC carried this story concerning the latest outbreak of maternal/infant HIV, this time in Namangan, in the Ferghana Valley of eastern Uzbekistan. The Uzbek cases were discovered in October, and have reportedly been referred to prosecutors. But they have not been reported in th...

Early in the morning on July 10th, a series of explosions rocked the southern Uzbekistan city of Bukhara. Witnesses remarked that the blasts were strong enough to break windows more than 10km from the point of explosion. Uzbekistan National News Agency reports that the explosion was caused by a fire...

Are the Saudis behind Muslim terror most everywhere, or does it just seem like it? After all, 80% of Al Qaeda were Saudis several years ago. What's the figure now? We know that Zarqawi's Iraqi Al Qaeda was full of men from the Gulf, not necessarily Saudi Arabia, but Arabia nonetheless. Fallujah was ...

Josh saw this on my personal weblog [peaceclog.com] and suggested that it belonged on Registan.net as well, so here it is, slightly edited for the target audience.  I’d also like to point out that I’ve met someone that reads news on the region from various blogs, but avoids Registan.net...

Islom Karimov is getting in on the territory left open by the death of Turkmenbashi with his own book on moral living. Last week, Uzbek state television showed the presidential book-launch ceremony, where participants praised Karimov’s new work as “the best book on philosophy and morality since ...