Thu, Apr 01, 2004 page5

• Uzbek violence gets little official mention

  `NEWS OF PARADISE' Tuesday saw suicide bombers and a gunfight between police and terrorists, but you'd barely know it from the news broadcasts in the capital, Tashkent

  • AP
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  In this city whose mosques bespeak its faith and whose crumbling tenement blocks are monuments to its Soviet past, puddles of blood-tinged water tell the latest chapter of Tashkent's history.

  Soviet habits of secrecy die hard here, and officials are quick to sanitize the news just as the hoses have been hard at work washing away the ugly residue of three days of suicide bombs and gun battles. There was no live coverage of events; the violence was mentioned only briefly on the evening TV news.

  But there's water on a road where two men blew themselves up, killing three police officers. Another puddle down the road marks the trail where police shot a woman in the legs; they couldn't stop her detonating a homemade bomb as she approached a bus.

  

  A man sits on a road leading out of the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, on Tuesday. The road was blocked by an armored personnel carrier as special police units were tracking alleged terrorists on the outskirts of the city.

  PHOTO: AP

  The hoses came out again to spray staircases and sidewalks where five bodies lay splayed across a sidewalk for hours amid drying pools of blood. The alleged terrorists died at a four-story apartment building in an hours-long gun battle.

  In a burned-out building down the road, water was sprayed on walls riddled with bullet holes in apparently the heaviest fighting Tuesday.

  And then there was just the little splash in the dirt by Hairniso Supiyeva's house in Kibray, a Tashkent suburb. That's where, according to Supiyeva, a female suicide bomber's head landed, the shrapnel from her bomb pitting holes in the blue metal gate.

  The violence left at least 42 people dead and ushered the Uzbek capital into the company of Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta and other cities that have experienced the sudden blow of post-Sept. 11 mayhem.

  As everywhere else, death struck at random -- outside a store called Children's World, where a child was among the fatalities Monday, and by the Chorsu bazaar, where blue-tiled domes mimic the architectural grandeur of the medieval conqueror Tamerlane.

  Tashkent, ``Stone City'' in Uzbek, sits on a plain. Its more than 2 million people make it the fourth-largest city in the former Soviet Union. In 1966 an earthquake destroyed much of the city. In 1991 the Soviet Union died, and Tashkent became the capital of one of the five newly minted Central Asian republics.

  An old town of mud streets and tightly packed houses evokes the legendary Silk Road. Islam is low-key here. People drink vodka and only very few mosques broadcast the call to prayer.

  Uzbekistan has allied itself with the war on terrorism, allowing US troops to base themselves about 400 km from Tashkent. US soldiers and contractors sometimes turn up in the capital, but their presence is barely felt.

  Stoic forbearance is bred into the Uzbeks. They look aged beyond their years by the fierce sun, and make do with what they have, their destinies once determined by feudal khans, then Soviet masters and now an unsure independence.

  Supiyeva coped as best she could. With electricity, water and gas shut off after the fighting Tuesday, the 64-year-old woman built a fire in her yard and cooked the family dinner of plov -- the oily fried rice and mutton eaten across Central Asia.

  On the streets, among left-over Soviet apartment blocks and single-family houses suddenly stricken by terrorism, the two Tashkents were on vivid display: Uzbek women in full-length robes and colored head kerchiefs, and Russians in skirts and slacks. Their languages were different -- Uzbek and Russian -- but they shared the same fear and anger.

  Still, the stoicism occasionally broke as people voiced rare public outrage at Uzbek President Islam Karimov, the country's current and Soviet-era leader who has displayed little desire for democratic or economic reform.

  "Why didn't Karimov come here to see the victims?" asked one woman.

  With no live media coverage or officials giving any news conferences, rumors compounded the fear and anger.

  At the end of the day, the official version of events finally made it to state-run TV.

  The evening news, which distrustful Uzbeks cynically refer to as "the news of paradise," led with Karimov meeting the former Lithuanian president. Tuesday's violence merited only a brief statement.
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