One exercise that I often used with my students is to read an introductory sentence or two from newspaper articles describing atrocities around the world. However, I would switch the location of the topics in the articles so that if there was a bomb that went off in an Afghani market killing 37 people, I would say that the bomb went off in Columbus, Ohio or Miami, Florida.
As soon as I mentioned it happening in their ‘universe,’ students immediately wanted to know much more about the situation. I would then tell them where the event really happened and their entire quest for information would disappear. I always wondered if there was a psychological experiment in that methodology…
It is in this context that I ask you to care about what happens in Kyrgyzstan.
Hostilities began late last week and have led to one of Central Asia’s worst humanitarian crises in recent decades as marauding bands of Kyrgyz singled out Uzbek neighborhoods. The death toll is in the hundreds, and as many as 100,000 Uzbeks have fled their homes and are in makeshift camps on the border area between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
The flow of people was so overwhelming that Uzbekistan had to close some of its border crossing areas leaving many standing at the border on the Kyrgyzstan side of a barbed-wire fence. Many ethnic Uzbeks that have remained in Kyrgyzstan have had to hide out in abandoned buildings.
The true number of casualties is unknown, as many of the dead were buried without relatives registering them as having been killed. A further 1,870 people are said to have been injured.
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