The American Conservative

In 1994 Orthodox bishops from the various jurisdictions gathered in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and agreed to work toward a united church. One approach is for each to be granted independence from its “mother church;” independent bodies can then combine into a united American church. It’s a prospect that has enthusiastic support among American Orthodox of all backgrounds, although the Ecumenical Patriarch and other leaders overseas have opposed such independence.

Three Orthodox bodies in America are the largest: Russian, Greek, and Antiochian (mostly composed of Arab Christians and those from the Middle East.) The Russian Orthodox were granted independence in 1970, and are now known as the Orthodox Church in America. The Antiochian Orthodox conference in Pittsburgh continues the process of independence for that body. The third group, the Greek Orthodox, have been having the most contentious experience, as laity desiring independence have had bitter clashes with church leaders.

A united American Orthodox Church will be much better able to speak for itself in the American culture, better able to partner with Protestants and Catholics in joint projects, better able to do outreach, evangelize, and serve. If not for the accidents of history, we would have had that united Church a century ago. The Antiochian conference is one more step toward a unity that is long overdue. ~Frederica Matthewes-Green, Christianity Today, July 2004

This is an old article, but the issue is still very current. On the face of it, and in the way that Mrs. Matthewes-Green has presented it, Orthodox jurisdictional unity in America sounds very sensible. It sounds as if sheer chance had derailed the possibility of Orthodox unity in America. Of course, none of us believes in sheer chance, so there may be a message in this experience as well as something to be learned from it other than that “unified jurisdiction is good.” Undoubtedly, the Greek Archdiocesan churches, the Antiochians and the OCA could combine their jurisdictions without much difficulty. They are on the same calendar and each could, to the extent that each parish desires, retain its own language.

That only leaves out several other jurisdictions that cannot, for reasons of important but little-understood (even by most Orthodox) calendrical disagreements and anti-ecumenism, participate in the foreseeable future in the reorganised jurisdiction, including the not insignificant Serbian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which is centered in America under His Eminence, Metropolitan Laurus.

There is another, perhaps more compelling reason for not having an American Orthodox Church, suggested to me by my first parish priest. He said that there cannot be American Orthodoxy until there are many more American saints. At the moment, there are about a half-dozen. The purpose of having autocephalous or autonomous churches on a national basis is to allow for the spiritual freedom of members of those churches to express their Orthodoxy in a way most suitable to evangelising their people, language and culture. Then it may become a vessel for preserving the transformed and Christianised people’s heritage. What would an American Orthodox Church be able to do in this regard that the existing jurisdictions cannot do?

Have the unifiers considered the detrimental effects, perhaps even scandal, that might result among our Orthodox brethren in the rest of the Americas in our identifying the jurisdictions to which they have belonged with America, by which we mean here the United States? Ironically, though quite unintended by the unifiers, I can easily see how this specifically American attempt to overcome the “problems” of ethnic jurisdictional division will reinject the problem of American nationalism into the life of the Church as a whole.

Several jurisdictions coexisting do not have to be at odds with one another, and it could be that the challenge set before Orthodox in America is to realise genuine spiritual and practical unity without resorting to the more mechanical means of a single hierarchy, at least as a temporary means to overcome the real barriers among the Orthodox here and everywhere in the world. Until the larger problems afflicting the entire Orthodox world are resolved, however, there will be many Orthodox in America who could not participate in such an American Orthodox Church, and it would be a mistake to create it without the consensus of all Orthodox bishops in America.

The House of Representatives voted down a measure, by a 128 to 300 vote, that called on President Bush to devise a plan for a withdrawal from Iraq. It came in the form of an amendment to the $491 billion budget for the Pentagon that was passed on Wednesday night.

But the withdrawal amendment marks the first time that Congress has officially voted and debated legislation that deals with a withdrawal.

“No, it won’t pass today, but it will give us a chance to talk about it,” said Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), the sponsor of the amendment. “It’s an opportunity for members of Congress who are frustrated that our troops are being killed for a war that wasn’t necessary in the first place and that there is no plan in sight to bring them home.”

Despite the overwhelming defeat, about two-thirds of Democrats voted for it and so did five Republicans – a dramatic shift from just a few months ago, when talk of a potential withdrawal was taboo for even the most progressive lawmakers.

Of the five Republicans to vote for Woolsey’s amendment, only one, Representative Walter Jones of North Carolina, spoke in favor of it on the House floor. Jones, one of the most conservative members in Congress, led the campaign in 2003 to change French fries to freedom fries. ~Mitch Jeserich, Antiwar.com

As simply silly and trivial as the entire “freedom fries” business was, Rep. Jones should be congratulated for having the honesty and decency to admit that invading Iraq was unjustified. That he should have known that all along is true, but secondary at this point. There was no political profit for him in abandoning the party line on this major issue, which is why it is exactly such Republicans who need to be cultivated and drawn away from the leadership. He will probably be targeted in the primaries by his state party, so it might be tactically wise for antiwar advocates to lend support to Republicans who show some glimmer of common sense.

As long as support for withdrawal has an overwhelmingly Democratic face on it, large sections of the country will reflexively oppose it and the military will fight it tooth and nail, even if a majority actually agrees that the war has been a colossal waste and should never have happened. Even if Rep. Jones has only come to this late in the day, his change of heart is encouraging, because he represents the sort of overzealous nationalist who enthusiastically supported the war and will now enthusiastically oppose it because the war has become offensive to the same nationalist conception of American interests.

A real political move for withdrawal, however weak, has begun. If those against the war want to accomplish something meaningful in the second half of this year, we should begin avidly encouraging members of the majority who have begun to waver on Iraq to break ranks for basic reasons of national interest and patriotism. That is the language that the Republicans will understand, and that is the language that will motivate them to vote for a withdrawal. By the same token, stalwart supporters of this morally abhorrent policy should be targeted for defeat at every stage in the 2006 elections. We need to begin sapping confidence in pro-war congressmen now for it to take maximum effect by next November.

Many evangelicals say they’re just trying to satisfy demands not met by traditional churches. Craig Groeschel, who launched Life Church in Edmond, Okla., in 1996, started out doing market research with non-churchgoers in the area — and got an earful. “They said churches were full of hypocrites and were boring,” he recalls. So he designed Life Church to counter those preconceptions, with lively, multimedia-filled services in a setting that’s something between a rock concert and a coffee shop.

Once established, some ambitious churches are making a big business out of spreading their expertise. Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., formed a consulting arm called Willow Creek Assn. It earned $17 million last year, partly by selling marketing and management advice to 10,500 member churches from 90 denominations. Jim Mellado, the hard-charging Harvard MBA who runs it, last year brought an astonishing 110,000 church and lay leaders to conferences on topics such as effective leadership. “Our entrepreneurial impulse comes from the Biblical mandate to get the message out,” says Willow Creek founder Bill Hybels, who hired Stanford MBA Greg Hawkins, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant, to handle the church’s day-to-day management. Willow Creek’s methods have even been lauded in a Harvard Business School case study.

Hybel’s consumer-driven approach is evident at Willow Creek, where he shunned stained glass, Bibles, or even a cross for the 7,200-seat, $72 million sanctuary he recently built. The reason? Market research suggested that such traditional symbols would scare away non-churchgoers. He also gives practical advice. On a recent Wednesday evening, one of his four “teaching” pastors gave a service that started with 20 minutes of music, followed by a lengthy sermon about the Christian approach to personal finances. He told the 5,000 listeners about resisting advertising aimed at getting people to buy things they don’t need and suggested they follow up at home by e-mailing questions. Like Osteen, Hybel packages self-help programs with a positive message intended to make people feel good about themselves. “When I walk out of a service, I feel completely relieved of any stress I walked in with,” says Phil Earnest, 38, a sales manager who in 2003 switched to Willow Creek from the Methodist Church he found too stodgy. ~Yahoo Finance

Granted, I belong to a liturgical tradition in which musical instruments are officially and properly forbidden, to say nothing of “multimedia-filled services,” and normally I don’t bother to comment on the liturgical oddities and absurdities of other confessions (since they are all, in various ways, quite strange and shocking to me), but all of this is truly appalling to me. I actually feel sorry for people who think they have found true meaning in such “worship.”

If it aims to make people “feel good about themselves,” it is not challenging, instructive or edifying. And how can it be edifying in places where there is no Cross (rather important to “getting out the message,” wouldn’t you say?) and no Bible (what, pray, are these people reading if not the Bible?)? Worship has ceased to be a living relationship with God, and has indeed become a glorified self-help assembly, as if the lesson to be taken from the Gospel is in any way consonant with the language of “self-help,” which suggests a bizarre preoccupation with the self and autonomy in these churches that is itself spiritually dangerous.

What is more, liturgy is our work for the supplication and glorification of God. It is not entertainment, or something to be jazzed up to keep the spiritually bored titillated long enough to pay attention through a whole service. Consider our conventional English word for liturgical celebrations: service. Why do we call it that? Someone is being served by it, which is to say that someone is receiving the submission and obedience of others. Whom are these pastors serving, and whom are the people serving? All of the business plans, marketing jargon and “giving the people what they want” tells me that the pastors are serving the people not as a humble shepherd but in the way that waiters or customer service representatives of corporations “serve” people, and it tells me that the people are serving themselves as if the church were a buffet line and not a consecrated place in which man honours his true God.

Goodness, if some of these people found Methodist churches “stodgy,” what would they make of an Orthodox church? Of course, the more traditional and authentic a church is, the less “stodgy” or “boring” it will seem, as more traditional liturgies convey to people the words of Life and should, if the heart is willing, inspire and spiritually delight. And if people are so concerned about “hypocrites,” they should know that they will find them wherever they go. We are fallen, and at times we are all hypocrites, which is to remind us that we have quite enough spiritual labour ahead of us for ourselves without needing to worry about whether anyone else is being hypocritical.

If people are going to church to “feel good about themselves,” they have surely got the wrong ideas about Our Lord and His Church. The Lord does not ask us to feel good about our wretched present state, but calls us to take up our cross and to be perfect as His Father is perfect. Our very being being transfigured, perfected and deified by God–this is the Good for which we should yearn, rather than the pitiful, self-important, self-congratulatory, self-satisfaction of feeling vindicated by shallow, sentimental pop-worship.

It isn’t that God wishes us to be miserable, or something of that sort, but that so much of what we believe about ourselves is delusion encouraging us to “feel good about ourselves” instead of being watchful, serious and honest about the state of our souls. Christian life involves, and indeed must have, the stripping away of that delusion before repentance and salvation in Christ are possible. Surely Orthodox monastic wisdom that self-esteem is the most pernicious vice would help cure some of that delusion in these people.

Truly, this is something like the abomination of desolation (Matt. 24:15). Something sinister and corrupt stands in place of the worship of God in these churches. Pardon the apocalypticism, but if these churches are the cutting edge of the future of evangelical Christianity in this country I can only hope that the Orthodox here are ready to recover the bewildered, spiritually lost millions who will probably flee from these increasingly hollow forms of religion in a few decades’ time.

Hat tip to A.C. Kleinheider.

Rhetorically, the United States government is committed to spreading “freedom” throughout the globe; in practice, however, the interests of the U.S. state are in direct and often deadly conflict with the radical libertarian rhetoric – never more so than today. Uzbekistan is a textbook example. A free-market revolution against a murderous neo-Communist dictator is going down in flames as the U.S. presides over the carnage with calls for an “investigation” – and a wink and a nod to Karimov.

This is why the United States government – not Russia, not China, not the various thugs who loom large in the pantheon of thuggery for a moment, then are quickly forgotten – is the main danger to liberty worldwide. Precisely because its leaders raise the banner of human freedom, and then dip it in blood, soil it with every imaginable crime, and carry it into battle for reasons that have nothing to do with their professed ideals, Washington stands in the way of the realization of human freedom everywhere. This is why we oppose America’s foreign policy of global intervention – not because we don’t favor the liberation of foreign peoples from the shackles of whatever tyranny besets them, but precisely because we do favor it. We realize, though, that the interests of the American state, qua state, can only drive it to betray and actively sabotage the very ideals of “freedom” and “democracy” it pretends to export. ~Justin Raimondo

The Washington-Tashkent “special relationship” started as early as the mid-1990s, during the Bill Clinton administration. In 1999, Green Berets were actively training Uzbek Special Forces. Khanabad has nothing to do with Afghanistan: Bagram takes care of this. But Khanabad is crucial as one of the key bases surrounding Bush’s Greater Middle East, or to put it in the relevant perspective, the Middle East/Caucasus/Central Asia heavenly arc of oil and gas. It’s on a seven-year lease to the Pentagon, due to expire in late 2008.

So Karimov in Uzbekistan is as essential a piece in the great oil and gas chessboard as Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. Inevitably, there will be more uprisings in the impoverished Ferghana Valley that has reached a boiling point. Karimov again will unleash his American-funded army. The White House will be silent. The Kremlin will be silent (or dub it “green revolution” – by Islamic fundamentalists, as it did with Andijan). Corporate media will be silent: one imagines the furor had Andijan happened in Lebanon when Syrian troops were still in the country. Uzbeks in the Ferghana won’t be valued as people legitimately fighting for freedom and democracy: they will be labeled as terrorists. And Rumsfeld will keep cultivating a “strong relationship” with Karimov’s Rosebud. ~Pepe Escobar, Asia Times

I don’t endorse Mr. Escobar’s idea that there are “peaceful jihad” groups, unless the term jihad is simply being used flippantly (which is unlikely). Jihad, even the so-called “greater jihad,” with its ostensibly purely spiritual application is simply the application to religious life of the militancy towards non-Muslims explicit in the Qur’an and symbolically aligns non-Muslims with the impure nafs (soul) to be purified. This would be the equivalent of adopting a pogrom as the image of one’s Christian spirituality. (If it be objected that jihad does not equal terrorism, it is worth remembering that the technical Qur’anic prohibitions against attacking non-combatants has often been honoured more in the breach than in the observance.)

But clearly what was happening in Andijan resembled more a large-scale jailbreak than anything resembling terrorism. The secularism of Uzbekistan does not make Islamism less likely, or less potent where it exists, but ensures that as the situation becomes more desperate increasingly extreme forms of Islam will win over those suppressed by the government. A consistently secular regime shuts off or suppresses normal religious expression, leading the religious to conclude that they cannot freely coexist in such a system, which encourages them to adopt increasingly violent rhetoric and methods. Besides, most of the Chechen rebels themselves were initially relatively secular, but as the war went on they found that there was a great deal more rhetorical value and foreign money in Islamism. But Karimov cannot hide behind anti-terrorism this time. He is a butcher, and we should cut off all support to him.

The Moscow theater hostage crisis was a terrorist attack. Beslan was a terrorist attack. Washington showed little sympathy for legitimate Russian fears then, because its favoured goons from the Caucasus were causing the mayhem. Now that the Uzbek government has slaughtered hundreds, Washington has essentially accepted the anti-terrorist explanation and committed one of the worst ‘sins’ in neocon morality, “blaming the victim.”

Meanwhile, the property rights of thousands of enterprises are in limbo. In Kiev, rumors abound that oligarchs connected to the old regime are trying to sell their enterprises to Russian business executives and are preparing to escape the country. Naturally, executives are cutting off investment, and economic growth is screeching to a halt.

To make matters worse, a new socialist minister of privatization has been appointed who opposes privatization in principle. She asked recently: “What is so bad about re-nationalization?” Tymoshenko concurred in a recent newspaper interview: “The biggest enterprises, which can easily be efficiently managed, must not be privatized, and they can give the state as an owner wonderful profits.” This sounds like state capitalism.

The old regime doubled pensions, saddling Ukraine with the highest pension costs in the world as a share of national income. The new Ukrainian government has added to this excessive burden by raising state wages no less than 57 percent.

To finance these and other huge social expenditures, the government is scrambling to find more revenue. A lot of discretionary tax exemptions have, sensibly, been abolished, but the overall tax pressure has risen dramatically. Meanwhile, Yushchenko continues to talk about his plans for sharp tax cuts.

Incredibly, this new regime brought to power by the middle class and small entrepreneurs has abolished the simplified taxation that served those segments of society so well. The result has been that tens of thousands of small entrepreneurs have been forced to close their businesses, while others have fled into the underground economy.

Reformers have long demanded that the lawless tax police be abolished and that the tax administration be forced to obey the law. But Tymoshenko is cheering the tax police on and has declared that the performance of the regional governors will be judged by their ability to collect taxes.

Inflation is skyrocketing with increasing public expenditures. The predominantly Russian oil companies have increased their prices as world market prices have risen. Tymoshenko has imposed strict price controls on gasoline and forced the remaining state oil companies to deliver it at prices below market levels. Not surprisingly, oil supplies have declined, and gasoline shortages have erupted. She has also started controlling the price of meat, which has begun to disappear from markets. The price controls are accompanied by abuse of private producers and praise of state companies.

Tymoshenko does not talk about reform of state monopolies but instead about their reinforcement. In an additional effort to squeeze business profits and boost state re venue, she wanted to boost railway tariffs for metals by 100 percent, but settled magnanimously for a hike of only 50 percent.

The contrast between the declarations of the Orange Revolution and current government policy could hardly be greater. Curiously, this discrepancy continues. In an editorial on Yushchenko’s first 100 days, the Kiev Post points out that “while Yushchenko is making grand statements abroad, the rest of the government does not seem to follow his lead.”

The official justification for these populist policies is that they are meant to boost Tymoshenko’s popularity for the parliamentary elections next March. Both Ukrainians and Ukraine’s foreign friends need an explanation of what is going on. ~Anders Aslund

Only the credulous admirers of democracy and of that unique oligarchic democratism favoured by interventionist Americans and Europeans can feel “betrayed” by Tymoshenko and the others or believe that the “Orange Revolution” has been “betrayed” by its leaders. This is ignorance, pure and simple, or else it is ideological nonsense. Everyone who could be bothered to read a shortest background piece on the criminal Tymoshenko knew where she stood on state control of industry (having gotten rich off of defrauding privatisation, I suspect she hopes to get richer off of re-nationalisation), and everyone who was not hypnotised by the ugly orange rags of the Kiev mob knew that Yushchenko was about as liberal as Petlyura and as good of an economic manager as Jimmy Carter. Only fools can be disillusioned with such a fraudulent gang of crooks, who made their fortunes robbing the Ukrainian people going and now look to rob them coming as well.

But let me speak up for this sorry lot on one point: the government of Ukraine is and ought to be the sovereign government of the Ukraine, and it does not owe “explanations” to think tank intellectuals, American politicians or anyone else except the Ukrainian people whom it has hoodwinked so terribly. Perhaps the Ukrainians don’t mind the statism–this is, after all, supposedly the government for which most Ukrainians voted (even though the election occurred under unprecedented foreign pressure, in contravention of the Ukrainian constitution and in the wake of a concerted, dishonest media campaign that could have made even the neocons blush). Regardless, it is their country, and I for one am sick of internationalists telling anyone what to do in his own country. Perhaps the internationalists will give Yushchenko and his lot such a hard time over domestic economic policy that his nationalist supporters will finally push him to adopt a less slavishly pro-Western approach, and the fruits of hegemonist support for this criminal will disappear. Probably not, though. Never underestimate the sheer, pointless, stubborn hatred for Russia that will always push Ukrainian nationalists into the arms of people who want nothing but to exploit them and use them as cannon fodder, figuratively or literally.

If Yushchenko’s crowd gives in to its worst nationalist and populist urges, I can only say that I and others in agreement with me warned that this would come to pass. One had to blind oneself willingly to what Yushchenko was and what he represented. This is not to pretend that Mr. Yanukovych, Yushchenko’s now-forgotten opponent, was as pure as the driven snow–he was corrupt, but in that rather matter-of-fact, unobtrusive way that most leaders of such countries are corrupt because personal relations still matter more than institutions (and sometimes I have to wonder why we prefer our way). In contrast, Yushchenko and his crowd stink to high heaven with the extent of their corruption. The fact is that the Orange Revolution was always as rotten as the crook who led it, and anyone who says differently is trying to sell something equally rotten to the unfortunate Ukrainians and to our own ignorant public.

One can be critical of the Crusades, but primarily because of the great damage they have inflicted on the Christian East. As for the slaughters, what the Crusaders did to the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099 was as bad as what the Muslims had done to countless Christian cities before and after that time. From the distance of almost a millennium, it is time to see the Crusades as Christendom’s reaction to Muslim aggression, a reconquest of something taken by force from its rightful owners. By the end of the 13th century, the last Crusader remnants in Palestine and Syria were wiped out. That was the end of the real Crusades but it was by no means the end of jihad. That same jihad that had conquered and reconquered the Holy Land continues in earnest today. With his Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott has joined the ranks of its abettors. ~Srdja Trifkovic

As Karimov clamped down at home, the strategic importance of the Karshi-Khanabad base, the cornerstone of the US-Uzbek alliance, was dramatically declining. Today, many of the functions performed by the base could be easily shifted to Afghanistan. Indeed, Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants permanent US military bases in Afghanistan and the Pentagon is spending US $83 million this year to build permanent facilities at its large bases near Kabul and Kandahar.

Western powers may soon come to regret its lack of attention to civil society developments in Uzbekistan. Karimov’s repressive system has ensured that all democratic parties are banned. Unlike in Georgia Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, where democratically oriented opposition leaders were waiting in the wings, there is no democratic force at present in Uzbekistan capable of replacing Karimov, and maintaining stability.

The main result of Karimov’s authoritarian practices has been the formation of underground Islamic extremist groups in Uzbekistan. Such groups took shape in the late 1990s, receiving assistance from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The most well known group the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which was decimated in the 2001 anti-terrorism offensive in Afghanistan, but whose remnants are now based in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Over the past four years, IMU militants have reorganized and reestablished contact with supporters in Uzbekistan.

Reports of a clash near the Kyrgyz border on May 15, in which Uzbek soldiers were supposedly killed, may be an indicator that Islamic militants are again active inside Uzbekistan, and are seeking to take advantage of the chaos in eastern Uzbekistan. It should be stressed, however, that the armed group which first attacked the government jail in Andijan on May 13 did not comprise Islamic radicals, but friends and relatives of the 23 businessmen and traders who were on trial in Andijan.

There are simply no good choices available in Uzbekistan. In Tashkent, Karimov is rumored to be extremely ill, and there is a possibility of a three-way power struggle to succeed him. The main contenders for power in Tashkent are; secret police chief Rustam Inoyatov; Interior Minister Zakir Almatov; and the powerful presidential adviser Ismail Jurabekov. All these figures are considered even more ruthless and dangerous than Karimov.

Western policies have ensured that even if Karimov were toppled in an internal power struggle, his replacement would only be another dictator. The chances of a democratic movement emerging in Uzbekistan are highly unlikely. Armed struggle, even if waged by democrats in the Ferghana Valley, is unlikely to stay democratic very long.

The longer that Karimov carries out acts of repression, the greater the likelihood that Islamic extremism spreads. ~Ahmed Rashid, Eurasia.net

Aside from Mr. Rashid’s rather credulous remarks about the “democratic” movements in other ex-Soviet republics, his article makes some very sound points and generally matches my thinking on the matter regarding this week’s massacre and the military importance of our alliance with Uzbekistan.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday the United States is pressing for facts in the political unrest in Uzbekistan late last week that may have left hundreds of people dead. She says the Bush administration has been a persistent critic of President Islam Karimov’s human rights record despite cooperation on anti-terrorism issues.

The Bush administration has credited the Karimov government with key support in the war on terrorism, including allowing U.S. forces to use an airbase to support operations in Afghanistan.

But at a press event late Tuesday with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Ms. Rice sharply rejected the idea the administration has looked the other way when it comes to human rights abuses by Uzbek authorities, and said Washington has pressed for reform in no uncertain terms.

In particular, she said the United States is looking for a very open accounting by the Karimov government of the circumstances of last week’s events in the city of Andijon, where Uzbek opposition sources say hundreds of people were killed when security forces fired on demonstrators:

“It is quite clear that a lot of people have lost their lives, and that is always a cause for concern because it should just not be the case that innocent people lose their lives. Nobody is asking any government to deal with terrorists. That’s not the issue. The issue though is that it is a society that needs openness, it needs reform. And again I think if you look at the record, you’ll find that we’ve raised that with the government of Karimov for quite some time,” she said. ~VOA.com

This account sharply contradicts the claim of Uzbekistan’s prosecutor general, made yesterday, that not one civilian had been killed. Rashid Kadyrov said that 169 had died, all “terrorists”, apart from 30 soldiers, three women and two children who were among hostages killed by the rebels.

The developments came after Condoleeza Rice, the US Secretary of State, repeated her call for the need for openness and reform in country after meeting Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, in Washington.

The unrest, sparked by the trial of 23 Muslim businessmen, was blamed by President Islam Karimov on Islamic extremists. Residents and a local human rights activist said the uprising was prompted by local people protesting against poverty, corruption and Mr Karimov’s hard line against Muslims.

As the grieving citizens of Andijan continued the grisly task of burying the dead, more families were coming forward to claim that loved ones had been hunted down and killed in a mopping-up operation by military death squads.

From five funerals visited by The Independent ­ held in private homes for fear of the security forces still flooding the city ­ in three cases the relatives said that the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head. In two cases, they claimed, the corpses showed gunshot wounds to the body and a single shot to the back of the head.

Eyewitnesses, rights activists and local doctors have claimed that up to 700 were killed in Andijan and across the Ferghana valley but that the death toll could climb higher. ~The Independent

The silence from Washington, aside from the weak complaints emanating from the State Department, is simply disgusting. The U.S. government is “concerned” and condemns the wanton killing of civilians–what a profound, moral stand! I am waiting for the great neocon humanitarians, who could not restrain themselves from mocking opponents of the Iraq war or opponents of intervention in Sudan on the grounds of our supposed inhumanity and lack of “moral clarity,” to speak up in defense of the slaughtered civilians killed by their dictator ally’s thugs. I suspect I will be waiting forever. It does not require one to advocate killing still more people (the usual neocon answer to brutality, or anything else for that matter) to denounce decisively and clearly the appalling acts of another government, whether it is allied to our government or not. The government should at the very least recall our ambassador from Tashkent and should sever diplomatic relations with Uzbekistan. Islam Karimov has become a liability and he is an ally we do not need and should not want to have.

Update: The U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan’s website contains no statement about this week’s events. The name Andijan (or Andizhan) is nowhere to be found. I somehow seem to remember our Kyrgyzstan embassy being a bit quicker in issuing a statement in response to the events in Bishkek, but then it helps when the dictator isn’t yours and the “revolution” has been helped along by your government.