Although it appears that opportunistic actors with political and economic motivations provoked the violence that erupted in southern Kyrgyzstan during June of this year, the scale, rapid spread, and vicious character of that violence belies a very real cultural divide between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the country. Those who provoked the violence were obviously aware of the volatile nature of this divide, which had fostered a similar proliferation of ethnically based physical attacks, murders, and sexual violence in the same cities and towns only twenty years before. […]
Memo #:
106
Series:
2
PDF:
PDF URL:
http://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/pepm_106.pdf
