Kyrgyzstan’s Dual Revolution
I’m no expert on Kyrgyzstan. I only play one on the Internet. In my travels around cyberspace in an attempt at a quick education, I’ve run into a lot of punditry, a whole lot of “What Kyrgyzstan means for the US”, a slew of saucy reductions of the situation into Russia vs. America, the Great Game, Cold War revisited, and a whole lot of stupidity. Sadly, this silencing of Kyrgyzstan is merely a symptom of a more pervasive disease. As Sarah Kendzior wrote on Registan,
Central Asia is the black hole of international media. It is not the “other” but the other’s “other” — Russia’s orient, a region whose history and political complexities are poorly understood even by some who proclaim to be experts; a region whose best-known ambassador