BBC - Around the World - Ariel's 'Foreign Bureau' - 1 June 2005

by Khayrullo Ubaydullaev, Uzbek producer, Tashkent, 1 June 2005

When troops machine-gunned unarmed demonstrators, killing hundreds in the eastern Uzbek town of Andijan, the BBC’s Tashkent bureau was at the centre of a huge world story.

We’d been in Andijan just hours before the tragic events began to unfold, covering the end of a four-month long series of peaceful demonstrations outside the city’s central court.

On trial were 23 local businessmen accused of belonging to an extremist group. This trial was to be the catalyst for the violence that was to follow.

Andijan is a five-hour drive from Tashkent through a spectacular mountain pass, and we’d only been home for a few hours before the phone rang telling us some kind of uprising had begun.

Throughout the night and the whole of the following day, we were in contact with our reporter in Andijan, and with the various human rights activists and local people taking part in the protests.

We listened with a sense of disbelief as the first shots were fired into the crowd at about 11am. The same thing happened again at midday when the army returned. Despite the violence the crowd did not disperse, but after several hours of speeches and behind the scenes negotiations they moved off up the only road open to them heading north out of the city.

One of the demonstrators kept a mobile switched on and for an hour we listened as the crowd was mowed down by machine gun. We heard screaming, people saying their last prayers, the sound of the guns and then silence as the phone was suddenly cut off.

Throughout this long and dreadful day the telephones in our office rang continuously. We gave interviews to so many BBC programmes and to other tv and radio stations, in so many languages that we almost lost count. There were no tv or radio reporters in Andijan and we realised the BBC was almost the only source of any kind of recorded material from the city on the day the violence broke out.

All day long we clipped and translated voices and the sounds of gunfire and helicopters circling overhead and relayed them back to London.

In the days that followed reporters from the Central Asian and Caucasus service sent us reports and actualities from Andijan, from the refugee camp across the border in Kyrgyzstan and in the little frontier town of Kara Su where the mayor had been thrown out and the police had reopened a border crossing which had been shut two years before. We spoke by phone to people in otherwise inaccessible areas and recorded their stories.

Three days into the crisis we had some welcome back-up from Natalya Antelava, the BBC’s Georgia correspondent, and a tv crew from the BBC’s Delhi bureau – cameraman Sanjay Ganguly and producer Shelley Thakral. We returned to Andijan with the Delhi crew a week after the killings. We found a city transformed and full of fear, but were able to send some tv reports and file in Uzbek, Russian and English for radio and online.

For ordinary people here in Uzbekistan it has been almost impossible to find out what really happened in Andijan. Access to foreign tv channels and internet sites was blocked for the first few days of the crisis, and the local media has given only the official version of events – a version which differs almost entirely from what eyewitnesses to the tragedy have been telling us.

We’ve been amazed at the number of times we’ve been approached on the street, in shops and in taxis by people wanting to find out more. And we’ve been moved by those who’ve risked their lives to tell us what they saw and to ensure that the real truth about Andijan reaches the rest of the world.