Remembering Andijan

Early on Friday morning, 11 refugees from Andijan were evacuated from Kyrgyzstan to London. They are to be moved on to third countries. According to the BBC's correspondent Ian McWilliam, 'the town is outwardly calm but people are living in a climate of fear'.

See also Amnesty International report The Wire - September 2005.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, interviewed on The World this Weekend (14 Aug) for the 25th anniversary of Solidarity in Poland, said that, unlike Ukraine and Belarus, Uzbekistan is not at the stage of development to support democratic reform. Surely the point is that the Karimov regime's policy is to prevent Uzbekistan ever reaching that stage of (economic) development.

The trial of the 'ringleaders' of the demonstrations starts today.

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Further thoughts on 'In critical condition' by John Sutherland (see here), occasioned by seeing a charity collection envelope with the motto 'belief in action': anyone remember "Seven Types of Ambiguity" ?

Literary editors, [Scott] Pack sarcastically observes, would rather have "a full-page review of a biography of a largely forgotten academic with an unfeasible beard" (William Empson, if you haven't guessed) than the books that actually keep the book business in business.

This is philistinism to a high degree, a worship of celebrity and the ephemeral.