There Was No Way Back

From a recent AP report on the massacre in Andijan:

As the unrest entered a second week, Atamatov, one of the prisoners whose escape triggered the first protests, recalled his odyssey from successful businessman to inmate to refugee - and denied that radical Islam had played any role in his woes.

Last June, he said, after three days of brutal interrogation focusing on his business partners, he was charged with religious extremism.

"I told the court that I'm not an extremist," said Atamatov, who owned a small confectionary factory that employed 23 people and was a sponsor of local children's soccer and karate clubs. "I asked the judge: How can a man who implements the president's decrees on creating more jobs, on developing sports among children, be an extremist?"

The trial had opened in February, and by last week, a sentence was due. The trial had already brought thousands into the streets of Andijan for peaceful protests, and the protest leaders promised massive resistance if the men were convicted.

But the sentence never came. Around midnight on May 12, Atamatov said he heard about 10 shots and then someone opened the door of his prison cell with a crowbar. He and another 11 inmates in the cell came out to the street.

Someone there, whom Atamatov said he didn't know, said: "'Those who want can come with us to the governor's office.'" And so he went, and found himself among thousands of people who demonstrated all day.

Atamatov said government troops shot at them in the morning, killing about a dozen people, and opened fire again about noon, killing a similar number. Two hours later, he said, they took aim from a truck and killed a 5-year-old boy who was running along a street. When his mother ran screaming toward her son, soldiers shot her, too, Atamatov said.

He estimated that 150-200 people died on the square when troops encircled it in late afternoon, and that many more were killed as they ran for their lives down a main avenue, Chulpon Shokh Prospect.

"There were three military positions there: when they fired at us at the first one, only a few people died; at the next one another 10-15 died, and at the third position they had armored personnel carriers and snipers sitting in trees - lots of us died there," he said.

After an all-night trek, they reached the Kyrgyz border. A resident of the frontier village of Teshik Tosh said he would show them a way to cross the border, but he led them into an ambush and was himself killed.

"My 48-year-old mother was with me. She was wounded and we had to leave her behind. An aunt was killed on the border," Atamatov said.

Then a local woman came to them and said that the governor of Pakhtabad would let them cross the border, but warned that Kyrgyz border guards might shoot at them.

"There was no way back, so we went ahead," he said.

(via global-geopolitics)