Dirty Diplomacy: The Rough-and-Tumble Adventures of a Scotch-Drinking, Skirt-Chasing, Dictator-Busting and Thoroughly Unrepentant Ambassador Stuck on the Frontline of the War Against TerrorSince one of the HRW 2008 Defenders, Umida Niazova, is an Uzbek journalist, we decided to read something on Uzbekistan. The HRW website has a great deal of information on their country page. For some basic information and history, try this wiki entry. For more news and a detailed introduction, go to the BBC Country Profile.
The New York Times review is here. The New York Post review is also here. The Washington Post also ran a story on the author.
The author is not without serious faults, and according to some reviews, his book follows suit. It should, however, make for an interesting read and hopefully a great discussion as well. If you have the time, complement your reading with the HRW documents, particularly the multimedia presentation of the Andijan Massacre, where you can watch or listen to eyewitnesses.
If you are interested in the history of this country, particularly women's history, a place to start may be Douglas Northrop's book Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia, published in 2004. It is scholarly but I have found the writing to be pretty accessible.
To read about the current news, go to this site for News on Uzbekistan.
A recent Media Freedom conference in Uzbekistan seems to be another example of the double-speak of the Karimov regime.
