“My Andijon Remains”: Memory and Forgetting Ten Years after the Andijon Events

Lunch event featuring:
Laura Adams, USAID and Harvard University

Sarah Kendzior, Al Jazeera and CAP Associate

Noah Tucker, Registan.net and CAP Associate

Steve Swerdlow, Human Rights Watch

The 13 May 2005 Andijon violence has been documented, interpreted and remembered by survivors, by society and by the state in ways that have evolved over the ten years since it occurred. While responses to the violence and the drive by survivors to document their firsthand experiences helped expand the Uzbek-language internet in an important way made possible by new technologies, rapid technological change and the shift to social media erased many of those discussions and firsthand narratives without deliberate censorship or action by the state. The state itself has at times promoted memory of the events — memory of specific versions — and other times, particularly after the Arab Spring, preferred to forget they occurred as it attempts to promote a narrative that Uzbekistan is synonymous with “peace and stability [tinchlik va osoyishtalik].” The panelists will discuss how all these processes have evolved in the decade since the violence and how technological change shapes the way tragic events are remembered — and forgotten — in the age of social media.