Uzbekistan

From the totalitarian freak show of Turkmenistan to the backwater of Uzbekistan, no gas or oil, Islam Karimov, the president until assassinated has turned on his own people. Uzbekistan made it into the world news earlier this year when the army massacred over a thousand demonstrators. Still this country seems positively liberal by comparison, the police accept bribes in a much more professional manner at the periodic police checkpoints, Karimov, illiterate and the product of ugly parents cannot cover the country in his portrait and has resorted to double speak slogans on the cheapest of billboards. This country has three great boasts, birth place of the black plague, Samarkand and Bukhara, historical seats of Islam, and Timur the Lame, their one great leader who sought to outdo his purported grandfather Genghis Khan in brutality. The waves of invaders appear in the multitude of faces, eyes narrowing, blue eyes, Iranians, Russians, Mongol, they have been raped and massacred by everyone. An article I read suggested that 4% of central Asians are descended from one man who swept through the region nearly 900 years ago.