Place that has fallen off the map . . .
Uzbekistan fails to report the story of the decade
Newspapers and television in Uzbekistan have won the strange honour of being perhaps the only media in the world not to report the story.
by Richard Orange in Almaty
1:26PM BST 04 May 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8492345/Uzbekistan-fails-to-report-the-story-of-the-decade.html
As the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US Navy Seals dominated headlines across the world, the repressive Central Asian republic's 30m people were left entirely in the dark.
A spokesman for Pravda Vostoka, the leading government mouthpiece, said that it had not heard about bin Laden's death because it did not have an internet connection, Uznews, a website for exiled Uzbeks, reported.
The spokesman added that bin Laden's death was "unlikely to be of interest to its readership."
A spokesman for the Uzbek national news agency said that while the agency had been aware of bin Laden's death, his correspondents had failed to get through to political analysts who could provide commentary on the event.
The agency was planning to publish an analysis of bin Laden's demise later, he said.
The uzreport.com website complained that it did not have correspondents in the region who could confirm the reports.
Osama bin Laden's death is by no means irrelevant to Uzbekistan, which has long struggled to contain Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, its own al-Qaeda-affiliated terror group.
It shares a 90-mile border with Afghanistan, and allows the US military to ship supplies to troops across its territory.
By Wednesday afternoon, none of the Uzbek news agencies had corrected the oversight.
Uzreport.com's lead world news story was based on a UN report that "headaches were the most common health disorder around the world, but widely untreated." Pravda Vostoka was leading with an article about the impending visit of the President of neighbouring Turkmenistan.
Turkmenistan's state-controlled media is if anything more closed, and appears not to have reported bin Laden's demise either.
The two countries ranked in the bottom 10 for the freedom of the press in this year's index by Freedom House, the US government funded pro-democracy website, alongside North Korea, Belarus, Burma and Eritrea.
Freedom House said that in these countries, "independent media are either nonexistent or barely able to operate, the press acts as a mouthpiece for the regime, citizens' access to unbiased information is severely limited, and dissent is crushed through imprisonment, torture and other forms of repression."
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