There’s no, why is this going on. But from a very narrow perspective they see a very huge difference so I think that’s a part of it, the different ethnic groups. There is a language difference it’s not a, they both have a Turkish background but it is two separate language groups. There was a perception that the Uzbeks were given more control for certain business’ in the south and the Kyrgyz were given more control of certain security services and that’s been a myth based upon some reality that’s been there for the last ten years, that been something that’s been talked about but it was never at this level of open conflict. But if you go to the South and you walk around the streets, you’ve lived there a while, I’ve lived there a while I could probably with high degree of accuracy tell you which group was which. The dress is different, the men wear different hats and so I could walk around Doshen probably with a pretty high degree of fidelity as a westerner tell you who was with which group and a local could do that almost exact accuracy so there is a distinction and people make that distinction very clearly. So that was a very long answer but it was a big question.

Barbara: May I ask one thing. One thing that was interesting for me when I was doing my research on Kyrgyzstan at that time there were a number of round tables and panels and many of the panels I participated in that I attended there was always this talk about Uzbeks taking over the Southern part of Kyrgyzstan because Kyrgyz’ were more likely to go to Russia, to Kazakhstan for jobs, young Kyrgyz men. And so there was this fear even among very well educated academicians and policy makers that Kyrgyz villages were being emptied and being replace by Uzbeks and so this was de facto occupation of Kyrgyz territory by Uzbekistan. And I think that the fact that people that you would think would be more tolerant, more educated, that they even felt that onslaught, I think that was pretty telling of the rising tensions in recent years.

Kevin DeWitt: That’s actually an excellent point and I didn’t touch on it at all but it feeds into the whole work migration and so after part of this also comes out of you have a huge amount of work migration that was happening in the 2000’s to Russia and as Russia was expanding Russia was growing, Russia’s economy was going through the roof. I was there in 2008 and 2009 in Moscow, all the construction workers were from Tajikistan. I flew to [Dushumbei] a couple of times and the planes were just, it was young men flying back and forth doing construction work. A lot of the street workers were Uzbek and you had the Kyrgyz working in the shops in Moscow. In my neighborhood in Moscow where I lived which was right downtown all the shops that I went to were all Kyrgyz working behind the counter almost exclusively. The people working on the streets and maintaining the buildings were all Uzbek.

So you had a huge amount of people moving for labor migration and you have simple population pressures. Kyrgyzstan is about five and a half million, Uzbekistan is 23 million and the land size is not that much bigger and so you have a huge population pressure from Uzbekistan and you’re absolutely right as more Kyrgyz men were leaving to go north to work in Kazakhstan or Russia, percentage-wise more Uzbeks were going to Russia than Kyrgyz. but there’s just more Uzbek men so then they would fill that gap, they would move into Kyrgyzstan and they were working and living in many of the villagers so it’s an excellent point and that dynamic was interesting because I was looking at that about two years ago and one of the questions that we were raising at that time was as Russia’s economy was going to [world] economy and Russia’s economy withy it going down significantly all those workers were going back. What happens when now you have a loss of income through the remittances is gone. In Tajikistan it could be 50%, we don’t know exactly the number. GDP and it’s remittance in Kyrgyzstan is a little lower,. Uzbekistan it’s also quite large. So now you’re losing this economic income to your village, to your community and you have young men that are unemployed that don’t have anything to do that are back in their communities. So that’s another important driving factor that has to be put into there.