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Uzbekistan: International Friendship Monument in Central Tashkent Dismantled |
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Wednesday, 16 April 2008
The Tashkent authorities had the International Friendship monument in front of the Friendship of Peoples Palace dismantled on April 12 night. The monument had been erected in memory of the Shamakhmudovs who adopted 15 orphans in the Great Patriotic War and became a symbol of generosity and humanism of the Uzbek people.
One of the best known monuments in Tashkent was dismantled in the evening, the traditional time of monument dismantlement in Uzbekistan. This correspondent encountered two excavators and workers with rock-drills and hammers (asphalt all around what had been the monument broken up) trying to pry the foundation loose. Onlookers kept their distance, clearly lacking the courage to approach the site.
The foreman in civvies told this correspondent that the monument was to be moved somewhere to Chilanzar (one of the city blocks in the outskirts). "You do not really think we are dismantling it, do you?!" he said and added that a flower bed was to be set up here. The man said he did not know why the monument was to be moved in the first place.
The Shamakhmudovs' story is known to absolutely everyone in Uzbekistan. When Tashkent women appealed to the women of Uzbekistan to adopt children evacuated from all over the Soviet Union in the first months of the Great Patriotic War, smith Shaakhmed Shamakhmudov and his wife Bakhri Akhmedova adopted 15 orphans - Russians, Belarussians, a Moldovan, Ukrainian, Latvian, Kazakh, Tatar, and others.
The Shamakhmudovs gave the children what they lacked - a genuine home and family. They became prototypes of the main characters of Rakhmat Faizi's novel "His Majesty, Man" and movie "You Are Not An Orphan".
It is clear that not even the head of the city administration could made this decision entirely on his own. The monument must have failed to fit Islam Karimov's concept of the Uzbek state.
16.04.2008
Ferghana Ru |
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
Uzbekistan
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